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throughout last night.
    In her dreams, Poppy hadn’t been standoffish or in need of personal space. Shehadn’t been wary of him or of the things he might do.
    It hadn’t been awkward. She hadn’t been clueless or desperately out of her depth, the way she had been with others.
    She hadn’t been seventeen going on fourteen and Sebastian hadn’t been twenty-two and impatient. Sebastian hadn’t been baffled by her awkwardness or horrified by her age and inexperience when finally she’d confessed it.
    He hadn’t muttered stumbling apologies interspersed with curses, while scooping up her clothes and directing her to put them on, put them on, before hurriedly showing her the door, saying, ‘Sorry, sorry, dear God, I’m sorry. I had no idea.’
    Sebastian hadn’t said sorry at all.
    Fine things, dreams.
    Poppy threw her covers back and stretched out and waited until the sun bathed every inch of her in its glow.
    Dreams were what wishes were made of.
    Sebastian wasn’t at the house when Poppy arrived there just on 8:00 a.m. Easy, then, to make herself at home in the cave and find Tom’s cache of music and crank up the juice and get down to business.
    She almost didn’t hear the outer office phone, but the repetitive ring seeped through to her brain eventually and with it came a new dilemma. Answer it or not? Surely the man had an answering machine?
    But a quick look confirmed the phone for some sort of satellite affair and whether it had an answering service function was open to speculation. She reached for the phone and picked it up gingerly.
    ‘Finally,’
said an exasperated female voice. ‘I didn’t think you were ever going to pick up. You done brooding yet? Because there’s a few things here in need of your attention. Like a potential blowout in the Timor Sea. Do we want after it or not?’
    ‘Hello?’ said Poppy. ‘You’ll be after Seb.’
    ‘Who’s this?’ asked the voice suspiciously.
    ‘
Are
you after Seb?’ countered Poppy politely. ‘Because I’m quite happy to take a message. I’m quite happy to go and
find
him and deliver a message if it’s important.’
    ‘Who are you, exactly?’
    ‘A friend of Tom’s.’
    ‘Seb’s brother.’ The voice grew friendlier by the second.
    ‘Yes. Seb’s not in the house right now. I’m not sure where he is, to be honest.’
    ‘In that case, I’d love you to give him amessage. Tell him there’s a jackup leaking oil and gas in the Montara field. It’s been evacuated and I’m pulling in more details from the parent company now. It’s a mess. Tell him to call Wendy asap.’
    ‘Tell him or ask him?
    ‘Ask him,’ said Wendy. ‘But if you can make it sound like it’s non-negotiable, all the better.’
    ‘All righty,’ said Poppy. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’
    She hung up and, with a wistful glance towards the computer room, headed for the quad and set it chugging sedately down the track towards the boatshed in search of her host.
    But he wasn’t in the boatshed, so she tried to remember where he’d said he might be as she took the track that ran around behind it and worked the quad slowly around the edge of the island. Fishing, climbing, swimming or something. That was where he’d be.
    Poppy kept motoring, with the smell of the bush closing in on one side of her and the smell of the sea on the other, and the colours spread out before her were forest green and azure blue, sometimes butting up against each other and sometimes separated by a strip of sand. Wind in her hair, the sun on herface and the throb of the quad beneath her. Poppy’s senses were sharper here. Her enjoyment of sensual things more pronounced.
    Maybe that might explain her fascination with one Sebastian Reyne.
    He wasn’t on the first stretch of beach that she came to but she did find his quad parked in the shade of some trees on the second. Poppy scanned the beach and the bushland behind her but there was no sign of the man on either.
    Sighing, she turned her attention