Page 12

Please. He’d have to lever me out of his bed with a crowbar at this point. My muscles had melted.

But I murmured a sound of agreement, and watched as he left the bedroom. He was back moments later with a damp washer, and he tossed it at me with a smile. I cleaned up, and then unfortunately had to get up and hunt for my pants. He took the washer off me and vanished again.

I climbed back into bed and pulled the doona up.

I could hear Joe rattling around somewhere at the other end of the house, and Hiccup’s claws clicking on the floor.

Joe said something in a low voice. Moments later, Hiccup appeared in the bedroom and wandered up to the bed, her tail wagging.

I scratched her snout, and she rested her head on the mattress and sighed happily.

“I said stay on the couch, Hiccup.” Joe leaned in the doorway, two steaming mugs in his hands, and something wedged under his arm.

“She’s fine,” I said. “What have you got there?”

“Hot cocoa,” he said. “And the book you were reading.”

“Are you kidding me? Sex and hot cocoa and a book? Red Joe Nesmith, how are you still single?”

Joe flushed all the way to his temples, which really only made him more adorable.

My heart did a somersault, and holy shit, I wasn’t just falling for this guy.

I’d already landed— splat —right in the middle of some emotional state that I didn’t want to put a name to, because the more perfect Joe got, the more impossible it was going to be to leave next week.

So I smiled at him and drank my hot cocoa and read my book while he fell asleep beside me and Hiccup snored beside the bed.

* * *

I woke sometime in the middle of the night when Hiccup leapt up onto the bed. She seemed delighted to discover me there, her tail lashing the doona as she flopped down on me and breathed heavily in my face.

“Hiccup,” said a low voice from over by the window, which confused me, since I’d expected Joe to still be in bed beside me. I swept an arm down his side of the bed and no, it was definitely empty, and he wasn’t throwing his voice.

I wheezed from underneath the dog, who rolled off me at last.

“What are you doing over there?” I asked.

I heard the rattle of a curtain. “Just looking at the weather.”

“In the middle of the night?”

“There’s weather then too.” I could hear the smile in his voice.

“Well, obviously. But it’s not like you can see?—”

He pulled the curtain open and flooded the bedroom with moonlight.

“Wow.” I blinked. It felt as brilliant as neon after the warm darkness I’d woken to. I pushed the doona off and climbed out of bed. The floor was cool under my feet. I joined Joe at the window—I hadn’t put my glasses on, so I leaned close to the glass to peer outside. It was cold against my nose.

Joe stood behind me and wrapped his arms around my waist. He rested his chin on my shoulder. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

Joe’s bedroom window overlooked the cliffside. From here, the land dropped away into an ocean that shone like molten silver. Above it, the moon blazed in a cloudless sky dotted with stars. It was beautiful. I couldn’t see the lighthouse from here, but I could see the beam cutting through the night.

“Wow,” I said again, as eloquent as always.

Joe pressed a kiss to the top of my head.

“You can almost imagine the tall ships,” I said. “The HMS Dauntless , sails billowing, sailing right towards the island. Wait...would they have had their sails out this close to the island? I don’t actually know anything about how tall ships work.”

“Well, neither did they,” Joe said, “since they wrecked.”

“That’s a very unfair assessment,” I said. “Lots of ships wrecked.”

“Lots of shitty drivers back then,” Joe said.

“I know I said I don’t know anything about how tall ships work, but even I know they didn’t have drivers .”

“Well, I’m not pretending to be an expert, unlike some.”

“On the mutiny, not the ship itself. There’s a difference.”

“I don’t know. It feels like you’re just trying to save face at this point.”

I elbowed him. “It is beautiful, though.”

“Some nights I grab a chair and a blanket and go outside and just wait for the dawn.”

“That might almost be worth freezing your balls off,” I said.

He laughed silently, his body shaking against mine. “Yeah, almost.”

“Saltwater in your veins, huh?”

“Something like that, yeah.”

A note in his voice caught my attention. “You don’t sound so sure.”

“No, I wasn’t, for a while.” His arms tightened around me for a moment. “But I think I’m getting there now.”

I brushed my fingertips against his knuckles and waited for him to tell me more.

He let out a soft breath that ruffled the hair beside my ear.

“When I was at uni, I thought for a while that maybe I wouldn’t come back here.

Now that I’m back, I know it was the right choice, that I’d never feel as at home anywhere else.

But when you’re in your early twenties and suddenly surrounded by clubs and nightlife and parties and people who introduce you to new worlds and new ideas, well, life on Dauntless is a hard sell even with views like this. ”

“Why’d you come back?”

He was silent for long enough that I knew the story wasn’t going to be a light one. He drew a breath and exhaled slowly. “My dad died.”

I gripped his forearms. “I’m sorry.”

He hummed. “He was the skipper of a fishing boat that went down in a storm. He drowned, and so did two of his crew. It was the school holidays. I wasn’t here, but my little sister Amy was.

I came back for her. I think I had some sort of crazy idea that I could take her back to the mainland with me, somehow juggle a fifteen-year-old kid and uni, but of course that never would have worked.

And Dauntless is home. I don’t regret staying. ”

“Because it’s beautiful here and you have saltwater in your veins.”

He pressed a kiss to the side of my head. “Yeah.”

Just yeah , as though it was the simplest thing in the world and there was nothing that could shake it.

Joe was as stalwart as the lighthouse he looked after, standing tall and solid and strong through every storm.

He was a fixed point in a world that spun too fast. Dauntless was.

Not much had changed here in the past two centuries, and there was something comforting about that, even for an outsider like me.

I wondered what it would feel like to have that solid, unchangeable sense of home, that internal compass always pointing steadily north.

I’d spent enough time on Dauntless to know that it was a lot of things—frustrating, impossible, ridiculous, even dangerous—but, if the incident with the chickens had showed me anything, it was that the one thing everyone here shared was a sense of community.

And there weren’t too many places like that over on the mainland anymore—at least not in the cities.

The day I’d broken up with Kyle, I’d been sitting in the gutter with all my stuff, tears streaming down my face because I was a mess, waiting for Dad to drive down from Maitland and collect me, and not a single person had noticed me.

Well, apart from the woman who’d stood on my hand, and she’d just told me to get out of her fucking way.

Nobody had given a shit about my broken heart, but here?

Here people still cared about each other.

I wished that the rest of us hadn’t forgotten how to do that.

Dauntless was something special, and so was the guy with his arms wrapped around me.

We watched the ocean together as the night crept slowly on towards dawn.