Princes of the Outback Bundle (19 page)
Read Princes of the Outback Bundle Online
Authors: Bronwyn Jameson
“You couldn’t find some compromise?” she asked carefully. “A job she could do from—”
“She got a job,” he said curtly. “In Broome. She’d applied, interviewed, without telling me. A done deal.”
A surprise, Angie guessed, and why he didn’t much like them.
“She told me the day she died.” He looked up, and although his voice was flat, even, controlled, the look in his eyes was raw. “I can’t go through that again, Angie. I don’t have anything left to give.”
“I’m not asking for anything.”
“You are, Angie. I see it in your eyes and I hear it in your voice.”
“No.” Adamant, needing him to understand, to see into her heart, she leaned forward and made him look at her. “I only want you.”
He stared back at her a moment. “Tell me you don’t want to be my wife.”
“I can’t,” she breathed, and in that moment she knew that her honesty would cost. Knew it would be her undoing.
“I can’t marry you, Angie.”
“I’m not asking for that commitment. I just want to stay, to live here with you.” Her voice shook with the depth of her emotion. “I know about the isolation, I know how hard you work, and none of that fazes me. Give me a
chance, Tomas, a chance to prove that this is the only place I want to be. Give me a chance to love you, that’s all I want.”
“I can’t love you, Angie, and you deserve better than that.”
Tomas made an appointment for her to see a doctor recommended by Alex—or Alex’s secretary—the following week. Not a good time for him to be away, but he rearranged his schedule so he could go with her. She argued about whether that was necessary, but he stood his ground.
“It’s my baby, too. I’m going to be there.”
“Are you going to be there when he first starts to move? When she kicks? When he’s born? Her first day—”
She’d made her point and he walked away. He wouldn’t fight with her—what could be gained? The next day he flew to Brisbane to meet with some Japanese buyers, and when he returned three days later she was gone. He picked up the note she’d left in the middle of his bed, and scanned the words again.
I know you don’t like surprises, so I am leaving this note. I want to see the doctor alone—if that’s the way it will be in the future, then that’s the way it should be now. I’ll let you know when I have any news, either before or after the appointment. Love always, Angie.
He tried not to notice the quietness of a house without her vibrant presence, the loneliness of his dinner table, the skip of his pulse when he walked in the door half expecting to see her before he remembered…
She was gone, and wasn’t that what he’d wanted all along?
T
he e-mail arrived the day before the doctor’s appointment he’d made on her behalf, catching Tomas completely unprepared. He stared at the screen for five, ten, fifteen seconds while a herd of wild emotions stampeded through his system. When the thunder of his heartbeat receded to a bearable level he clicked on her name and opened the message.
It was short and to the point: she wasn’t pregnant. She was very sorry she hadn’t been able to help him, in any way. She wished him all the best.
No explanation of how she knew; no hint of how she’d taken the news; no sign that she felt anything like the hollow clenching disappointment in his gut.
Did she really think that a cold, unemotional e-mail was all he wanted from her? Hell, she hadn’t even tempered the tone with a personal salutation. He stared at the signature line.
Angelina Mori, Corporate Conference Center, Carlisle Grande Hotel.
She hadn’t wasted any time asking Rafe for a new job. So much for her passionate I-love-the-outback vows. Evidently she’d slotted right back into the city. Clearly she didn’t have time to call and tell him the news person to person. Obviously she had no idea how mad that would make him…or how worried because of all she hadn’t said.
He didn’t bother closing the e-mail or turning off the computer. He had a trip to plan.
By the time he arrived at the Carlisle Grande late that afternoon, Tomas had built up a full head of resentment, all of it justified. He was also tired, cranky, and edgy as a bullock in a branding race. It didn’t help that Angie wasn’t in her office, that he’d been led on a merry goose-chase through three levels of hotel facilities in an attempt to track her down. It didn’t cross his mind to stay put and send a message. Sitting down was not an option.
He was a man on a mission, and when he stepped off the elevator—the fifth time—and caught sight of her at the far end of the ballroom he was in no mood for niceties.
The staff member who stepped into his path obviously was. “May I be of assistance, sir?”
“I’m here to see Angie,” he said shortly.
“Do you mean Ms. Mori?”
Tomas ground his teeth. “Forget it, I’ll go tell her myself.”
“Is she expecting you?”
“I doubt it.”
