The Australian Tycoon's Proposal

The Australian Tycoon's Proposal
Margaret Way

Bronte's had enough of rich, ruthless men - she's just narrowly escaped marrying one! Now she's wary of all men, especially when six feet two inches of pure Australian male arrives on her doorstep with a business proposal….The chemistry between her and tycoon Steven Randolph is explosive - Bronte finds him impossible to resist, and begins to dream of a future with him. Only then does she discover Steven is not all he seems….

“So you don’t want an affair?”

“No.”

“What a pity!” Steven laughed. “You mightn’t be tough, Bronte, but you’re a great kisser.” He lifted a hand and gently caressed her cheek.

“And that’s the only one we’re going to share,” she told him crisply.

“Don’t panic. What a prickly, touchy person you are.” He slid his arm companionably through hers. “It’s a miracle I’ve warmed to you so quickly.”

Margaret Way takes great pleasure in her work and works hard at her pleasure. She enjoys tearing off to the beach with her family at weekends, loves haunting galleries and auctions and is completely given over to French champagne “for every possible joyous occasion.” She was born and educated in the river city of Brisbane, Australia, and now lives within sight and sound of beautiful Moreton Bay.

The Australian Tycoon’s Proposal

Margaret Way

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

EPILOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

VOLCANIC red dust puffed up under Bronte’s every step. It found its way into her expensive sandals, irritating her toes and the soles of her feet. Obviously her feet had grown tender since she had last left the jungle. Grit the colour of dried blood, she thought mawkishly, coated the fine leather. But then who in their right mind wore high heeled sandals to trudge down a bush track?

“Damn!” She tottered to a stop, in the process wrenching her ankle. Moans gave way to muttered curses. She was about as irritable as she could get. What she should be wearing was lace up boots or at least a pair of running shoes. She set down her shoulder bag that had cost an arm and a leg. Never featherlight even when empty it had been growing heavier at every step. Her small suitcase followed. It weighed over a ton. Now she was able to shake the dust and grit first from the sole of one foot, then the other.

Ah, the relief! She gulped in hot scented air.

One of her bra straps had slipped off her shoulder. She fixed that. Her sunglasses needed propping back up her nose, a water slide of sweat. She was wearing a big wide-brimmed hat, yet the blazing tropical sun was burning a hole through the top of her head. Boiling and bothered she yanked at her designer label tank top. It was wet under the arms and glued to her back. She just knew her face was the colour of a ripe plum.

“No wonder you’re so darned unhappy. You’re a fool, Bronte.” She often talked to herself. She’d grown into that habit as a lonely and isolated little girl. She’d even had imaginary friends. Great friends they were, too. There was a girl called Em who grew along with her. A boy called Jonty who was a very gentle person and lived in the rain forest. Once Gilly claimed she saw Em and Jonty playing tag around a giant strangler fig. Gilly always spoke to her as if she were an equal even when she was seven! Of course Gilly was having a little joke. Bronte knew her friends existed only in her powerful imagination.

A whirlwind of dust blew up, rousing her to move off the track until it passed. It was her own fault that she had to walk. Death before dishonour was her motto. She was stuck with it. She hadn’t learned it. It had been passed out at birth. It got her into a lot of trouble, that’s all.

It wasn’t right for the taxi driver to call Great-Aunt Gillian with a hard G “a crazy old bat!” accompanied by hoots of laughter she was expected to join in. That had made her hopping mad. Not that Gilly of the copious snow-white hair, once blue-black like her own, black eyes and wicked grin didn’t communicate with their dead ancestors on a regular basis. As an imaginative child Bronte, actively encouraged in her psychic powers by Gilly, had sensed long dead members of the McAllister family hanging around the place. They spent their time wandering the old sugar plantation and the big patch of virgin rain forest bordering McAllister land. They’d even been seen up on the main road, scaring the tourists. The locals took no notice whatsoever.

Gilly, despite her solitary, secluded life, was right up there as a local character in an area that was legendary for its “characters.” Gilly was the Bush Medicine Woman. The plantation, the two hundred acres that remained from the original selection, would attract a lot of developers if it were ever put on the market, but Gilly lived a frugal life. Most of her inherited money had gone. “I’ve lived too long!” She supplemented what was left, by running a profitable little side-line selling herbal potions, concoctions, the odd aphrodisiac—said to work—facial and body creams guaranteed to alleviate the symptoms of every discomfort known to woman including the “infernal itches”. Gilly having been stood up at the altar fifty odd years ago didn’t give a hang what happened to the men. They could look after themselves.

