An Outback Affair/Runaway Wife/Outback Bridegroom/Outback Surrender/Home To Eden (58 page)

Until he became involved with Corrinne again. The moth to the flame. Heath Cavanagh as a husband wasn't long in favor. David, her first and last lover, returned. After that it was only a question of time before tragedy overtook them. There was no way, given that particular triangle, they could escape their brutal destiny.

“So where is Heath?” Nicole asked finally, knowing there was no putting it off.

“He keeps to his room mostly,” Sigrid said. “As I told you he's very ill.”

“Shouldn't he be in hospital with the proper care?”

“It may come to that, but for now he desperately wants to stay here. He's come home to die.”

“This isn't his home,” Nicole said flatly.

“My darling, he is your father.” Louise spoke in a near whisper. “He may have done lots of things to cause the family shame, but he's one of us. Our blood.”

“Do you really believe that, Gran?”

“
I
certainly do,” Sigrid suddenly barked. “Corrinne chose him. She had David, but she couldn't keep herself in line. She was a man-eater, and she looked like butter wouldn't melt in her mouth. You're not a
cold person, Nicole. Just the opposite, but you're so bitter about your father. He suffered, too, you know.”

“What a lie.” Nicole's blue-green eyes flashed.

“You were too young to see it,” Sigrid said, her throat flushed with emotion. “Too much in shock. That man suffered.”

“That monster! I've never spoken of it, but he used to slap me.”

“I know nothing of this!” Louise said in amazement.

“I didn't want to start anything. Upset you or Granddad. He tried to throw a scare into me. It didn't work.”

“I'm not surprised,” Sigrid said in a derisive voice. “You were just so…”

“What?”

“Spunky, I suppose. Cheeky. Too precocious.”

“She was adorable,” Louise protested, never one to find fault in her even when she deserved it, Nicole knew.

“That man didn't love me. He didn't want me around.”

Sigrid snorted, loud as a horse. “That's not true, even if no one really rated beside Corrinne.”

“I don't understand how you can defend him, Siggy—when it suits you, that is,” Nicole said.

This time Sigrid inhaled forcefully. “Because I feel sorry for him.”

“Well, I hate him. I mean, I really hate him. I could have had my mother—”

“You can't get off it, can you? You've got some incredible block.”

“Block, be damned!” Nicole saw red.

“My dears, please stop.” Louise held a lavishly be-jeweled hand to her head.

“I'm so sorry, Gran.” Nicole broke off immediately. She and Siggy had always gone at it.

“There has to be hope for us,” Louise said. “If Drake has asked you over to Kooltar, surely we can see that as a thawing, can't we?”

“Gracious me, who'd want to call on Callista?” Sigrid hooted. “You surely don't think you're going to fall into her outstretched arms, Mother. She bloody hates us, the cold bitch. She blames us all for the loss of her brother. She worshiped at his feet. Everyone knows that. If I'd have been her mother, I'd have sent her packing.”

“To where?” Nicole asked. “That's hardly fair. She was the daughter of the house.”

“They should have sent her to one of her relatives in Sydney or Melbourne,” Siggy said sternly. “Opened up her life. Station living is too isolated. We're too much in one another's pockets. Callista was positively fixated on her brother. A byproduct of a lonely life. I tell you, if he hadn't been her brother, she'd have tried to bag him. She was too close. A bit kinky, I'd say.”

“Like Joel is too close to me?” Nicole shocked her by saying.

Sigrid, on the voluptuous side when young, now bone thin, let out a swearword that made her mother wince. “That's the most preposterous thing I've ever heard. It's not at all the same. Tell her, Mother.”

Louise sighed deeply, flapping her right hand helplessly. “I'm not sure if Nicole isn't right.”

A worse swearword escaped Sigrid. “You've only
just come home, Nicole, and you're already stirring things up.”

“I'm trying to understand what's going on in my life, Siggy,” Nicole responded hotly. “I don't want to upset you, especially when you let fly like a station hand. This may not be the time to ask, either, but why did you get rid of Dot?”

“Why talk about bloody Dot?” Sigrid made a gesture as though she was swatting a fly. “It was time she retired. She wanted to live on the coast.”

“I never, ever heard her express that desire.” Nicole lifted her eyebrows.

“It seems she did, darling,” Louise intervened gently.

“She said that to you, Gran?” Nicole was amazed. “She said nothing to me and I was here in June. Why so sudden?”

“I don't know, darling, but she seemed quite happy to leave. I was most surprised. I thought Dot was a fixture on Eden.”

