Required: Three Outback Brides: Cattle Rancher, Convenient Wife / In the Heart of the Outback... / Single Dad, Outback Wife

‘I can feel it. I can smell it,’ he said. ‘Besides the rain is coming down in bucket loads in the North. The last report I heard a cyclone was forming in the Coral Sea. That’s all it will take. It’s either flood or drought. If the cyclone develops and we get torrential rain, the Big Three—that’s the Diamantina, the Georgina and the Cooper—will bring the floodwaters right down into our remote South-West corner. The Channel Country is one vast natural irrigation system as I’m sure you know. You’ve never been there?’

‘I regret to say, no. I spent years at boarding school, then university, then I married. But I will get there one day.’

‘It would be nice to take you,’ he said. ‘The whole region can flood without a drop of actual rain. Seen from the air it looks like the whole country is underwater.’

‘Of course!’ She looked across at him in quick realisation. ‘You would see it from the air. You have your own plane on Turrawin?’

He nodded. ‘A Beech Baron and a couple of Bell helicopters. We use the choppers a lot for mustering. We also use the services of an aerial mustering company from time to time. Choppers have revolutionised the whole business.’

‘I can imagine, with those vast areas.’ She stopped what she was doing to study him. ‘But it can be dangerous? I’ve heard of many instances of fatal light aircraft and chopper crashes.’

‘Very dangerous.’ He shrugged the danger off. ‘But it’s our way of life, Allegra. We have to keep our fears under control.’

‘That’s pretty amazing,’ she said dryly.

‘When fatalities happen our vast community shares in the heartbreak. We’re all in it together. I’ve been in ground searches and aerial searches in my time. We’ve had two major accidents in the last twelve years on Turrawin. One death I regret to say. A really good bloke, one of our regulars who could fly anything and land anywhere so no one worried about him for quite a while. The other was a crash landing, but mercifully the pilot walked away. I’ve had a close call myself. Once I came down in the middle of a big paperbark swamp. In the Territory I could have been taken by a croc, but we don’t have any crocs in the desert. Well not anymore.’ He smiled. ‘Though you can see them in our aboriginal rock paintings.’

She stared back at him fascinated. ‘You have cave paintings on Turrawin?’

‘We don’t advertise, but yes. Some of them are amazing. One cave in particular is guaranteed to make you believe in the Spirit Guardians. The hairs stand up on my forearms and I consider myself pretty cool.’

‘You are cool.’ She laughed. ‘I’d love to see that cave myself.’

‘I wish I could take you there.’

‘That would be wonderful,’ she admitted recklessly. ‘We don’t have anything like that around here.’

‘I know.’

His mouth, quirked as it was now, was framed by the sexiest little brackets. She realised she watched for those moments. That was what falling in love was all about. It seemed that for her this was the classic coup de foudre. Which by no means guaranteed things were going to turn out fine she reminded herself. As for it happening at such a turning point in her life she was beyond thought.

‘You’re very passionate about your desert domain, aren’t you?’ She said, knowing he would be passionate about most things.

‘Yes, ma’am.’ His crystalline eyes looked right into hers. ‘It’s like no other place on earth and Jay and I have managed to see quite a few. Australia is the oldest continent on earth. I think that accounts for a lot of the extraordinary mystique. It’s the timelessness, the antiquity, the aboriginal feel, the power of the Dreamtime spirits. Then there’s the colour of the place … the vivid contrast between the fiery red earth and the cloudless blue sky. Every country offers its great and its quiet wonders.

‘I’ve stayed a few times with friends, another cattle family, who own and run a magnificent ranch in Colorado. They have the Rocky Mountains for a backdrop. It’s like wow! Then we had a great trip to Argentina a couple of years back. Business and pleasure. A wonderfully colourful and exciting place. We loved it. We managed to get in a few games of polo while we were there. They’re the greatest as I’m sure you know. We even got to fly over the Andes. I love flight. I love flying. Being up there in the wild blue yonder all on your lonesome. It’s tremendous!’

‘Then you’re going to miss it, aren’t you?’ she said, getting a clear picture of him seated at the controls of a plane. ‘Naroom doesn’t run to light aircraft.’

He shrugged. ‘Well you are much closer to civilisation. Turrawin on the other hand is right on the edge of the Simpson. The sand dunes there peak at around one hundred feet and they run for a couple of hundred kilometres unbroken the longest parallel sand dunes in the world. It’s really eerie the way they bring to mind the inland sea of prehistory. I’ve stood on top of our most famous dune, Nappanerica—’

‘The Big Red?’ She smiled, glad she knew the answer.

