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“Yes, you are.” I gave him a few strokes while I kissed down his neck, then I captured his mouth with mine. “Now get on the bed.”
Thunder boomed overhead and lightning lit up the sky outside. The air between us crackled, charged with energy. Derek smirked and did as I told him. As the summer storm wreaked havoc outside, we made slow love, over and over. Steamy and sweaty, our bodies joining in the most intimate of ways, the way our hearts already had.
As one, and forever.
OUTRUN THE RAIN
CHAPTER ONE
TULLY
I satin my old Jeep Wrangler, waiting for the plane from Darwin to come in. Jabiru Airport was no more than a one-building low-key airport, smack bang right in the middle of Kakadu National Park in the Top End of the Northern Territory.
It wasn’t a thriving metropolis, lemme put it that way.
The brick terminal building was better than the tin shed it used to be, but still. Heathrow, this place was not.
Jabiru itself had a grand population of around one thousand people. Well, that many in the dry season, less in the wet season. The climate up here did funny things to folks, and most packed up and went south for a few months, before the heat and humidity and torrential rain set in.
That was when I got here.
Because with that heat and humidity came summer storms. Brutal, fierce, electrical storms that rolled in almost every afternoon, dumping monsoonal downpours, and setting the skies on fire with lightning.
Which was why I was waiting at Jabiru Airport.
A guy was coming up from the Bureau of Meteorology in Melbourne. Staying for a week or two to study lightning. Well, he’d already studied it; he had some doctorate or some other fancy title. Well, he hadAtmospheric Sciences and Meteorologyafter his name, followed by a whole bunch of letters. He was coming all this way toobserveit. To run some fancy tests, or some scholarly thing I didn’t understand.
Apparently, he’d put some feelers out in the Darwin scholarly meteorology circles about wanting to spend a week in the wilds of Kakadu National Park studying and observing all he could. I was surprised he didn’t get laughed at, but someone mentioned me—a non-scholarly type who spent weeks chasing electrical storms—and a few phone calls later, he’d tracked me down.
I’d told him I wasn’t like those university dicks. I just spent my summers chasing storms because it was fun and because I could. I explained it involved camping out in Kakadu National Park. That there was some hiking involved. That it would just be me and him in the middle of nowhere, and there would be a possibility that we saw no other human beings for his entire stay.
He said that was fine.
He’d offered me some ridiculous payment, some government study grant, and I told him to donate it to the Kakadu National Park. He did exactly that, and I was all out of excuses.
So, despite my best efforts to convince him otherwise, he was getting in today.
Doctor Jeremiah Overton.
With that name, he had to be eighty. I’d not spoken to him on the phone, only via email with his fancy doctorate signature, but even the way he wrote was very formal. Or maybe that was just the way super smart scientists wrote requests from their fancy science websites.
I had no clue.
But I was about to find out.
The small plane flew in, went careening down the runway, and with a sigh, I climbed out of my Jeep and went inside. At least the terminal was air conditioned.
“Afternoon, Tully,” Yasmin said from behind the check-in counter.
I gave her a smile. “Afternoon.”
“What brings you in today? A person or cargo this time?”
“A person.”
A person who I didn’t know at all. Hell, I didn’t even know what they looked like, didn’t know what kind of time I was in for.Why had I agreed to this?
Regret ratcheted up a notch or two as the plane rolled to a stop and the door opened.