She was wearing the Ms. Hotel Management outfit, he noticed as he strode toward her, and looking all city-sleek and so damn beautiful that he had to work overtime to maintain his rage. Luckily it was a huge room. Luckily she was engrossed in conversation with a small cluster of pink-suited women and didn’t notice his approach.
Then he heard the soft chuckle of her laughter and the impact of that sound caught thick in his chest. She was laughing? He’d dropped everything and rushed here because he was afraid for her emotional state after that terse un-Angie-like e-mail and
she was laughing?
His temper seethed on the brink of control as he came to a halt several yards away, his gaze fixed on her smiling profile. He saw her stiffen slightly a second before she turned his way. Whatever she’d been saying froze on her lips and so did her smile. He was vaguely aware of the other women turning too, of all the chatter gradually fading into an intense, electric silence.
Only vaguely, though, because so much of his attention was focused on her face, on her full lips as they silently mouthed his name, on the surge of emotion that rocketed through his body. On stopping himself from walking over there, picking her up as he’d done that day in his bedroom, and carrying her off someplace private where he could rail and yell and then kiss her senseless.
Visibly she gathered herself and turned to murmur something to her group. Then she walked briskly off to the side and waited for him to catch up. “I’m busy,” she said without preliminary. “If you could come back—”
“No, I couldn’t.”
She met his eyes for the first time, and he realized that she was working on her own head of steam. “I can’t talk to you now. I’m working.”
“I would be, too, if I wasn’t here.”
“Which brings us to why you are here,” she said. “Didn’t you get my e-mail?”
“Perhaps you could have called to check.”
Her eyes narrowed. “You expected me to call? To what—discuss how many more ways you can tell me to get lost?”
“So I could ask how you are, how you’re coping with the news. Whether there are any problems, healthwise.”
“As you can see I’m fine,” she said shortly and she started to turn away.
With a hand on her arm, he turned her back. “Are you, Angie? Are you fine?”
She drew a breath, released it on a sigh. “Yes, and I really do have work to do. I can’t do this now, Tomas. Really, I can’t.”
He cast an irritated glance beyond her shoulder and caught a curious bunch of faces watching them intently. “How long will you be?”
“Twenty minutes but, frankly, I don’t know what else there is to say…unless something has changed since last time we talked.”
And there it was, the perfect opening. His chance to say…what? Had anything changed? Other than he’d recognized the fact that he missed her?
She made an impatient sound. “Does this visit have anything to do with Alex’s wedding falling through? Or Rafe’s new bride going AWOL?”
“No. I needed to know you’re all right. With the pregnancy thing.”
“We’ve established that I am,” she said curtly, “because there is no pregnancy.”
The cold impact of those words caught him unprepared, and he missed the cue by a mile. She turned out of his hold and started walking away, each tap of her heels on the timber floor a brisk note of finality. A sick, scary feeling settled in Tomas’s gut. He’d been here before and got it all wrong, was he going to do the same again? Was he going to let the woman he loved walk away because he was too stubborn and too scared and too tongue-tied to say what needed to be said?
“It’s not only about the pregnancy,” he called out after her, and he sensed a dozen eyes fix onto his face. Not one of them was dark and luminous and fired with passion or seething with anger. The only eyes that mattered remained steadfastly turned away and she kept on walking.
“Unless you want me to shout the rest of what I have to say across the room, Angie, you better stop walking away.”
A thousand emotions pounded through Angie’s blood as she heard and barely dared to believe what she’d heard. She stopped, drew a deep breath. “This had better be good, Tomas Carlisle, and it better not cost me my job.”
“You want to keep this job?” he asked.
Slowly she turned and met his eyes. Her heart kicked hard in her chest. “It’s not my first choice.”
“The commute would be tough.”
“If I were living…?”
“With me.” He took the first steps, as slow and steady and deliberate as the blue eyes that held hers, and her heart started singing with joy. “We miss you, Angie.”
“We?”
“Manny and Rae miss you giving them nights off. Stink says you’re the only one who listens to his stories. Charlie misses the long walks.”
“And you?”
He stopped in front of her. “More than anyone.”
“What are you saying, Tomas Carlisle?”
“I want you to come home, Angie.” He touched her face with one hand. “I want to take that chance you offered me.”
“You said I deserve better.”
“I said a lot of things that day. Most of them I thought I meant, some of them I even believed.” He swallowed, shifted his feet, frowned. “I’m not good with expressing how I feel, especially with an audience—” he cast a glow
ering glance at the small gallery of spectators and she heard a murmur of voices and a shuffling of high heels “—but I want to be that better man you deserve.”
