The Cattle Baron's Bride

“About Belle.” He had no trouble lying.

Joe took it Ross didn’t want to talk about it. “Hell, man, better Miss Isabelle don’t mope about the homestead,” he said. “Is she gunna go with you tonight?”

Sunderland shrugged as if to say he wasn’t sure. “My sister at the great age of twenty-six has reached a crisis point in life. I’m just grateful she chose to come home. It was bad enough losing Dad the way we did. Two years later Belle loses her husband.”

Joe wondered as much as anyone else what exactly that last argument between husband and wife had been about. Miss Isabelle hadn’t just been grieving when she returned to the Sunderland ancestral home. She was and remained in a deep depression which led Joe to remembering what a glorious young creature she had been. The apple of her father’s eye, Ross his great pride. The Sunderlands had become a very close family after the children’s mother, Diana, who had been a wonderful wife and mother to start with fell in love with some guy she met on a visit to relatives in England. In fact a distant cousin. Within a month Diana had decided he meant more to her than her husband back home in Australia. She’d had high hopes of gaining custody of her children but they had refused to leave their father. Ewan Sunderland was a wonderful, generous, caring man. An ideal husband and father. He had idolised his beautiful wife. Put her on a pedestal. At least it had taken her all of fourteen years to fall off, Joe thought sadly. Such a beautiful woman! She laughed a lot. So happy! Always bright and positive. Wonderful to his people. Then all of a sudden put under a powerful spell. Love magic. Only this time it was black magic.

All these years later Joe’s eyes grew wet. Her defection had severed Ewan’s heart strings. The children had suffered. Three years apart. Ross, twelve, Isabelle only nine. Joe still couldn’t fathom how Diana had done it. The cruelty of it! Now Ewan Sunderland lay at peace struck down by a station vehicle that got out of control. A bizarre double tragedy because the driver, a long time employee had died as well, a victim of a massive heart attack at the wheel. The shock had been enormous and none of them had really moved on. Ewan Sunderland was sorely missed by his son and daughter and his legion of friends.

Isabelle woke with a start. For a moment she couldn’t remember where she was. The room was dark. There was no sound. Her heart hammering she put out a hand and slid it across the sheet. Nothing. No one. A stream of relief poured through her.

Thank God! She pressed her dark head woven into a loose plait back into the pillow, her feeling of disorientation slowly evaporating. She lay there a few minutes longer fighting off the effects of her dreams, so vivid, so deeply disturbing she felt like crying. The same old nightmares really. She could feel the familiar fingers of depression starting to tighten their grip on her, but she knew she had to fight it. No one could cure her but herself. There were still people who loved her—her brother most of all—but she had to solve her problems on her own. Another approach might have been to talk to a psychologist trained to deal with women’s “problems” but she was never never going to tell anyone what her married life had been like. The truth was too shocking.

Her bedroom was growing lighter, brighter. Soon the birds would start their dawn symphony. Did those wonderful birds know how much emotional support they gave her. The beauty and power of their singing cut a path through her negative feelings, the grief, the anger, the guilt and at bottom the disgust she directed at herself.

Determinedly she threw back the light coverlet and slid out of bed her bare toes curling over the Persian rug. A glance at the bedside clock confirmed what she had guessed: 4:40.

Oh God! So early, but there was no way she could go back to sleep. In her dreams Blair slept with her, a hand of possession on her breast. That’s what she had been to him. A possession. Some kind of prize. He put a high value on her. Her looks and her manner. He had even insisted on coming with her to buy her clothes. Only the best would do. Roaming around her, viewing back and front, giving his opinion while the sales-woman beamed at him, no doubt fantasizing what life would be like with a rich handsome loving husband like that.

If only they knew!

Fully awake now, she tried to shrug off the memory of Blair’s voice. It still had the power to resound in her ears. So tender and loving, so full of desire. That alone had filled her with trepidation. Then as predictably as night followed day, full of a white hot fury and the queerest anguish, berating her. His hand against her throat while she froze in paralysis.

You make me do this. You just don’t understand, do you? What it’s like for me. You cold neurotic bitch! What have I got to do to make you love me? What, Isabelle, tell me. I can’t put up with any more of your cruelty. You will understand, won’t you? I’ll make you!

