Princes of the Outback Bundle (42 page)

“Tell me about your sister.”

Damn. A dormant memory awakened suddenly to grab her by the throat. Last night, in bed, she’d murmured something about her sister and then she’d distracted him and distracted herself.

How could she have forgotten that slip? How could she have imagined that he-of-the-clever-mind would forget?

“She’s my half sister, actually,” she said. “Four months older than me, although she swears I act like the big sister.”

“His legitimate daughter?”

“Yes.” And without mentioning names, she told him how she’d met Susannah and how they’d become friends. How Susannah acknowledged their blood relationship when none of her family wanted to know, and how she’d promised to keep that relationship secret for the sake of her mother. “She’s quite fierce about protecting her mother.”

“I think I’d like your sister,” he said, and Zara’s heart thumped hard in her chest.

“I’m sure you would.”

Hard as she tried, that statement did not come out level and free of irony. Breath held, Zara waited for him to comment, to stop looking at her in that puzzling way. In the end she couldn’t stand the weight of the tension. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

“Trying to imagine how she could be more beautiful.”

“Look, I’m not being precious about this beauty thing. I know I stand out in a crowd, but that comes with being an Amazon. People can’t help but notice me.” Frowning, she struggled to explain without even knowing why she needed to explain, why she couldn’t just accept that this man found her beautiful and run with the lovely feelings that invoked. “I matured early. I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t the tallest in my class, but I wasn’t always this lean, this fit.”

“You worked hard at that?”

“I drove myself,” she admitted, “after Mum got sick. I started running as a way of getting out in the open air for a while. Then I started to run to escape. Then I ran until it hurt.”

“And when that didn’t hurt enough, you took up kickboxing.”

She smiled tightly, acknowledging his astuteness. “I shouldn’t have. It wasn’t for the right reason.”

“An aggressive release because your mother was hurting? Because you were hurting? What’s wrong with those reasons? Better than having a breakdown from holding it all inside.”

He would know, she realized, thinking about his mother. How she’d broken down from grief and the pressure of media hounding. They lapsed into silence for several minutes, several miles, and despite the aching sadness she always felt when remembering her mother’s pain, Zara also felt a measure of comfort in knowing she could share this part of her life, so long held closely guarded, with another person.

How easy it was to share with him; how unexpected he was.

“She shouldn’t have suffered so cruelly,” she said softly,
the ache of remembered sadness thick in her voice. “No matter how hard I ran or how hard I punched and kicked, that never got any easier to take.”

Zara woke with a start, surprised she’d relaxed enough to nod off in the passenger seat. Sitting up straight, she stretched the kink in her neck and the arm scrunched against the door handle and looked around.

They’d stopped. Her heart skipped a beat as she noticed where they had stopped. Her gaze zeroed in on the familiar outpost store and the couple she could see through the large front window. Alex, of course, looking tall and broad and heart-kickingly gorgeous in those jeans. He leaned against the counter watching Carmel, her mouth in nonstop motion, stack supplies into a large box.

A strong strand of emotion wound through Zara’s chest. Instead of buying their food from an upmarket city deli, he’d taken a detour to give his business to someone who needed it more. To someone who’d done them a good turn.

In assuming he’d palmed off the details of this trip to a hotel concierge, she’d done Alex another disservice. He was so much more than she’d anticipated and for the first time this acknowledgment didn’t ring cautionary alarms or cause stomach flips of anxiety.

For the first time she accepted that he could be more than her weekend lover. More than the man who’d awoken her dormant sensuality. This was a man she liked. A man to share her cares and concerns, her laughter and her tears.

She pressed a hand to her mouth, to still her burgeoning smile, but she couldn’t suppress the knowledge that unfurled like a flower’s petals in the morning sun.

This was a man she could love.

Unlike a week earlier, the evening was mild—warm enough inside the cabin that they could have done without a fire. Alex built one anyway. “So I can undress you in the firelight,” he told her, and anticipation flared through Zara like a match to tinder.

He’d brought candles, too, and linen and crockery and fine crystal glasses.

