Outback Wives Wanted!: Wedding at Wangaree Valley / Bride at Briar's Ridge / Cattle Rancher, Secret Son

“Leave this to me, Alana,” Guy repeated, putting his tall rangy body between her and her father.

“What?” She stared at him dazedly. “You know what Dad’s saying. You know—don’t you, Guy. And my uncle knows. That’s why he hates us.”

“Doesn’t he just?” Alan Callaghan suddenly bellowed. “He’s never tried to conceal it. Idolised her, he did, his beautiful sister. Loved his dear friend David. But I didn’t care how I got her. I was mad for her. Just couldn’t back off. I always had a touch of the prize fighter in me.”

“You’re not putting up any fight now, Alan.” Guy’s dark eyes were blazing with light. “I see no sign of the fighter. Look at you. A big man—what? Fifty-five, fifty-six years of age?—collapsed in your bed like you’ve been defeated.”

Alana was seized by agitation. “Dad’s no coward, Guy!” she cried. “He has courage.” Or once he had had it, she thought mournfully. But now her father had lost all direction.

Guy bent his gaze on her. “Someone once said courage in a man is enduring in silence whatever heaven sends him.”

“What about what heaven takes away?” she retorted fierily. “Takes away so you can never get it back?”

Guy sighed deeply. “We all bear the weight of our losses, Alana. I miss my father every day. He was a fine upstanding man. The finest.”

At that, Alan Callaghan’s broken laugh exploded. “That he was!” he roared, and then, as though all played out he rolled away without another sound. Face to the wall.

It was the worst of all possible scenarios. Alana sat rigid, arms clasped around her, in the living room, waiting for Guy to come out of her father’s room—the cell of the condemned man.

What had her father done all those years ago? What tricks had he used to get the woman he had always looked at so adoringly? How had her mother agreed to marry him, have his baby, when she’d been meant for somebody else? Had loved somebody else? Or was there little truth in that either? What else could she hope to find out when her father was drunk?

Guy had known what had been hidden from her and Kieran all along. He had never breathed a word. Surely other people in the Valley knew of the old love triangle? Why had everyone, including her uncle, kept the old story so deeply hidden? And the stark way Guy had spoken! Should he have rubbed in her father’s defeat? Could she forgive or forget that? The real nightmare was that Guy himself might hate them underneath. How would she know? What really lay in the depths of his unfathomable dark eyes? And what of Guy’s mother, always civil, but maintaining her distance? Guy loved his mother. Sidonie would have known about an old love affair of her husband’s, surely? It hadn’t gone as far as an engagement, but it now appeared to have been serious. Maybe her mother and David Radcliffe had never patched up a violent quarrel? It happened. Maybe they had argued about the Irishman Alan Callaghan? Was the truth more shocking yet? Whatever it was, it haunted her father—maybe to the grave. It was his choice to walk a self-destructive path.

“He’s dead to the world,” Guy announced when he returned.

It couldn’t have sounded more grim. “Who? The coward?” she retorted, feeling the stinging heat of humiliation.

“I didn’t use that word, Alana,” he said almost wearily. “You did. But isn’t he, in a fashion?” Guy’s tone was extraordinarily bitter for him.

He sank onto the leather sofa opposite her, the teak chest that served as a coffee table between them.

“And I thought you were a compassionate man.” She stared at him with deeply wounded eyes.

“Compassion isn’t working, Alana,” he responded bluntly, finally convinced of the fact. “Your father has taken a tremendous blow in life, losing his beloved spouse. But so have others in the Valley—including my own mother. The world is full of people who have had massive blows to overcome. Your father calls himself a fighter? Well, as a fighter, he has hit the mat. Anyone can forgive him that. But he’s never tried to get up, Alana. That’s the thing. He has you and Kieran. He has Briar’s Ridge. He’s as good as lost it.”

Her voice shook with emotion. “You think I don’t know that?’

He leaned forward, focusing on her distressed face with its large expressive eyes. “You’ve put your heart and soul into the farm, Alana. Don’t you deserve some consideration? And Kieran has worked like a slave. Though Kieran will fall on his feet. Kieran has inherited the Denby gift.”

“No sign of any gift in me?” She flashed him a look that was more poignant than bitter. Did he despise her?

“Alana, you’re beautiful, and gifted in so many ways,” he said with a curious sadness. “What I hate is that so much weight has been put on your shoulders. You should be enjoying a better life, not spending your time fighting off ruin.”

