Outback Bachelor / The Cattleman's Adopted Family: Outback Bachelor / The Cattleman's Adopted Family

“Keefe, he knew!” She wanted desperately to touch him but held herself back with an effort of will. “You’re everything he wanted and needed in his son, his successor. He knew the empire he built was safe with you. He never mentioned your name without it ringing with love and pride.”

He turned his dark head away, his skin drawn taut over his chiselled bones. “Do what I ask. I want to gallop until I drop.”

“Why me?” She issued it like a challenge. “You have a brother, a sister, yet you come looking for me.”

“Of course, you,” he responded roughly. “Who else?”

It was mutual validation of sorts. “I don’t understand you, Keefe,” she said on a note of despair. “You push me away. You draw me back in. You make life a heaven and a hell.”

“Maybe I only feel complete when you’re around.” He turned to her with intensity. “I missed you. You didn’t come.”

That almost sent her over the edge. “You surely didn’t think I was about to forgive you for breaking my heart?” she cried fiercely. “You showered me with affection, Keefe. As a child, as an adolescent. You made sure I was never lonely. Your kindness and your patience. It’s all etched into my memory. You might have been years and years older instead of only six. Then I grew up. And you took it all away. But not before you took me.” Her blue eyes blazed.

Colour rose in a tide under his bronzed skin. “It was what you wanted.” He grasped her by two arms, agony in his expression. “What I wanted. Neither of us could stop it. Neither of us tried. It was like it was ordained. Knowing your body meant everything in the world to me, Skye. Don’t ever forget it, or downgrade it. It was another stage in our incredible bonding. The intimacy. I have a sister who’s struggled all her life with jealousy of you. Consider her feelings for a moment. It was you I loved. You, Skye. You were so full of life and fun and endless intelligent questions. You sparkled. I love Rachelle. She’s family. We share the same blood but, terrible to say, often times I don’t like her.”

“And you think you should?” Skye asked a little wildly. “Rachelle was never nice to me. Not for one single minute. She let her jealousy eat her up. Anyway, it’s not unusual not to like someone in your family, though I didn’t have one, except Dad. Thing is, we can’t pick our families. We can’t always like them.”

“I guess.” A muscle throbbed along his jaw. “I have to contend with Scott’s jealousy as well. The two of them, my sister and my brother, ruining their lives with jealousy and resentment. Neither of them will find a life for themselves. Rachelle won’t consider getting herself a job. There are things she could do, but she’s falls back on her trust fund. Who knows what Scott’s thought processes are? I’ve offered him Moorali Downs. It’s a chance for him to find his feet. But no! It’s all about focusing his weird enmity on me.”

“Maybe if he falls in love?” Skye suggested, feeling his distress and frustration. “Finds the right girl? Marries her?”

Keefe laughed grimly. “Scott’s fantasy is all about you.”

That hit her like a blow “But surely he’s forgotten me.” Her expression revealed she was shocked and appalled. “I saw him with Jemma. She’s a very nice young woman.”

“Who is wasting her time.” Keefe rejected that solution with a kind of anger. “I like Jemma too. She’ll make some lucky man a fine wife but it won’t be Scott. Scott’s choice has to be my choice. Scott will always want the woman I want. As Gran once said, ‘Scott wants to be you, Keefe’. That’s his huge problem in life. Sibling rivalry is part of Scott’s deepest being.”

“Then that’s a hell of a thing,” she said. “Maybe he needs professional help.”

“You think he doesn’t realise it?” Keefe spoke with a mix of anger and sorrow. “Scott does have an insight into his own behaviour. He knows what drives him. The tragedy is he doesn’t want to change things.”

“So this is what it always comes to. I shouldn’t have come back.” Skye was painfully convinced it was so. “There’s no place for me here, Keefe. I only make matters worse. Remember who I am.”

His eyes flashed like summer lightning. “Who you are? I’ll tell you. You’re a beautiful, bright, accomplished woman. What more do you want? I don’t give a damn that you were raised as Jack McCory’s little motherless daughter. Jack is a good man. But who in God’s name was your mother? That’s the real question.”

