The Australian's Society Bride

He was looking at her intently. “I realise I make you sparkle with temper, revolt, whatever. I have a mental image of you at the age it all started. You were around sixteen. You’d been really sweet up until then.”

You mean I was your little slave.

“It’s called growing up,” she said coolly. “Finding one’s own identity. Sometimes you do make me very angry,” she admitted. “You’re so terribly…”

“What?” He pressed for an answer.

“Dominant,” she flashed back with spirit. “The family idol, born to be worshipped. You mock me like I’m a—”

“Nonsense!” he cut in. “Why are you so unwilling to really answer my question? It’s all evasion with you these days. That makes me sad. It’s not any authority I might have that angers you. It’s something else. So far as the mockery goes, it’s the other way around. I see it in your face and in your voice. I can see it now.” His eyes swept over her, marking the tension in her body, which looked so entrancingly fragile but he knew was in fact quite athletic.

“Boyd, everyone is watching us,” she whispered a warning, her nerves exquisitely frayed.

“That’s okay,” he answered without concern. “They’re well used to the friction between us by now.”

“How can you call me evasive, Boyd? Did I not just agree to go riding with you?” she asked, pleased to have tripped him up. Then it struck her.

“We are going on our own, aren’t we, or are you getting up a party?”

“A party of two, Leona,” he told her dryly. “I’m after your company alone. No need to bring in the rest of the family.”

“Right!” She tilted her chin as she prepared to move off.

“You used to love me,” he said, very, very gently to her averted profile.

It stopped her in her tracks. It was still so deliriously true.

She moved back to him in that moment, wanting to throw herself at him, clamp her arms around him. Never let go. Have his arms move to embrace her. If he kissed her she feared she might lose consciousness. Or maybe her soul would float out of her body into his. Instead, she raised herself on tiptoe to be nearer to that so dear yet so dangerous face. “I don’t any more,” she said.

There was safety in deception. Much better to be safe than horribly sorry.

For well over an hour they rode through a countryside that had never seemed so luminous to her. Along the eastern seaboard and even deep into the Outback the land had received wonderful life-giving rain and overnight the land had renewed itself. The light beneath the caverns of trees was jewelled, the display of blossom sumptuous, the air sweet with a hundred different haunting perfumes. Riding together so companionably was too precious to be described. Leona wanted to retain the memory for ever. The sight of him, the familiarity and the exciting strangeness, the profile she loved, that clean cut chiselled jaw. With his head half turned away one would have assumed his eyes would be very dark to match the black of his hair and his strongly marked brows. They were anything but—sometimes his eyes were so blue they looked violet. He really was a dream come true.

* * *

Out of the golden glare of the sunlight and down into the dappled green sanctuary of one of the many creeks that wound their way across the estate, he turned his head to smile lazily at her. His eyes, even in the shade, blazed. His wide-brimmed hat, a soft grey, was tilted at a rakish angle. Riding gear suited him wonderfully well. “Enjoying yourself?” he asked.

“I love it!” Leona responded with uncomplicated joy. “I especially love water. All the time we’ve been riding we’ve been in sight and sound of it.”

“That’s what’s so powerfully attractive about the estate.” He studied her smiling open face with pleasure. “You don’t feel threatened by me when you’re on horseback?”

“I’m secure in the knowledge I could gallop away from you.” She laughed, one hand lightly holding the reins of her pure Arabian mare, as nimble and sure-footed as ever a mare could be. “Anyway, you’ve never really done anything to threaten me,” she added.

“I think I have,” he answered slowly.

The way he said it shook her to the marrow. She had to look away. Curly tendrils of her hair had escaped from her ponytail, glowing brightly against the cream of her skin. “You sound as though you care.” She couldn’t help the revealing tinge of sadness in her voice.

“Of course I do,” he answered, almost roughly.

“Good!” she retorted, suddenly very tense. In fact she was starting to feel light-headed. “At least you know with me you can’t have it all your own way.”

“You think I do?” He leaned forward to caress the bay’s neck.

“You’re quite daunting in a way, you know.”

“Leo, that’s absolute nonsense,” he said crisply.

Her breath fluttered. “No.” She could feel the heat in her cheeks. She even felt like bursting into tears, he moved her so unbearably. That alone gave him a power she could never match.