For a moment she was too overwhelmed by his words to speak, so she turned her face into his hand and kissed the palm.
You are that man,
she thought,
you are.
And just when she thought she might find her voice, to tell him so, he traced her lower lip with his thumb and said, “I love you, Angie.”
Not so bad, she decided when she could think again, for a man short on words to express himself. And she told him so before he kissed her, and after he kissed her she told him that she loved him, that she always had, that she always would.
“Are you sorry about the baby?” Tomas asked.
“We still have time to try again, to make sure we keep Kameruka.” He didn’t miss the
we.
He liked the way that sounded. Their home, their future, as partners. “Third time is supposed to be lucky.”
“No,” he said, smiling into her eyes. “I’m lucky.”
Twenty-five minutes later, after she’d dispersed her Pink Ladies and finished her working day, they walked hand in hand to the best suite in the hotel and as soon as he closed the door she walked into his arms and he got very, very lucky.
By Bronwyn Jameson
No new mail.
C
atriona McConnell stared at the message on her computer screen, not surprised, not even disappointed so much as numb. She resisted the urge to hit the Receive Mail button again, just in case her e-mail program magically retrieved the message she needed to see—the one it hadn’t found on the last three attempts—from somewhere deep inside the bowels of the World Wide Web. But Drew hadn’t responded to any of the messages she’d left over the past week, via every contact point she could dig up, so why would he respond to her latest desperate e-mail?
Because he’s your friend, your one-time lover. He grew up next door. He should care.
“Because neighbors care? Yeah, right!”
No longer numb, Cat turned off the computer and shoved her chair back from the time-battered table she called a desk.
A churning mix of anger and disillusionment and what-the-blazes-will-I-do-now anxiety roared low in her ears, in perfect pitch with the rumble of distant thunder.
Halfway to the door she paused, listening as the noise gathered enough strength to vibrate through the roof and into the solid mud-brick walls. Not despair, not thunder ahead of the forecast evening storms, but the roar of a plane. A plane flying so low over Cat’s Australian outback homestead that she instinctively ducked.
Then she got moving.
Before the screen door had slapped shut in her wake, she’d hurdled the veranda rail onto the lawn…or the semidead patch of grass that used to be lawn. Eyes peeled upward, she whipped around in a half circle until she found the plane, a bright slash of white against the darkening sky.
Drew?
Heart pounding with recharged hope, she followed the low dip of one wing as the aircraft banked off to the west. And wouldn’t that be just like him? Ignore her flurry of messages, give no advance warning, go for the big dramatic entrance. She guessed he’d deliberately buzzed her home and now he would swoop off to land at his father’s airstrip, ten miles to the northwest.
Cat started for her truck without thinking, then drew up short. She didn’t want to visit with Gordon Samuels, the snake, but if the unexpected fly-in visitor
was
Drew, she needed to be there. She needed to know what the hell had gone down between father and son regarding the money she’d borrowed.
The whole future of Corroboree, the station that had been in the McConnell family for six generations, depended on the answer. Her whole future depended on the answer. And the way she felt about Drew Samuels right now,
his
life might also depend upon it!
Jamming her stockman’s hat low on her forehead, Cat stalked the last yards to her Landcruiser. But before opening
the door, she glanced skyward again, and her heart jumped and jammed in her throat. The plane hadn’t banked to fly northwest. It had turned a full 180 degrees and now hung low against the horizon, an insignificant-looking dot against the angry billow of storm clouds.
“Oh, no,” she breathed. Chill apprehension shivered through her bones. “You aren’t. You wouldn’t.”
Drew knew the locale too well to attempt a landing on her ungraded, out-of-use, pathetic excuse for an airstrip. Surely her last message hadn’t sounded so desperate that he’d pull such a crazy stunt. Heart in mouth she watched the plane dip out of sight behind a stand of coolabah trees, and that jolted her out of immobility and into her truck.
All the way to the strip her pulse pounded in rhythm with the
please no, please no
chant running through her mind. She’d wished Drew to damnation many times these past months, but never literally. Her hands clasped the wheel tightly, holding her speeding vehicle steady against the rutted track and the buffeting crosswind. The storm was coming in much faster than anticipated and it was turning into a real howler.
Almost airborne, her ancient utility truck crested the last rise and landed with a bone-jarring racket of overstretched shocks. Cat paid no heed. Her eyes were fixed on the flat stretch of land ahead and the plane that was shuddering to a drunken listing stop at one end.