Then a blow that made her double over. Who could have dreamed such a charming young man could be capable of such behaviour? Cushioned in normality, the love of her father and brother and then Blair. In a single day everything changed.

What have I got to do, Belle, to make you love me? For all the very public displays of loving and remarked generosity Blair was what her grandmother would have called “a home devil.” Correction. Blair had been a home devil. Blair was dead and a lot of people blamed her. Probably they always would. Certainly his family, especially his mother, Evelyn, who had bitterly resented being ousted as the number one woman in her only son’s life. But then, she was to blame. How could anyone think otherwise? Maybe things in her own past—her mother’s destruction of a marriage and the childhood trauma she had suffered had played a part in the calamity of Blair’s death. Maybe her mother had passed on her destructive genes to her? This feeling was especially strong in her. A sense of guilt. Yet it could be argued she was being very unfair to herself. She used to be such a positive person. Not now. Being with Blair had poisoned her. She had never told a soul of his psychological cruelties, the little mind games, much less the unpredictable rages when he had resorted to physical blows, trying to pummel her until she found the courage to fight back. Sometimes it happened he came off second best. She reminded herself she was a Sunderland. She told him it had to stop. It was so demeaning. She wouldn’t tolerate it. She would leave him.

No joke, Blair, she told him when he began to laugh, swinging around on him, picking up a knife. No joke!

Something in her eyes must have warned him she was in deadly earnest. After the confrontations, the usual deluge of apologies. Van loads of red roses. Exquisite underwear and nightgowns he loved to tear off. Blair down on his knees begging her to forgive him. He idolised her. She was everything in the world to him. He despised himself when he lost his temper. Hated what he did to her. But didn’t she realise it was her fault she made him so angry? She deliberately provoked him, always trying to score points like a skilled opponent with an inexperienced adversary. It hurt him desperately the way she flirted with other men. People talked about it.

How could they? She never did…

And why did she have to go on about a baby for God’s sake? Wasn’t he enough for her? She had already stopped talking about a baby. Honest with no one else—her damnable pride again, her blind refusal to admit she had made a terrible mistake—she was honest with herself. The days of her marriage were numbered. Almost three years on, she wondered how she had married Blair in the first place.

Well, she had paid the price. Far better that they had never come into one another’s lives. She knew Ross thought she had been in deep mourning these past months. Well she had in a sense. Mourning the waste of a life. What might have been. It was her failure to be able to mourn Blair’s removal from her life that was the problem. She hadn’t deserved his treatment of her—no woman did—but she did deserve her crushing feelings of guilt. It was what she had said to Blair that last night of his life that had sent him on his no return journey to death.

Isabelle showered and dressed then went downstairs to prepare breakfast for her brother. The best brother in the world. She loved him dearly. When she thought about it they had never had a single fight right through their childhood and adolescence which wasn’t the norm in a lot of households. Ross’s aim had been to love and protect her just as it had been their father’s. Both men in her life had tried their hardest to make up for the painful loss of a mother. They couldn’t bear to see her cry and after a while she had stopped. She was a Sunderland.

So many losses she thought. Mother, father, husband. Losses aplenty. Plenty of bad memories. Plenty of scars.

She heard Ross come in and moved into the hall to greet him, wiping her hands on a tea towel. “Find the boy?”

He nodded. “I don’t think he’ll pull that stunt again. Had some bet with young Pearce he could make it back to camp on his own. The only thing is he headed in the wrong direction.”

“Easy enough to do if you’re stupid.” Isabelle gave a half smile. “Ready for breakfast?”

“In about ten minutes okay?” Ross needed a shave and a shower. Out all night he showed no signs of strain or tiredness. “You don’t have to get up this early, you know,” he turned back to tell his sister gently.

“My sleeping habits aren’t what they used to be,” Isabelle answered. In truth she was immensely grateful to sleep alone.

Her brother heard the sorrow behind the words and misconstrued it.

