Partner for Love

Partner for Love
Jessica Hart

She was here to stay–whether he liked it or not!Darcy discovered that the remote outback ranch she'd inherited came complete with a hostile partner–Cooper Anderson. It seemed he'd go to any lengths to get back his family home–even suffer Darcy's cooking. But Darcy jumped at Cooper's challenge to be his housekeeper for a month…. She'd prove that she and Bindaburra belonged together–even if that meant pretending she and Cooper were ideal partners, too!"Jessica Hart has a great gift for story-telling…. I never want to miss one of her books!"–Rebecca Winters

“Then what exactly is it that you want, Darcy?” (#u0cd7514b-1dc4-5659-9f86-5ee8ba47a1ed)About the Author (#ucb05f6af-6428-5f97-8f98-9e87d4967516)Title Page (#ua5f4e284-0fd9-5185-ba48-8d5189fbd178)CHAPTER ONE (#u68aada28-4116-5d85-8663-e89edb1c9b5f)CHAPTER TWO (#u953e4ce2-8754-50a6-bec2-c334680f36e2)CHAPTER THREE (#u7052074c-74f6-53a1-a07e-a55aee32fe4b)CHAPTER FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER SIX (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

“Then what exactly is it that you want, Darcy?”

“I don’t want anything from you!” As Cooper came closer, she stepped back, but he reached out without haste and took hold of her wrist, pulling her inexorably back toward him.

“Don’t you?” he asked softly. His other hand cupped her chin, and his thumb stroked the line of her jaw. “Are you sure?”

Jessica Hart had a haphazard career before she began writing to finance a degree in history. Her experience ranged from waitress, theater production assistant and outback cook to newsdesk secretary, expedition PA and English teacher, and she has worked in countries as different as France and Indonesia, Australia and Cameroon. She now lives in the north of England, where her hobbies are limited to eating and drinking and traveling when she can, preferably to places where she’ll find good food or desert or tropical rain.

Look out for Jessica Hart’s next book, Birthday Bride #3511, coming out in July 1998.

Partner for Love

Jessica Hart

www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)

CHAPTER ONE

DARCY stood under her umbrella and lifted her feet in turn to inspect her shoes with a grimace. She could remember Uncle Bill boasting that Bindaburra was in the driest part of the driest state in the driest continent in the world, but after two days of rain Darcy was beginning to wonder if he had been pulling her leg. The Australian outback was supposed to be hot and parched, not cold and wet and extremely muddy.

Scraping her shoes against each other gingerly to remove the huge clods of mud that kept gathering around them, Darcy looked around her, profoundly unimpressed by the spindly gum trees that lined the track and the low, sparse scrub stretching interminably off towards the horizon. Although there was still nearly an hour to go before dark, the rain had cast a dull pall over everything. Had she come all the way from London just for this?

Darcy sighed and continued trudging along the track. It was like walking through concrete. Every time she put one foot in front of the other, she had to drag it up through the mud, half of which stayed clogged around her shoes until they were so heavy, she had to stop and knock it all off again. She just hoped Bindaburra wouldn’t be much further. She had been driving all day along slippery mud tracks like this one and she was tired and fed up. Why couldn’t the car have managed a few minutes more instead of getting bogged frustratingly close to her goal?

Just then the sound of a vehicle changing gear as it approached the creek made her dark blue eyes brighten with hope. Surely whoever it was would be able to give her a lift for the last mile or so? Tightening her grip on her umbrella, Darcy picked her way cautiously into the middle of the track and got ready to wave enthusiastically.

It seemed a long time before the engine growled out of the creek and the vehicle accelerated towards her, its headlights boring through the gloom. Darcy, swinging the umbrella around, was transfixed by the powerful beams, a slim, incongruously vivid figure in the inhospitable landscape.

For one awful moment she thought that the driver hadn’t seen her. Screwing up her eyes against the rapidly approaching light, she flapped her free arm frantically as she staggered out of the way.

To her relief, the car was slowing until she could see that it wasn’t a car at all but a mud-splattered ute. Hardly the most glamorous of vehicles to be rescued by, thought Darcy, but since she hadn’t seen another car for the last three hours she supposed she should be grateful it had come along at all.

The ute came to a halt beside her and the driver wound down the window as Darcy slithered towards it. The mud was so thick and slippery that she almost lost her footing and had to make a grab for the door to steady herself.

Slightly breathless but relieved still to be upright, she looked down into the cab with a winning smile. ‘Hello,’ she said, quite unconscious that her English accent was as incongruous out here as her appearance.

Her first thought was that the driver looked rather unfriendly. He had leant his elbow out of the window and was frowning at her with a mixture of exasperation and disbelief. Beneath his bushman’s hat his face was coolly angular with a firm nose and an unyielding look to his jaw. Darcy found herself looking into a pair of wintry grey eyes and hastily revised her first impression.

He looked very unfriendly.

‘What do you think you’re doing?’ he asked curtly, making no attempt to return her greeting.

Darcy looked at him in surprise, a little affronted by his tone. Men usually reacted to her smile quite differently. ‘I wanted to be sure you’d see me,’ she explained.

