Olivia's Awakening

“Vulnerable, Bessie,” McAlpine corrected, privately agreeing.

“Whatever!” Bessie shrugged. “I always say vunerable. Why don’t you never tell me before?”

“Never heard you say it, but you’re spot on.”

“'Course I am. Anyway, knew this was gunna happen. Too many clothes. I spotted that right off.” She leaned over to slip off Olivia’s low-heeled, very expensive leather shoes.

“Who wouldn’t?” McAlpine commented drily. He seemed to remember telling the high-and-mighty Ms Olivia Balfour to get off her high horse, pedestal, whatever. She had got under his skin and he hadn’t bothered to hide it. The divorce coming up. That was his excuse. Marigole had been giving him all the flack she could muster.

“Not used to our heat,” Bessie was saying. “How she’s gunna survive outback, boss, I dunno as yet.”

“It’ll come to you, Bessie, like it always does. You and I both know lilies thrive.” He stared down at Ms Balfour’s still, lily-skinned face. She had very long eyelashes. They were starting to flutter. A good sign. He moved his hand to undo a few buttons on her silk shirt. She had done it up almost to the neck despite the pressing heat which today was climbing to near forty degrees Celsius. Did she have no sense at all? Next he slipped the waist button on her tight pencil-slim skirt. “Cold water, Bessie, chop, chop.”

“Sure, boss!” Bessie spun on her thongs to obey, just as a terminal staff member hurried towards them, a very attractive brunette who had waited her moment to zoom over to them, physically beating off another female attendant in the process. She carried a plastic container of ice-cold water.

“Is she all right?” the brunette enquired, looking not at the faint victim as perhaps she should have, but full into the cattle baron’s extraordinary big-cat topaz eyes. They were stunning in his bronze face. She had been told he was a hunk. She wasn’t at all disappointed. Hunk was too tame. He was drop-dead gorgeous!

“She’s coming around.” Clint frowned slightly, taking Olivia’s pulse. A bit rapid but not overly weak. “Thanks for that.” He took the container from the attendant without really seeing her.

“No problem, Mr McAlpine.” Long heavily mascaraed eyelashes batted away, her fingers tingling deliciously from the brief contact with his. Gosh, he was awesome! And he was unattached. Everyone in the Territory knew his marriage hadn’t worked out. Unbelievable! The ex-wife had to be a blend of near blind and mentally challenged. “Could she need medical attention?” she asked helpfully. “I can arrange it.”

“I shouldn’t think so.” Gently Clint tapped Olivia Balfour’s cheeks. They were cool and damp and not worryingly hot and dry. “She’s exhausted from the long flight and she’s overdressed. The cold water will cool her down.” He realised after a moment the brunette was lingering on. He had got used to this kind of thing. Women worked hard at attracting him, often outrageously. Amazing how much more attractive having money made a man. “Thank you.” He gave her a smile that held a pleasant dismissal and reluctantly the airline attendant tore herself away, heading back to her mundane duties.

Olivia opened her eyes, trying desperately to reorientate herself.

Dear God, had she died and been transported to hell or what passed for it? She made a grab for someone’s shirt. Heat was swirling all around her. Surely she didn’t deserve this?

Full consciousness swiftly returned. She was looking straight into McAlpine’s lion’s eyes. She uncurled her fingers which were twined like tentacles of a vine around his arm. “God help me, did I faint?”

“Ah, the princess awakens from her slumbers!” he murmured suavely. “God help you, you did, Ms Balfour.” He rose to his impressive height. “Look, I’m going to lift you so your head is resting back against my shoulder. Then I want you to drink some cold water. Bessie will help.”

“Oh, good, Bessie …” She was enormously grateful Bessie, her Good Samaritan, hadn’t left her.

“I’m here, love, don’t you worry.” Bessie, who had already decided to take this beautiful, fragile lady under her wing, had moved in close, clucking like a mother hen. Why, the willowy creature had eyes as blue as a Ulysses butterfly’s wing and skin so white she might have been zoomed down from a celestial planet. Bessie took the container in hand.

“Really, I’m all right!” Olivia protested, when she felt like a rag mop.

“Really, you aren’t,” McAlpine drawled. He sat behind her, drawing her upper body against him. Immediately she slumped her golden head gratefully against his shoulder, clearly needing assistance. She might be terribly hot and bothered, he thought, but her skin gave off the most exquisite scent of roses. “Right, Bessie. Let’s get it into her.”

“Always wanted to be a nurse.” Bessie chuckled. “Like takin’ care of people.”

“Well, now’s your chance.”

“She’s lucky I sensed her,” Bessie said with satisfaction. “Not that me antennae bin flyin’ solo. The crowd had spotted her too. Never seen anyone so beatific in their whole lives.”

“Beatific?” Clint laughed. “That’s a good word, Bess.”

“Means angel, don’t it?”

“Looking like an angel.”

“Or mebbe a brolga in search of water. Jes’ standin’ there, she was.”

