Her Outback Protector

Frustrated by his attitude, Sandra dredged up an old Outback expression. “What would you know, you big galah!”

He choked back a laugh. “Hey, mind who you’re calling names!”

“Sorry. Galah is not the word for you. You’re more an eagle. But surely you realise they must have been shocked out of their minds by the will. Uncle Lloyd would have fully expected to inherit. He wouldn’t want to work the place. He’d sell it. Bernie would go along with that. Bernie disliked anything to do with station work. You must know that, too. Where do you live?” she asked abruptly.

“I have the overseer’s bungalow.”

“Roy Sommerville, what happened to him? He was the overseer when we left.”

“Died a couple of years back of lung cancer. He was of the generation that chain smoked from dawn to dark.”

“Poor old Roy! He was nice to me.”

“Anyone would be nice to you.” His response was involuntary.

She grimaced. “I don’t recall Uncle Lloyd ever bouncing me on his knee. His ex-wife, Aunty Jilly, used to dodge me and my mother all the time. No wonder that marriage didn’t work out. Bernie was always so darn nasty. Now they must all think I’m the worst thing that ever happened.”

He couldn’t deny that. “What was your grandfather like with you?” he asked, really wanting to know. “Any fond memories?”

“Hello, we’re talking Rigby Kingston here!” she chortled.

“The most rambunctious old son of a bitch to ride out of the Red Centre.”

He shook his head. “When you’d melt any man’s heart.” A major paradox here when Kingston had left her his fortune.

“I don’t want to melt men’s hearts,” she exploded, the blood flowing into her cheeks. “It’s all smiles and kisses one day. Rude shocks the next. I don’t like men at all. They don’t bring out the best in me.”

He held back a sigh. “I think you must have had some bad experiences.”

“You can say that again! But to get back to my dear old grandpop who remembered me at the end, I do recall a few pats on the head. A tweak of the curls before he was out the front door. I didn’t bother him anyway. He was happy enough when my dad was alive. After that, he turned into the Grandad from Hell. He seemed to put the blame for what happened to my dad on my mother.”

“How could she have been responsible?” he asked, puzzled.

“Uncle Lloyd blew the whistle on a little affair she had in Sydney,” she told him bleakly. “Mum used to go away a lot and leave Dad and me at Moondai. Uncle Lloyd said she was really wild, but then he was a great one for airing everyone else’s dirty linen.” She broke off, staring at him accusingly.

“You must have heard all this?”

Why pretend he hadn’t when an unbelievable number of people had made it their business to fill him in on Pamela Kingston’s alleged exploits? Lloyd Kingston wasn’t the only one who liked airing the world’s dirty linen. Apparently Sandra’s mother had been famous for being not only radiantly beautiful but something of a two-timing Jezebel. There had even been gossip about who Alexandra’s father really was. Alexandra didn’t look a bit like a Kingston which now that he had seen her Dan had to concede. The Kingstons were dark haired, dark eyed, tall people with no sense of humour. Pamela had routinely been labelled as an absentee wife and mother who spent half her time in Sydney and Melbourne living it up and getting her photo in all the glossy magazines. Dan knew she had remarried eighteen months after her first husband’s death. Wedding number two was no fairy tale, either. It too had gone on the rocks. Pamela was currently married to her third husband, a merchant banker with whom she had a young son. It seemed Sandra had moved out fairly early. He wondered exactly when? Not yet twenty-one the combative little Ms Sandra Kingston gave the strong impression she had looked after herself for some time. And possibly after her mother, the basket case. Hell, he knew as much about female depression and the various forms it took as the illustrious Dr. Freud.

“All right, what are you thinking about?” Sandra cut into Dan’s pondering.

“I was wondering when you left home?”

At the question put so probingly she began to move the salt and pepper shakers around like chess pieces. “To be perfectly honest, from which you might deduce I’m given to telling lies—I’m not—I’ve never really had a home.”

“You and me both,” he confessed, laconically.

Instantly she was diverted from her own sombre thoughts.

“So there’s more?” She leaned forward, elbows on the table, all attention.

“If you think I’m about to share my life story with you, Ms Kingston, I’m not!”

She shook her head. “Is that a hint I’m communicating too much?” she asked tartly, slumping back in her chair.

“Not at all. It strikes me you’ve spent a lot of time alone?”

She sighed theatrically, then stole one of his sandwiches.

“That’s what happens when your mother has had three husbands.”

“One of them was your dad,” he pointed out.

She nearly choked she was so quick to retort. “That son of a bitch Lloyd challenged that at least a dozen times before I was ten.’”

The muscles along his jaw tightened. He knew all about labels. “He’s not a very nice person,” he said shortly.

“He’s a bully,” she said. “And I’m going to prove that. He really really upset my mother. I know she wasn’t the woman to exercise caution but don’t you think she would have been completely insane to try to put one across my dad let alone my fearsome old grandpop. My dad always knew I was his little girl. He used to call me ‘my little possum.’ He told me every day he loved me. I think he was the only person in the entire world who did. Then he went off and left me. I was so sad and so angry. My mum and I needed him. It’s awful to be on your own.” She dug her pretty white teeth into her nether lip again, dragging them across the cushiony surface, colouring it rosy.

“So a man does come in handy?” he asked.

She looked into his eyes and he saw the sorrow behind the prickly front. “A dad is really important.”

Hadn’t he faced that all his life? Even a bastard of a dad.

“Getting killed was the very last thing your dad wanted, Sandra. Unfortunately death is the one appointment none of us can break. I’m sure your mother loves you. Your grandfather too in his own way.”

“God that’s corny!” Now she fixed him with a contemptuous glare. “In his own way. What a cop-out!”

“He made you his heiress,” he pointed out reasonably. “Do people who hate you actually leave you a fortune? I don’t think so. Your grandfather bypassed his son, your uncle, and his only grandson who is older than you by three years.”

“I can count,” she said shortly, hungrily polishing off another one of his sandwiches. “I actually got to go to university. I was a famous swot.”

“Head never out of a book?”

“Something like that.” She shrugged, picking away a piece of rocket. “In a locked room. My stepfather, Jeremy Linklatter, IV, developed a few little unlawful ideas about me.”

He who thought himself unshockable was shocked to the core.

“You can’t trust anyone these days,” she said in a world-weary fashion. “Certainly not men. There should be a Protection Scheme for female stepchildren.”

“Hell!” he breathed, hoping it wasn’t going to get worse.

“He didn’t touch you?”

Her expression showed her detestation of stepfather Jeremy. “Not the bad stuff.” How was she confiding all this to a stranger when she had never spoken about it at all? There was just something about this Daniel Carson.

“Thank God for that!” He released a pent-up sigh. “The guy must have crawled out from under a rock. So when did you leave home?”