Bronte didn’t love men either. She was amazed anyone did! Most of them turned out to be bitter disappointments. Not that she’d been stuck on her lonesome in front of the altar. She was the one who found commitment darn near impossible. To prove it, with one week to the Big Day, she’d recently called off her much publicised society wedding, bringing her mother’s and her demented stepfather’s fury down on her head. She’d made a fool of them but she had learned that she was a fool already. Her actions, apparently, put her on a par with some sort of a criminal. A mass swindler perhaps? The humiliation was not to be borne. The disgrace! Worse, it was bad for business.

Nat, her fiancé, had been angry enough to call her names, grinding his teeth as he did so. He wore not so much a devastated as totally baffled expression. What girl in her right mind would give him up? A girl could get tramped to death standing in line to meet Nathan Saunders.

Nat’s mother had been livid! In fact she’d been astoundingly crude. Bronte hadn’t realized Nat’s mother knew let alone used four letter words. “No breeding!” sniffed Gilly when she heard. Nothing like scorning a son to bring out the worst in a mother. No one stood up Thea Saunders’s—one of society’s leading lights—wonder boy. She had demanded the 3 carat diamond solitaire back, not that Bronte had ever intended to keep it. Her finger felt a whole lot lighter without it. Bronte had consoled herself with the knowledge that she wasn’t the first girl to have second thoughts about tying the knot. The big problem was she hadn’t been able to work up the courage to voice her concerns until the last minute. Pathetic really! For that, she despised herself but she knew the turbulence her decision would create.

Turbulence. Chaos. A tongue-lashing from the stepfather she detested. Nat had been hand-picked for her. She was ashamed to admit she was still trying to please her mother when let’s be straight about it, she never had. Her rejection of Nat Saunders had caused a huge scandal. Few of her so-called friends had sided with her. She was scolded and marvelled at at every turn. She had everything going for her and she blew it! What an idiot! The word had become an alternative to fool. Her mother had ended most sentences with one or the other.

The handsome and popular Nat was the scion of media mogul Richard Saunders, a close friend and partner in various enterprises—probably dodgy—of her stepfather Carl Brandt. Of course she lost her budding career. A swift retribution that did nothing to raise her spirits. Over the past year she’d swum into the limelight as a popular character in the award winning TV police drama Shadows. Two weeks ago she had met with a very bloody end. A shoot-out. Officer down. It had blitzed the ratings and caused a storm of protests from her fans—she never knew she had so many—but she wasn’t going to be allowed to get away with shaming two outstandingly rich families.

Her mother had given her hell, like it was her main aim in life to make Bronte’s existence intolerable.

“How can any of us hold up our heads?” Miranda had exploded. “After all Carl has done for you, you ungrateful little fool!”

What exactly had Carl done for her? He hadn’t adopted her. Her own father had left her enough money to cover her education through university, pay for her upkeep and her clothes. Her mother still beautiful and sexy at forty-five—never mind she had celebrated that birthday twice already—had not been her first husband’s beneficiary. Bronte had been that, her inheritance administered by her late father’s lawyer as executor of his will. Apparently Ross McAllister hadn’t trusted his wife to do that. Bronte found out years later her father had changed his will on the very day of his death. Her mother had got away with the family home, all the contents and her cache of jewellery, a veritable Aladdin’s Cave, otherwise she’d been cut out entirely. There was a story there, with in all probability grave implications, but nothing could bring her father back. She had loved him so much! She could still feel his hand patting the top of her head.

Her remarried mother sided with her new husband on everything. Perhaps she had no alternative? Bronte understood it was easier on her mother that way. Carl Brandt was a big shouldered, imposing looking man with heavy lidded, obsidian eyes and a very loud voice. No one would ever have to ask her stepfather to repeat himself. Yet for reasons totally beyond Bronte, her stepfather was positively magnetic to women who liked a touch of the brute. On the proviso, of course, he was powerful and had lots of money. Even age didn’t seem to come into it. Such men retained their attractions at over ninety unlike women who some believed started the downhill slide once they hit thirty.

Her mother had always been attracted to money and power. Never mind that Carl Brandt was a tyrant, with a tongue like a chain saw. Bronte’s own gentlemanly father had doted on her but he had been taken from her when she was only seven. Killed when his high powered sports car crashed into a tree. Her mother thereafter maintained Ross McAllister was a reckless driver with a thirst for speed. An opinion rejected by his many friends.