Isabelle let him make inroads on a substantial breakfast, sausages, bacon, eggs, tomatoes a couple of hash browns, toast, before starting any conversation. She smiled at the enthusiasm with which he attacked his meal. She couldn’t fill him. Never could. A big man like their dad. Six three, whip-cord lean with a wide wedge of shoulders. His down bent head gleamed blue black like her own. His fine grained skin was a dark gold. His eyes like hers were a remarkable aqua. Their mother’s eyes. Otherwise they were Sunderlands through and through. When they were just little kids people had often mistaken them for twins, but Ross grew and grew while she stopped at five-eight, above average height for a woman.

“So have you made up your mind about tonight?” She poured them both a cup of really good coffee—a must—hot, black and strong the way they liked it. None of that milky stuff.

He didn’t answer for a moment, absently chewing a piece of toast. “I don’t know.”

“Hey, they’re expecting you,” she reminded him, knowing full well he didn’t like to leave her. “Cy and Jessica will be there. After all, Jessica was the one who arranged it all. It’s Robyn’s gallery.” Robyn was Cy’s rather difficult stepsister married to a big developer. “You’ll see Samantha again.”

His lean handsome features tautened. “Who said I wanted to?”

“Sorry. I don’t mean to pry.” Isabelle considered for a moment. “She got under your skin didn’t she?”

“Yes,” he said bluntly. “I don’t like women getting under my skin.”

It was no revelation to his sister. “We’ve paid heavily for our past, haven’t we?”

“Sure have.” His eyes reflected the grimness of his thoughts.

“The past can spoil relationships.”

“I know. It’s all patterned and planned and destined.” He looked at her. Always slender Belle was close to fragile. There were shadows under her eyes from many hours of lost sleep and probably bad dreams but she was indisputably beautiful. That was the main reason Hartmann had wanted her. For her beauty. It had woven a spell around him. With so many other things about Belle to appreciate and admire, her intelligence, her talent, her sheer quality Hartmann had seemed to ignore all that. If indeed he even saw it. Poor Belle! She had rushed in to a marriage that probably wouldn’t have endured even if Blair had lived.

“Talk to me, Belle,” he found himself pleading. “I’m here to listen. Tell me what went so terribly wrong in your marriage?”

“I’m a tough nut like you. I keep it all locked up.” Isabelle stirred a few more grains of raw sugar into her coffee.

“It might help to talk don’t you think?”

What could she say? Good-looking, softly spoken, Blair had been abusive? What an upsurge of rage that would arouse! It was unthinkable to tell her brother, just as she had never been able to tell her father. It was all so demeaning. Both Sunderlands big strong tough men living a life fraught with dangers and non stop physically exhausting work, would have cut off a hand before lifting it in anger to a woman. Her father had never so much as given her a light slap even when she got up to lots of mischief. Ross was intensely chivalrous. An old word but it applied to him and a great many Outback men who cherished women as life’s partners and close friends. Blair could have considered himself done for if she had ever told her father or brother of her treatment at his hands. But for all his insecurities, cunning Blair had known she would never expose him. In exposing him she would be devaluing herself. Pride, too, was a sin. There was just no way she could tell her brother her terrible story. He would wonder if she had been in her right mind not seeking her family’s protection.

“Well?” Ross prompted after a few moments of watching the painful expressions flit across his sister’s face. “He adored you, didn’t he? I mean he was really mad about you. It might seem strange but Dad and I never thought he plumbed the real you. Was that it? Terrible to speak ill of the dead and the tragic way he died so young, but Blair gave the impression he was extraordinarily dependent on you. Needy I suppose is the word. You couldn’t walk out of the room ten minutes before he was asking where you were. Who you were with. You don’t have to tell me but I know he was terribly jealous. Even of our family bond. Did it become a burden?”

She couldn’t meet her brother’s eyes. “We had problems, Ross.” She concentrated on the bottom of her coffee cup. “I imagine most married couples do, but we were trying to work them out.”

“What problems?” Ross persisted, knowing there was a great deal his sister wasn’t telling.” I know you wanted to start a family. You love children. Every woman wishes for a baby with the man she loves.”

Only I didn’t love him. Blair was the baby. Blair wanted a real baby to stay away. His mania was her sole attention.

“There’s no point in talking about it now, Ross,” she sighed. “I feel terrible Blair had to die the way he did. Such a waste of a life!”

His brows drew together in a frown. “Surely you mean you find it unbearable to be without him?”

“Of course. We both know what it’s like to lose someone we love.”