An Outback Affair/Runaway Wife/Outback Bridegroom/Outback Surrender/Home To Eden (3 page)

“Am I right or wrong?”

“You couldn't be more wrong.” He grimaced. “I'm a humble wood worker.”

“You surely don't think yourself humble?” What was the matter with her? She was breaking all the rules.

“All right, then, you tell me?”

“I think you're a casualty of battle.” My God had she said that?

He raised a large, sculpted hand. “Miss Graham, you've blown my cover.”

“Sometimes an emotional response can be quite unconnected to appearance or reason.”

“I just happen to agree.” Out of nowhere a complex intimacy was taking hold. “If you think you know something of me, may I ask if in coming out here to the desert you're making a fresh start?”

His voice was deliberately bland, but it didn't fool Laura. “I've made you angry.”

“You've thrown down a challenge. That's different.” When she had cut through his barriers with frightening ease. Few people had ever done that. Even hardened professionals.

“I won't bother you, Mr Thompson, if that's what you're worried about.”

“When you're the sort of woman who would always bother a man?” His watchful eye caught her tremble. “Forgive me. I'm quite sure we're going to be good neighbours as long as we keep to ‘good morning' and ‘good evening' over the fence. That's if you're going to stay?”

“Unfortunately, yes.” She gave him a tiny smile.

“I'm quite sure it's not what you're used to.”

“No more than you, in the old colonial next door. Actually, I was making some notes about what sort of furniture I'd need when you knocked.”

“There's a good secondhand store in the main street,” he found himself telling her. “The cottage is sound structurally. You'll need the fireplace from time to time. Desert nights can get very cold. Is this in the nature of a breathing space? Don't you have people who will miss you?”

“My life can wait.' She didn't attempt to say it lightly. He wouldn't be fooled. “As for you? Don't you have a story to tell?”

“I suppose I should ask are you psychic?” His voice was deliberately dry. “You have a witch's beautiful green eyes. Surely a give-away. Then again, you could be a spoilt little rich girl on the run.”

She visibly paled. “And if I were you wouldn't protect me?”

He was silent for a moment, her words and that spontaneous intimacy hammering away at him. “We'll deal with that when the time comes. You need have no fear of me, Miss Graham. I don't know who you are, but I do know you're taking a risk.”

“Is it possible you're psychic yourself? You know nothing whatever about me.”

“Quite possibly I'm like you.” He shrugged. “Covering my tracks. I'll keep quiet if you will.”

She watched him, watching her. “How did this all start?” she asked genuinely taken aback. “I don't understand how we got into this conversation at all.” For all its curious liberation.

“I do,” he said with surprising gentleness. “Sometimes it happens like that. A shortcut to discovery.”

“It strikes me as very strange, all the same.”

“Have no fears. Though when I saw you in the garden I thought fear would be alien to you. You looked so innocent, I suppose.”

“So why have you changed your mind?”

“You're too intense, and there's a haunting in your eyes.”

“All right, you're a psychiatrist?” She tried to cover her confusion with a banter. “A highbrow writer? Award-winning journalist? You're very intense too.”

“That comes with things we have to guard.”

“Then both of us have been very revealing this morning,” she said. Certainly nothing like this had ever happened to her before.

“It would seem so. I don't often meet a young woman so disconcertingly perceptive. Also, you're something of an enigma. You're too young to have had much life experience? How old? Twenty-one, twenty-two?” His eyes dipped from her face to take in her slender body in cool white skirt and ruffled top, a mix of cotton and lace. Refined. Virginal.

“Can you deal with twenty-three?” He was clearly much older, with a wealth of experience behind those dark eyes.

“A baby,” he concluded.

“I don't think so.” Her fingers clenched white. She was quite old enough to have had bad experiences.

He didn't miss the movement of her fingers. “You know about tragedy?”

“Tragedy spills into lots of people's lives. Maybe not on the level of what happened to you. What did happen to you?” she asked after a pause.

“Miss Graham, I'd have to know you a whole lot better before you could ever make that breakthrough,” he answered sardonically. “Besides, I'm pretty sure you're not willing to tell
your
story.”

“Investigative reporter? Something tells me I should know you.” He had far too much presence to be an ordinary everyday person.

“You don't,” he assured her briskly. “Anyway, we're not adversaries. Are we?”

“I hope not, Mr Thompson. It'll be a whole lot safer to be on your side.”

“You amaze me,” he offered freely. And she did.

“
You
amaze
me
,” she admitted in wry surprise. “I hadn't bargained on more than a brief introduction. Are you always like this with strangers?”

“You're not a stranger,” he said, with a dismissive shrug of his powerful shoulders. “I hadn't bargained on liking you either.”

“Ah, so I wasn't wrong. I could feel the hostility when you first arrived.”

“You assumed that,” he corrected.

“No. It's true.”

