The English Bride

“You shouldn’t look at me that way,” he warned, still feeling ripples of pleasure moving down through his body, pooling in his loins.

“What way?” She gave a shaky laugh, feeling enslaved by his enormous dash, moving back along the wide verandah as he resumed his journey to the front of the house.

“You know, Francesca,” he half growled, half mocked. “Lord are you a sight for sore eyes!” He ran his gaze over her, from the tip of her radiant head to her toes. His hazel eyes, which could turn grey or green according to his mood, were now a clear green beneath the brim of his black akubra. They scanned her face, her swan’s neck, the slender body with its willow waist, her light limbs, a muscle in his hard jaw lightly flicking.

It was impossible to cast his glance away so caught up was he in her feminine beauty, the soft ravishing prettiness he found irresistible. She was wearing riding gear. Such riding gear! The aristocratic young English lady from the grand stately home and one of the most egalitarian young women he had ever known.

Her short-sleeved cream silk blouse lightly skimmed her delicate breasts and was tucked into tight-fitting cream jodhpurs. Highly polished, very expensive, tan coloured riding boots adorned her small feet. There wasn’t an ounce of excess weight on her. She had the neatest, sleekest little butt and good straight legs. It nearly mesmerised him just to see her move along the verandah, near dancing to keep up with him. To his overheated mind, and body, make no mistake about it it thrummed like electricity, she appeared to be floating, so lightly were her feet touching the timber floor-boards.

“A hard day?” Francesca asked him as he mounted the short flight of stone steps to the verandah, excited, not her usual calm, contained self at all.

He leaned against the rail with slouching elegance, smiling at her with the unblinking cat’s eyes she found so wildly attractive. “I’m over it now I’ve seen you,” he drawled. He was, too. “What have you been doing with yourself all day?”

“Come and I’ll tell you.” She indicated the comfortable white wicker furniture. “I expect you’d like a cold beer? Brod always does.”

He nodded and took off his hat using it like a Frisbee to skim unerringly onto the head of a wooden sculpture.

“Rebecca will be here in a moment,” Francesca slid into the chair he held out for her. Rebecca was mistress of Kimbara, Brod’s new wife. “We’ve been organising a picnic race meeting for most of the day. We thought it would be a change from the usual polo. Rebecca worries about Brod when he plays. He’s such a daredevil. For that matter so are you.” She actually shivered at some of her recollections. Polo was a dangerous game. Especially the way these fellows played it.

“So you worry about me as well?” He held her with his eyes.

“I worry about you all,” she returned lightly before she drowned in his expression. It struck her more than ever how physically alike Grant and his brother Rafe were. The rangy height, the golden good looks, though Grant was tawnier.

Both had great presence. Both wore achievement like a badge. If there were a difference, Rafe had a kind of courtliness about him. There was no other word for it. Grant showed more “temper” a high mettled energy and determination that didn’t sit all that comfortably with everyone. To put it in a nutshell Grant Cameron could be difficult. Add to that, he had a habit of speaking his mind, without holding back. He was full of energy and had a macho quality, an absolute manliness that characterised these men of the outback. In some respects he even seemed like a creature from another world. A creature of vast open spaces with no boundaries. The image of a splendid young lion sat easily on him. He was her first taste of a thrilling excitement that contained a kernel of caution. She knew her feelings for Grant Cameron were getting right out of hand.

Now he knit his dark golden brows together, staring across at her, his strong brown arms on the circular glass-topped table steely with muscle. He was wearing the uniform of his company in serviceable khaki the blue and gold logo on the breast pocket. He looked great, the afternoon breeze ruffling his thick tawny hair with its pronounced deep wave.

“So what’s the verdict, my lady?” He came closer to grasping her hand. Never letting her go.

She laughed and blushed at the same time. “Was I staring? Sorry. I was just thinking how much alike you and Rafe are. Growing more so as you—”

“Mature?” he cut in swiftly, his relaxed easy drawl taking on a faint glittery edge.

“Oh, Grant,” she said in gentle reproach. Francesca knew the brothers were devoted to each other, but Grant a couple of years younger must have chafed often under Rafe’s authority. With both parents dead Rafe had had to take on almost a parental role from an early age. Grant still had a tendency to chafe if only because of his driving ambition to prove himself, to be the man his father always said he would be. Grant fairly pulsed with raw ambition, undischarged energy. “Actually I was going to say, as you grow older,” she told him mildly, watching his tall, super lean body with its athlete’s muscles relax.

“Of course you were,” he agreed with his charming, slightly crooked smile that revealed perfect white teeth. “Sometimes, Francesca, I’ve got a perverse devil in me.”

“Yes, I know,” she told him gently.

“I love Rafe as much as any brother could.”

“I know you do,” she said with understanding, “and I know what you mean so don’t bother explaining.” The best of relationships were fraught with little tensions. Like mother and daughter. She turned her head as footsteps sounded in the front hall. “That’ll be Rebecca.”

A moment later Rebecca appeared like a summer breeze, all smiles, touching Francesca affectionately on the shoulder before speaking directly to Grant who came swiftly to his feet. “Don’t bother to get up, Grant,” she said, realising he must be tired. “All over for the day?”

“Thank the Lord.” He gave a wry grin.

“Then you could probably do with a cold beer?”

He laughed aloud and resumed his seat. “Brod sure has his womenfolk trained. Francesca has just offered me one, too. That’d be great, Rebecca. I have to admit it was long, hard and dusty. I’m parched.” He was struck again at how much Rebecca had changed from the enigmatic young woman who had first come to Kimbara to write Fee Kinross’s biography. Fee, Francesca’s mother, had had a brilliant career on the London stage. The biography was due out any day.