“Your smooth side?” she asked, watching him pour wine. Watching the dance of candlelight and shadows over the raw angles of his face and thinking she would never describe him as smooth. He was too intense, too strong-minded, too male.

Naturally, he made a mockery of her judgment by producing the battery-operated stereo with all the flourish of a conjurer unveiling his best trick. He’d said a first date was all about making an impression. This, she knew, would be an impression that lasted a long, long time.

“You told me you liked to relax to music.” The voice of a silver-tongued crooner drifted through the cabin as he held out her chair, inviting her to sit. “I wasn’t sure what style.”

“Bublé is a pretty nice choice. Very smooth. And considerably more romantic than knitting.” She met his eyes across the table, letting him know she remembered that conversation. And that she appreciated him remembering.

“What has Carmel cooked up for us?”

A trout pâté, chicken, salad side dishes and freshly baked bread. Simple stuff, all beautifully prepared, all delicious. But how could she find room for food, when her appetite was all for the man sitting opposite her? The man who hadn’t touched her since they’d left Melbourne. The man who watched her over the rim of his wineglass, his eyes lambent with the same desire that prowled through her blood.

The same restless energy that crackled in the air.

“Dessert?” he asked.

Zara shook her head.

“It’s chocolate mousse.”

“I know.”

His nostrils flared. His eyes blazed with speculation as they drifted over her. “Take off your shirt.”

Zara didn’t bother with buttons. She simply lifted from the hem and peeled the shirt off. Underneath she wore a camisole, but it wouldn’t have mattered if she’d worn nothing at all. She would still have stripped the shirt off.

“Only the shirt?” she asked.

“For starters.” His voice was thick, low, aroused. She watched him sip from his wine and swallow. Felt the swell of response in her body, the tightness in her nipples, the ache of emptiness between her legs.

“Come over here.”

She went without hesitation, her pulse a loud drumming of want in her ears. The blaze of heat in his eyes all the confidence she needed. Eyes locked on his, she took the glass from his hand and placed it on the table.

Then she straddled his lap and kissed him with all the pent-up hunger of a day without. He tasted of wine, rich and intoxicating. He turned her dizzy on the first sip, freed her ponytail on the second, stroked the length of her hair over her shoulders and breasts on the third.

Man, but he was some kisser.

“This is unexpected,” he said when they came up for air.
This
was the silk camisole, one of the few pieces of sexy frippery she owned. He fingered the thin strap, the edge of lace across her breasts.

“Take it off,” she whispered and he did.

But he didn’t toss it aside. Instead he held it bunched in
his hand a second while his gaze glinted with wicked intent. Then he feathered it over her skin, tracing the slope of each breast, teasing her nipples into aching points.

Eyes closed, she arched her back into that gossamer touch. “I didn’t take you for a tease.”

He dragged the silky fabric over her again. “Doesn’t that feel good?”

“Not as good as your hand.” She stretched up straight and met his eyes. “Or your mouth.”

His response, rough and hungry, growled in his throat.

Zara would have smiled with satisfaction but then his hand stretched wide on her back, pulling her to the strong, wet suction of his mouth, to all the magic he could do with her body, there in a straight-backed chair and on a linen-spread table amid the remains of their meal.

They didn’t ever get to the mousse because he said he preferred the taste of her and he showed her how much, satisfying her cravings again and again, and it struck her in one dark molten aftermath that with Alex Carlisle in her life she might never need chocolate again.

They made love by the fireside, and in the midnight dark when she woke surrounded by his heat, and Zara wondered how many times she could come apart, how many times he could shatter her into tiny shards and then put her back together with the stroke of his hands and the blaze of those storm-blue eyes.

At some point she remembered asking him about almonds and he licked her throat and said, “That’s what you taste of, sweetheart. Amber and honey and almonds,” and she slept, too exhausted to tell him that was her perfume, a gift from her sister, as was the silk camisole.

A gift from Susannah, she thought as she drifted into sleep. Just like you.

