The Cattleman

Bannerman took the slender hand, thinking most people had to work hard at containing their awe of him, but this chit of a girl showed no such deference. He stared into her large green eyes. Memories speared through him, for a moment holding him in thrall. “Please, sit down,” he said after a moment, his voice harsher than he intended. On no account did he want to frighten her away. “Has Robyn organized some coffee?” With an impatient frown, he went around his desk, sitting in the black leather swivel chair.

“Yes, she has,” Jessica answered, thinking intimidation was something this man would do supremely well. He had been born to power. Clearly, he took it as his due. Broderick Bannerman had to be nearing sixty, but he looked at least ten years younger. He didn’t have his son’s amazing sapphire eyes, but his icy glance was remarkable enough. His hair was as thick and black as his son’s with distinguished wings of silver. All in all, Broderick Bannerman was a fine figure of a man with a formidable aura. Why in the world would a man like this choose her to handle such a big project? Brett would have been the obvious choice.

“Speaking of watercolors,” he said, “my aunt Lavinia loves them. She’s a very arty person, so you should get on well.”

“I had the pleasure of meeting her momentarily,” Jessica said, thinking it best to say. It would come out sooner or later.

“Really? When was this?” The frosted gaze locked on hers.

“She happened to be in the entrance hall when I arrived.”

“Good. I don’t want her to hide. Then you’ll know she’s somewhat eccentric?”

“I found her charming,” Jessica said.

“She can be a handful,” Bannerman said, with a welcome trace of humor. “Most people think she’s senile, but she’s not. She likes wearing weird costumes. She had a brief fling as an opera singer in her youth. Still daydreams about it. You’ll no doubt get to see the costumes. Tosca’s my favourite. She’s a Buddhist at the moment. She’s actually had an audience with the Dalai Lama. Regretfully she has arrived at the point where we can’t let her go out alone, though she managed to get to Sydney recently—but I’d sent along a minder for her and she stayed with relatives. Don’t be too worried by anything she says. Livvy never really knows what time frame she’s in.”

Wary of his reaction, Jessica didn’t tell him Lavinia had called her Moira.

Bannerman was still talking when a middle-aged woman in a zip-up pale blue uniform wheeled a laden trolley into the room without once lifting her head. Robyn was standing directly behind her, looking very much as if one false move and the tea lady would get a good rap on the knuckles.

“Thank you, Molly,” Bannerman said. “This is our housekeeper, Mrs. Patterson, Jessica. You’ll be seeing quite a bit of each other.”

The two women exchanged a smile, Jessica saying a pleasant hello.

“I’ll pour, shall I?” Robyn asked.

Bannerman looked back at her coolly. “This is a private conversation, Robyn.”

Jessica felt mortified on Robyn’s account. Was this his normal behavior?

Robyn colored, as well she might. “I thought you might need a little help.”

“Thank you, no.”

Not the nicest man I’ve ever met, Jessica thought.

In the end, she poured the coffee, which turned out to be excellent. To her surprise, instead of getting down to business, Bannerman began to question her, albeit in a roundabout way, about her family, listening to her replies with every appearance of interest. One might have been forgiven for thinking before matters progressed any further she had to establish her family tree. Surely he didn’t talk to everyone this way, did he? Not everyone would expect to be quizzed about their ancestors, unless they were marrying into European royalty.

In the middle of it all, the phone rang. At least she was off the hook for a while, she thought wryly. Bannerman turned his intense pale gray stare on the phone as though willing it to stop. Finally he was forced to pick it up. “I thought I told you to hold the calls,” he boomed into the mouthpiece.

He certainly has a way with the staff, Jessica thought. That sort of voice would make anyone gulp, let alone damage the ears.

“All right, put him on.”

Jessica made to jump to her feet to give him privacy, but he waved her back into the seat, launching into a hot, hard attack on the poor unfortunate individual on the other end of the line. How people of wealth liked to make lesser mortals quake! Afterward, satisfied he had made himself clear and beaten one more employee into the turf, Bannerman centered Jessica with his lancing eyes. “Look, you haven’t had time to settle in and I have to attend to some fool matter. You have no idea the amount of nonsense I have to put up with. Some of my people can’t do anything on their own. What say we met up again at four? It will be cooler then. I can take you on tour of the new house.”

“I’m looking forward to it, Mr. Bannerman,” Jessica said. He might be shaping up to be an ogre, but no need to call home yet.

“You’re hired, by the way.” He flashed her an odd look, impossible to define.

“Wouldn’t you prefer to wait until I submit some designs or at least hear my ideas? They’d be off the top of my head, of course. Better, when I’ve had time—”

“No need,” he said dismissively. “You’ll do very well.”

It was the first time she’d been given a commission on the basis of her looks and ancestors.

UP IN HER BEDROOM, Robyn paced the perimeter of the Persian rug, as a lioness might pace the perimeter of her cage. She was utterly enraged. For B.B. to humiliate her in front of a complete stranger left her wanting to kill someone. Though she had done everything in her power to fit into this family, she fumed, she would never be regarded as a true daughter of the house. Like that old witch Lavinia, who smiled so lovingly on Cyrus, had said, Robyn wasn’t a true Bannerman. No unshakable bond of blood; the belonging was only on the surface. Scratch the surface and it was as clear today as it had been from the outset when she’d first come to Mokhani with her mother, she was an outsider. Her mother, not capable of getting both oars in the water, had nevertheless shoehorned herself in, always sweet and unassuming, dutiful and deferential to her rich and powerful husband.