“Then tell me,” he demanded. “In what way?”

“In every way!” she said a little wildly. “Don’t let it bother you. You can’t help being like that.” Despite the lovely cool of the creek, she could feel trickles of sweat run between her breasts. She had to stop this conversation before her emotions got right out of hand. That would be a very serious mistake.

“Maybe it’s proved a pretty effective defence,” he suggested, as though he had discovered the answer. His handsome, dynamic face was caught in a shaft of sunlight. She realised he looked unexpectedly serious, faintly troubled.

“Against what?” Horribly, her voice wobbled.

He turned a concentrated gaze to her. “Do you remember when you were a little kid you used to pester me with questions?”

“The miracle is you used to answer me.” Despite herself, she gave him her lovely smile, her green eyes changing from stormy to dancing.

“You had such an insatiable curiosity about everything. You read so widely, even as a child.”

“That may have been because I was so lonely after my mother died. You know, sometimes when I’m walking about the lake, I hear her calling to me,” she confided with a poignant little air.

That didn’t surprise him. Many times he had fancied he had seen his own mother near the little stone temple that stood beside a secluded part of the lake. “We never lose the images of those we love,” he murmured gently, wanting only to comfort her.

“She was a beautiful woman, Aunt Alexa. She was so kind to me.” She sighed deeply, in many ways still the child denied her beloved mother. “After my mother died—the way she was killed—I thought I’d never get on my pony again. You were the one who helped me through that. Not my father. He was too dazed. He went off to some distant planet. It was you who convinced me it was what my mother would have wanted. She loved horses. She adored riding. You made me understand that although peril can be anywhere, we have to go on with our lives; we have to hold our simple pleasures close.”

“Then I was good for something,” he said, a faint twist to his sculpted mouth.

“You were. You are,” she said, unbearably conscious of his closeness and the fact that they were alone together. But did it really have to put her in such a frenzy? Why, for the love of God, couldn’t she relax? Was it because she knew Boyd, heir to the Blanchard fortune, would always be denied her? Maybe she had to accept, once and for all, that he was much too much for her.

The silence between them had taken on a deeply intimate turn whether she wanted it or not. She had the strongest notion that the nerve fibres in their bodies were reaching out to draw them together. When all was said and done, he knew her better than anyone. Her eyes smarted with tears. To be together like this always. To have their relationship develop and flourish as she wanted.

She knew in her heart that it wasn’t possible. It wouldn’t be allowed. That was the reason she kept that side of her hidden. Now alarm bells were going off in her head. How easy it was to slip into a dream. But it wouldn’t do at all. Boyd was so far above her she couldn’t begin to calculate the distance. Resolutely she squared her shoulders. “D’you want a race? Let’s say to the old ruin?” she challenged him. The old ruin was what they called an extraordinary rocky outcrop on a wilder part of the estate.

“Flower Face, you couldn’t beat me,” he answered, slowly coming out of his elegant slouch.

“Then I’m going to have a darn good try.” Abruptly she turned the mare, spurring her into action. They were tearing up the fairly sharp incline, vanishing down the other side while startled magpies croaked their high displeasure and wild doves shot up into the blue, blue air.

He was giving her a start. She knew that, not sure if in plunging away she wasn’t revealing what an emotional coward she was. What made her so emotionally insecure? Was it because she had lost her mother at such a tender age? In many ways she had lost her father to his grief. Lord knew Delia hadn’t turned out to be a mother substitute. She couldn’t even mother her own son. Galloping wasn’t half as dangerous as getting into an intimate conversation with Boyd.

She travelled so fast towards the ruins that an old time Western movie posse might have been giving chase. She wondered excitedly when he was going to close in on her.

To her left was a thick copse of cottonwoods, the golden poplars whose foliage put on such a wonderful brilliant yellow display in the autumn; to her right Chinese elms covered in spring’s delicate whiteish-green samaras. Beyond that an indigenous forest of eucalypts in a country where the gum tree was king.

Did anyone who didn’t ride realise the wonderful exhilaration of being in the saddle? Her breasts beneath her cream silk shirt rose and fell with her exertions. The balls of her feet, encased in expensive riding boots felt weightless in the stirrups. Compared to the order of the rest of the estate, she was heading into near virgin country as she veered off to take the short cut to the ruins.