S
he didn’t study much, unless she counted studying Alex’s very fine anatomy as they lazed in bed together Sunday morning. Alex didn’t fish much, either, although they did take all the gear and trek down to Bad Barry Creek, mostly because he wanted to see her execute the specialist cast she’d bragged about over breakfast.

Relaxed and cocky, she almost slipped up telling him how she’d learned the skill.

“Pappy said it’s all about feel and timing,” she said as she commenced her forward cast, and he looked at her funny.

“I thought you said Susannah taught you.”

Damn. She’d been quoting Susannah, but somehow in her memory she “heard” the instructions in the voice of her unknown grandfather. Ridiculous, but there it was. “Susannah’s grandfather taught her,” she covered smoothly. “I got used to her saying, ‘Pappy said this, Pappy said that.’”

Which was the truth, after all.

She continued her demonstration but refining Alex’s technique was another matter. She pointed out that his grip on the rod was too firm to make a smooth cast. He suggested she demonstrate on his rod—seeing as she’d mentioned the importance of choosing the right rod—and, well, things just deteriorated from there.

Later, they stretched out on the soft spring grass beside the stream, and Zara couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt this relaxed, this carefree, this happy. She astounded herself by saying the words out loud.

“You want to stay relaxed and happy a bit longer?” Alex asked.

Nestled in the crook of his arm, Zara had to twist around to see his face. She could feel her heart fluttering just from looking into his sleepy eyes. Just from imagining what he might mean. “A bit?”

“Yeah.” He grinned and tickled her bare belly with a blade of grass. “We could stay another night.”

“What about work tomorrow?”

“We could play hooky.”

She laughed softly and shook her head. “I can’t imagine you playing hooky.”

“You couldn’t imagine me wearing jeans.”

Point taken. Her gaze drifted down his body, relaxed, sated, not wearing jeans anymore. As always, her pulse picked up just by looking. “When did you last take a week-day off?” she asked.

“My father’s funeral.”

“For pleasure.” But she pressed a kiss to his chest, not for pleasure but for comfort. Her unspoken message to say
I’m sorry you had to take a day off for that purpose.

“I guess that would have been last November. Melbourne Cup day.”

Zara snorted. “Half Australia takes Melbourne Cup day off. That does not count!”

“Have you ever been to the Cup?” he asked, conveniently changing the subject.

“No.”

“I’ll take you this year.”

In five weeks’ time? Her stomach tightened with longing but she didn’t know how to respond, whether he was teasing, whether he was serious. His expression gave nothing away.

Wrinkling her nose, she chose the safe option. Light, teasing, dismissive. “I don’t have a hat.”

“So?”

“So, ladies have to wear a hat to the Cup. It’s a rule!”

His brows dipped a fraction and she thought he was about to take issue with that rule. Then he reached over his head and retrieved the trucker’s cap she’d been wearing earlier. Before he’d hauled it—and all her clothes—off her.

“There you go.” He pulled it on her head, back to front. “A hat.”

Amused by the mental image of an almost six-foot-tall woman strolling through the toffy Flemington members’ enclosure wearing a pretty floral spring dress and a trucker’s cap—especially on the arm of Alex Carlisle in one of his stylish Italian suits—she laughed long and hard. But then she caught a flash of emotion in his eyes, something that grabbed at her chest and squeezed all the air from her lungs and the laughter from her lips.

And there, lying beside an isolated mountain stream, naked but for a backward trucker’s cap, she knew she’d gone and fallen in love.

Damn.

In the end, they didn’t play hooky because Zara had a full day of lectures on Monday.
That’s what really matters,
she reminded herself.
Your degree. The honors-year program. All-important exams in a month’s time.
But when they arrived back in Melbourne Sunday evening and he asked, “Where to?” she couldn’t bring herself to say
home.

She spent another night in his hotel room, in his bed, and by the time she kissed him goodbye in the morning she’d convinced herself she could handle this affair. Driving back to the city, he’d repeated all the right things about not wanting promises or commitment. He wasn’t going to be demanding. He lived in Sydney. He had the means to come and see her some weekends.

Others he would be too busy with work or travel.