Their marriage had been a big lie. B.B. had married her mother, an old school chum of the incomparable Deborah, only to beget more sons. But poor Sharon couldn’t rise to the challenge, though she had looked like “lust on legs,” as a guy she knew put it. The sad reality was that Sharon hadn’t been very fertile, and her marriage to B.B. seemed to render her completely barren. Her daughter, Robyn, her only child, was her sole achievement. Needless to say, B.B. was bitterly disappointed in her mother and had all but ignored her, unceremoniously bundling her out of the master suite and into a room on the other side of the house, causing Sharon to curl up and simply fade away. B.B. had wanted a long succession of heirs, not just Cy, the son of the only woman he had ever loved, that paragon Deborah who, for all the cups and ribbons she’d won, had gone hurtling over the neck of her horse.

Robyn had sensed quickly, as an animal might, B.B.’s deep-seated fear of his own son, as though one day Cy would overshadow him, and hell, wasn’t it already happening? Though she hated to have to say it, Cy was remarkable. Cy was the future. She didn’t know anyone apart from B.B. who didn’t wholeheartedly admire Cyrus. As for how people regarded B.B., they mostly feared him, called him a bloody bastard—but never within B.B.’s hearing. B.B. would regard such a thing as a declaration of war, then order a preemptive strike.

But he was a bastard, nevertheless. A ruthless bastard. It was that more than anything that kept Robyn in line. In the odd moment when she choked up on memories of her mother—she really had loved her, or at least as much as she could, given Sharon’s single-digit IQ—she realized with great bitterness just how badly B.B. had treated her mother. Sharon had had everything material she’d wanted, but she had missed out totally on what she really wanted—tenderness and affection. Sharon had realized from the beginning there was no way she was going to get love.

Ironically, this beast of a man seemed to inspire all kinds of women, from the innocent needy like her mother to gold diggers, to give matrimony with him their best shot. B.B. hadn’t married any of them, but he certainly hadn’t been celibate since her mother’s death. Lord, no! There had been various affairs, all very discreet. Even with young women, who found the sexiest thing about a man was his bank balance. The one thing Robyn hadn’t been prepared for when B.B. had announced he was calling in an interior designer to decorate the mansion, was that she would be so young and ravishingly pretty. Attractive would have been okay, but not a bloody aphrodisiac for men.

The shock had been ghastly. She didn’t think Cy had expected it either, nor had he been pleased. But here she was among them, this Jessica Tennant.

B.B. had first seen her on national television. Robyn had missed the program herself, as had Cy, so they’d had no warning. They knew only that she was shortlisted for some big prize, which meant she had to be good at what she did, but at twenty-four she couldn’t have had much experience. Add to that, she was a bloody siren. Robyn had seen the look B.B. had given the woman. It had been as rapt as a sixteen-year-old boy’s.

Robyn halted in her frenzied pacing, and her blood turned to ice water. What if B.B. had it in his head this time to take another wife? Why should that shock her? He had plenty of money, after all. So what if they were decades apart in age? B.B. was a secretive man, but he didn’t do anything without a reason. No one had ever seen him make a false move. Now Ms. Jessica Tennant, in the guise of an interior designer. What had seemed incomprehensible started to appear perfectly clear.

I have to protect myself, Robyn thought. I’m no loser like Mum.

A FEW MINUTES BEFORE THE TIME scheduled for the grand tour, Jessica made her way downstairs. Best not be late, when Bannerman was famous for bawling people out. Robyn had dropped out of sight, no doubt slamming her palm against her forehead in mortification, but Mrs. Patterson, who turned out to be a very pleasant woman, had been on hand to show Jessica to her room.

There, she had changed her outfit, settling for something cool, cotton pants with a gauzy multicolored caftan top decorated with little crystals and beads over with tiny buttons down the front. Usually she did up just enough to cover her bra, but with the way Broderick Bannerman had been looking at her, she decided to do them all up.

The dazzling play of late-afternoon light falling through the beautiful leaded panes and fan lights on the front door held her immobile for a moment. The kaleidoscope of color unlocked some lovely fragment of memory from her childhood. Before she could move, the door opened, letting in a wave of hot air.

And Cyrus Bannerman. The look he gave her held her transfixed.

“Hi!”

“Ms. Tennant. We meet again.”

At first glance, he could have been a particularly sexy and virile escapee from the TV show Survivor. His darkly tanned skin glowing with sweat and grimed with red dust gave him a startlingly exotic appearance. Red dust had thrown a film over his jet-black hair, which was tousled and fell onto his forehead. There was a stain of brownish-red—blood—across his bush shirt, and his eyes seem to blaze a hole through her.

They continued gazing at one another for what seemed an inordinate amount of time. Was it the atmosphere? she wondered. The old homestead certainly had an air about it.

“Sorry,” he said finally. “I must look a mess. One of the men took a bad fall off his motorbike. Head injuries. We didn’t want to move him. I had to call in the RFDS. That’s the Royal Flying Doctor Service, as I expect you know. God knows what we’d do without them. They didn’t take long.”

“Is he going to be all right?” Only now could she take a few more steps down the stairs, reassured that an injured employee so clearly mattered to him.

“We have to wait and see with head injuries. I’m worried about him.” Cy’s remarkable eyes made another sweep over her. “Meanwhile, what have you been up to?”

“Why, nothing.” She stopped where she was on the stairs. “Change of clothes is all,” she said sweetly. “Now your father is taking me on a tour of the new house.”