Her head shot up, all sorts of alarms going off. “What do you mean?”

“Why don’t you have the courage to allow your concerns—our concerns—to leap to the centre?”

“I have no idea what you mean.” She did. There were critical parts of her mother’s life that were totally unknown.

“You do,” he flatly contradicted, “but I can’t handle it now. Take that black dress off, though heaven knows it makes your skin and your hair glow. Leave a note for Jack. Say you’ve gone riding with me. He’ll understand.”

“Of course he will!” She cut him off with something of his own clipped manner. “He’s my father.”

Chapter Three

BIRDS shrieked, whistled, zoomed above their heads, filling the whole world with a wild symphony of sound. They had left the main compound far behind, driving the horses, initially unsettled and hard to saddle, at full gallop towards the line of sandhills, glowing like furnaces in the intermittent, blinding flashes of sun. Aboriginal chanting so ghostly it raised the short hairs on the nape at first floated with ease across the sacred landscape. Now the sound was fading as they thundered on their way.

From time to time crouching wallabies and kangaroos lifted their heads at their pounding progress, taking little time to get out of the way of the horses. Manes and tails flowing, they raced full pelt across the plains, their hooves churning up the pink parakeelya, the succulent the cattle fed on, and sending swirls of red dust into the baked air.

The heat of the day hadn’t passed. It had become deadly. Thunderclouds formed thick blankets over a lowering sky. But as threatening as the sky looked—a city dweller would have been greatly worried they were in for an impending deluge—Skye, used to such displays, realised there might be little or no rain in those climbing masses of clouds. A painter would have inspiration for a stunning abstract using a palette of pearl grey, black, purple and silver with great washes of yellow and livid green.

Probably another false alarm, she thought, not that she cared if they got a good soaking. Any rain was a blessing. Her cotton shirt was plastered to her back. Sweat ran in rivulets between her breasts and down into her waistband. There could be lightning. There was a distant rumbling of thunder. She had seen terrifying lightning strikes. A neighbouring cattle baron had in fact been killed by a lightning strike not all that many years previously. Yet oddly she had no anxiety about anything. She was with Keefe.

Half an hour on, as if a staying hand had touched his shoulder, Keefe reined in his mount. Skye did the same. Riders and horses needed a rest. In a very short time the world had darkened, giving every appearance of a huge electrical storm sweeping in. It confirmed to her distressed mind this had been a very sad day. Wasn’t that the message being carried across the vast reaches of the station by an elaborate network of sand drums? The chanting and the drums acted as powerful magic to see Byamee, Broderick McGovern, safely home to the spirit world.

Keefe took the lead, in desperate need of the quiet secrecy and sanctuary of the hill country. He loved and respected this whole ancient area, with all its implications. The ruined castles with their battlements had a strange mystique, an aloofness from the infinite, absolutely level plains country. It was as though they were secure in the knowledge it was they that had been there from the Dreamtime, created by the Great Beings on their walk-abouts. The hill country exerted a very real mystical force that had to be reckoned with. Many a Djinjara stockman, white or aboriginal, had over the years claimed they had experienced psychic terror in certain areas, a feeling of being watched when there was no other human being within miles. Keefe knew of many over time, including the incredibly brave explorers, who had tasted the same sensation around the great desert monuments that had stood for countless aeons, especially the Olgas, the aboriginal Katajuta. Ayer’s Rock, Uluru, sacred to the desert tribes, was acknowledged as having a far more benign presence, whereas the extraordinary cupolas, minarets and domes of Katajuta projected a very different feeling.

They dismounted, their booted feet making deep footprints in the deep rust-red loam. They saw to the horses, then began moving as one up a sandstone slope to where stands of bauhinia, acacia, wilga and red mulga were offering shade. The powerful sun was sending out great sizzling golden rays that pierced the clouds and lit up the desert like some fantastic staged spectacle.

Skye knew this place well. She had been here many times, mostly with Keefe, at other times on her own to reflect and wonder. This was Gungulla: a favourable place. A place of permanent water and a camping spot for white man and aborigine alike. Up among the caves there were drinking holes in the form of big rock-enclosed bowls and basins. There was bush tucker too, all kinds of berries and buds packed with nutrition. One could survive here. She turned to witness a thrilling sight. The summits of the curling, twisting, billowing clouds were rimmed with orange fire.

