Princes of the Outback Bundle (36 page)

Alex’s gaze narrowed. “Is that what your father did?”

“Hell, no! I didn’t even know who he was until just before Mum died. I tried to meet him and he didn’t want to know me.”

“And what if he had?” he asked, turning her argument around on her. “Would you have enjoyed joint custody arrangements? Being shunted from one house to the other?”

She hitched her chin even higher. “No, but that doesn’t make a child the right reason to marry.”

“What
is
the right reason to marry?”

“Love,” she said without hesitation. “Falling madly for someone you want to share your whole life with. Someone who makes your heart warm just looking at him. Someone you can’t bear living without.”

“I didn’t pick you for a romantic.” Alex shook his head slowly. Then he moved a step closer, captured her gaze with the steady intensity of his as he bent closer. “So, if you were to meet someone tomorrow who made your blood hot just looking at him. If you fell madly in love and wanted to share your life with this man, you’d marry him?”

For an instant she seemed absorbed in the moment, in his eyes, in whatever the hell he thought he was trying to prove. Then some kind of resolve snapped in her eyes and she stepped away from him and the blazing intensity of that moment.

“Tomorrow?” She turned with her back to the fire and
gave a casual shrug. “No. I can’t afford a relationship of any sort until I finish my studies and establish a career.”

“Can’t afford?”

“The time, the commitment.” Laughing softly, she shook her head. “Between study and my job I don’t have time to date.”

“Your course is that full on?”

“Oh, yeah. And I need to maintain my grades. I’m shooting for an honors year in medical science next year.” Her eyes burned with a different kind of intensity, something from within that caught at his gut in a way nothing about her had before. But then her lips curled with a curious wryness. “Plus, I promised my mother I’d get my degree.”

“To make her proud?”

“Oh, I’m pretty sure she’d be proud of me with or without the degree,” she said with quiet confidence. “But I deferred my studies to nurse her and she made me promise I’d go back. It would have broken her heart if I hadn’t.”

In the ensuing silence Alex realized that the rain had stopped, at least for now. The only sound was the crackle of firewood…that and a silence so tense that it might have crackled as well. And through that moment, he had to force himself to remain still. Not to reach out and touch her in some way. That, he knew, would be a step he couldn’t take back.

“The rain’s stopped.” Inconsequential, but he had to say something. The silence was stretching into awkwardness, as if they both acknowledged revealing too much, too soon. The hush of darkness was falling over the cabin, too, and with it the knowledge of a decision to be made. To leave or to stay.

Her eyes met his with that same jitter of knowledge. “Are you thinking about leaving?”

“Not yet. The wind hasn’t died down much. I’ll give it a while.”

“It might keep blowing all night.”

“It might.”

She seemed to give that ordinary answer an inordinate amount of consideration. She rolled her shoulders and tucked her hands into the pockets of her jacket. Moistened the full curve of her lips. “We probably should just give in to the weather and stay the night.”

“Earlier you said you had to get home.”

“To study.”

“Is there anyone going to worry when you don’t come home?”

“I have a housemate. Tim, who you spoke to. He’ll wonder but he’ll likely think I decided to stay up here the night. He knows I love this place.”

“Staying would be sensible,” he agreed, eyes still holding hers, body entertaining all manner of non-sensible ideas. “You can have the bed.”

“That wouldn’t be fair. I think—”

“Don’t suggest we share, Zara,” he interrupted. “Because
that
wouldn’t be fair.”

She didn’t argue. They didn’t have to discuss why, it hummed in the air between them. “I’m just going out,” she told him, and he saw the flare of her nostrils as she drew a breath, “to the bathroom.”

When she opened the door, the wind rushed in and cut an icy slice right through to his bones. That settled his uneasy mind about their decision to stay, and he set about tending the fire and setting out her sleeping bag on the bed. His on the floor as far away as possible.

And when she returned and started stripping off her jacket, pulling off her shoes, preparing for bed, he escaped to the bathroom. The cold-water shower helped for a while, but only for a while. Then she rolled over in her sleeping
bag, and he knew she wasn’t asleep and he couldn’t control the rush of reaction that burned in his skin.

It was no surprise to find himself painfully hard. Ridiculous. He hadn’t felt this out of control of his responses since his first adolescent crush.

