The Outback Bridal Rescue (5 page)

A checked shirt and jeans was her usual garb, as it was today. Maybe she wanted to look like a man in them but she didn’t.

As much as she might try to minimise her femininity, her figure was too curvaceous for anyone to mistake her for a male. In fact, her antagonism towards him over the past few years had made him acutely aware of her as a woman, especial y when she turned her back on him, her taut cheeky bottom wagging her disdain of what he stood for in her eyes, stirring feelings in him that were entirely inappropriate, given she was Patrick’s daughter.

Did she resent having been a daughter instead of a son?

Was that why she looked so sourly on him…because he had a similar physique to her father?

Johnny hadn’t meant to speak first, yet the question that rose in his mind seemed imperative, at the very core of the situation that had to be settled between them. The words tumbled out, seeking the answer that might make sense of Megan Maguire’s attitude towards him.

‘What happened to the girl who used to like me?’

I grew up.

Megan wasn’t about to give that answer, nor explain the milestones that had marked her passage to where she was now. She looked at Johnny El is, knowing he was thirty-eight, yet the years sat so easily on him, she could stil see the sixteen-year-old boy who’d made up songs for her when she was just a little kid—songs that had generated dreams that were never going to come true for her.

The monumental crush she’d had on him in her teens had final y bitten the dust when he hadn’t come home for her twenty-first birthday. She’d planned for him to see her as a woman, but her coming of age had obviously meant nothing to him. He’d stayed in the U.S., busy with his career, and no doubt involved with the kind of woman who shared his limelight. She was just Patrick Maguire’s youngest daughter, someone he was nice to when it suited him to visit Gundamurra.

Facile charm.

Meaningless.

It was her father who’d drawn him back to Gundamurra…her father who had given him almost half of it in his wil , trapping her into this ridiculous and frustrating partnership with a man whose life was aimed at adding more stars to his celebrity status.

‘Do you need everyone to like you, Johnny?’ she lightly taunted, hoping he’d hightail it back to Hol ywood where everybody probably fawned on him.

He shrugged, his eyes holding hers in chal enge.

‘Usual y I know why not. Where you’re concerned, I’m at a total loss, Megan. What have I done to you to warrant your dislike? Best spit it out now before we get into business together.’

‘What reason could I have for disliking you, Johnny?’ she countered. ‘You’ve always been charming to me.’ Which was absolutely true. ‘As for doing business together,’ she quickly ran on, ‘I don’t imagine you’l want to take an active part in running Gundamurra. You do have a movie to finish and probably many more in your pipeline.’

‘No. Just the one. Which I’m committed to by contract,’

he stated drily. ‘Undoubtedly, people wil wait to see how wel I perform on screen before other offers come in.’

‘Oh, I’m sure with your star quality—’

‘Let’s not speculate on a hypothetical future, Megan,’ he cut in. ‘We’re here to discuss the far more immediate future of Gundamurra, are we not?’ He cocked a chal enging eyebrow at her. ‘Can we be honest about that?’

She felt herself burning again. She’d thought a bit of flattery—pandering to the ego that stars of his magnitude had to have—would set the scene she wanted to play through with him. But his eyes were seeing straight through that ploy, mocking her attempt to manipulate what she saw as his push to be loved by more and more fans through the movies he could make.

‘You need not be concerned about the running of Gundamurra, Johnny. I’l be doing that,’ she stated with grim determination.

‘I don’t doubt you’re capable of it, Megan, given enough resources to ride through the drought. That’s where I come in.’

The lack of resources…there was no denying that, though there’d been no mismanagement. Her father had taken out the first big loan from the bank to finance Emily’s helicopter business, before the drought started biting deep.

Then to keep the sheep alive, keep paying wages, more loans…and wool prices had dropped. The mortgage now was so big, Megan didn’t know how she could service it with no relief from the drought in sight. Even if it rained tomorrow, she’d need recovery time.

A rescue package had to be accepted from Johnny El is if she was to keep Gundamurra. Except it wasn’t entirely hers to keep. It was his, too. And she stil didn’t know how he wanted to work their partnership. He’d just denied her any sense of security about him going away and staying away.

‘We need an injection of funds,’ she admitted flatly.

