Princes of the Outback Bundle (22 page)

“I imagine your ego is in as fine shape as the rest of you.” And with that matter-of-fact diagnosis, she started packing up their plates and taking them to the kitchen.

Rafe bit his tongue. He didn’t need to ask how she knew about his fine shape. She’d seen pretty much all of it in the bathroom earlier. But he did need to ask what she’d meant earlier, before she walked out of his bedroom.

“The last time we were discussing my ego, you said I wouldn’t be sticking around long.”

“That’s right. A neighbor’s going in to Bourke today. I’ve arranged a lift for you.”

It was Rafe’s turn to rock back in his chair. She sure hadn’t wasted any time. “When?”

She looked up from the sink where she was stacking dishes and smiled. “Not too long. I imagine by the time you’ve finished clearing up the table and washing these, Jen will have called with an exact time.”

With thirty years of practice, Rafe had perfected his helpless-male routine. Catriona McConnell wasn’t the first woman to see right through it, but she’d done so with a remarkable indifference to his charm. Twenty minutes later Rafe still wore a rueful grin. She really was something else!

When he’d stared cluelessly at the sink and murmured, “Washing dishes, huh? This should be interesting,” she didn’t
roll her eyes and nudge him aside so she could take over—which is what he’d been angling for.

He’d tried another tack. “I’ve never done this before. I don’t suppose you’d care to give some hands-on instruction?”

“Oh, I’m pretty sure you’re smart enough to work it out for yourself.”

“What if I break stuff?”

“My stuff is hardly Limoges,” she’d flung over her shoulder on her way to the door. “But if it makes you feel any better, I’ll add any breakages to your bill.”

“That should make me feel better? With this head?”

Hand on door, she’d paused, frowning. “Your head’s aching? Perhaps you should go and lie down.”

“Will you bring me a cold compress and take my pulse, Nurse?”

She made an impatient sound, tongue against teeth. “Don’t you ever give up?”

“What?”

“The lines. We both know they’re wasted on me.”

Rafe shook his head sadly. “You’re a hard woman, Catriona McConnell.”

She’d smiled and thanked him, as if that were the greatest of compliments, before closing the door behind her. Ten seconds later it opened again—and, yeah, she caught him still grinning and shaking his head over that exchange—so she could remind him about the phone calls he’d been deliberately forgetting.

“The phone is in my office—” she pointed off to her right “—through that second doorway over there.”

“Will the calls be on my bill?”

“Of course. Knock yourself out.”

Rafe had winced at her unfortunate wording, but that was all for show.

After finishing his phone calls, as he headed out the door where she’d disappeared earlier, he remembered her words
with a grin of approval. It didn’t surprise him that he liked her—he rarely met a woman he didn’t like on some level—but it surprised him how much this smart-as-a-cardshark woman tickled his fancy.

On the back porch he paused to look around, seeing her place for the first time. Seeing what lay beneath and beyond the debris scattered by last night’s storm with another jab of surprise. The paint peeling from the outside walls. The empty garden beds. Beyond the back fence, what looked to be the remains of an orchard, the trees long dead. Catriona’s home wore an air of disrepair like a patched-up coat and he hadn’t expected that. She seemed so on top of everything.

Then he remembered the moment at the breakfast table, when he’d asked about her cowboy and he’d felt the tension—and her disillusionment—hovering in the kitchen air. Things weren’t any more shipshape in her world than in his, and it struck him that fate—or his most faithful mistress, Lady Luck—might have landed him here for a reason. Nine times out of ten he would have backed himself to outrace a storm. But yesterday he’d been flying with his mother’s words soft in his memory.

Take care, Rafe. Please, don’t do anything harebrained that you might come to regret!

He knew she’d been talking about more than his daredevil ways with a joystick, yet her message of caution and the accompanying concern—in eyes already pierced with grief from her husband’s recent death—had led him to search out a strip when the storm billowed quicker and wilder than predicted.

That strip was Catriona McConnell’s.

And as he crossed the yard with its random patches of would-be lawn, as he sidestepped sheets of roofing steel blown clean off a nearby shed, he decided that fate had put him here for more than washing her dishes. More, even, than shifting the uprooted tree that lay crushing her fence.