“All right,” he shrugged. “For a few moments you reminded me of someone I used to know.”

“Someone no longer in your life?” At his expression her smile faded.

“Exactly.” The brilliant dark eyes became hooded. “Anyway, apart from a few similarities you're not like her at all.”

“That's good. You had me worried until you smiled.”

“That's it? A smile?” he questioned, with a faint twist of his mouth.

“Yes,” she said simply, almost with relief. She didn't add that as a big man he was in such possession of the space around him. Necessarily the dominant male. Colin had lacked this man's presence, for all her husband's arrogance and physical attributes. How she wished her life had gone otherwise.

Poignancy left its imprint on her face. Women like her always made a man protective, Evan thought. “Well, I've got an hour or two to kill,” he found himself saying. “Would you like some help picking out furniture?”

“You mean you accept me as your neighbour?” Her eyes lit up.

“I accept that in some way you're very vulnerable.”

“You're accustomed to vulnerable people?”

“I'm not a doctor. I'm not a psychiatrist or a rocket scientist either. But I know a lot about people in pain.”

“Then you know too much,” she said quietly.

That contained emotion caused him to make a further offer. “How about lunch?” He, Evan Thompson, the loner! “Then we look at furniture, if you like.”

“You're being kind, aren't you?” Kindness was there, behind the brooding front. People mattered to him. As they did to her.

“Kind has nothing to do with it,” he said crisply. “I'm hungry.”

“Okay, that would be very nice.” She walked towards him as he rested his powerful body against the doorjamb. “Why don't you call me Laura?” She gave him a spontaneous smile that would have had Colin enraged. Her normal smile, or so she thought. Uncomplicated.

Evan found it captivating. “Then you must call me Evan.” He held out his hand. After a slight hesitation she took it, her hand getting lost in the size of his.

It was warm and firm, but never hurting.

“There, that wasn't so bad, was it?” he asked, one eyebrow raised. “You didn't really think I was going to crack your fingers?” He turned her hand over, examining it. “Delicate, but strong. Are you any good as a pianist?”

The effect of his skin on hers was the most electrifying thing that had ever happened to her. She couldn't pull away. It was as though she was held by a naked current. “People seemed to think so.”

“Conservatorium trained?”

“Wh-a-t?” It was so hard to concentrate when every nerve seemed to be jumping.

He released her hand. “I asked if you were Conservatorium trained?”

“I graduated. I'd begun studying for my Doctorate of Music.” She managed to speak calmly.

“So what happened?”

“Life.”

“An unhappy love affair?” Something had overwhelmed her.

“Desperately unhappy,” she admitted. “But that's all you're getting out of me.”

“There are worse things than unhappy love affairs,” he said.

I
T WAS
market day in the town. A day to be enjoyed. Street stalls sold their produce: fruit and vegetables, all sorts of pickles, home-made pies and cakes, the town's excellent cooks vying with one another to come up with some surprises. Stall after stall featured crafts. The town's two cheerful little coffee shops, one hung with red gingham curtains, the other with ruffled pink and white, were crowded.

“Let's get some sandwiches and have a picnic in the park?” Evan suggested. “Would you like that?” He glanced down at her as she stood at his shoulder. No, not his shoulder. A way down from there. More like his heart. Hell, if he wanted to he could pick her up and put her in his pocket.

“Why not?” She smiled at him as if she were treasuring every moment. “Koomera Crossing is such a pretty place. I didn't expect it to be so peaceful and picturesque. The pure air! It's on the edge of the desert, yet lovely warm aromatic breezes are spiraling around us. It's like a thawing of the heart.”

“Your heart needs thawing?” he asked, dipping his dark head to her.

“Well, I'm relaxed and comfortable here.” she said, looking towards the park, where small children were playing with the balloons they'd been given at the road stalls. “The bauhinia trees are lovely. They'll protect us from the sun while we eat.”

“So shall I be mother?” Humour lit his fine eyes. “We don't want to give people too much to talk about.” A trained observer, he already knew tongues had been set wagging at their appearance together.

“You know the town better than I do,” she conceded, happy when the passing townsfolk nodded to her and Evan
in their friendly Outback fashion. “Besides, I might get you something you don't like.”

“Would that matter?”

She was conscious of his penetrating glance on her. “Some people are very hard to please,” she said by way of explanation.

“Like the boyfriend?” After years of dodging bullets and destruction she seemed too young, too innocent, too unseasoned, to survive.

“We'll have to agree not to talk about him.”

“Right. You stay here and soak up the healing sunlight. I'll get the sandwiches and some coffee. Black or white?”

She considered sweetly. “Cappuccino, if they have it.”

“Look, you can have a cappuccino, a latte, a mini-cino, a Vienna, a short black, a long black—”

“Thank you. I get the message.” She smiled. It was the most incredible thing to be at peace with a man. For all his height and breadth of shoulder, the dark smoulder, he was surprisingly easy to warm to.

