Outback Husband

‘What is it?’ he asked.

‘Nothing.’ Juliet’s fingers trembled as she pulled out the plug and made a big deal of rinsing out the sink. She had to get a grip of herself! ‘That is…’ She stopped. No, that wasn’t a good idea.

‘What?’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

Cal frowned irritably. If she had something to say, why didn’t she get on with it? ‘What doesn’t?’

Driven into a corner, Juliet wiped her hands on a tea-towel and wished she had never opened her mouth. But Cal obviously wasn’t going to let it drop, and maybe it needed saying after all.

‘I was just thinking that it might be a good idea if we established a few ground rules.’ She pushed her hair behind her ears, absurdly nervous for some reason.

He looked at her with that infuriatingly unreadable expression. ‘Ground rules?’

‘Yes. I mean, we’re going to be living together until we can get the manager’s house cleaned up, so perhaps we should agree a few things now.’

‘What sort of things?’

‘Well,’ she said, ‘I presume you don’t want to cook separately, so we need to decide about meals, that kind of thing and…well, you know…how we ensure that we both have some privacy,’ she finished lamely. It had seemed so sensible when she started, but under Cal’s dispassionate gaze she found herself faltering for some reason.

‘You’re very keen on rules, aren’t you?’ he said sardonically, and she flushed and lifted her chin.

‘Sometimes they save awkwardness.’

‘I don’t see what’s awkward about sharing a few meals.’

‘I didn’t just mean that,’ said Juliet. ‘I meant the situation generally.’

‘What situation?’ asked Cal, exasperated.

‘You know what I mean!’ she flared. He was being deliberately obtuse! ‘The fact is that the two of us will be alone together here for much of the time.’

‘Ah!’ he exclaimed, suddenly enlightened—as if he hadn’t known all along exactly what she was talking about, Juliet thought sourly. ‘You want some rules to make sure I don’t take advantage of you, is that it?’

‘Yes…no!’ she corrected herself frantically as Cal raised an eyebrow. ‘Of course not,’ she said more calmly. ‘All I’m trying to say is that we’re both adults, both single. If we don’t acknowledge that now, I can see a situation arising where we might…might…’ She could feel herself floundering again and wished she’d never opened her mouth. ‘Well, we might…might wonder…’

‘Might wonder what it would be like if I kissed you?’ Cal suggested in a hatefully calm voice, but she was too relieved to have the sentence completed for her to resent him.

‘That kind of thing, yes.’

She was standing by the cooker in her turquoise dress, hugging her arms together self-consciously and wearing a defensive expression that made her look very young. Cal looked at her thoughtfully for a moment, then laid his tea-towel over the back of a chair.

‘Let’s find out now,’ he said, coming over to Juliet.

She looked at him blankly. ‘Find what out?’

‘What it would be like if I kissed you.’ He took her hands and unfolded her arms so impersonally that he had taken hold of her waist before Juliet had quite realised what was happening. ‘Then we won’t need to wonder,’ he explained briskly, drawing her towards him, ‘and we won’t need any rules.’

And with that he bent his head and kissed her.

Juliet’s hands came up quite instinctively to clutch at the sleeves above his elbows for support as his mouth came down on hers and the floor seemed to drop away beneath her feet.

It was a hard, punishing kiss, a kiss meant to teach her a lesson. Juliet knew that, but she was unprepared for the searing response that shot through her at the feel of his lips and his hands hard against her. It seemed to leap into life, jolting between them like electricity, at once shocking and dangerously exciting, so that the kiss which Cal had intended to be so brief somehow took on a life of its own and he tightened his arms around Juliet, moulding her against him as her lips parted beneath his.

Cal slid one hand up to the nape of her neck, tangling his fingers in the silky hair. He had forgotten how she exasperated him, forgotten her stupid rules, forgotten everything but how warm and soft and pliant she felt in his arms. Caught off-guard by the piercing sweetness of her response, Cal was in the middle of gathering her closer and deepening his kiss when the realisation of just how close they both were to losing control stopped him in his tracks as effectively as a bucket of cold water.