This trip had a purpose, one he’d resisted for the first month
or more since his father’s death. Since he and his two brothers learned about the will’s clause and the baby they needed to produce. Needed, not wanted. Rafe couldn’t see himself in the role of father, which meant he needed to choose very wisely.

More wisely than Nikki Bates. More wisely than any of the women in his past.

Yup, he decided as his narrowed gaze fixed on Catriona down by the kennels. Fate had come to his rescue in the nick of time.

C
at was sitting cross-legged on the concrete stoop outside her kennel enclosure, her lap filled with sleeping puppies, when she heard the distant slap of the kitchen door closing. Blast. She’d hoped that the washing-up and his phone calls would have kept him occupied for longer. Another five minutes enjoying the simple, comforting warmth of the morning sun and her canine company was all she wanted. Five minutes before she faced up to the consequences and cost of last night’s storm. Before making the tough decisions on what to do next, how to find Drew, who to believe.

With a heavy sigh, she lifted one chubby tan body close to her face. “Not that I have any idea where to start on that one, little mate.” Everything about her dealings with Drew had turned out to be so much less than she’d bargained for.

For some reason that turned her thoughts right back to Rafe Carlisle, who had turned out to be so much more than she’d bargained for. It was one thing to enjoy looking at him,
appreciating his beauty the same as she would a sleek Thoroughbred or an exquisitely formed sculpture or some out-of-her-reach trinket in a shop window. It was another entirely to enjoy his company, to sit at the breakfast table trading quips and confidences. To stick her head through the door and see him with sleeves pushed up, hands in her sink, that lethal grin lifting the corners of his exquisitely formed mouth.

Knowing that
she’d
put the grin there.

That memory mingled with the crunch of his footsteps on the gravel approach, and Cat shivered—not in her skin but somewhere deeper. For a wisp of time she buried her nose in the puppy’s fur, absorbing its comforting warmth, centering herself so that when she turned and peered up at him none of that unease showed in her expression…despite the way her heart revved up a gear.

From her position down on the ground, it was a perilously long way up to his face. A long traverse past thighs and hips encased in expensively aged denim. Past that buttercream knit that should have made him look soft but—damn it—didn’t. And by the time she’d taken that all in, by the time she’d arrived up at his face with all its dark planes and masculine angles, he was ducking down to her level and reaching out to stroke the puppy in her hands.

“So…Cat is a dog person,” he said, sea-green eyes awash with amusement.

Cat tried to smile back, but she was transfixed by those eyes and then by the gentle stroke of one large fingertip over the tiny puppy’s head. Snared by the magnetic power of his proximity. Even in the bedroom he hadn’t been this close, his head almost grazing hers as he bent to study the bundle of puppies in her lap.

“How many have you got there?” he asked, his voice as slow and mesmerizing as that caress.

“Seven, all up.”

“Huh. My lucky number.”

Probably another line, but she had to admire the finesse of his delivery. The smooth way he had of drawing her in with what appeared to be genuine attentiveness. Why not enjoy it? Any kind of attentiveness was a novelty, and dogs she could talk about until the cows came home!

“Where’s their mama?” he asked, and Cat looked around for Sheba.

“She won’t be too far away. Especially if she gets a whiff of a stranger lurking near her babies.”

“Ah, a warning. Should I step back slowly, hands in the air? Before or after she bares her teeth?”

Cat smiled. “I think the worst you’ll suffer is a severe growling.”

“From a mother, growling can be scary stuff.”

Although he grinned back at her, she sensed a truth in his words. And glimpsed another element she hadn’t bargained for—the disquieting element of Rafe Carlisle in family mode. Carefully she settled the puppy from her hand back with its siblings. “Yeah, well, Sheba’s growl is much worse than her bite. She’s only ever taken a violent dislike to one man.”

“Your cowboy?”

“His father, actually.” Cat met his eyes and saw a stillness, a seriousness, she hadn’t expected. Saw questions she didn’t want to answer…and was saved by the distraction of a low canine whimper. The perfect segue. “Speaking of fathers—” she nodded toward his right “—that’s the pups’ daddy over there.”

As expected, Rafe turned to inspect the daddy. Head on paws, Bach treated them to his best put-upon look and another pitiful whine.

“Oh, please!” Cat shook her head at her dog before explaining to Rafe. “I have to lock him up while Sheba goes for a run, otherwise she won’t leave her puppies. Bach thinks it’s the height of indignity.”