“Won't be long.” He strode away, glimpsing the town sticky beak, Ruby Hall, peeking through the window of the general store.

He lifted a sardonic hand to wave, but instead of waving back she unsuctioned her nose from the glass.

Dr Sarah Dempsey had come a long way from when she was a girl helping her widowed mother run the store, he thought. After Sarah had left town, Ruby assisted Muriel part-time, inundating everyone who went into the store—which was just about the whole town—with suggestive little questions designed to translate in to hot gossip.

Ruby Hall, nosy parker, really should be stopped, he thought—not for the first time. What she didn't know she made up.

He had attended Mrs Dempsey's funeral—as had most of the town—and shortly after that Sarah had taken over at the hospital from its long-time resident Dr Joe Randall, who had died of cancer at Wunnamurra homestead, stronghold of the
McQueen pioneering family, one of the most powerful landed families in the country.

Now Sarah was shortly to marry Kyall, the heir, as good a man as any woman was likely to get. If his new neighbour had Sarah Dempsey for a friend she had made the right connection.

 

They sat in rustic wooden chairs beside a bench in the shade of flowering orchid trees and a grove of ancient white gums. White gums flanked the curving banks of the creek, the iridescent green water eddying around small boulders that dotted the stream.

“The stream is the colour of your eyes,” he pointed out casually. “A sparkling green.”

What a voice he had! Deep, warm, sexy, with that interesting little cutting edge. He even had a slight foreign accent, or was she imagining it?

“It's lovely here,” she said happily, incredibly comforted by his presence and the fête-like atmosphere of the town centre. “And to top it off these sandwiches are delicious. Fresh bread, lovely thick ham, just enough lettuce, whole-grain mustard. Perfect.” With a total stranger she felt safe.

“Don't forget your cappuccino. It's not terribly good, I'm afraid. I can do better.” He reached out a long arm to position it nearer her. “And there's a couple of little cakes.”

“One each?”

“They're for you. You seem a tad underweight.”

“No doubt because—” She stopped abruptly. She was being seduced by sun and water, the sweetly melancholy song of the magpies, the joyous shrieks of children, and most of all by this big, mesmerizing man who seemed familiar in the deep recesses of her mind.

“You weren't having lots of fun?” He followed up with a question.

“No.” She felt a momentary chill as the past brushed up against her.

“What do you intend to do with yourself while you're here?” he asked, his tone brisk.

“Do with myself?” Her voice was startled. “As a matter of fact I haven't thought that far. It's enough to be here.”

“You've got yourself in a state if you had to disappear.”

Her eyelashes quivered. “A breathing space. No more.”

“I see.” He exuded disbelief.

“Sarah has been marvellous to me. I've been staying with her until I find a place.”

“What? In the haunted house? Lucky old you!” His laugh rumbled deep in his chest.

“I'd only been in town ten seconds before I heard about it. But ghosts don't frighten me as much as real people.”

He spun his head to stare at her, the dappled shade highlighting his broad, darkly tanned, handsome face. All he needed was a gold earring and he'd be perfect as a swash-buckling pirate. “Let's get this straight. Your boyfriend was frightening you?”

It was evident he'd never considered for a moment she was married. Did she look so young and inexperienced when she had known such terrible turbulence? “Ye gods! I didn't say that.”

“Ye gods?” he gently jeered. “Where did you dig that out? I haven't heard that for years.”

“My father used to say it.” A sad expression came into her eyes. “He was killed in a car crash when I was eighteen. I adored him.”

He nodded, never very far from his own grief. “I miss
my
father terribly. We were very close.” He looked away to where a large flock of pink and grey galahs were busily picking over the grass seeds.

“He died?” she said gently.

“Also in a car.” He didn't add that he had been murdered by terrorists Evan's own lover had put in motion.

“Are you an only child?” She tried to picture him as a boy. Couldn't. He was so adult. So big. So commanding—even in a short-sleeved blue cotton shirt and jeans, boots on his feet. He made her feel like a doll.

“Like you? Continue the inspection,” he invited dryly. “I'm used to being looked over.”

She blushed. “You mean by the women of the town?” She heard about this, and understood now she'd meet the high level of feminine interest.

“Women are always looking for a mate,” he said, a smile flitting around his handsome mouth.

“But you don't need one.” He seemed enormously self-reliant.

He was silent a while. “Of course I need one. But I have to get my life back together before then.”

“Your experiences have affected you deeply?”

“Things I don't want to talk about, Laura.” Killing fields. Unimaginable brutality.

“So I've learned a lot and yet nothing about you.”

“Same here. But you're such a clever thing I'm surprised you can't read my mind.”

“I'm doing my best. Do you like music?” she digressed. “Or do you merely pretend? No, you wouldn't pretend, would you?”

