How long had it been since she’d touched someone like this?
All that hard flesh Eve had seen on the beach—felt on the bike—pressed back against her fingers as they splayed out across his chest. Across the shadowy eagle that she knew lived there beneath the saturated cotton shirt. Across Marshall’s strongly beating heart. Marshall was right. They weren’t going to see each other again. This might be the only chance she had to know what it felt like to have the heat of him pressed against her. To know him. To taste him. All she had to do was move one finger. Any finger. She’d never meant to enter some kind of self-imposed physical exile when she’d set off on this odyssey. It had just happened. And before she knew it she’d gone without touching a single person in any way at all for… She sucked in a tiny breath. All of it. Eight months. Only one way to find out. Eve trailed her butterfly fingers lightly up to his collarbone. Beyond to the rigid definition of his larynx, which lurched out of touch and then back in again like the scandalous tease it was. Strong fingers lifted to frame her face—to lift it—and he brought her eyes to his. They simmered, as bottomless as the ocean around them, as he lowered his mouth towards hers.
Her Knight in the Outback
Nikki Logan
NIKKI LOGAN lives on the edge of a string of wetlands in Western Australia, with her partner and a menagerie of animals. She writes captivating nature-based stories full of romance in descriptive natural environments. She believes the danger and richness of wild places perfectly mirror the passion and risk of falling in love.
Nikki loves to hear from readers
via nikkilogan.com.au or through social media. Find her on Twitter: @ReadNikkiLogan and Facebook: NikkiloganAuthor
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For Mat
With enormous gratitude to Dr Richard O’Regan for his help with the pharmaceutical aspects of this story, which were integral to its resolution. And with deepest respect and compassion for the families of ‘The Missing’.
Contents
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
IT WAS MOMENTS like this that Evelyn Read hated. Life-defining moments. Moments when her fears and prejudices reared up before her eyes and confronted her—just like a King Brown snake, surprised while basking on the hot Australian highway.
She squinted at the distant biker limping carefully towards her out of the shimmering heat mirage and curled her fingers more tightly around the steering wheel.
A moment like this one might have taken her brother. Maybe Trav stopped for the wrong stranger; maybe that was where he went when he disappeared all those months ago. Her instincts screamed that she should press down on her accelerator until the man—the danger—was an hour behind her. But a moment like this might have saved her brother, too. If a stranger had only been kind enough or brave enough to stop for him. Then maybe Travis would be back with them right now. Safe. Loved.
Instead of alone, scared...or worse.
The fear of never knowing what happened to him tightened her gut the way it always did when she thought too long about this crazy thing she was doing.
The biker limped closer.
Should she listen to her basest instincts and flee, or respond to twenty-four years of social conditioning and help a fellow human being in trouble? There was probably some kind of outback code to be observed, too, but she’d heard too many stories from too many grieving people to be particularly bothered by niceties.
Eve’s eyes flicked to the distant motorbike listing on the side of the long, empty road. And then, closer, to the scruffy man now nearing the restored 1956 Bedford bus that was getting her around Australia.
She glanced at her door’s lock to make sure it was secure.
The man limped to a halt next to the bus’s bifold doors and looked at her expectantly over his full beard. A dagger tattoo poked out from under his dark T-shirt and impenetrable sunglasses hid his eyes—and his intent—from her.
No. This was her home. She’d never open her front door to a total stranger. Especially not hours from the nearest other people.
She signalled him around to the driver’s window instead.
He didn’t