Quietly frustrated, unable to sit still, he got up from the fireside and padded to the window. He could no more control the stir of heat in his groin than he could control the unrelenting lash of the storm outside. He felt trapped, not only within these four walls but trapped within his body. His slow exhalation fogged the cold pane of glass and he heard her stir restlessly again on the bed. A hush of movement as quiet as her breathing, and with the howl of the wind and the renewed slice of rain against the glass he shouldn’t have heard.

But he did.

He didn’t turn. He stood still and alert and erect.

Inconsequentially, he thought that his brothers would get a laugh out of his predicament. Especially Rafe who had a thing about fate and chance and luck. He wouldn’t be standing by the window while his body ached for a woman. He’d take this meeting, the storm, the one bed, this amazing sexual fascination, and turn it into a sign.

Alex didn’t hold any stock in signs but he did trust logic and gut instinct. Both had told him from the start that Zara wasn’t the right woman, not for a man who wanted peace and stability and control. In half a day she’d outrun him and out-thought him, intrigued him and challenged him, made him smile and scowl and ultimately turned him into a victim of his glands.

And the night was only just beginning.

Oh, yeah. Rafe would get a real laugh out of this.

Z
ara tried every relaxation technique she had learned and employed over the years but all to no avail. An hour or more later, she was no closer to sleep than when she’d crawled into her sleeping bag. Up here she usually slept easily, embraced by the soothing country dark and the earthy scents of pine and eucalyptus and timber. Often she was so worn out by a day spent bush walking or casting a line into one of several trout-rich streams within hiking distance that she fell into an eight-hour stretch of solid, blissful, dream-free slumber.

She probably snored a treat.

A smile touched her lips at the thought, then turned warmly reminiscent as she fixed on the day Susannah flabbergasted her with a lesson in trout fishing. It had been quite the weekend for shocks, starting with the cabin itself. When Susannah invited her away to “a little place my
grandfather left me,” she’d expected “little place” to be one of those classic understatements the wealthy tended to use.

She hadn’t expected anything this basic, rustic, primitive.

And she sure hadn’t expected her newly discovered half sister with her cool elegance and private-school accent to display such skill in casting a fishing line. They’d only known each other a couple of months—a couple of awkward, getting-to-know-each-other months because of the circumstances under which they’d met.

Zara, distressed and grief-angry at her mother’s failing health, had been on a mission to meet her father. After discovering some clippings among her mother’s things, she’d found him easily enough. Susannah had overheard their heated exchange, including her father’s callous dismissal of Zara’s paternity claim, and sought her out afterward.

She’d wanted to meet her only sibling and to plead with her to keep their relationship secret. “Mother doesn’t know about his affairs. She’s not well and a shock like this would about kill her.”

Zara was happy to oblige. After meeting the coldhearted son of a bitch, she didn’t want to acknowledge Edward Horton as her father. It had taken a few coffees, a couple of lunches, several long, bonding conversations about their respective mothers’ illnesses and a defining weekend at a mountain cabin to overturn her preconceptions about Susannah.

She was no spoiled society princess, and Zara had felt mean and shamed for making that assumption. Especially when Susannah had told her why she was sharing the line-casting skill. “Pappy Horton taught me to fish. He was a wonderful man, our grandfather. He would have brought you up here and taught you himself, if he’d known about you.”

Zara had stared at her with wide, stunned eyes. “Really?”

“That’s why I brought you here, sis. I hate being out of
phone coverage. I hate not having a hot shower. But I wanted to share something with you, something of family. Please, use the cabin whenever you like. Pappy would have wanted that.”

After that weekend, they’d become firm friends, as close as sisters, although that word had never been spoken again. As much as Zara disliked the lack of acknowledgment, she’d grown to accept it because Susannah was protecting the mother she loved.

The wrong result for the right reason…and that brought her rambling thoughts right back to Alex Carlisle.

She’d prejudged him, the same as she’d done with Susannah. She’d imagined the big man painted in the media, powerful and power hungry, self-important and self-involved. A younger, wealthier version of Edward Horton really, and if that didn’t predispose her to dislike him then nothing would!

He’d asked Susannah to marry him—the wrong result—for the best of reasons. Yet she couldn’t help feeling he wasn’t right for Susannah. Or was she looking for excuses? Justification to stifle the guilty knowledge that she was fiercely attracted to him?

With a frustrated sigh, she flipped onto her back and kicked at the sleeping bag when it didn’t turn with her. So, okay, she was attracted. She could be honest about those biochemical reactions in her body, which she couldn’t do a thing to control. The isolation didn’t help. Being alone with an enormously attractive man, especially after the adrenaline-producing crash and the run back to the cabin, was suggestive.