He nodded. ‘I’l wipe out the mortgage today, get the bank off your back.’

Just like that! Megan instantly bridled at how easy it was for him while she had sweated over every dol ar being spent. ‘No, you won’t!’ The denial exploded from a deep wel of pride.

He frowned. ‘I have the funds, Megan.’

‘I don’t want to owe you fifty-one percent of the mortgage.’ She glared defiantly at him. ‘If you pay off forty-nine percent of it, I can get another loan from the bank which could see me through…’

‘Why put yourself through that worry when you don’t have to?’ he argued, waving an impatient dismissal of her counterproposal.

‘Because I won’t take your charity,’ she shot back at him.

‘Charity?’

He rose from his chair, glaring down at her from his formidable height, a big man, as big as her father had been, emanating a power that wanted to blast her point of view to smithereens. He raised a clenched fist, shaking it as he spoke with more passion than she’d ever heard from Johnny Charm.

‘I owe
my life
to this place. I don’t want to see it go under. I didn’t like seeing it struggle to survive. I offered your father…’

He closed his mouth into a tightly compressed line, shutting down on the vehement flow of emotion.

What had he offered her father, Megan thought wildly.

What? Had it influenced the terms of the wil ?

Johnny stepped forward, pressed his hands on the desk, leaning forward, his eyes firing bul ets at her. ‘I now have the right to do what I’m going to do. Patrick gave me the right.’

‘He didn’t give you the right to interfere with my share,’

she fired back, refusing to be intimidated into being indebted to him.

‘You can pay me back when you can, Megan. If you must. But the bank is not going to have any claim on Gundamurra.’

‘Even if I let you do that, I’l have to borrow again to keep going,’ she pointed out, mocking his ignorance of what had to be done.

‘No. I’l set up an account for you to draw from,’ came the swift reply. He was al primed to fix everything with his money.

Her jaw set stubbornly. ‘I won’t accept that.’

‘You don’t know how long this drought wil last.’

‘I’l manage it my way.’

Frustration boiled through Johnny. Megan would put Gundamurra at risk again and there was no need for it. He wanted to pick her up and shake some sense into her, but there was steel in the grey eyes so fiercely defying him—

Patrick’s eyes—and he knew he had to find another way of convincing her to use the money he could provide.

He straightened up, turned away, walked over to the window, stared out at the one patch of green left on Gundamurra—the homestead quadrangle. Not al the mil ions of dol ars he had available could turn the rest of the vast sheep station green. Only rain could do that. Lots of rain.

However, an unencumbered supply of funds could pay for feed to be trucked in. It could pay wages. It could make life absolutely secure for everyone here, bring back those who’d had to leave. They could comfortably wait out the drought, be ready for the good times to come again.

‘Would you prefer me to buy you out, Megan?’ he tossed at her with little hope.

‘No,’ came the firm and predictable reply. Her eyes said she’d have to be forcibly dragged off Gundamurra, no letting it go of her own free wil .

He shrugged. ‘I thought, since you dislike having to deal with me so much…’

‘You overstepped the line, Johnny,’ she informed him rigidly. ‘By al means wipe out your share of the mortgage.

That’s your right.’

‘Fine!’ he snapped. ‘Do you want to draw a line through Gundamurra, divide it up so I can pour whatever funds I like into salvaging my forty-nine percent of it?’

Treat her kindly…

Maybe there was truth in the old adage that one had to be cruel to be kind.

Her jaw clenched. ‘My father wouldn’t have wanted that,’

she grated out.

‘Have you stopped to think of what your father did want…instead of what
you
want?’

‘He didn’t accept your money while he was alive.’

He pounced on that statement, inflamed by her antagonism towards him. ‘Because
you
argued against it?’

‘No. I didn’t know about any offer. You just mentioned it

‘No. I didn’t know about any offer. You just mentioned it yourself, Johnny.’

Her eyes were clearly weighing its effect on Patrick’s wil . He blasted her calculation by informing her, ‘Ric and Mitch offered help, too. Al three of us, Megan.’

Confusion looked back at him. ‘Then why choose
you?
’

It was eating at her. ‘Would Ric or Mitch have been more acceptable to you?’ he tested, wanting to know if his friends were equal y unwelcome in her life.