“You called your dog Bark?” he asked on a note of disbelief, although a smile lifted the corners of his lips.

“
B-A-C-H.
Like the composer.”

“Awful pun.”

“Yes, but
Wag
ner would have been worse.”

He laughed at that, a rich rumble of amusement that warmed her from her inside out. Oh, yeah, the man knew how to laugh, how to smile, how to charm. “At least my cat has a dignified name.”

That laconic admission whipped her attention from his lips to his eyes. “You have a
cat
?”

His eyes narrowed. “Don’t tell me you’re one of those dog people who look down their noses at cat owners?”

“Not at all. I just didn’t picture you with a cat, is all.”

Cat didn’t want to picture him with a pet any more than being growled at by his mother. She much preferred her preconception of Rafe Carlisle as a superficial, self-obsessed rich kid. Entertaining, likable, highly watchable, but essentially lightweight. She really wished she didn’t have to ask, “What is your cat’s dignified name?”

“Tolstoy.”

“Is he a Russian blue?”

“I have no idea.”

“Then why did you name him Tolstoy?” she asked, hope stacked upon hope that he didn’t enjoy the classics, because that would be too much on top of all his charm and wit and the pet-ownership thing.

“I didn’t. He belonged to a woman I knew. I guess she named him.”

Cat’s heart put in a funny little kick beat as she wondered what, exactly, the word
knew
meant in Rafe-Carlisle-speak. “And she gave her cat to you?”

“She left, and the next day Tolstoy was back.” He gave a careless little shrug, like the shift of spare muscle inside his silk sweater. “Apparently he preferred living with me.”

“Didn’t she?” Cat asked without thinking.

And when his eyes lifted to hers, when their sea-green
depths glowed with a wicked lick of heat, she wished she
had
thought. Wished she’d bitten her tongue and her curiosity.

“Oh, she liked it well enough,” he drawled, and Cat believed she knew why. He would be lethal in bed. As lazy and graceful as that shrug; as knowing and sinful as those eyes.

As hot as the wash of curiosity that streamed through Cat’s veins.

She struggled to contain both the heat and the curiosity. Struggled against the crazy itch to reach out and touch the silky strands of his hair, the extravagant fullness of his bottom lip, the stubbly regrowth of dark beard along the sharp line of his jaw.

Methodically, one by one, she folded the fingers that itched to touch into her palm, forming a loose fist, which she rubbed along her thigh. And she reminded herself what this exchange really meant about this man and his life and his lifestyle.
Not for you, Catriona McConnell, not even in your wildest midnight imaginings.

“So you kept her cat,” she said.

“His choice.”

Cat was saved from remarking on Tolstoy’s taste when Sheba trotted back from her short spell of exercise and took immediate exception to Rafe’s presence. “It’s okay, baby,” she soothed while she quietly transferred the puppies to their kennel. “This is Rafe Carlisle and he’s not as big and scary as he looks. He has a cat.”

Rafe gave a half grunt of laughter. It didn’t surprise her that he felt no need to defend himself against the cat-ownership charge. As she’d already noted, his male ego was in excellent shape.

For an oddly comfortable moment they watched the pups jostle for prime positions at their mother’s belly. Odd because she’d thought this might have been awkward in its intimacy…and perhaps it could have been if he’d let the moment, silent but for the muffled sound of suckling, stretch.

Instead he smiled and said, “Hungry little beggars.”

“Lucky they’ve got a good mamma.”

But when she finished securing the gate on Sheba’s pen and turned, ready to get on with her chores, she found him watching her with unexpectedly serious eyes. It jolted her for a second, that expression, the stillness in his big body, the skip of her heart.

But she kept on moving, picking up the hose and turning on the tap, keen to push whatever that moment was about out of her consciousness. “Did you make your phone calls?” she asked.

“Unfortunately.”

His dry tone brought her gaze swinging back to his as she filled the water containers. “Alex wasn’t happy then?”

“Why do you suppose I rang my brother?” he asked slowly.

Cat shrugged. “You mentioned him enough times yesterday. I gathered he owns the plane in my paddock…although you kept calling it a jet.”

“I did?” Uncertainty clouded his expression, bringing his dark brows together in a confused frown.

