Free Awakened by His Touch by Nikki Logan

where?’
    ‘Cheapest flight out of Perth was to Bali. You’d be amazed at how many people go to the trouble of travelling to another country and then don’t want to engage with the locals. I ran errands for xenophobic Westerners for a few months before hopping over to Vietnam, then Thailand and India. Picking up whatever work I could get, always living local. Living cheap. Exploiting whatever opportunities I could find as I went along. Country-hopping.’
    ‘How did you manage the languages? The politics in some of those areas? As a kid?’
    ‘I didn’t always, but I got by. By the time I hit India I had a system and I was of age. Bars, hotels and restaurants were perfect for short-term work, because you could sneak at least one decent meal a day while getting paid. I kept a low profile and always kept moving.’
    ‘You didn’t want to stop?’
    ‘No.’ Passion leaked out of him as a groan. ‘I’d been stopped my whole life. I just wanted to move.’
    She shuffled around towards him. ‘Then why did you come home?’
    When she said ‘home’ it was with a respectful breath. But she got the sense that to Elliott it was more of a dirty word.
    He accepted a drink from the waiter who had delivered it to their cluster of seats and then dropped his voice down for her hearing only.
    ‘I grew up. Got tired of my own pace. And I realised that I could get the same spirit of... conquering ...from finding small businesses and growing them. Selling for a profit. Eventually, that led to a buy-sell pattern that was as nomadic as my travelling but more profitable, and Ashmore Coolidge took me on as an intern. And the rest is history.’
    What he saw as nomadism she saw as reluctance to commit. Not that it had made him any less money that way. ‘No more travel?’
    ‘For business, yes. And the odd holiday back to Bali, where it all started.’
    ‘We’re very different people,’ she murmured.
    The only part of his wanderlust that she could relate to was the frustration towards a parent. She’d felt it her whole life, but attached to her over-eager father, whereas Elliott’s had been with his apparently under-achieving mother.
    ‘Not so different. You wouldn’t have grown Morgan’s the way you have if you didn’t have a pioneering spirit.’
    ‘I grew it to secure our financial base. I wasn’t looking to revolutionise the industry.’
    ‘Yet you have in some ways.’
    ‘What ways?’
    ‘The apitoxin side of your business. Treating rheumatism and Parkinson’s. That’s pretty unusual. The surf wax.’
    Hmm. Someone had been reading up.
    ‘Apitoxin is not revolutionary. I started with bee venom in response to the Davidsons’ allergic son—to help desensitise him so that they can stay on the land they love.’
    And once she’d discovered that harvesting the venom didn’t have to kill the bees, she’d realised it was a perfect by-product of what they did every day, anyway.
    ‘And we produce near one of Australia’s best surf regions. Of course we were going to make a speciality board wax. But I still didn’t invent the idea.’
    ‘There’s nothing that Morgan’s is doing that’s totally unique? What about your facial recognition work?’
    Really? Was he going to keep badgering until she confessed to being the Steve Jobs of bees? ‘It’s the bees that are amazing. And the software engineers. Not me.’
    ‘It was your proposal.’ But something in her expression must have finally dawned on him. ‘Why don’t you want to be amazing, Laney?’
    Frustration hissed out of her. ‘Because I’m not. I’m just me. Anything I do is out of curiosity or the desire to strengthen our brand. I’m not curing cancer or splitting atoms.’
    ‘Not yet...’
    Ugh..! ‘Why does everyone try to make me more than I am? I just work with bees. They are my business and I try to be smart about business. But that’s it.’
    ‘Laney—’
    ‘We have a whole weekend ahead of us, and I’m not going to show you anything of