“If you give me her address, Siggy, I'd like to contact her.” Nicole turned to her aunt.

Sigrid nodded stiffly. “I'm sure I've got it somewhere. If you don't trust me, Nicole, to make decisions…”

“Of course I trust you, Siggy.” Nicole felt free to lie. “You should have told me, all the same. Dot was devoted to Joel and me when we were children. How much severance did you give her?”

“Certainly not a blank check.” Sigrid pulled a long face. “But enough to keep her comfortably for the rest of her life. That's if she's careful.”

“If you don't want to say it, Siggy. Write it,” Nicole suggested acidly.

“All right, twenty thousand.” Sigrid compulsively smoothed her thick caramel-colored hair, her best feature for all her tendency to hack at it with nail scissors.

Nicole shook her head in dismay. “That was supposed to be generous? She could live for another twenty years unless she meets up with a bus.”

“I don't think so,” Sigrid replied briskly. “Dot smokes like a chimney. I thought anyone who smoked was a leper these days. No one could stop her, though she didn't dare smoke in the house. She'll probably finish up with lung cancer.”

“Dot, poor Dot, what a vulnerable soul!” Nicole moaned. “This isn't the end of it, Siggy. I have to ensure Dot is secure. That's the least I can do. I suppose I can even meet Heath Cavanagh if I put my mind to it. If he's not as ill as you're saying, I'll put him on the first plane out of here.”

“What about Zimbabwe?” Sigrid challenged. “Is that far enough?”

“You won't want to when you see him, my darling,” Louise promised very quietly.

W
HERE WAS
the handsome, rather bullish man she remembered? Where was the bulk of chest, the width of shoulder? The florid patches in darkly tanned cheeks? The voice like an erupting volcano? The intimidating demeanor? The glitter in large, mesmerizing, black eyes? Gone, all gone. His illness had reduced him to a haggard shell.

“Hello, Heath,” she said softly, venturing into the large elegant room this man had once shared with her mother. Even with fresh air streaming through the open French doors, it had a sickly fug.

“Nicole.” He moved to stand up, but fell back coughing into the deep leather armchair someone must have brought in for him. Siggy, probably. Nicole didn't remember its being there.

“You look ill.” He looked far worse than ill. Despite herself she felt badly shaken.

“I
am
ill, bugger it, but the heart is still pumping.” A faint echo of the bluster. “How beautiful you are, girl. Aren't you going to kiss your dear father?”

“That's one heck of a question to ask. No, I'm not. You're lucky I have such a sweet nature, otherwise I wouldn't have come to visit you.” She didn't have the heart to say she half believed her real father was dead.

“Don't blame you,” he mumbled. “Terrible father.
No skills for it. No skills for husbanding. The only bloody thing I was ever good at was bedding women. And on my good days backing the right nags. Please sit down. I hope you're going to stay a while.”

“So we can chat?” The animosity was unfolding. Nevertheless she did as he asked, taking a chair several feet away, facing the balcony.

“Sarcastic little bitch!” he grunted, his near-affectionate tone defusing the insult. “All right, so I'm a beast and a brute, but I care about you, Nicole. In my own miserable, insensitive way. Didn't have much to give after your mother— Adored her. The plain truth.”

“I expect you've convinced yourself that's true.”

“What do you know about passion, girl?” The sunken eyes flashed.

“Not much, but it's nice of you to be concerned. Most days I walk about frozen inside. That comes from finding the bloodied and smashed bodies of my mother and her lover in the desert with the carrion circling. Some people might call that a fairly seismic trauma. And the name's Nicole, by the way. I don't answer to
girl.
It's on my say-so that you'll be staying on Eden.”

He looked amused. “Pardon me, but is that a threat, my lady?”

“It sure is,” she answered laconically.

“Even as a kid you knew how to crack the whip. Granddad's little princess.”

“All destroyed.”

“Yes.” His sigh rattled. “I beg your pardon most humbly, Nicole, even if you were reared an uppity little madam. Not my doing.”

“Maybe you never knew how to speak to me properly, you cruel man.”

“When was I cruel to you?” He appeared genuinely taken aback.

“You used to take swings at me all the time.”

“When did one land?”

“I was too quick.”

He started to laugh, stopped, hand on chest, as though it pained him greatly. “You never told on me to your granddad. I admired that. I'd like to stay here, Nicole, if you can stand me. I haven't got a lot of time…”

Looking at him, listening to him, Nicole didn't doubt it. “Surely you should be in a hospital where they could give you the proper care. I'm willing to foot the bill if you can't.”