‘The very same. A Simpson traveller, Dennis Bartell named it. It’s closer to one hundred fifty feet. The most amazing little wildflowers come out after a shower. Not the gigantic displays we get after flooding. But it’s fascinating to study the little fellas up close. There are so many you can’t move without crushing them underfoot, but then they release the most wonderful perfume. You think you’ve died and gone to Heaven.’ He purposely didn’t say he thought the fragrance akin to the fresh fragrance that came off her body.

‘And after flooding?’ she asked. ‘I’ve seen marvellous photographic shots in calendars.’

‘Allegra,’ he said dryly, ‘You have to see the real thing.’ As he spoke he was imagining her with a diadem of yellow daisies around her head. As young boys he and Jay had fashioned them for their mother. ‘After heavy rain, the desert flora has no equal,’ he said with unmistakably nostalgia. ‘The landscape is completely carpeted by pink, white and yellow paper daisies. It’s like some great inland tide. They even sweep up to the stony hill country. Even the hills come alive with thousands of fluffy mulla mulla banners and waving lambs tails. So many varieties of desert peas come out, fuchsias and hibiscus, our exquisite desert rose. Nature’s glory confronts you wherever you look.’

‘It sounds wonderful,’ she said, moved by the controlled emotion in his voice and face. Nostalgia was written all over him ‘The central plains must seem pretty tame to you after your desert home?’

He raised both his wide shoulders in a shrug, but he didn’t answer.

‘Is there no hope of a reconciliation between you and your father?’ she dared to ask the question.

His face angled away from her, looked grim. ‘I need to get as far away from my father as is humanly possible.’

Good God as bad as that!’ she said, pondering the no-holds-barred bitterness and hatreds in family life. ‘It seems to me you’re a son to be proud of.’

He looked up then to smile at her, the smile that was impossible to resist. ‘Why thank you, Miss Allegra.’

‘I’m not trying to butter you up,’ she said, a shade tartly to counteract that sexual radiance. ‘Just a simple statement of fact.’ Belatedly she put the coffee on to perk. He was just so interesting to talk to she had forgotten all about it. ‘Take a seat.’

He pulled out a chair, resting his strong tanned arms on the table. He was wearing a red T-shirt with his jeans, the fabric clinging to his wide shoulders and the taut muscular line of his torso. It was hard to look past his physical magnetism. In fact it was making her jumpy. So jumpy she felt if he touched her she would fall to pieces. Wisely she stayed on the opposite side of the table.

‘So what have you got to tell me?’

He was as aware as she was of the glittering sexual tension that stretched between them, but he tried to play it cool as befitting a serious man. ‘I can go a little higher with my bid.’

She raised an arched brow. ‘How high is a little?’

He turned up his hands. ‘We’ll split it between $3.5 and $4 million. My final offer, Mrs Hamilton, is $3.75.’

‘That Mrs Hamilton might cost you,’ she said frostily.

‘What did he do to you?’ The intense desire to reach for her—the desire he was endeavouring to keep on simmer—damned nearly boiled over.

‘What’s made you change your mind about me?’ she asked. ‘When we first met it was like—What did she do to her poor husband?’

‘I’ve had an epiphany,’ he said, deciding there was safety in being flippant. ‘For one thing, you’re a great cook.’

‘So the fact I can cook swung it?’ The coffee was perking away merrily. She turned away to shift it off the heat.

‘I’m joking!’ There was amusement in his eyes.

‘I know you are, Rory Compton,’ she said tartly, betraying her stretched feelings. There was only one answer to all this. The question was when?

‘So what did he do to you?’ Rory repeated, his gaze very direct. He didn’t think he could stop until he knew. That in itself was a danger.

She set his coffee down in front of him and pushed a plate of homemade biscuits his way. ‘Isn’t this too early in our relationship—for want of a better word—to ask a question like that?’

‘One doesn’t have to go together a long time to have a relationship.’ He let his gaze rest on her. ‘I thought we’d agreed we’ve well and truly bypassed the preliminaries?’ He stirred three teaspoons of raw sugar into his black coffee.

‘That’s way too much sugar,’ she murmured, unable to deny the truth of what he had just said.

‘I take sugar to rally my flagging spirits. Not that I actually need it right now.’ The little sexy quirks bracketed his mouth again. ‘If you won’t answer my question about your husband, answer this. What do you think of my offer?’

Her hand reached up to brush back a fallen thick coil of her hair. ‘Well, I have to see what Valerie and Chloe think.’