The man looked at her umbrella. It was bright yellow and green and cleverly designed as a banana tree with each spoke marking the point of a leaf and jolly bunches of bananas hanging from the middle. A friend had given it to Darcy for her birthday, and she loved it.

He didn’t look as if he shared her sense of fun. ‘I could hardly avoid seeing you,’ he said in a deep Australian drawl that still somehow managed to sound crisp, and his gaze left the garish umbrella to travel down over Darcy’s scarlet jacket and narrow striped trousers to the ridiculously unsuitable shoes that were now clogged with thick, orangey red mud. ‘You don’t exactly blend into the background,’ he added disapprovingly. ‘It’s over two hundred miles to the nearest town. I want to know what you’re doing wandering along here as if it were some shopping mall.’

Darcy wasn’t used to being treated with such brusqueness, but since this rude man appeared to be her only chance of a lift she decided that it was best to ignore it.

‘My car got stuck in the mud,’ she explained.

‘So that’s your car I passed before the creek?’

Beneath her banana leaves, Darcy nodded. ‘I’m sorry if it was in your way, but it was completely bogged. I couldn’t move it forwards or backwards, so I just had to leave it.’

The rain chose that moment to redouble its efforts, crashing down on the umbrella and on the roof of the car, and effectively drowning out his reply. ‘You’d better get in,’ he shouted, and leant across the bench seat to open the passenger door.

Darcy slipped and slid her way round the bonnet, too relieved at the prospect of getting out of the rain to object to the unenthusiastic invitation. ‘Thank you,’ she gasped, manoeuvring herself into the seat and shaking out her umbrella vigorously before attempting to scrape the worst of the thick mud from her shoes. They were utterly ruined, she noticed ruefully; if she had known the outback was going to be a sea of mud, she would have brought her gumboots with her.

The roar of the rain was deadened as she pulled the door closed, marooning them in the shelter of the cab, although it still drummed on the roof in frustration and sluiced down the windscreen. Darcy shivered and stored her precious umbrella down by her feet before turning to take stock of her rescuer.

He had switched on the overhead light and was regarding her with ill-concealed impatience. There was something austere about him, Darcy decided, studying him covertly. Used to the flamboyance of the theatrical world, she was struck by his air of cool reserve, a kind of quiet, contained strength that was somehow overwhelming. It wasn’t a face that gave much away. The planes of his face were lean, his features strong and sharply defined, and there was a distinctly cool set to his mouth. This wouldn’t be a man who showed his emotions easily, thought Darcy, who was fond of instant analysis. Even so, it wasn’t hard to tell that he was less than impressed with her. His mouth was turned down at the corners and the cold grey eyes were uncomfortably observant.

Under his disapproving gaze, Darcy felt herself flush, realising for the first time what an odd spectacle she must have presented, tripping along in the middle of nowhere beneath her banana umbrella. ‘I’m terribly grateful,’ she said, suddenly conscious too of how English she sounded, and tried her smile again.

It had no more effect than before. ‘You should never leave your car in country like this,’ he told her in a stringent tone. ‘Why didn’t you stay with your vehicle and wait for someone to come and help?’

‘I thought it would be quicker to walk,’ said Darcy.

‘Walk?’ echoed the man incredulously, staring at her as if she had proposed cartwheeling to the moon. ‘Where to?’

‘I’m on my way to a property called Bindaburra,’ she said with dignity.

‘You’d have been in for a long walk,’ he said grimly. ‘It’s a good thirty kilometres to the homestead from here.’

Darcy’s blue eyes widened in dismay. ‘But on the map it looks as if it’s just off the main track! I thought it would be just round the next bend.’

‘I can only suggest that you look at the scale next time you attempt a bit of map-reading,’ he said with a caustic look. ‘It would make better sense than heading off into the unknown like a complete idiot.’

‘How was I supposed to know it would be that far?’ said Darcy a little sulkily.

‘That’s the whole point—you don’t know, and in those circumstances you never leave your car, no matter how close you think you are. It’s very easy to get lost out here, even when the track looks obvious, and you’d have been wandering around in the dark, which would have made it even easier. We would have found your car eventually, but we might never have found you.’

‘Well, you did find me,’ Darcy pointed out crossly, beginning to wish that he hadn’t. A thirty-kilometre walk might have been preferable to being rescued by this disagreeably unsympathetic man. Why wasn’t he rushing chivalrously to tow her car out of the mud instead of lecturing her about outback safety?

‘Only by chance,’ he said dampeningly. ‘What do you want at Bindaburra anyway? There aren’t any camping facilities there, if that’s what you’re hoping.’

‘Camping?’ Darcy stared at him in astonishment. ‘Who would want to camp in this?’ she asked, gesturing largely at the rain.

‘I thought you might be looking for somewhere to spend the night instead of driving on to Muroonda,’ he said. ‘Obviously I was wrong.’

‘I’d rather drive back to London than camp,’ she assured him. She had never been near a tent in her life and she didn’t intend to start now!