“My dear,” he said in a semblance of his once-deep, rich, whisky-and-smoke-laden voice, “I was hard-pressed just to buy a train ticket out here. After a lifetime of gambling, and I've had a few huge wins, I'm stone broke.”

She looked away, more disturbed at seeing him like this than she could have imagined. “That's okay, you always were, until you married my mother. She must have been in one of her completely mad phases when she married you.”

“My dear, we were both completely mad,” he said almost cheerily. “But she loved me. For about ten minutes.”

“Before you drifted back to all your little games?”

“Don't you bloody believe it!” he exclaimed loudly, then paid for it with a coughing fit during which Nicole passed him a glass of water. “Thank
you.” He drank, let her take the glass from him. “Can you believe it, all these years later and I still feel rage. Oh, that woman! I was the casualty, child. Your beloved mother was the one who was carrying on. I loved her.”

“It was just that you didn't know how to show it.” The sentence came out like a lament, which indeed it was.

“A tremendous handicap of mine. Look at me, Nicole, not out the bloody door.”

She didn't know whether to laugh or weep, but instead said with stinging contempt, “I've already given you a complete once-over.”

He cocked his dark head to one side as though making a judgment. “You know, sometimes you talk like me. Razor-sharp, but just a pose.”

She shook her head in denial though it suddenly struck her forcibly that she did occasionally. Exposure to him, of course. Her mother never had a cutting tongue.

“I loved your mother like I've never loved anyone in my life,” he said, clearing his throat. “I can't look in the mirror without seeing her head peeping out from behind my shoulder. She used to stand there, you know, when I shaved, her arms locked around my waist. She was such a seductive creature and she didn't even know. I can't walk down the street without spotting her ahead of me in the crowd. That marvelous hair. Your hair. Trick of the light, of course. No one's got your hair. You're not really the image of her. Everyone else might think so. I don't. Side by side you'd see the differences. You're taller, more willowy. You have a certain regal, albeit peppery, presence my
Corrinne couldn't match. She didn't have the suggestion of a dimple in her chin, either.” He put up a hand to stroke his deeply dimpled jaw. “Her eyes didn't flash like yours or glitter with anger. I know you've had a rough time, but you look like a fighter. You'll be the kind of old lady no one wants to cross. Corrinne was sweet and gentle like Louise. She never had your kind of fearlessness. She bruised too easily.”

Nicole found these confidences very strange. “I've heard she had my temper.”

He guffawed, broke into another rasping cough. “Nonsense! That's
my
temper,” he said eventually. “Corrinne was a pussycat compared to you. Even as a little kid, you could work yourself into a fury.”

Nicole was flabbergasted. Is that the way he saw her? “Only with you,” she burst out in defense. “A gentleman doesn't slap little girls. And ladies. I'd say you enjoyed it.”

He shook his head, the once-springy black hair flattened and thickly peppered with white. “Girlie, you were spoiled rotten. You really needed a firm hand, but you didn't get one. Your antics only served to entertain. Your grandfather in particular. He undermined every effort to put a curb on you. You were the grandchild he wanted. The sweet little firebrand with the Shirley Temple curls. Poor difficult little Joel missed out with the old hypocrite!”

She stared at Heath, shocked. “That's not true!”

“Of course it is.” His breathing wheezed. “But we can keep that between you and me. Siggy loves her boy without liking him. She's always trying to protect him, but Joel has been a big disappointment. He really needs to get out before it's too late. I don't know why
he doesn't pack up and leave like I did. He's got the consolation prize—plenty of money—even if he didn't get Eden. He doesn't want it, anyway. Hell, I was a better cattleman than him. He's not even a good horseman. Too hard on 'em. Give a horse what he wants, food and affection, and he'll do anything for you. You know that. You're the horse lover. Joel would give anything to possess the skills of someone like Drake McClelland. It always seemed to me you had a bit of a crush on Drake, for all the sparks that flew between you.”

She felt as if a deep dark secret had been ripped from her. “I'm afraid you're way behind the times,” she said coolly. “We were friends, but that was a very long time ago when we were kids. Any adult relationship was damned.”

“Yet I suspect some part of you craves one all the same.” He pulled out a handkerchief and pressed it to his mouth.

Nicole shook her head. “I'm sure neither of us has given the other much thought these past years. I'm not into obsession and neither is Drake.”

“But neither of you can exorcise your demons any more than I can. I want my name wiped clean before I die, Nicole. I've had to live all these years like a murderer who somehow got off. I've lost so much—my friends, my wife, my daughter, a future. My health.”