Literally dropping Juliet back to earth, he stepped away from her and took a deep, steadying breath. Juliet was left to collapse back against the cooker, dazed and trembling. They stared at each other for a long, long moment.

‘Well, now we know,’ said Cal, when he could speak. ‘We won’t need to waste any more time wondering about it, will we?’ He could see Juliet’s mouth shaking, and the temptation to pull her back into his arms and forget everything else once more was so strong that he had to make himself turn away.

Juliet was still leaning against the cooker when he reached the door. ‘Thanks for the meal’, he said, and then he was gone.

CHAPTER THREE

‘DAD’S gone to have breakfast with the stockmen,’ Natalie announced when Juliet found her in the kitchen the next morning. ‘He said to tell you he won’t be back until this evening.’

‘When did he tell you this?’ asked Juliet, put out to discover that all the effort spent on steeling herself to face Cal with cool composure this morning had been completely wasted.

It had taken her ages dithering around in the corridor before she had got up the nerve to even open the kitchen door, and now he had just swanned off for the day without so much as a by-your-leave, leaving a casual message that he would be back later. No doubt she would be expected to have a meal waiting for him when he deigned to turn up, too!

‘Just now,’ said Natalie. ‘He only left a minute ago.’ She was anxious to help. ‘Shall I go and find him for you?’ she offered, halfway off her chair.

‘No!’ said Juliet quickly. She wasn’t up to a confrontation with Cal just yet. ‘I mean, no, it doesn’t matter, thanks,’ she added more gently.

Running her fingers through her hair in a weary gesture, she put on the kettle to make herself some tea. The twins were still asleep. Typical that the one morning she could have had a lie-in she had woken early, feeling hot and cross after a restless night.

It was Cal’s fault, of course. Why had he kissed her like that? How could she have let herself be kissed like that? Juliet had lain awake for hours, tossing fretfully from side to side, her heart still pumping at the feel of Cal’s hands on her bare arms, her lips still tingling with the touch of his mouth. She’d wanted to be angry with Cal—she was angry with him—but deep in her heart she’d known that he wasn’t entirely to blame. She hadn’t even tried to push him away.

It hadn’t even been that much of a kiss, she’d tried telling herself. Cal had been making a point, no more than that, but her own electric response had alarmed and shamed her.

She had been alone too long, that was all, Juliet had decided at last in the small hours. It was the only thing that could explain her own bizarre reaction to the way he had kissed her. If it hadn’t been for those long months of rejection by Hugo she would never have kissed Cal back as she had. She wouldn’t have wanted the kiss to go on and on, and she wouldn’t have felt so bereft when he’d let her go.

And she wouldn’t have been lying there, squirming with frustration, unable to stop wondering what would have happened if Cal hadn’t dropped her when he had. He would have been lying in bed, his body where her hand smoothed over the sheet. Juliet’s palms had twitched at the thought. She’d felt as if her nerves were jumping just beneath her skin. She’d wished she could stop thinking about what it would be like to touch him, to taste him, to shiver at his hands drifting over her, at his hardness covering her…

She had to stop this!

If Cal thought she was going to make a big deal out of one crummy kiss, he would be disappointed. Juliet had spent too long coping with Hugo’s sudden whims and changes of mood. She was in charge now, she reminded herself, and she wasn’t going to go to pieces just because some man had kissed her.

No, she had hired Cal to manage the station. He would just have to accept that she was his employer, not a convenient diversion for the empty outback evenings.

‘Sorry?’ Juliet suddenly realised that Natalie was talking to her and that she hadn’t heard a word. ‘What did you say?’

‘I said, the kettle’s boiled,’ said Natalie, evidently puzzled by Juliet’s abstracted air.

As she drank her tea, Juliet wondered whether Natalie was upset at being abandoned by her father for the day, but she seemed to take it in her stride. She was happy to stay with Juliet and the twins, she told Juliet, adding conscientiously, ‘If you don’t mind.’

The only thing Juliet minded was the way Cal had simply assumed she would be there to look after his daughter, but she could hardly say that to Natalie, and anyway, the little girl turned out to be very useful. It was much easier to get things done knowing that she was keeping an eye on the twins, who were liable to get into all sorts of mischief if they weren’t watched like a hawk.