‘You want to try?’ he asked, and she hesitated.
‘Try what?’
‘Fish feeding.’
‘You’re kidding?’ But as she watched he lifted his hand and scattered a fistful of crumbs around him. The water erupted. Slivers of silver fish leaped, contorting, brushing him, desperate to reach the crumbs.
‘Like to try?’ He held out a bread roll.
How was a girl to resist an invitation like that? She dived down and swam strongly underwater, opening her eyes as she neared him.
Fish. Everywhere were fish. Gorgeous silver arrows, long and thin and darting with magic speed… There must be hundreds of them.
She surfaced right by Alistair’s legs and the fish didn’t care at all. They were surfacing all around her, brushing her face, swimming through her hands.
She’d never seen anything like it. Entranced, she floated while all about her the fish leaped and tumbled and just…
Just were.
‘It’s a real-life spa,’ she whispered, and Alistair grinned.
‘Want to see me turn the power up?’ He tossed another handful of crumbs and the water around them churned with the horsepower of a commercial washer. Sarah lay back, grinning like a fool. She’d come down to the beach determined to keep her distance, but who could keep their distance from an experience like this?
Not Sarah.
‘This is magic,’ she breathed as he handed over a bread roll and turned into a spectator himself. She crumbled the bread and lowered it into the water so it would just float away from her hand.
It didn’t have a chance. The fish were actually lifting it from her fingers, darting away and then surging forward for more.
She was laughing out loud.
‘What are they?’
‘Mostly whiting. Though those guys there are banded grunters.’
‘Banded who?’
‘Banded grunters.’ He grinned. ‘You catch one and you’ll see why they’re called that. But you can’t catch one here. The local fishermen have declared this area off-limits to preserve breeding grounds. So we have everything here. Even sea snakes.’
‘Sea snakes?’
‘Sea snakes. That’s one winding through your legs right at this minute.’
‘Right at this minute?’ To say she froze would be an understatement. ‘There’s a snake winding through my legs…?’
‘Look.’
‘I’m carefully not looking,’ she whispered.
‘It wants some crumbs. Not you. Crumbs taste better.’
‘Gee, thanks.’
‘It’s gone now.’ He grinned at her still frozen expression and pointed to where a streak of silver-grey was breaking the surface as it snaked away. ‘He’s had his feed. He doesn’t need a dessert of toes.’
She relaxed. Sort of. She tossed another lot of crumbs and relaxed some more. Sea snake or not, this was an experience that was almost unbelievable.
‘People would pay a fortune for an experience like this,’ she murmured, and Alistair smiled in agreement.
‘They would. And so would those guys.’
‘Who?’ She looked up from her mass of writhing, tumbling fish and found he was pointing to the other side of the rocky outcrop protecting the little beach. A ring of rocks around the cove made it totally secluded. There was no fear of sharks coming in here. At high tide the rocks would be covered by about a foot of water, she thought, but now the ring of rocks was exposed. And outside it…
Fins. It was all she could do not to yelp. Rocks or not, there were fins, and her toes suddenly felt very vulnerable.
Sea snakes. Fins. A lesser woman might be clutching Alistair’s neck right now, huddled into his arms.
Come to think of it…
No. Concentrate on fins.
‘Sharks?’ she quavered, and his smile widened.
‘Look again.’
She did. The fins were cruising up and down on the other side of the rocks. Then whatever was under one of the fins seemed to take a chance. The creature surged forward, leaping into the air as if trying to see over the rock barrier. And Sarah gasped in sheer joy.
‘Dolphins!’
‘You can’t imagine how frustrated they must feel,’ Alistair told her. ‘They’re watching us feeding what they’d like as their dinner. The whiting and grunters come in here in schools and they’re perfectly safe. The dolphins, however, have to live with frustration.’
‘You tease them,’ she said wonderingly, and he grinned.
‘I do. They don’t mind. There’s heaps of fish on their side of the barrier.’
‘Can we get closer?’
‘I’d imagine with your swimming ability you’d be able to get as close as you like. And they’ll be as interested in you as you are in them. I don’t believe they’ve ever met a forensic pathologist before.’
‘Don’t tell them what I do,’ she said urgently-half seriously. ‘Let them think I’m a schoolteacher or something.’ Then, before he could question her, she’d turned and dived through the small wavelets and was stroking firmly towards the rocks.
Alistair watched her for a moment-just watched her-and then followed.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE dolphins were the stuff of fantasy. Sarah sat on the rock ledge with water lapping over her toes and watched, seemingly entranced, while Alistair watched from behind.
What had that last comment meant? he wondered. Didn’t she like being a forensic pathologist? Hadn’t she been free to be whoever she wanted to be?
He knew so little about her, he realised. She’d been his brother’s chosen wife and yet she was a total enigma.
Or maybe not completely. What did he know? Only what was written in the sort of glossy magazines Claire collected for his waiting room.
So he did know something. Sarah Rose was the daughter of a media magnate and one of his numerous wives. Alistair knew nothing of her mother-she seemed to have faded into insignificance since her brief marriage-but Sarah had been raised by her famous father in a glare of publicity, where very public marriages, very public divorces and far, far too much money were the order of the day. She had four half-sisters, all much older than Sarah and all of whom had gone on to be society wives of wealthy men. Sarah, though, had surprised the jet set by quietly going off to medical school. She’d surprised them even more by doing well.
Alistair remembered the first phone call he’d had from Grant. ‘Hey, I’ve got a date with Sarah Rose.
Maybe she did have everything, but now… What did she have now? Shadows, he thought. He watched her as she watched the dolphins, hugging her knees and smiling that enigmatic little smile that told him of inner pleasure. Where was her jet-setting past in all this?
Would she ever have been happy with Grant?
Grant would have been happy with her, he thought bleakly. She was everything Grant had ever wanted in a