The humiliation of it all rendered her abruptly furious. “I love my life, Guy!” she said, leaping to her feet. “The last thing I need from you is pity! I hate it! And never, never from you!” Easier that the entire world should pity her.

His response came fast. In a single explosive movement he was on her side of the table, towering over her, his own disturbed emotions in full view. “That’s how you see it? Pity?”

She stared up at him with a thudding heart, knowing that a challenging answer would change everything in one indelible second. Still she threw out the challenge. “What else is it?” She lifted her chin, trying to hold her nerve, yet knowing she was in some kind of jeopardy.

Black eyes that smouldered caught fire. “Well, here’s where we find out!”

She couldn’t look away The intensity of his expression chopped off her breath. She had set herself against him for years now, but he was about to prove who was in control.

He hauled her to him so her head snapped back, then seemed to fall in slow motion into the crook of his arm. Her hair spilled everywhere in a wild golden mass.

She had the disorienting sensation she was falling … falling … toppling from a very high place with no way to stop. Or would he save her? But this was a wholly different Guy. One she had barely glimpsed. She was confronted by the dominant male pushed that little bit too far. The hunter in him was about to take what he wanted. She couldn’t get her breath for the overwhelming excitement.

“Guy—please don’t!” It would be the end of their relationship as she had known it.

“Stop me if you can!”

Pulses of electricity were running up and down her thighs, pooling in the delta of her body, alive with raw nerve-endings.

“Guy!” Her voice shook with panic. She felt the force of him, the inner energy, the demands he was going to make on her. Everything about him gave her to understand beyond any possible doubt that he desired her above anything else.

Her heart beat as if wings were unfurling in her chest. It was as though she had never been up close to a man in her life, had never known the violent eroticism of a man’s hard body, so powerful, so aggressive, so very different from her own.

He was deaf to her involuntary cry—if he even heard her. This was all about getting what he wanted. His mouth, poised over hers, abruptly came down, opening her lips beneath his, pressing without crushing, gaining control and then mastery. She had no defence against him. Not even the desire to protect herself. What was happening was ravishing, far from gentle, and deeper than hunger. What could it be? The only possible answer was passion. She had no recourse but to yield to it—because in the end wasn’t this what she craved? All she could do was cling to him, trapped by a sexual pleasure that was nigh on unbearable.

The scent of him was in her nostrils. She felt the indescribable warmth of his mouth and his mating tongue, the taste, the texture, the faint rasp from his tanned polished skin on her tender flesh. She thought dazedly that their mouths were refusing to part. Refusing to surrender the fabulous thrill. Her back arched at the same time as she let out a whimper. What she feared that was she would lose all coherent thought.

His voice, strangely laboured, came from above her head. “Not much pity there, Alana,” he said, with unfamiliar harshness.

She thought if he took his encompassing arms away she would simply fold. “No …” She couldn’t deny it. There were tears in her eyes. “What was your intention?” she whispered. “To teach me a lesson?”

His spread fingers pressed along her spine. “I don’t want to discuss it.”

“You’re so very good at it. Would you like to feel my heart?”

She hadn’t believed for one moment that he would respond to what was no more than a taunt. Instead he confounded her. He pushed his hand inside the printed silk of her shirt, the palm of his hand taking the weight of her breast, thinly covered by her bra.

She gasped, instantly suffused in heat. His fingers, manlike, sought her naked flesh. She gripped his wrist tight. She had to stop him, even though she desperately wanted him to keep going. It filled her up with a reckless passion she had never experienced before. Where was her life going? She thought wildly. She had never thought of him as a lover.

Liar, said that inexorable voice inside her.

“Your heart’s racing,” he murmured, continuing to caress her. His expression was drawn taut, intent, as if he had started on a long-awaited voyage of discovery of her body.

Speech was impossible. Indeed, how could they ever speak to each other after this? The tips of his fingers had found her sensitised nipple, full of colour, were rolling it between them so it became a swollen bud of pure want. With one arm he brought her closer into him, staring down into her flushed face.

“You’re a beautiful, beautiful woman, Alana!”

“One you shouldn’t be putting at risk.”

“Close your eyes. I won’t hurt you,” he promised. “I only want to make love to you a little.”

Couldn’t he see her agitation? Her flesh was threatening to catch fire. “And if I say you can’t?”

“I know I can.” His kisses moved to her throat. “Your father will sleep well into the morning. I want to take you home with me.” His voice was so low and seductive it could have melted stone.