But nothing was going to happen. Not even if Susannah appeared at the door right now and said, “Go ahead, be my guest, he’s all yours!”

She didn’t have time for a relationship, not even a brief fling, not with Alex Carlisle. It would be too intense, fierce, hot, consuming. She knew this without question, as surely as she knew where he stood right now, still and silent and watchful.

Watching her.

Physical awareness washed through her body, more potent than anything she’d ever felt. The wind had died down but the rain had started up again, a steady drumming beat on the iron roof that echoed in her body. The heightened beat of her pulse. The restless throb of desire in her veins.

Lying on her back staring up at the faint play of shadow over the darkened ceiling, she should not have known where he stood…or that he stood. She should not have heard him move, either, above the noise of the rain, but she did.

She sat up, found him by the sink, a dark, solid silhouette beyond the low glow cast by the banked fire.

“I was just getting a drink,” he said. “Did I wake you?”

Zara shook her head. “No. I’ve been awake a while. I couldn’t sleep.”

“Are you cold?”

The husky edge of concern in his voice rolled through her, a shiver that had nothing to do with the cold. “No. Not cold.”

Hot, much too hot.
And dry, she realized, as she watched the shadow of movement as he lifted an arm to drink the water he’d poured. As she attempted to moisten her mouth.

“I’d love some water, actually.” She started to unzip her bag, to swing her legs free.

“Stay there. I’ll bring it.”

The faucet hissed again as he refilled her bottle from the rainwater tank, then he started toward her and there was an almost expectant hush in her body, a still anticipation as she waited for him to walk from the deep shadows into clearer
sight. He wore his trousers and shirt, unbuttoned and hanging loose. A tousled, disreputable version of the polished man who’d climbed from that car six or so hours ago.

He paused beside the bed long enough for Zara to notice, right there at eye height, that several sparks from the fire had burned right through the fine cloth of his trousers. Long enough to see that he wore white underwear. And that both underwear and damaged trousers were distended by the jut of his arousal.

That all swam dizzily before her eyes another second before he sat on the side of the bed. A frown colored his voice as he asked, “Are you all right?” and she opened her eyes and discovered how close he sat.

Her heart thudded. Close, hot, aroused. “Just overheated. And thirsty.”

He handed her the bottle. She thanked him politely and lifted it to her lips. Then, as she drank, she made the mistake of meeting his eyes and the burn of heat in their deeply shadowed depths sucked at her breath. And her mouthful of water went down the wrong way, leaving her choking and coughing and disconcerted.

She couldn’t meet his eyes. And because she looked away, she had no notice of what he was doing, no warning that he was going to touch her. The pad of his thumb stroked across her chest, spreading dampness against her hot skin.

Air hissed between her teeth, and for a moment she thought that was the sizzle of his touch on her skin. Her eyes shot to his, connected with that same scorch. “What are you doing?”

He took his hand away and disappointment tightened hard and low in her belly.

“Spillage.” His gaze slipped down to where he’d touched, then lower. “Best I leave the rest to you.”

She looked down too, saw what she hadn’t even felt. The damp circle over one half of her breast. The clear outline of her nipple. She swallowed. “The water went down the wrong way.”

“I noticed.”

Their eyes connected again, with a glint of knowledge at what they’d both noticed. In her, in him.

And before she did something or said something regrettable, she searched around for a safer topic. The first thing her eyes lit upon was his sleeping bag spread on the far side of the fire, on the perimeter of its red-tinged glow. Smooth and untouched. “I know I’m having trouble sleeping,” she said, “but it looks like you haven’t even tried.”

He turned a little, followed her line of gaze. “The floor wasn’t so inviting.”

“Your choice,” she reminded him. “We could be sharing the bed.”

Slowly his gaze slid back to hers. Something that looked like
are-you-kidding-me?
crossed his expression and she felt the heat, the color, the knowledge flare below her skin in her throat and her cheeks. But she lifted her chin and met that incredulous look.

“We both have sleeping bags. It’s not as if I’m inviting you to slide between the sheets with me.” She lifted her shoulders in an attempt at a casual shrug. “We can top and tail if that helps.”

“I doubt that would help, Zara.”

She inhaled sharply, swamped by the vivid imagery he painted with that one line. With the wry intonation and the burn of heat in eyes she had once thought cold as the winter ocean.