Carlisle’s international dealings took him away often, sometimes for a day or two, sometimes a week or more. Later this week he was flying to London to meet with U.K. executives, so she wouldn’t see him for at least two weeks and that was okay. She would not let this euphoria of infatuation overwhelm her.

Surely, one day soon, she wouldn’t grin like a loony every night when he called. Every time she heard “hello, Zara” in a voice as deep and dark as the late-night hour, she would not turn weak with longing.

She would not tell him she missed him. Absolutely not.

Over the next few days, she managed to keep her feet on the ground during the busy daylight hours. Whenever she found herself daydreaming about, say, spending the summer break in his Sydney harborside home or visiting his family’s outback station, she gave herself a good mental shaking.

No promises, no commitment, remember?

She forced herself to remember that first weekend at the
cabin and their conversation about why he’d asked Susannah to marry him. He wanted a family; he was at that stage of his life.

Zara, most definitely, was not.

And thinking about that first weekend, about how they’d met, about Susannah, never failed to produce a twinge of guilt.

For a start, there was the whole sister-secret thing crouched like a dark phantom in the shadows, waiting to catch her out. She wanted to tell him—she
would
tell him—once she had Susannah’s permission. Once she heard from Susannah who, apparently, was still in America.

During one of their long, late-night phone conversations, she asked Alex if he’d heard from her again. He hadn’t.

“If she calls again, please get her number or ask her to ring me,” Zara said. “I need to talk to her.”

“Okay, but I doubt she’ll call me.”

“Why ever not?” And some inner demon reminded her that this was the woman he’d chosen as his wife. “What if she changes her mind about marrying you again?”

“She won’t.”

The certainty in his voice stilled her for a second. “Because of this other man? Does she love him?”

“I don’t know. She said she’d never forgotten him; that she couldn’t stop thinking about him. I said I understood.”

Zara’s heart started to thump so hard she barely heard the question she asked. “Do you?”

“Yes. That’s exactly how I felt. About you.”

Infatuation, not love,
Zara cautioned herself afterward, but her heart didn’t want to hear. It took off soaring and didn’t touch down until later that week when a weekly gossip magazine hit the newsstands.

When she became front-page news as Alex Carlisle’s “Mystery Melbourne Blonde.”

She didn’t even know until Tim brought the magazine home and tossed it on the kitchen table. “I talked to this dude on the phone, Zee. Twice.” He picked up the magazine and studied it again, shaking his head accusingly. “You didn’t say you were sleeping with a freakin’ prince!”

He didn’t notice Zara’s face pale as she stared at the front page.

She hadn’t seen a photographer. The series of pictures were obviously taken outside the Carlisle Grande last Friday night, after he’d taken her to dinner. Their clothes gave that away. So did their absorption in each other. The moment before the kiss. The kiss. Walking hand in hand into the hotel.

No need for any caption to say what was going on, she thought bitterly. It was all there on the front page.

How could she have been so stupid, so shortsighted, so oblivious? They’d talked about the media interest in his life, for Pete’s sake. Why hadn’t she paid attention? Why hadn’t she realized?

A sick feeling clutched at her throat as she grabbed the magazine from Tim’s hands and scanned the copy with swift eyes.
Mystery blonde…unknown beauty…latest lover.
No mention of her name, thank God.

She could feel the sheen of cold sweat on her skin as she slumped into a chair, weak and dizzy with relief.

“You all right, Zee?” Tim shifted uncomfortably, finally clued in to her distress. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“Shock.” She shook her head. Put down the magazine. Sucked in a deep breath. “I didn’t know anything about this.”

“You didn’t know he was this ‘Prince of the Outback’ dude?”

“I knew that. I didn’t think anything like this—” she waved a hand at the offending article “—might happen!”

“It’s not that bad, is it? He’s not married or anything.”

Zara shook her head.

“And it’s not like they’re poxy photos. He caught your good side. Hey, you’re even wearing a dress.”

“Well, thank you, I think.”