‘That’s not the question,’ she snapped evasively.

‘I think it’s pertinent. Why not me?’ he chal enged.

Intriguing to watch the flush come again, sweeping into her cheeks with blazing heat. She dropped her gaze and fiercely claimed, ‘I can manage on my own. With the mortgage reduced, I can…’

‘What if you can’t? Why risk it?’ He paused, sure now in his own mind that
he
was the problem. ‘Is your dislike of me so great that you can’t bear to let me help?’

‘I don’t dislike you! It’s just not right!’ she burst out, banging her own hands on the desk as she leaned forward to deliver this declaration with vehemence.

‘Then what would make it right for you, Megan?’

The storm of feeling in her eyes gave way to a dul bleakness. Johnny read the answer in her mind—
Nothing.

Was she looking down a black pit, too, with her father dead?

‘I don’t know. I don’t know,’ she muttered, shaking her head over the wretched admission and sagging back in the chair, shoulders slumped in defeat.

She looked so miserable, for the second time this morning, Johnny felt the urge to pick her up, but not to shake her, to wrap her in a comforting embrace and promise her he would make everything better. He remembered doing that when she was a little kid.

She’d been running to tel him something and fal en over, scraping her knees—such a sweet little girl, clinging to him, trusting him to make the hurt go away.

He’d loved that little girl.

Patrick’s youngest daughter.

Maybe that was what Patrick’s wil was about…taking care of Megan. But how was he to do it?

His gaze dropped to the chess table.

What was the phrase used where no-one could win?

Stalemate.

He had to start again, adopt a strategy that would get past Megan’s pride. If she real y didn’t dislike him, there had to be other factors involved in her attitude towards him, perhaps a love affair gone wrong when she’d been at that agricultural col ege, seeding some drive to prove herself completely independent, basing her whole future on taking over from her father. If she was stuck in that groove, how could he ease her out of it?

Not by anything she perceived as charity.

Slowly, accompanied by a weird sense of many factors pushing it, an idea came to him.

It was total y wild. Absurdly quixotic. Yet the more he thought about it the more it appealed to him. On many levels. Especial y the prospect of wearing down Megan’s resistance to it, winning her over.

Though that mission could wel prove impossible.

Stil , something was needed to break this hopeless impasse and the shock of his offer might open Megan up more, give him an understanding of how she viewed him.

He certainly had nothing to lose by putting it on the table. In heaping more scorn on him, she would have to give reasons for it, reasons he could work on.

He pasted an ironic little smile on his mouth and aimed it at her. ‘You know, Megan, you’d have the right to al I could provide…if you married me.’

MARRY
him…

Megan felt her jaw drop in sheer shock.

Incredulity blanked her mind for several seconds.

Her heart rocketed around her chest in some stupid manic excitement until the words that had preceded Johnny’s proposal hit home, firing up a surge of anger that lifted her right out of her father’s chair to hurl a furious rejection at him.

‘You think I’d marry you for your money?’

She didn’t wait for a reply, so total y incensed by the suggestion, she flew straight into attack. ‘How dare you lump me with the kind of women who hang off you for what you can give them?’ Her arms scissored a dismissal of absolute disgust. ‘Which just goes to prove how tainted your thinking is by the life you lead. Buy a woman here. Buy a woman there. Have one in every port of cal .’

Her mocking hands landed on her hips, planting themselves there in a bel igerent flaunting of her own femininity which wasn’t for sale. ‘Wel , not at Gundamurra.

Not even if I was reduced to eating dirt would I join that queue for your favours.’

He had the gal to look amused, his eyes twinkling unholy mischief at her as he observed, ‘So, you see me as some indiscriminate sex machine, churning through women at a rate of knots, probably not even remembering their names.’

She glared back at him, wishing she hadn’t let her tongue loose on this theme.

He strol ed towards her, gesturing an open invitation to continue. ‘I’d like to hear what evidence you have that formed this picture of me.’

‘Oh, don’t pretend there haven’t been swarms of groupies after you,’ she snapped, folding her arms across her chest to contain herself against the strength of his attraction as he came at her. ‘Anyone in a sweet shop gets tempted to taste,’ she fired to pul him up short.