That seemed so very long ago.

“If I trust you,” she said, straightening her shoulders and meeting those eyes steadily, “can you agree to trust me?”

“Why would you trust me?” he asked warily.

“Because you’re my best friend’s fiancé and a gentleman.” She paused a beat. “Because we’re both adults and neither one of us wants anything to happen between us.”

He continued to eye her with a curious mix of circumspection and concentration, as if he were searching back through her words looking for hidden traps. She scooted to the other side of the bed, which, being a double, wasn’t a terribly long way.

But it was a stance and a demonstration of intent.
Me on my side, you on yours.
When he still didn’t move, she patted the mattress she’d cleared. “Don’t be a chicken, Alex. Get your pillow and sleeping bag and give it a try.”

The coward taunt worked. When he got up to fetch his things, Zara silently congratulated herself. She also took the opportunity to drink without choking, and it was only after he’d returned and stretched his long body out on top of his carefully positioned sleeping bag that she questioned what she’d just done.

Nothing,
she answered herself.
Nothing is going to happen.

That’s what her brain said while her breathing grew shallow and her heart rate blew up and her glands pumped a steady stream of I-want-stuff-to-happen hormones into her blood.

From the corner of her eye she could just make out his figure in the low light. On his back, hands resting on his abdomen, bare feet crossed at the ankle. A couple of feet separated them, yet she could feel his proximity in every cell of her body.

She could not just lie there, saying nothing, doing
nothing. She wanted to talk about something light and easy and safe. Her gaze fastened on the ghostly silhouette of her bike. Their only means of transport in the morning.

“I bet I know why you can’t sleep,” she said.

He didn’t answer.

“I can hear you thinking.”

“That’s my stomach rumbling,” he said.

Zara smiled. “No, it’s definitely your brain. You’re worried about tomorrow.”

That got his attention. She felt the shift of interest, heard the subtle friction as his head turned on his pillow. “What am I worried about, exactly?” he asked slowly.

“About putting yourself in my hands. When you get on the back of my bike.”

She’d expected him to scoff at that. Or to suggest that he’d be in charge and she would ride pillion. She didn’t imagine Alex Carlisle rode in life’s passenger seat too often.

She sure didn’t expect the long, still stretch of a pause or his quietly spoken answer. “I’m not worried about putting myself in your hands, Zara.”

That answer seemed laced with everything she felt. Every wired strain in her body, every thud of her heartbeat, every shiver of heat in her blood. Man, but she ached to turn on her side, to look into his eyes, to see if they reflected the sensual ache low in her body.

But she didn’t, she couldn’t, in case she did something silly like inviting him into her hands. He wasn’t hers to touch, he wasn’t hers to hold.

“What’s the first thing you’re going to do?” she asked instead. “When we get back to town? I’m thinking about a long, hot shower.”

“I’m thinking about eating.”

She smiled at that, at the tone, at the certainty, at the dryness. At the fact that she’d inadvertently hit upon the one thing that would take her mind off her other hunger. “Well, yes, but I figure we’ll do that at the first roadhouse or café we come across. I’m thinking about one of those big truckie’s breakfasts. Bacon and eggs and sausages.”

“With mushrooms?”

Her tummy growled and she did too, in sympathy. “Oh, yeah.”

“Tomatoes?”

“Grilled and drizzled with cheese.”

“Coffee,” he said, low and sybaritic. “I don’t even care if it’s instant.”

She made a low
mmm
of assent as she pondered her cup of hot tea. “Afterwards,” she continued dreamily a few seconds later, “I’m going to have one of those chocolate bars I foolishly denied myself yesterday.”

“For breakfast?”

Frowning, she turned to look at him. “I thought you loved chocolate.”

“Never before noon.”

“Are you always so disciplined?”

For a moment he continued to stare up at the ceiling, then slowly he rolled his head on the pillow and she felt the burn of his gaze as it fixed on hers. “We’ll see.”

The breath caught in her throat, a hitch of sound they both heard and understood. A hitch of the knowledge that, despite her earlier avowal of trust, only her sleeping bag and his discipline separated them on this bed.

We’ll see.

Those words beat through her with the same constant driving rhythm as the rain on the roof, with the same beat as forbidden desire, strong and thick and unrelenting. “I
guess you’ll be going back to Sydney,” she said. “Once we get out of here.”

“If I can’t find Susannah. Yes.”