One of the things Zara liked about Tim was his sense of humor, and within five minutes he had her laughing at his Zara-as-Princess tomfoolery. By the time she traipsed upstairs to hit the books, she’d convinced herself that she’d overreacted.

She was only the mystery blonde. A five-minute fancy that wouldn’t create any lasting interest because she wasn’t a celebrity. They didn’t know her background. They didn’t know about her mother, right, so why should she worry?

Because one day they might find out,
an inner voice whispered,
and then what?

Alex didn’t call that night and in a way she was glad. She needed perspective on the magazine piece, time to work out her true feelings, although none of that stopped her from sitting up past midnight in case the phone rang. Hours later she woke with a start, jackknifing upright in her study chair and spilling the remnants of her midnight milk all over her cytology notes.

Dumbly she stared at the mess, her heart racing from coming awake too quickly. From the horror of her dream. She grabbed a sweatshirt to sop up the milky puddle. In the bathroom she rinsed it clean and splashed water on her face, then rubbed at her eyes.

Nothing obliterated the nightmare front page stamped in her brain.

Mystery Blonde Exposed the headline screamed. The picture underneath was a sleazy pole dancer with her
mother’s face. The copy exposed Zara as the daughter of Ginger Love, former stripper and infamous mistress of transport tycoon Edward Horton. Illegitimate, unacknowledged, half sister of Alex Carlisle’s former fiancée, Susannah Horton.

Weren’t dreams supposed to be less overt? More open to interpretation?

Zara’s sat cold and heavy in her mind and her stomach. A journalist would not have to dig too hard to come up with that front page. She’d never hidden her identity; she’d never felt any need to. She was simply a mature-age medical student, intent on making something of her life.

Linked with Alex Carlisle, she was all kinds of scandalous headlines, things he would not see coming.

Bracing herself on her forearms, she stared at her reflection in the bathroom mirror. Saw the churning ache of what she must do to reclaim her independence, her anonymity, her own identity.

She had to say goodbye.

Alex resisted the urge to push hard through his London meetings so he could fly home a day earlier. What difference would that make? He’d still be two days away from the weekend. Better he remain a full day’s flying away from temptation, from this restless urge to see her sooner, to consign his take-it-slow declaration to hell.

Except, he had vowed to play it cool. To Zara and to himself.

He didn’t want her ambushing his thoughts, night and day. He didn’t like the ache of anticipation, waiting for the hours he knew he could call her at home. And he loathed the savage plummet of disappointment when all he got to hear was her short, perfunctory voice-mail message.

Zara here. Leave a message.

In the end he did leave a message. His contact number, instructions to reverse the charges, a couple of suitable times. And, because he couldn’t help himself, a simple, sincere message.

“Call me, Zara. I miss talking to you.”

But she didn’t call him back and he hated the ensuing frustration more than everything else put together. He hated not knowing if she’d received his message. He hated the biting, gut-deep worry that something might be wrong. And he hated the sense that he no longer controlled their relationship, that he might no longer control himself.

On Wednesday morning he arrived back in Sydney and headed straight to his office. And there, on his desk, on top of a stack of personal correspondence his PA had left for his perusal, he found her note. An innocent sheet of white notepaper, six neatly handwritten lines that turned his simmering frustration cold.

Alex read it again, searching for hidden meaning, feeling the cold turn to ice and the stab of each shard, word by word. Her message was clear: She’d reconsidered; she couldn’t do a relationship; she was sorry.

Yes, she’d dressed it up in pretty words, words he’d heard before about not being the right woman for him, about not being able to handle the media attention he attracted, about how great that weekend had been but she believed they were better off to end it now.

Alex crumpled the note in his fisted hand and aimed it at the bin. He wasted half an hour pretending he could concentrate on work, pretending to listen to his PA’s update, pretending he could deal with being cast aside as if that last weekend hadn’t meant a thing.

As if she hadn’t looked into his eyes and told him she’d
never been this happy, this satisfied, this contented. As if she hadn’t told him on the phone, forty-eight hours later, her voice low and raspy with emotion, that she missed him already and wished he were there in her bed.