Since her marriage to Brod, Rebecca was all friendliness and warmth, happiness and contentment shining out of her quite extraordinary grey eyes. This was a marriage that would work, he thought with great satisfaction. God knows Brod and Ally had one hell of a childhood with their arrogant bastard of a father. Such was Rafe’s persona even Stewart Kinross had approved of Rafe, though he hadn’t lived to see Rafe and his only daughter, Alison, married.

Grant was certain Kinross would never have approved of him. “Too much the hothead!” Kinross had once described him, “with the intolerable habit of expressing his quite juvenile opinions.” Opinions, of course, that ran counter to the lordly Kinross. Still the two families, Cameron and Kinross had always been entwined. Almost kin. Now they were.

When Rebecca returned with his cold beer, just the one—he was too responsible a pilot to consider another—and an iced tea for herself and Francesca, they talked family matters, their latest communications from Rafe and Ally, local gossip, what Fee and David Westbury, the visiting first cousin to Francesca’a aristocratic father, were up to. The two had become inseparable to the extent Francesca told them she wouldn’t be surprised to get a phone call to say they’d popped into the register office that very day. Which would make Fee’s third attempt at making a go of marriage.

They were still talking about Fee and the important cameo role she was to play in a new Australian movie, when they were interrupted by the shrilling of the phone, the latest miracle for the outback that had depended for so long on radio communication. Rebecca went to answer it, returning with an expression that wiped all the laughter from her luminous grey eyes. “It’s for you, Grant, Bob Carlton.” She named his second-in-charge. “One of the fleet hasn’t reached base camp or called in, either. Bob sounded a bit concerned. Take it in Brod’s study.”

“Thanks, Rebecca.” Grant rose to his impressive lean height. “Did he say which station?”

“Oh I’m sorry!” Rebecca touched her creamy forehead in self-reproach. “I should have told you at once. It’s Bunnerong.”

The station was even more remote than they were. About sixty miles to the north-west. Grant made his way through the Kinross homestead, familiar to him from childhood. It was amazingly grand in contrast to the Cameron stronghold with its quietly fading Victorian gentility. Ally, of course, would change all that. Ally the whirlwind but for now his mind was on what Bob had to say.

Bob, in his mid-fifties, was a great bloke. A great organiser, a great mechanic, well liked by everyone. Grant relied on him, but Bob was a born worrier, a firm believer in Murphy’s Law, whereby anything that could go wrong, would. Equally Bob was determined no harm would come to any of “his boys.”

On the phone Grant received Bob’s assurance all necessary checks had been made and the chopper had passed the mandatory 100-hour service. The helicopter was to have set down when the stockmen were camped at Bunnerong’s out station at approximately four o’clock. The pilot, a good one with plenty of experience in aerial muster had not arrived by four forty-five when Bunnerong contacted Bob by radio. Bob in turn had not been able to contact the pilot by company radio frequency.

“I wouldn’t worry too much about it.” Grant wasn’t overly concerned at that point.

“You know me, Grant, I’m going to,” Bob answered. “It’s not like Curly. He runs by an inbuilt timetable.”

“Sure,” Grant acknowledged. “But you know as well as I do things can go wrong with the radio. It’s not all that unusual. It’s happened to me. Besides it’s almost dusk. Curly would have put down somewhere and made camp for the night. He’s got all he needs to make himself comfortable. He’d resume again at first light. If he’s anything like me he’s dog-tired. Besides, he’s not actually due to start the muster until morning anyway.”

All of which was true. “There’s an hour or so of light left,” Grant said at length breaking in on Bob. “I’ll take the chopper up and have a look around, though I’m coming from another direction. I need to refuel on Kimbara, if I’m going to get close in to Bunnerong.”

“I suppose we might as well wait for morning,” Bob sighed. “Curly could still turn up. Bunnerong can get a message to us and I’ll relay it to you.”

So it was decided. “Curly” to all because of a single wisp of hair that curled like a baby’s on his bald patch, was a pro. He had food with him. A swag. He’d probably put down near a bush lagoon and set up camp for the night. Nevertheless Grant felt the responsibility to take his chopper up. Initiate a bit of a search before night fell.

Bob’s mood had affected him, he thought wryly. Experience told him Curly, though obviously having problems with his radio was most likely safe and sound setting up camp on the ground. Still he liked to know exactly where every one of his pilots and helicopters in service were.

Grant walked swiftly back through the house, telling the two young women of his intentions the moment he set foot on the verandah.

“Why don’t you let me come with you?” Francesca asked quickly, keen to help if she could. “You know what they say, two pairs of eyes are better than one.”

Rebecca nodded in agreement. “I was able to help Brod once on a search and rescue. You remember?”

“That was from the Beech Baron,” Grant told her, a shade repressively. “Francesca isn’t used to helicopters. The way they fly, the heat and the noise. She could very easily get airsick.”

Francesca stood away from her chair. “I don’t suffer from motion sickness at all, Grant. In the air. On the water. Please take me. I want to help if I can.”

His response wasn’t all that she hoped. The expression in his hazel eyes suggested there was a decided possibility she could become a liability. But in the end he nodded in laconic permission. “All right, lady! Let’s go.”

Minutes later the rotor was roaring and they were lifting vertically from the lawn, rising well above the line of trees, climbing, then steering away for the desert fringe. Francesca like Grant was strapped into her copilot seat, wearing earphones that at least made the loud noise of the swishing blades tolerable. Still she found it a thrilling experience to be up in the air looking down at the vast wilderness with all the rock formations undergoing another change in their astonishing colour display. Even when they flew through thermal cross-winds over the desert she kept her cool as the winds took hold of the small aircraft and shook it so it plunged into a short, sickening dive.

“O.K.?” Grant spoke through the headphones, a deep frown of concern between his eyes.