If they hadn’t been in the car and weren’t still mired in the after-kiss awkwardness, Gem would have hugged her. She could so easily see the child who, through no fault of her own, hadn’t fit in a highly aggressive, competitive, physical family. Austin seemed to be the last person in need of protecting, but Gem ached with a well of protectiveness all the same. “Well, you’ve made up for it now. You’re pretty damn famous yourself.”

Austin laughed, and this time her obvious pleasure softened her features, making her seem younger and far less cynical. “Yeah, that’s me—crowds follow me wherever I go.”

“Told you,” Gem said, inordinately happy just to have made her laugh. Maybe the after-kiss strangeness would fade away now too.

“So,” Austin said, “enough about my uninteresting past. Tell me what kind of birds you’re expecting, and when.”

“I’m mostly interested in waterfowl—ducks, geese, swans, pelicans—especially since many of them overnight on pastures en route where they might come into contact with domestic fowl. And of course, all the shorebirds are key to follow. Many of them endangered.” Gem stretched, beginning to feel the stiffness in her back and thighs from the long hours of inactivity. “The saltmarsh sparrow is a favorite of mine. And don’t try to tell me you’re dying to know more.”

“Come on,” Austin protested. “It’s interesting. Do you band them or something?”

“Some, yes. We also document the flocks through satellite tracking, geographics, and sometimes with little tracking devices called geotrackers. And we ask birdwatchers to call a hotline if they sight a banded bird.”

“I had no idea,” Austin muttered, and she really should have. She’d dealt with environmental rescue teams more than she’d like, but she’d never talked to the biologists—usually just the incident commanders. She needed to get a lot closer to the ground to understand the personalities involved and what was at risk. “How long do they stay?”

She hoped the answer was not very long. If the spill was ongoing but slow, even if they couldn’t contain it immediately, they might be able to set up enough blockades to stop or divert the movement of the surface contaminants to shore. Then if the birds were gone, the impact would be far less. Cleanup procedure would be a lot less complicated if they didn’t have to deal with wildlife salvage.

“They don’t all arrive at once, of course,” Gem said. “We’ll be seeing nesting flocks for the next few weeks.”

“I see.” Of course she couldn’t catch a break. But then, maybe she would. Maybe Ray Tatum would give her good news. And she needed to contact him soon to get a sit rep. “We’re still a good three hours from the island at the speed we’re going. If the weather clears a little more, I’ll be able to make better time, but I’m not counting on it.”

“Whenever you’re ready, I can eat,” Gem said.

“Let me know when you’ve got some kind of signal again too. I need to make some calls.”

“I’ll keep checking.” Gem remembered Austin had mentioned there was no one she was meeting, but she didn’t pry. It was none of her business who Austin needed to call, a stark reminder she didn’t really know anything about her. Or rather, what she did know were not the things one ordinarily learned on first meeting. Sure, she knew where Austin lived, more or less, and she knew what she did for a living, and she’d learned a couple of things about her family. But she didn’t know her age, she didn’t know her taste in music, or her favorite food, or her favorite color, or, God—if she had a girlfriend. Weren’t those the things you were supposed to talk about when first getting to know someone? Obviously, she was failing at Relationship 101. But she did know some things about her—she knew she was confident, capable, a good listener, protective, a little possessive, secretive at times, and, beneath the strength, plagued by sadness. Austin was fascinating, alluring, and a fabulous kisser. And about that kiss…

“What happened back there,” Gem said before she could second-guess herself, “was pretty unusual for me.”

Austin cut her a look. “The tire changing or the kiss?”

Gem smiled fleetingly. “I’ve done both a few times before. Actually the kiss more than the tire thing, but I usually wait until, you know, we’ve had a date or three or so to jump. So to speak.”

“We had breakfast at the diner. That’s kind of the date.”

“It was.” At a loss, Gem searched for exactly what she wanted to say. She didn’t want to apologize. She wasn’t sorry. The kiss had been everything she hadn’t realized she wanted—exquisitely sensual, passionate, a tangle of sensations that disengaged her mind and left her with nothing but feelings. Wonderful, wild feelings she wanted to recapture. Of course, she wasn’t about to mention she wanted to do it again. That and more. She needed to examine those emotions a lot more carefully before she found herself in way too deep. The kiss was one thing. Sex with a near stranger was something else again.