“After I got you out of the plane,” she explained, “when we were driving back here, you kept repeating yourself. You’d tell me something, then forget and tell me again.”

“Did I embarrass myself?”

Oh, the temptation to tease him! It hovered in front of her, a great big shining orb of enticement, too bright to resist. “I crashed the jet.” She slurred the words, imitating his voice from the previous day. “Alecsh will be pished.”

Rafe winced, and she felt a tiny pang of remorse for teasing him over something so serious. But only a tiny one.

“I gather it is your brother’s plane?”

“No. I hired it in Bourke. Alex’s jet is safe and sound at the airport. I rang and checked.” Expression rueful, he rubbed a hand along his jaw. “If I had crashed the Citation, Alex definitely would have been pissed.”

“If you’d crashed a jet, you really wouldn’t have to worry about your brother!”

A sobering thought, and one Cat didn’t want to revisit. She had no business feeling fright or relief or anything on his behalf. No business feeling
anything
for the man. He flew a private jet, for heaven’s sake. He hired a light plane the way other mere mortals hired a car or hailed a cab. At the moment Cat would give her eyeteeth for enough cold hard cash to hire a bicycle!

“You hired the Cessna?” she began as she turned off the tap and coiled the hose. She didn’t need to know more about him, but she needed to talk, to consolidate who he was, to chase away the whispery traces of uneasiness that coiled through her gut. Straightening, she found him lounging against the mesh gate of Sheba’s pen looking askance. “After you flew Alex’s jet to Bourke?”

“That’s right. I’d been visiting with my mother.”

“She lives on a station, right? In the Northern Territory? I remember reading that somewhere.”

“Kameruka Downs,” he told her. “We grew up there, my brothers and me. Tomas still lives there and runs the cattle business.”

“I read an article about him in
The Cattleman
.”

“That’s the one,” Rafe said slowly as their gazes linked. “I guess you’ve read a bit about my family here and there.”

“A bit.”

The classic understatement, Rafe knew, especially when there’d been so much to read in the past couple of months. And when her hazel eyes clouded, when their expression softened with sympathy, he knew she’d been reading that press.

“You lost your father recently,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

Rafe inclined his head in the briefest acknowledgment. Charles Carlisle might not have been his birth father, but he was the only father he’d known.

“How is your mother coping?”

“Barely.” Little point in sugarcoating the truth, not when the gossip media had made a meal of Maura’s “increasingly hermitlike existence” in the month after her husband’s death. As if her choice to live out of the public eye and her decision not to attend his very public and photographed memorial service painted her eccentric. “Although she might have coped better without Dad’s interference.”

“Interference?”

Rafe hadn’t meant to bring this up yet, but since she’d introduced the topic…since she was studying him with such a cute look of befuddlement…why not answer her question? Why not see where it took him? “He had this notion that a grandchild would abbreviate the grieving process.”

Her cute puzzlement turned to a deep frown. “I don’t understand.”

Rafe could appreciate her confusion. Theirs—his and his brothers’—had been considerable. And heated. Their mother’s more so when she found out six weeks later. “When he got sick he added a clause to his will. We didn’t know anything about it until afterward.”

“When the will was read?”

He nodded. “So, we have twelve months to produce a grandchild for Mau.”

“Or you lose your inheritance?”

“Yup.”

Her face was a picture of astonishment as she digested this information, as she sifted through the pieces and put it all together as a whole. “You and your brothers,” she asked slowly, “do you
all
have to have a baby?”

“The clause specifies only one grandchild among us, but given the short time span and the fact we’re all starting from scratch, as it were…we’re playing the odds.”

They’d made a pact, one in, all in, the same way it had always been between them. No other way seemed fair. No other way gave them the best odds of succeeding.

“So.” She cleared her throat. “How’s that going?”

Rafe laughed dryly. Trust Catriona to cut straight to the chase. “Tomas has a willing lady but he’s being a stubborn fool over it. Alex and Susannah—” he shook his head “—are still trying to find a spare hour in their schedules to get married first.”

She raised her brows.

“He’s a traditionalist.”

“And you? Have you any, um, projects in the making?”

“Why? Are you offering to help me out?”

She laughed and shook her head. “Funny.”

“Is that what you think?”

Their gazes locked, and the mocking laughter in her eyes darkened, deepened. “Yes, actually. I do think that’s pretty funny.”