“I don't blame you for feeling sorry for yourself.” She sat farther back in her chair as though to ward him off. He was reaching her and she wanted to shut her heart on him.

“What would you know?” he asked sadly. “My
heart was torn from me. I would never have harmed a hair of your mother's head, though God knows she had it coming to her.”

“What about David McClelland?” she asked tightly.

“That bastard! I hated him. I could have happily killed him with my bare hands. I certainly wished him dead. Maybe it would have gotten around to that.”

“I'm sure he returned the strong feelings,” Nicole said. “Only, he wasn't homicidal. You took his fiancée from him.”

Cavanagh sighed loudly. “Ah yes, of course, of course. How can anyone take someone from the person they truly love? How did I find it so easy to sweep Corrinne off her feet? I swear, I didn't kidnap her. Corrinne was like a child. She did what her family wanted. She lived to please her father. Good old Sir Giles! Always the perfect gentleman, twinkling blue eyes and the patrician demeanor. A benevolent tyrant all the same.”

Nicole stared at him. “Then what drove you apart? If my mother loved you enough to run off and marry you—defy everyone, two families—what went wrong?”

He studied his trembling hands. “She got pregnant.”

“So? You didn't believe I was yours?” Nicole tried unsuccessfully to keep painful emotion from choking her. At long last they were getting to it.

He fixed her with his sunken black eyes. “You're like me, girl. I might seem vile to you, but I had my good points. I realize I was rotten in the role of father, but you're like the best of me. What I once was.”

“How absolutely dreadful!” Nicole shuddered. “You can't imagine what effect that news has on me.”

“Please don't talk like that. I wasn't so bad before I fell in with your lot. I never had the security of money like you, Nicole. No one gave me everything I wanted. No one doted on my every word. My poor old dad, your grandfather, was a gambler like me. I lost my mother. Dad lost a wife early. We were an odd pair, my dad and I. It wasn't long before he became a rock-bottom case. Like I am now. But when I was young, I was very popular. Especially with the ladies. It seemed to me before I met your mother I was making something of my life. After Corrinne, it all blew straight to hell. Our marriage was all I needed to run completely off the rails. Another woman might have thought I was worth saving. She might have offered me loyalty and support. That's very important, you know. I might have made something of myself with a little help. Instead I walked straight into a mine-field. I didn't have you. I was nothing and no one on Eden. Just the feller who supplied the sperm. Your grandfather reigned supreme. A colossus striding around his desert kingdom. Charming. Well bred. Greatly respected. So quietly spoken but everyone fell over backward to listen. Wife and daughters adored him.”

“Maybe he looked at you and saw nothing,” she said. “I adored my grandfather, too, might I remind you. In all my life he never said a cross word to me.”

“More's the pity!” Heath barked, causing a bout of coughing that left him wheezing. “Those twinkling blue eyes could look very intimidating. The white
smile could turn to icy contempt. You didn't know your grandfather in his glory days. A bloody tyrant!”

“Who tolerated you and Uncle Alan.”

“Please, do me a little favor. Don't lump me in with that poor fish Alan. He's loaded with neuroses.”

“And don't you speak ill of my grandfather. He offered you both sanctuary.”

“What was at the heart of it, do you think?”

“What do you mean?”

“Alan was tolerated because he's Joel's father and Siggy's husband, though she wanted him as long as Corrinne wanted me—five minutes. Your grandfather vowed to get rid of me. I was trouble. He may even have set out to bring Corrinne and McClelland back together, only, I hung in there. I really enjoyed thwarting the old bastard.”

“Hung in there?” Nicole's voice rose in mockery. “You couldn't wait to make your escapes. For years you were rarely home.”

“I could never persuade your mother to escape with me. She was only sensitive to what Papa wanted. He made no spoken demands. Plenty of unspoken demands. Besides, she could never escape and take you. If your grandfather loved your mother, he positively doted on you from your first yell, and you did yell—at the top of your lungs. I was there, though it was a wonder I was let in. Dear old Sir Giles completely forgot he already had a grandchild. Cranky little Joel, who couldn't measure up. The sins of the fathers are visited on the sons. You were his little angel when you were no angel at all. Watch Joel, by the way. As a kid he was too bloody clingy. I used to say to your
mother—‘That boy's got to go!' I thought she understood.”

“Understood what?”

Heath's head fell back wearily. “Your cousin, my dear, has always been inordinately fond of you. It aroused a bit of anxiety. Joel never did obey the rules.”

She felt wary and vulnerable like a woman under attack. “You make it sound like Joel is deeply disturbed. He had to get love from somewhere. We spent our entire childhood and adolescence together.”