She expelled a long gust of backed-up breath. Not only her lungs and chest but her whole body ached with a tension that only eased marginally on seeing the safely grounded plane. Yup, it had landed safely, but no doubt roughly and bouncily.
And that pretty much described the state of her outback station these days—rough, bouncy but still hanging together in one piece.
Less than thirty seconds later she wheeled to a halt beneath the stricken Cessna’s wing. Up close she could see the buckled landing gear, which listed the whole craft in a pained for
ward slump. There was no sign of movement, just an ominous stillness.
As she flung her door open, the wind grabbed hold, yanking it from her hand and slamming it back on its hinges. A bolt of lightning cut a jagged path between sky and earth. Thunder boomed loud on its heels.
Cat grimaced as she clambered up to reach the pilot’s door. “Please, don’t rain yet. Just give me a few minutes.” Both her plea to the heavens and her favorite Akubra were wrenched away by the wind’s fury, but her aggravation at losing the hat faded when she opened that door.
The plane’s sole occupant sat slumped against his restraining seat belt, motionless. A shock of dark hair fell over his forehead, obscuring his eyes but not the bottom half of his face. Cat stared in bewilderment.
She’d been so fixed on Drew that she hadn’t considered finding someone else strapped in the pilot’s seat. An olive-skinned someone else with a wide mouth and a sulky fullness to his bottom lip. A stranger, yet Cat felt a vague frisson of recognition as she stared at his dark-whiskered jaw and his strong, squared-off chin.
Another sharp crack of thunder rattled the plane, and Cat shook herself into action. With a firm hand on each shoulder she managed to push his upper body into a more upright position, but he remained out of it.
“You must have conked your head good and hard,” she murmured as she removed the radio headset and threaded his hair back behind his ears. His skin, she noticed, was a reassuringly warm contrast to the cool silk of his hair. Gently she probed his head, checked his ears, and found no sign of blood. Reassured, she moved quickly, checking the rest of his body for any sign of broken bones or misaligned joints, for any reaction that might indicate serious injury.
Satisfied he was all in one piece, she rocked back on her heels. Quick-decision time.
Medical help was close to two hours away and if this storm delivered on the fury it promised, the dirt roads might become impassable. Better to get him out of here while she could, get a start toward the hospital, rather than wait around for an ambulance that might not arrive. Moving his large, unconscious form could prove tricky, however, and she lived alone. She ran Corroboree on her own. Calling for a neighbor’s help would waste more valuable time.
“Just as well I’m the strapping type,” Cat said, mimicking one of her stepmother’s kinder descriptions of her sturdy five-foot-eight frame. She preferred to think of herself as a woman equal to the task…whatever that task may be.
She put her hands on her current task’s jean-clad knees and shook him gently. When there was no reaction, she took his shoulders in a firmer grip and tried again. “Time to wake up, Sleeping Beauty.”
She didn’t think that was overstating the facts. His face was a real treat, that mouth nothing short of spectacular. For one crazy second the waking-Sleeping-Beauty scenario flickered through her mind and she considered leaning forward and laying her lips against that beautiful mouth.
Of course she didn’t, and not only because, as a rule, she didn’t kiss strangers. Even those who looked like Mediterranean gods fallen from the sky. She didn’t because his lips started to move, to fashion speech…or at least some unintelligible slurred version of that faculty.
Cat’s gaze flew up to meet a pair of surprisingly lucid blue-green eyes, and her pulse began to skitter and race like a startled steer. Because he’d jolted her with his sudden consciousness. Because of all the adrenaline still zapping through her blood from the rush to the strip, from the fear of disaster and the shock of discovery.
And, okay, because he’d come to while she was staring at his mouth and wondering if he would taste as good as he looked.
Then those eyes she’d thought so clear a second before lost focus and glazed over. His complexion looked more wan, almost gray. “Are you okay?” she asked.
He started to nod, then winced as if the movement jarred.
“Head hurts a little, huh?”
“A lot.”
“Ah, real words.” Cat smiled reassuringly. “Now we’ve got the tongue figured out, let’s see what else we can get working.”
Something flickered in those hazy eyes. Humor? Cat rejected the notion. He was not up to wordplay. It was more likely pain.
“I hate to rush you, but I’m afraid we’re staring down the barrel of a ripper storm.” She reached for the latch on his seat belt. “Ready to rock and roll?”