Keefe had pulled a small blanket from his pack, letting it flap on the wind before spreading it on the sand beneath the clump of orchid trees. He looked up at Skye, standing poised above him, twirling a white bauhinia blossom with a crimson throat in her hand. She had picked the orchid-like flower off one of the trees as she had passed beneath. Keefe indicated that she should sit beside him. She did so, feeling a blend of longing and trepidation. Immediately the little sandhill devil lizards scurried for cover.

“I can’t get my head around the fact my father is dead.” Keefe spoke in an intense voice. “He was only in his mid-fifties. No great age these days. There’s Gran eighty. Dad was needed.”

Sympathy and understanding were in her blue eyes. “His death has put a huge burden on you, Keefe. I know that. You thought you would have more years to grow into the job but the truth is you’re ready. You can be at rest about that.”

“Well, I’m not!” He wasn’t bothering to conceal his grief from her. This was Skye. He was letting it out. “The numbers of us killed in light plane crashes!”

She couldn’t argue with that. “But it can’t prevent you from flying. Out here flying is a way of life. You were able to come for me.”

He made a short bitter sound, more a rasp than a laugh. “I’d come for you no matter what.”

She had to press her eyes shut. Block him out. “Don’t fill my head with impossible dreams, Keefe.” Goaded, she pitched the bauhinia blossom aside. He had hurt her so deeply the wounds would never heal. Yet here she was again defying all common sense.

“Do you dream of me?” he asked abruptly.

It took her breath.

“I dream of you,” he said, lying back on the rough grey blanket and staring up at the sky.

She looked down at his dark, brooding face. “If we weren’t who we are, would you marry me?” How absurd could she get? She waited. He didn’t speak so she answered her own question. “I think not.” All these years wasted. Only they were unforgettable years. She would remember them to her last breath.

“Who are we exactly?” Abruptly he pulled her down to him in one swift, fluid motion.

She allowed him to do it even when she knew she could ill afford the least sign of surrender. To prove it, high emotion kicked in in a heartbeat. Keefe’s sexual magnetism was unquestioned, and so proprietorial. He knew he owned her. That alone aroused a certain female hostility. Being owned was wrong. “Are you saying there are secrets, Keefe?” She turned on her side to challenge him. They were so close, the pain was scarcely to be borne. Whatever had happened between them, they could never truly lose the old unifying bond. In his own way he needed her. But never as much as she needed him. There was nothing really normal about their relationship, she thought.

Again he didn’t speak. Groaning with frustration, she flung her arm across his hard, muscled chest, feeling the rhythmic thud of his heart beneath her hand. Sometimes she thought she would simply expire with the pain of loving Keefe, when there seemed to be no resolution to the matter. It was here, almost this very spot, where he had first made love to her. Taken her virginity. Captured her heart. Held it so fast he had denied her the freedom to enjoy another lover for a long time. Even then, those few relationships had never taken real shape. There was no one like Keefe. The way he made love to her. The things he did. The things he said. It was magic and music. Unforgettable.

“Secrets, yes,” he muttered. With a strong arm he fitted her body to him, as though her proximity gave him all the comfort this world could offer. “But does every secret need to be told?”

Her vulnerable flesh was pulsing with desire, causing deep knife-like sensations in her groin. He hadn’t asked a rhetorical question. He needed an answer. “You’re saying not every secret needs to be exposed to the light? Are you worried I’m family, Keefe?” Finally she threw her hidden anxieties into the ring.

“Isn’t that the fear locked away in your own Pandora’s box?” he countered, a correspondingly sharp note in his voice. “Let it out and who knows what will happen? Family!” he groaned. “There’s nothing family about the way I feel about you.”

Such an admission, yet she had a fierce desire to lash out at him. “Feel, certainly. Never act on those feelings. They could be taboo.” Why not hurt him as he always managed to hurt her? “Just give me a simple answer. What do you feel?” She stared at him with her black-fringed radiant blue eyes.