We dress up our mating rituals in fancy clothes and expensive restaurants, but the objective is the same—survival of the species.”
Because he was uncomfortably close to being right, she took refuge in sarcasm. “Good grief, I’ve walked onto the set of the Nature Channel.”
“We live on it. All humans do.” His tone warmed. “You felt the pull between us the second we met.”
A pulse jumped in her neck. “In your dreams.”
“That, too,” he said without missing a beat.
She got out of the car but kept a hand on it as if braced for flight. “I suppose having driven off your rival, you’re now staking out the female?”
“You’re getting the idea.”
Anger swirled through her, although some of it was at his perceptiveness, she recognized. She had picked up the signals flashing between them, and her responses were as primitive as his animal analogy suggested. Arousal stronger than anything she’d ever felt. Annoyance that he could read her so easily and completely.
And fear.
Blake Stirton was exciting but dangerous. He saw life in far more basic terms than she did. Thinking she should be scarred by her childhood experience, for example, when it was no more than a glitch on her life’s radar screen. Assuming because the sparks were there, she intended to act on them.
He was wrong on all counts. The outback might be his world, but hers was the city, with its nonstop excitement and shops where you had more than one choice of everything. The crocodile hunter and his habitat were an assignment, nothing more.
He came around to her side of the car and she tensed, but he brushed past on the way to the tent. One tent. Why hadn’t she asked him to set up another so they wouldn’t have to share? At least there were two cots, and he’d brought his own sleeping bag. Zipped up in hers, she’d have more to worry about than arousal. Like how to go to the bathroom without getting eaten by a crocodile.
And how to be around Blake for a month without falling for the crocodile hunter and becoming his prey.
Chapter 4
The phrase sleeping with the enemy kept popping into Jo’s head as she washed herself with water from a bucket behind the tent. The night was hot and sticky, and she’d give a lot for a proper shower before bed. A swim would have been wonderful but after this morning’s experience, she wasn’t going anywhere near the creek.
And Blake wasn’t the enemy. He was a lifesaver; his presence made it possible for her to stay and write her series. So why did she have such confusing feelings about him?
She finished swabbing her face and neck, wrung out the damp cloth and pressed it against the back of her neck. He was only trying to scare her away with his talk of mating signals between them. If she was sending any such things, surely she would know.
“Bathroom’s all yours,” she said, carrying the empty bucket around to the front of the tent for him to refill with clean water from their supply.
She stopped in her tracks. He had stripped down to khaki shorts and boots and nothing else. In the flickering light of the lantern, his flexing muscles gleamed as if oiled as he set the camp to rights for the night.
She watched, fascinated in spite of herself. Nigel had been happy to leave things where they dropped and had teased her for trying to keep order, calling her Miss Efficiency.
Now she was watching Mr. Efficiency as he began to get the campfire ready for next morning. “You don’t have to do that. I’ll do it tomorrow,” she said, her conscience nagging. He was supposed to be assisting her, not doing the job for her. Not that he was tough to watch, she thought.
“Old habits die hard,” he said mildly. “Leaving things lying around camp is asking for trouble in the outback.”
“Nigel didn’t think so.”
Blake lifted his head. “Missing him already?”
“What do you think?” she asked, avoiding answering his question.
He finished hooking the billycan over an arrangement of sticks he’d placed across the fire then speared her with an unnervingly direct look. “I think you haven’t given him a thought since he flounced off at the airport.”
Since she couldn’t defend herself, she felt bound to defend Nigel. “He didn’t flounce. He left because he was almost taken by a man-eating crocodile.”
“Hardly a man-eater,” Blake corrected.
His lack of feeling was as infuriating as her own overabundance of it. “The beast leaped out of the river and attacked him. In my book, that makes it a man-eater. Or don’t you count near misses? Perhaps you’d prefer to see actual blood.”
Blake straightened. “You’re overreacting. That crocodile has lived in this river system for fifteen years without bothering anyone. Ask the indigenous people. They’ve swum in this creek for years.”
“Maybe it only eats nonindigenous people,” she responded.
“And maybe someone has been feeding it from the landing, luring it in.” His gaze narrowed. “Crocodiles only recognize food and nonfood. To them, there’s no difference between a piece of meat and the hand holding it. All this animal has learned is that anything a human holds out from the rock landing is food.”
Her palms felt icy and she rubbed them together although the night was warm. “You think Eddy Gilgai deliberately taught the crocodile to feed close by so it would attack humans?”
“His presence in the area, coupled with the rotten remains Andy found, make the theory seem likely. The difficulty will be in proving anything.”
“Did Andy find any more clues after we left for the airport?”
“Plenty of tracks, but nothing that would hold up in court.”
“If he had found something, would you still be here?”
In the flickering lamplight, his eyes gleamed. “Why don’t you ask me outright why I decided to stay?”
Annoyance rippled through her, although she wasn’t sure if it was at him for being so smug or at herself for caring what he thought. “I know why you stayed. You think I’m an incompetent city type who can’t be let loose on her own in the bush. If I get into trouble, it looks bad for Diamond Downs.”
His wide shoulders lifted and fell. “You said it, I didn’t.”
“You’re wrong about me,” she snapped. “I was a news reporter before I joined the magazine. I’ve investigated crime, drugs, you name it, without falling apart. I’d already started building a shelter before you showed up.”
His gaze went to the bush building materials she’d piled on the camp fringe. “So I see.”
“I wasn’t counting on a crocodile trying to eat my partner.”
“From the look of things, your partner wasn’t much help anyway.”
“We’d barely settled in.”
Blake braced an arm against the tent frame. “This isn’t a holiday camp. If it was a real survival test, you wouldn’t have the luxury of settling in. You’d get moving and do what you must to keep yourself alive.”
She tried not to be distracted by muscles she couldn’t remember seeing outside a gym and rarely enough inside it. His body had been sculpted by hard use rather than vanity, she thought. With his build, he’d make a great male model, although she couldn’t imagine Blake being willing to pose for hours. “I intend to survive,” she assured him.
His gaze leveled. “I think you will.”
She brushed aside the glow his approval brought. “I won’t have much choice, since I’ll be on my own after tomorrow.” She was grateful