“It's never struck me to pretend about such a thing.”

“But about other things?”

“We've all got secrets, Laura. Some people have nightmares.”

Like me. Laura closed her eyes and knocked a hand to her breast.

“Why did you do that?” He was surprised and rather perturbed by her gesture.

“I don't know. Reflex action. I'm not a very brave person, I'm afraid. Sometimes panic rises up inside me like a flock of birds.” As she spoke she looked towards the noisy galahs.

“You're like me. At this point in our lives we need the vastness of the Outback to breathe in. Speaking of music, the highly persuasive Harriet Crompton—that's the town school-teacher—”

“I know Harriet. Sarah introduced us. She's quite a character.”

“She is.” His eyes glittered with amusement. “Dear Harriet drafted me into the town orchestra. I play cello in the string quartet as well.”

“Do you really?” She turned in her chair to stare at him.

“Why the arched brows, miss?”

“I thought you looked a little like Beethoven,” she teased. “No, seriously, I look on your playing with the orchestra as wonderful. It's just that you seem a very physical man—as in action. It wouldn't surprise me in the least to find out you'd been a commando in your other life.”

He grunted wryly. “I can't believe the number of guesses you've had. I told you I'm a wood worker. I'll make you something, if you like. A chair. A table. A jewellery box. Did you bring your diamonds, emeralds and pearls? I bet you've got them.”

“Why ever would you say that?” Her voice shook slightly.

“Whatever you've been, Laura, you weren't broke.”

She let her long hair slide forward to hide her profile. “It's really weird, the way we're talking so freely, don't you think? We only met an hour or so ago.”

“Don't let that bother you. The truth is people have always come to me with their troubles.”

“I'm not telling you mine.”

“Not even the first chapter? Clearly you don't know how to choose boyfriends. Why in hell are you running anyway? Won't he take no for an answer?”

“Be nice. Get off the subject,” she begged.

“Okay. Providing we can continue at another time. You're not dieting, are you?”

“Good grief, no. Can't you see? I ate the sandwiches.”

“Then eat the cakes. They cost good money and I've no intention of throwing them away.”

“All right, then.” She picked up one of the little home-made cup cakes. “Have you finally found your role?” She glanced mischievously at him out of the side of her green eyes.

“As in big brother?” he asked sarcastically. Far better to treat her that way. “I feel almost geriatric beside you.” She carried with her the innocence and freshness of spring.

“At thirty-seven, thirty-eight?”

“I stopped being young long ago,” he said too bluntly.

“Now, when you're finished I think we ought to hit the Trading Post. They sell new furniture as well as old.” He raised a quizzical brow. “How do you intend to pay for it all?”

“Why?” She raised an anxious face, always worried about endangering herself, bringing Colin after her.

“So I can be sure the name on your credit card matches the name you told me. Laura Graham.”

“I can pay in cash.”

“Cash?” His deep voice slid dismally. “Surely you're not carrying around lots of cash?”

“Hey, cash will do.”

“Don't you have credit cards? It's illegal for banks to give away private information.”

“Surely people can find out anything if they want to?”

He shook his head, staring into her face, past and beyond it. “Why don't you tell me all about it on the way home?”

“No thank you, big brother,” she joked. “You mustn't worry about me.”

“On the contrary, I might have to.” He disposed tidily of the café's take-away boxes and paper cups. “If for no other reason than you're going to be my next-door neighbour.”

“There's something comforting in that,” she said, feeling safer than she had at any time since she'd lost another big, strong man radiating kindness and authority. Her father.

 

Picking out furniture proved to be the greatest fun. They wandered through the store, which was divided into two sections—Used and New Furniture—debating what would go where. Evan must have called in on the Lawsons, the owners of the cottage a few times, she reasoned, because he had an exact knowledge of the layout and dimensions of the various rooms.

“Yah goin' house-huntin', little lady?” The salesman, a lanky laconic middle-aged man, followed them around, wedging himself between Laura and every piece of furniture she particularly wanted to see.

“I've found it.” She smiled pleasantly.

“The young lady will be renting the Lawsons' cottage for
a while,” Evan intervened. “Don't worry about showing us around, Zack. We'll wander about, then get back to you when we find what we like.”

“Sure thing, Evan,” Zack said cheerily. “Listen, I got folks wanting those carved armchairs you've been makin'. They were real successful. You sure are a gifted guy, what with playin' the cello and all. Me wife keeps tellin' me it's so romantic; I think I'll go back to playin' my ukelele. Might fill in a few evening's. Reckon I could sell anything you cared to make. We've never had a cabinet maker anythin' like you,” he added fervently. “Folks around here just love yah designs. Reckon yah could put the price up easily without goin' over the top. Folks would be willin' to pay.”

“I'll think about it, Zack. And thanks for the nice compliments.”