“It was a hell of a kiss,” Austin added. “Just saying.”

Gem laughed, exhilaration coursing through her. The heaviness and uncertainty that had weighed on her evaporated. She felt as light as a bird must, drifting on an air current. “That’s an understatement, Ace.”

Austin caught her breath. Ace. No one called her that. She liked it. “You okay with it, then?”

“Mostly. You?”

“Sure, yeah.” Austin slowed and pulled in to a small lot in front of a single-story building with a sign out front proclaiming Erma’s Family Diner. She turned in the seat and faced Gem. “I mean, I’m not usually taken by surprise that way. I…I liked it a lot.”

“So we’ll just agree it was good, and we’re okay.”

Austin wished it was that easy. What she hadn’t said, couldn’t say, hung in the air like a thundercloud only she could see. She couldn’t divert that storm, not yet, and she didn’t want to tarnish the memory of the kiss, not when it was likely to be the only one she had. “Absolutely. We’re great.”

Chapter Seven

“We might catch a break after all,” Austin said, looking out the window beside their table. Although the sky remained gray and heavily overcast, the rain had stopped while they’d looked at menus and ordered. Unlike the diner that morning, this restaurant was nearly empty at the height of the dinner hour. Although not large, the main dining room felt cavernous with only a few tables occupied, or perhaps it was the silence at their table creating the vast empty sensation in her chest. Austin resisted the urge to shake her shoulders to throw off the cloak of melancholy. The ominous weight wasn’t going to be dismissed with a casual gesture. The easy connection between her and Gem had disappeared, and the tension taking its place twisted in her middle like a giant claw.

So much for talking away the unease between them. She’d said everything was okay between them. So had Gem. But the awkwardness intensified with each passing minute. Gem toyed with the stem of her wineglass, her expression pensive. Austin wished again she could read her mind. She wished a lot of things, and wishing for what she couldn’t have was something she thought she’d given up a long time before. Apparently, she’d been wrong. She reached across the table and caught Gem’s free hand. “Hey.”

Gem looked up, her eyes widening. “Sorry? What?”

Just the sound of her voice eased the knot between Austin’s shoulder blades. “Are you really okay?”

“Yes and no. Mostly uncertain.” Gem smiled faintly. “Lousy company. I’m sorry.”

“No need to be. Anything I can do?” Austin grimaced. She might be a little too late for that. “Or am I the problem?”

“I hate to say it’s me and not you, but that’s the truth.” Running her thumb over the back of Austin’s hand, Gem shook her head. “I’m just trying to figure myself out, and believe me, that’s never been easy. When it really counts, I’m a mystery to myself. It’s hell when you keep secrets from yourself.”

Austin sat back, reluctantly releasing Gem’s hand. She wanted to keep holding it, but she couldn’t keep inviting that connection with all that went unsaid between them. All she hadn’t said. “I’m sure there’s a million things about you I don’t know, but you don’t seem secretive to me. In my experience, people with secrets to keep rarely talk about themselves—or when they do, they never say anything that matters.”

Gem’s brows rose. “What matters, do you think?”

“To you?” Austin smiled. “Your birds, your work, your love of solitude. You enjoy being alone, but you’re easy to talk to. You like people but you don’t need someone around twenty-four seven. You’re independent and comfortable with your own company.”

“Well, at least I’ve given a good first impression,” Gem said lightly, but her expression remained contemplative. Her gaze was reflective, as if she was looking inward or somewhere far off into the distance.

Austin waited, her heart thumping, feeling like a fraud. She was the one keeping secrets, even though she’d been more open with Gem than anyone she could ever recall—at least once she’d learned not to expose her innermost thoughts to her family. Could Gem tell the disclosures were a little one-sided? They never seemed to have casual conversations. Every moment seemed so important. Maybe that was why she couldn’t pull back, didn’t want to let the silence—the distance—grow. Gem brought every fiber of her being to life. Could anyone blame her for not wanting to let that exhilaration fade away?

“The last few years,” Gem said at last, “my main goal has been to keep my life on an even keel, to be happy with what I have—the friendships, personal and professional, and my work. I thought I’d achieved a pretty good balance, all things considered.”