Brolga? Olivia felt a wash of panic. What was a brolga, for heaven’s sake? Some sort of slang for bird brain?

McAlpine’s body was disturbingly hot, hard and steely strong, the sweat on him clean—an arresting combination of pheromones and the vast outdoors, dead sexy in its way. For an insane moment she wondered what it would be like to know that body intimately. The next she wondered if it were possible she was on the verge of a spectacular mental breakdown. She had only set foot on this tropical outpost and already she was going troppo. She knew the term. Surely some Englishman who had spent too long in the tropics had invented it? She had never thought to experience it firsthand.

“Relax, no one is going to hurt you,” McAlpine said, as though humouring a fractious filly. “You need to cool down.”

“You’re gunna be OK, love.” Bessie gave her a big comforting smile, putting the plastic container to Olivia’s lips.

It was sooo good! Nothing in the world could have tasted better than pure cold water.

“Sip it,” McAlpine cautioned. “Don’t gulp.”

Even physically reduced, she bridled. “Hang on. I’m not—”

“Sip it,” he repeated, with a grimace of impatience.

Feeling childish, she slowly finished off the container of water, becoming aware she was the centre of attention. “Please, I can sit up.”

“Sure you can.” He was already in the process of helping her sit straight. Even with that loose wave of hair falling across her cheek, her shirt in slight disarray, the button of her skirt undone, she still managed to look elegant. No mean feat.

“How do you feel now?” Her eyes were the exact colour of the beautiful blue glaze on a Sung Dynasty vase at the house.

“Everyone is staring at me,” Olivia said worriedly. And so they were. Not rudely but sympathetically. She was sure the news had got about. The blonde lady fainted. A Pom. That explained it. Why wouldn’t she in the unaccustomed heat? The good news was she had Clint McAlpine, the Territory’s biggest cattle baron, to look out for her. The man might have been a national icon.

“How do you know they’re not staring at me?” he countered, watching yet another silky swathe of her beautiful blonde hair fall from her impeccable up-do. The few times he had seen her she’d always had her long hair pulled back tightly from her face and fashioned into some kind of knot. This was one repressed female. It would probably take a surgical team to get her out of her suit.

“So humiliating to faint!” Olivia murmured in embarrassment, as though it was on a par with jumping off a bridge only to land unhurt knee-deep in mud.

“Don’t be ridiculous.” He was pleased to see a little of her colour had come back, warming her flawless skin. The fact her father had wanted to send her out to Australia, and to him in particular, had come as quite a shock and he didn’t shock easily. He knew about the scandal, of course. Even if it hadn’t made their newspapers, he had plenty of relatives, friends and contacts in the UK only too pleased to pass on the gossip. Frankly he couldn’t see her getting into a punch-up with her beautiful sister, the so-called “wild one.” Olivia was the ice princess, unwilling and seemingly unable to leave her marble pedestal. But for once she had lost it. From what little he knew of her she would be smarting badly.

He knew she needed a good long sleep. As a seasoned traveller—he was aware of her jet-setting—he had thought she would take the last leg of her flight from Singapore to Darwin in her stride. He knew she had made an overnight stay at Raffles. Only the best for Ms Balfour. He couldn’t chance flying her to the station. Not today. Another overnight stay was called for. He could take her to the harbourside apartment the family maintained. McAlpine money had built the luxury complex. Or perhaps it would be advisable to book them into the Darwin International Resort Hotel. It was only a short distance away.

On the face of it Ms Balfour didn’t seem right for any job he could easily set her. Probably she had never been inside a kitchen in her entire life. Not that any of the McAlpine operations needed a cook—even if he could send a woman like her to an outstation. Out of the question. He had Kath and Norm Cartwright, husband-and-wife team, running domestic affairs at Kalla Koori.

Maybe Ms Balfour couldn’t cook, or keep house, and she sure as hell wouldn’t be able to tackle the hardest game of all, mustering cattle, but she looked far from stupid. In fact, she looked highly intelligent. As she would have to be.

He knew she had often acted as her father’s hostess and done the usual things for a young woman in her privileged position: charity work, opening fetes and nursing homes, that kind of thing. If she could cut the swanning around bit, she would be quite an asset to him on the social side of things. He had functions to give, important guests to entertain. He fancied Ms Balfour would find acting organiser and hostess a piece of cake.

She would, however, have to lighten up on the upper-crust hauteur. He seemed to remember he had told her, among other things, she had elevated snobbery to an art form. Ouch! He could hardly expect her to like him any more than he liked her.

Yet she was here. Oscar Balfour had sent her. Oscar Balfour was a good man to have onside. His late father had liked the man immensely. Oscar Balfour did have patrician good looks and a great deal of charm. Also a great deal of money. Oscar Balfour was a significant shareholder in M.A.P.C. It followed that both of them, he and Ms Balfour, would have to make the best of things or kill off each other in the process.

CHAPTER TWO

MCALPINE had to be a celebrity.