He winced again, perhaps at the mention of the storm that had no doubt led to his unexpected landing. Perhaps at the prospect of doing anything that involved rocking or rolling. Or perhaps because she wasn’t watching what she was doing down there with the seat belt. Her elbows nudged the muscular thighs spread slightly on the seat, her knuckles grazed the hard plane of his abdomen, and suddenly she was all fumbling thumbs until, finally, the catch gave.
Swallowing hard, she got her hands out of harm’s way as he started to maneuver himself out of his seat. And, ah, hell, even stooped over she could see that he was taller than she’d imagined, and she didn’t know how she would manage getting him down to the ground if—
“Are your legs going to hold you?” she fretted out loud.
Slowly he lifted his head and looked into her eyes. A pained attempt at a smile quirked one corner of his mouth. “Woan collapse on you, babe. Unless you wan’ me—”
His slurred voice trailed off, his eyes glazed over, and Cat shook her head. The man could barely stand up and he was flirting?
Give me strength!
“Okay, hotshot.” She reached for his arm. “Let me help.”
“I’m okay.” He rallied to grip both sides of the doorway. Then he squinted at the view beyond her shoulder. “You’re gonna get wet.”
Inevitably, since the first fat drops of rain were already soaking into the back of her shirt, but she didn’t want to hustle him into slipping and falling. “I’m parked right here, see? Not far to walk in the rain.”
Despite her worry, he descended without incident…until his boots hit mother earth and he tilted at the exact same angle as his Cessna. Lightning fast, Cat ducked her shoulder under his arm, taking most of his weight.
“I’ve got you.” She braced her legs when they both threatened to overbalance, and wrapped both arms solidly around his chest.
“Sorry.” His mumbled apology was almost lost in an explosion of thunder. “Woozy.”
With her face shmooshed up against his ribs, she could hear the solid thud of his heartbeat and feel the vibrant heat of his body right through his butter-soft suede jacket. And with every breath her lungs filled with the scent of hot skin and, well, hot man.
Yup, woozy about summed it up for her, too.
Thankfully, he regained his balance as quickly as before, easing the pressure on her shoulder. Together they shuffled to her truck, and he eased himself gingerly into the passenger seat. Cat had to work to extricate her arm from under his and then, as she dashed around to the driver’s side, she filled her lungs with cool, rain-wet air and cleared her head of that giddy reaction.
By the time she’d waited the obligatory tick-tick-tick to warm the diesel engine, the rain was bucketing down. “Lucky,” she said, turning to check her passenger as she found first gear and the truck lurched into motion. “We’d have been drenched in no time.”
His head was back, propped against the top of the seat, but slowly it rolled toward her. His eyes opened and focused with some effort on her face. “Rafe…Car…lisle.”
For a second Cat gazed back into his eyes—she’d never seen the Mediterranean, but her imagination painted it that exact sea-green hue—before it struck her that he was introducing himself. Her heart stuttered a half beat. Of course. That’s why she’d felt that niggle of recognition.
No, she hadn’t met him, but she’d seen enough pictures plastered through the media to know exactly who Rafe Carlisle was. Middle son of one of Australia’s richest and most newsworthy families. The media loved to refer to the Carlisles as Australia’s “outback royalty” since they owned so much of the northern cattle country, as well as hotels and property and God knows what else.
But this particular Carlisle brother didn’t get his Gucci footwear dirty in outback dust or cattle pats. Rafe Carlisle might hold some fancy executive title in the family’s hotel group, but from what she’d read he didn’t get too close to anything resembling work. Play was more his thing—playing in nightclubs, playing in casinos, playing with women.
And wasn’t that just a measure of the way her luck was hanging? One of the notoriously rich and handsome “princes of the outback” drops out of the sky into her paddock, and it has to be the lightweight glamour boy!
“And you are?” he asked faintly, obviously wanting her side of the introduction.
“Catriona McConnell.”
Impoverished, nonnewsworthy, hardworking pastoralist, with not a drop of blue blood to bless myself.
Except what did it matter which Carlisle had landed in her paddock? He wasn’t the answer to her barrage of messages or to her prayers. He wasn’t Drew Samuels. He was simply a stranger—albeit a rich stranger—in need of her help. She had to get him medical attention, which meant getting
through this deluge to the sealed road before the red dirt track bogged.
She
would
make it unless…
Hardly daring to look, she squinted at the fuel gauge and swore silently at the inaccurate flicker of the needle. How much was in the tank? When had she last filled up? She’d been budgeting, rationing, and she prayed fervently that this latest cutback wasn’t about to bite her on the backside.