Bronte’s life had changed dramatically after that. Her mother had acted deranged for a couple of days, a tragic figure on the verge of a breakdown. Bronte had been sent to live with her maternal grandparents, an arrangement that lasted only a few months. Her grandmother—not the kindest granny in the world—decided she couldn’t tolerate Bronte’s “tantrums” any longer. Children should be seen, but not heard whereas Bronte had been given to creating disturbances. That’s when Gilly McAllister had come to the rescue. Gilly had offered to look after her. Good old “crazy” Gilly. Thank goodness for her! Gilly who privately called Miranda “shallow and egotistical.” Bronte was meant to stay with her great-aunt until Miranda felt more able to cope after her tragic loss.

Bronte stayed five years. She saw her mother rarely. As her husband’s property—Brandt owned people—Miranda had to be on hand at all times. Her grandmother she saw not at all. “I can’t believe our luck!” Gilly chortled. Neither of them were asked to Miranda’s and Brandt’s society wedding which took place an unseemly month or so after Ross McAllister’s tragic death. So much for the tragedy queen and the nervous breakdown that never was. Then again, perhaps it illustrated Miranda’s extraordinary resilience.

A suspiciously short period of time later Bronte’s half brother Max—poor little victimised Max—made his much gossiped about entry into the world though Bronte and Gilly locked away in the deep Far North didn’t get to hear about that happy event until at least a year later when Gilly read about Max’s existence in the newspaper.

On her twelfth birthday Bronte’s mother—no one saw it coming—made the decision to send Bronte to an exclusive boarding school back in Sydney. “We have to get you away from this primitive place!” Miranda had cried, accelerating away from the plantation so fast she sent up a dust storm. “You’re nothing but a savage. I was a fool to let Gilly look after you. She can’t even look after herself.” Miranda had appeared genuinely shocked at the run-down condition of the old plantation gone back to jungle and Bronte’s appearance which even Bronte had to admit in retrospect must have been a little on the wild side. With Gilly for a mentor Bronte had gotten used to wearing a sort of safari outfit—boy’s shirts and trousers with a thick belt and good stout boots. She’d have worn that outfit to school, where she shone academically, only the headmistress, Miss Prentice, wouldn’t have let her through the front gate.

The day Bronte left, her darling Gilly had cried, her tall, vigorous body bent over and shaking like she had a tropical fever.

Gilly who was as brave and fierce as the general in the family. General Alexander “Sandy” McAllister who’d risen to fame in India fighting for the British in the Afghan wars. “Sandy” was one of Gilly’s favourites from the family spirit world. After his long stint in India Sandy’s spirit had settled in well to the humid heat of the rain forest, unfazed by the cyclones that blew in from time to time.

Feeling a little rested Bronte slung her bag back over her shoulder then picked up her expensive suitcase. It was one of her mother’s discards. Her mother enjoyed enormously being the wife of a very rich man. Rich men ran the world! Wealth defined the man! Brandt pampered her mother for a good reason. Miranda was always on show as his wife. Her beauty and elegance were legendary and she had a wonderful flair for dressing. Why else would Brandt have married her? It all reflected wonderfully well on his taste.

Otherwise he was far from being a generous man. He had never been generous to Bronte. She would have been walking around in rags, uneducated, if not for the inheritance her own darling father had left her. Her mother didn’t believe in spoiling her either. Worse Brandt was downright mean to his own son. Poor Max who hadn’t inherited any of his father’s abominable skills and bully boy nature. The endless criticisms, the cutting sarcasm, the scorn the two of them had endured. It had been tough to leave fifteen-year-old Max behind, but at least Max had respite at boarding school. He’d even dug in his heels to stay at school through vacations. Something that had affronted their mother who laboured under the monstrous delusion she was a good mother.

My sad, dysfunctional family! Bronte thought. There was a crisis every day of the week. She was always amazed she could look so much like her mother yet be nothing like her in her nature and behaviour. It was Gilly who had taught her values, shown her love and understanding. Gilly was the woman of substance not her own mother whom she continued to love even as she despaired of ever having her love returned. Beautiful Miranda who at the drop of a hat—for instance a broken engagement—could turn into a shrieking virago. If Brandt was famous for his lung power, he could on occasion be equalled by her mother.

Bronte staggered on bravely, remembering how Gilly had always called her “plucky.” As a child it had made her laugh. Plucky. For some reason—the obvious clucky—she associated it with Gilly’s chooks. Despite Bronte’s multiple discomforts she was drinking in her surroundings. She loved this place. It was the Garden of Eden complete with the snakes. The countryside was glorious. The coastal corridor north of Capricorn was as lush and bountiful as the Interior across the Great Divide was arid. She adored the rampant blossoming of the tropics. The brilliantly plumaged birds. The colour!