A Kiss to Seal the Deal Read Online Free

females for breeding season.
    Families. They came in all shapes and sizes, and if those pups got lucky they’d have theirs for a lot longer than she’d had hers. Kate frowned. She’d had a long time to grow accustomed to being on her own but it had never really grown any easier.
    One of the pups squealed and drew her maudlin focus back to them.
    It was amazing they tolerated human presence at all, given Kate and her team caught them up once a month and piled them into wool sacks for weighing. But the young seals seemed to view it as a regular part of their lives, a game to be had. More than one pup dashed straight back into the wool sack after release, keen to be back with its mates. Looking into the sack was one of the rare true pleasures of her job, as four pairs of enormous, melted-chocolate eyes in brown furry faces peered back out at her.
    It got all her maternal instincts bubbling, yearning, until she shushed them. When your colleagues barely noticed you were female, and when colleagues were the only men you met, kids weren’t an immediate issue on the horizon, no matter what her biology was hinting.
    Plus they were just one more thing to love and lose. And what was the point?
    â€˜Hey, Dorset,’ Kate murmured to one of the seals she could recognise by sight as she settled herself on a suitably flat rock. The large female was one of five wearing the monitoring equipment this month. The time-depth recorder captured her position above sea-level every five seconds when she was dry and every two seconds when she was wet, twenty-four-seven. They rotated the expensive recorders monthly across the whole adult colony, to get a good spread of data from as many animals as possible, in order to determine information for their study: where the seals fed, for how long and how deep they went.
    What they were eating was a different matter. There was no convenient machine for that, hence the vomit and poop-sifting.
    Dorset gave an ungracious snort and turned her attention back out to sea, sparing the briefest of glances for Danny Boy, her pup. Seal mothers were shockingly fast to abandon their pups when threatened; that made it much easier to catch up the young for weighing, but it bothered Kate on a fundamental level that these babies were often left undefended.
    She knew from experience how that felt.
    She’d made a pledge to herself back when she was young that she’d never let herself get in that position again—exposed, vulnerable to the capricious decisions of others. Without control. Without any say.
    It must have occurred to the seal species in the ancient past that the loss of the baby meant the loss of only one, but the loss of a fertile mother meant the loss of an entire genetic line. Pups were expendable. And entirely, tragically vulnerable.
    Danny Boy looked straight at her and then dashed off, barking in grumpy high-pitched tones. Sad affection bubbled through her. As far as the fishing communities along the west coast were concerned, seals and man were hunting the same fishstocks. And, when that industry was worth millions of dollars a year, anything or anyone threatening supply would not be tolerated. Her research was showing that, whether by good design or dumb luck, seals were hunting totally different fish from humans. If only she could prove that to the people of Castleridge. To the government. To the world.
    â€˜Don’t suppose you guys would consider going vegetarian?’ she quietly asked the wary mass of seals.
    Close by, one mother trumpeted her displeasure at that idea, and Kate scrabbled away from the ensuing stench; beyond disgusting.
    Her chuckle was half-gag. ‘Go on. Get it out of your system now. I need you guys to be charming the next time I come down.’
    With McMurtrie junior in tow. It was the obvious next step. If he was going to throw legalese at her, then she’d fight back with the only thing she had—history. If Grant McMurtrie had cared for