LITMIR.BIZ

      CHAPTER ONE

      ELLIOTT GARVEY LEANED on the bleached timber boardwalk like a seasoned stalker, watching the woman frolicking with her dog where the coastal rock slid down into the aquamarine ocean.

      It didn’t matter that this lookout and the long, sandy path leading to it were public, the map in his hands and the occasional sign wired to the fence lining the gravel track in this remote, picturesque spot reminded him very clearly that the property all around him was upper-case P private. So, technically, was the beach below. In fact, it barely qualified as a beach since—private or not—it was only about twenty metres long. More a cove, really, eroded out of the hard rock either side of it, protected and quiet.

      Back home they’d have turned this into a boat-launching area, for sure. It was perfect for it.

      Then again, back home they wouldn’t have had anything even remotely like this. Where he was from, further north up the coast, the ruling landform was sand, not the stunning limestone rock forms of the Morgan property. The lookout under his feet ‘looked out’ over the cove about twenty metres away, as it happened, but its intended view was the spectacular Australian coastline beyond it. Rugged and raw and beaten to death by pounding seas in the off season.

      But today the sea was flat and gentle.

      His eyes dropped again.

      Judging by the very determined way the woman was not looking up at him, she was either trying very hard to pretend he wasn’t there, spoiling her serenity, or she wasn’t supposed to be there. A tourist, maybe? That would explain the long cotton dress that she’d hiked up her bare legs instead of the swimsuit a local would have turned up in. And clearly this was a tourist who liked to travel with her dog. The soggy golden retriever bounded around her, barking and celebrating life in a shower of droplets, and the size of the lead bundled in the woman’s right hand suggested her dog was a handful most of the time. But right now it just circled her excitedly as she danced.

      Danced? More flowed, really. She practically ebbed in time with the soft waves washing onto the beach and retreating again, her feet lightly skipping in the wet sand. The wet bottom of her long summer dress wanted to cling to her legs, but she kept it hiked up, out of the way, as she splashed in and out of the water with her movements. Dipping and twisting and undulating her whole body to music he couldn’t hear.

      Out of nowhere, a memory surged into his crowded mind. Of him and his mother, the only trip they’d ever taken away from the city when he was about eight. He’d hung his lean little body half out of the open window of the car she’d borrowed from a friend, overwhelmed to be doing something as exciting as leaving the city, hand-surfing on the wind that whipped past. Riding the current, rising and dipping on it with both hands. Dreaming of the places it would take him if only he were light enough to catch its updraft.

      Just as that woman was dancing. There was no wind to speak of down below in the protected little cove, but that didn’t seem to cause her the slightest trouble as she moved on air currents no one else could feel. Not him. Not the still coastal wildflowers lining the tiny sandy strip. Not the barely interrupted surface of the water.

      Just her, her dog and whatever the heck drugs she must be on to put her in such a sublimely happy place.

      Elliott

Скачать книгу