Princes of the Outback: The Rugged Loner / The Rich Stranger / The Ruthless Groom

“The kind that sends him out looking to cut a deal with the first bar-bunny he happens upon?”

Angie stood so swiftly, her head spun. Whoa. Breathing deeply, she leaned against the desk. It was okay. Kameruka Downs was two hours of black dust and corrugated roads from the nearest bar. Even if Tomas did decide to hightail it into Koomah Crossing, he wouldn’t make closing time.

She exhaled slowly and settled back on the desk. “Confession time, guys. I really only overheard one slice of your earlier discussion, so who’d like to fill me in on the whole story?”

Once, on a bet, Angie had raced Tomas and her brother Carlo from the homestead to the waterhole, blindfolded. Remembering that experience fifteen years ago made tonight’s steep descent a veritable walk in the park. A threequarter moon rode high in the sky, casting enough light for Angie to pick a surefooted path through the scrub. Behind a bandanna blindfold there’d been nothing but intense black, yet she’d closed her eyes and run.

Anything to prove herself less of a girl.

You’re part feral goat, the boys had spat in disgust as they handed over her winnings, and it had taken Angie years to realize that comparison wasn’t exactly flattering.

Her smile, wry and reminiscent, faded as she neared her destination. Moment of truth, sister. She rubbed warming hands up and down her goose-bumped arms. She would bet the vintage silk-georgette dress she’d vainly not changed out of—despite the chill night and a setting more suited to jeans—that Tomas had retreated to his usual lair.

And when you find him, you say your piece and you make sure he listens. You don’t let him turn his back.

She’d seen Tomas several times since her return from Italy a week earlier. At the hospital before his father passed away, at the memorial service held largely for his city business associates, at Alex’s Sydney home afterward. Yet he’d managed to evade anything beyond a quick consoling hug and a few token words of sympathy.

So she’d stayed on at Kameruka Downs after the private funeral, begging a lift back to Sydney on the corporate jet with Alex and Rafe, instead of returning on the afternoon charter arranged for other mourners. She had to talk to Tomas, one on one. She had to set things straight between them.

This had nothing to do with the disturbing clause in Charles’s will that she’d just learned about in the library. This was about guilt and regret and failing to be the kind of friend she wanted to be. It was about closure, too, and moving on with her life.

And it promised to be damn-near the toughest thing she’d ever done. Tougher even than the night she’d confronted Tomas with her opinion on his upcoming marriage…and that had been Tough with a capital T!

It wasn’t that she hadn’t liked Brooke. They’d been close friends at school. Tomas had met his future wife at Angie’s eighteenth birthday party, on a night when she’d dressed and preened and set herself on being noticed as a woman instead of his wild-child pseudosister.

Instead—the supreme irony—he’d fallen into complete blinker-eyed besottedness with her petite and delicate friend. And eighteen months later he hadn’t wanted to hear Angie’s opinion on Brooke’s suitability to life in the outback. He loved Brooke. He married Brooke.

And that had been one tough challenge Angie couldn’t face.

Instead of accepting the bridesmaid’s gig, she’d taken off on a backpacking jaunt to Europe. Her grand adventure had started as an impulsive escape from pain and envy, from her fear that she wouldn’t make it through “does anyone have just cause” without jumping to her feet and yelling, “You bet I do! He’s supposed to be mine!”

She’d missed the wedding and, worse, she’d missed Brooke’s funeral. But now she was back, needing to make peace with her conscience. She doubted she could make peace with the flint-hard stranger Tomas had become, but she had to try.

“Moment of truth,” she muttered, out loud this time, as she ducked under a branch into the clearing beside the waterhole.

Slowly she scanned the darkness and the empty shadows, before hauling herself up onto a rock overhang. On sure feet she climbed higher to the secret cave. Peered inside.

Backed-up breath huffed from her lungs.

Nothing. Damn.

Disappointment expanded, tightening her chest as she slowly descended to the ground. She’d made a deal with herself, a deal about finding him and getting this over with tonight. How could she do that when he wasn’t here?

Swearing softly, she turned to leave.

Or perhaps he simply didn’t want to be found…

Her eyes narrowed. Perhaps Tomas hadn’t changed completely. Perhaps now, as in the past, he wasn’t completely alone down here.

Angie allowed herself a small smile before she lifted both pinkies to her pursed lips and whistled.

Tomas figured someone—most likely Angie—would come looking for him. He’d counted on the night hiding his secluded location. He hadn’t counted on her whistling his dog.

Ajay responded with a high-pitched whine of suspicion. Rough translation: You can whistle—point in your favor—but I’m no pushover. I’m a red heeler; I protect my boss. You better proceed with caution.

Angie didn’t.

The quick tread of her approach was as incisive and uninhibited as her personality. Loose gravel dislodged by her climbing feet splished into the water below, and Tomas saw the hair rise along Ajay’s spine. Under his restraining hand he felt a warning growl vibrate through the dog’s tense body. It was a measure of his own snarled mood that he actually considered letting the heeler loose.

He didn’t.

His muttered “Stay” was probably for the dog—God knows Angie wouldn’t take a lick of notice!

As if to prove his point, she appeared out of the darkness and used his shoulder to steady herself as she dropped down at his side. The floaty skirt of her dress settled around her legs where they dangled over the rock ledge, a flutter of feminine contrast to the rugged setting and the worn denim stretched over his thighs alongside.

“Did you consider I might want to be alone?” he asked, surprising himself with the even tone of his voice. Ever since Jack Konrads read out that newly added will clause, tension had snarled through his blood and his flesh. An anger that had whipped the hollow numbness of grief and loss into something hot and taut and hazardous.

“Yes,” she said simply, with a quick flash of smile.

Although that could have been for Ajay, because on the heels of the smile came a softly crooned note of surprise. Her hand slid from his shoulder down his arm—from rolled-up shirtsleeve to skin—as she leaned around him to take a better look. “While I was clambering up here, I kinda thought you mightn’t have Sergeant anymore.”

“He died.”

For the tiniest hint of time, she stilled. Then the pressure of her hand on his forearm changed, a tactile expression of her next words. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

“He got old.”

“As we all do.” She leaned forward. “Well, aren’t you handsome.” And started to reach—“Best you don’t do that.”

“I’m only saying hello.”

And wouldn’t you know it? His wary-natured heeler didn’t take a piece out of her hand. Tomas breathed a tad easier…but only a tad. He was still struggling to reconcile the Angie he knew—the annoying, exasperating, teenage tomboy—with this exotic, alien creature who’d returned from Europe.

She wore dresses, for pity’s sake. She’d straightened her unruly curls into one of those city-girl do’s, all sleek and dark and glossy. And every time she moved he heard the delicate tinkle of the jewelry she wore on her wrists and ankle.

Hell, she even had some kind of rings on her toes. And as for the perfume…

“What’s with the perfume?”

“Excuse me?”

Yeah, excuse him. He hadn’t meant to say it, the question that blared in his brain every time he breathed around her. Ever since that first day he saw her again—hell, was that only last week?—when she’d rushed down the hallway of the hospital to throw her arms around him, to hug him and hold him and leak tears and words and more tears into his shirt.

Except instead of feeling comforted, he’d dragged in air rich with this perfume and he’d felt her curves against his body and he’d tensed. His hands had set her aside, this woman who no longer felt anything like Angie should.

She’d changed when all he wanted was someone—something—to stay the same. To anchor him to the past that fate kept wrenching away.

“You smell…different,” he accused now. She smelled different, she looked different, and right now in the dark he swore she was looking at him different, too. “You’ve changed, Dash.”