O'Reilly felt a warm glow of pride as he watched his daughter ignore the boy's continuing taunts. Liam would have been off his horse in a flash, ready to pull the Cox boy down into the dust and bloody him. But Hannah was too smart to let herself be distracted or irritated in any way. Her attention was focused inward, gathering her forces for the contest ahead.
O'Reilly held the stick out to Amanda. "Whenever you're ready, Miss Davenport."
She met his smiling gaze with a start of surprise. He saw her hesitate, then reach for the makeshift flag. For one moment, their hands both grasped the stick as it passed between them. O'Reilly let go and stepped back.
She raised the flag high. A tense, expectant hush fell over the crowd. Then the flag dropped.
The horses broke away in a bunch. All except the gray, which had swung around and was facing backward at the crucial moment. Its rider, swearing viciously enough to bring bright color to Amanda's cheeks, yanked the horse's head about and brought his crop down with a resounding whack. The gray bolted forward.
The other horses streaked across the field together, clattering safely over the first hurdle, their hooves chipping at the hard, dry earth.
"Up here," said O'Reilly, taking Amanda's arm as they ran with the rest of the noisy, cheering crowd to a nearby high bank. "We'll be able to see better."
As they topped the bank, the horses cleared the second hurdle, then soared over the small creek bed, the first four all still in a bunch. But by the time they reached the turning, they were strung out in a ragged line. Hannah was in third place, behind Cox's white mare and the dark bay from Arkaba. The nervous gray had already passed the showy black, and was coming up on the three leaders fast.
"Come on, Hannah," whispered Amanda, clenching her little white-gloved fists in front of her. "Move up."
"She's holding him back," said O'Reilly, his eyes narrowing as he watched the horses pour over the next hurdle. "Cox is pushing that mare too hard. She won't last the whole two miles at that pace. And neither will the dark bay."
The spectators on the bank jumped and yelled themselves hoarse as the racers swept past in front of them. The very earth seemed to quiver beneath the thudding hooves as the horses streamed over the nearest hurdle. They stretched out over the flat, then turned sharply at the creek, heading back out across the plain, an overlapping ribbon of flashing hooves and sweating horseflesh and straining riders.
As they thundered past the bank again, Hannah eased Fire Dancer up past the dark bay, into second place. But she was still a good three lengths behind the Cox mare.
All around them, the crowd cheered and yelled and swayed back and forth in a frenzy of excitement. All except Amanda. O'Reilly felt her fingers dig into his arm. He glanced down at her tense, anxious face and rigidly stiff body, and wondered if she even realized she was clutching him so desperately. He watched her strain forward, and knew she wanted to yell and hop around like everyone else. A wave of sympathy swept over him. She was so obviously held back. Held back by her own damned hide-bound ideas about the kind of behavior fitting and proper for an English gentlewoman.
Let go, Amanda, he wanted to say. Let go and jump up and down and scream and shout like the rest of them. The way you want to. The way you need to.
But she couldn't.
A ragged cheer arose from the crowd as the horses swept around the broken rocks on the distant rise for the second and last time. Looking up, he saw the white mare still in the lead, Fire Dancer pacing it three lengths behind, the dark bay and the nervous gray hard on his heels. The showy black lagged far behind.
"Now, Hannah," O'Reilly said quietly. "Let him go."
As if she heard him, Hannah leaned low over the big stallion's neck. His stride reached out, accelerating. Hannah's fluid, lithe body seemed to flow into the muscular strength of the stallion, until it was as if the girl and the horse moved as one, were one.
Fire Dancer's flashing legs churned up the distance, gained steadily on the white mare, left the dark bay and the gray far behind. When they lifted over the next hurdle, Hannah was only two lengths behind Richard Cox. By the time they closed on the last jump, Cox's lead had narrowed to less than a length.
And then, just when it looked as if Hannah were set to ease into the lead for the final jump and the home stretch, Fire Dancer stumbled. Hannah pulled him up, but they were too close to the last hurdle. Cox sailed over it easily, but O'Reilly could see the tense awareness on Hannah's face as she realized she was coming at the jump all wrong.
She hauled in rein, but it was too late. The big bay lifted into the air a stride too soon.
"Oh, my God," Amanda cried. "She's going to fall." Amanda lunged forward, as if she could physically stop it from happening. O'Reilly caught her around the waist and held on. "Hannah," she whispered, clutching frantically to the arm he wrapped around her. "Oh, Hannah."
O'Reilly's arms tightened around her warm body, hugging her close, his gut churning, his heart thudding painfully. If Hannah fell now, the others would all smash into her. She'd be horribly injured.
Or killed.
To O'Reilly, it seemed as if the big, bloodred stallion soared through the air in slow motion. He had always admired his daughter's horsemanship, but he realized now that he'd never fully appreciated just how gifted she truly was. Just when he was convinced the stallion would come down in disaster, she somehow managed to collect him in midair. His stride lengthened out, and they cleared the last hurdle with a jarring but safe landing.
Ahead of her, flat out in a wild gallop, Richard Cox risked throwing a glance over his shoulder at the horse thundering up behind him. His lead narrowed to a length again. Half a length. His elbows pumped like jack handles, his whip rose and fell unmercifully. But his horse was spent.
"Hannah!" yelled O'Reilly, his fist punching into the air. "That's my girl!"
And then whatever it was that had been holding Amanda back, broke away. "Hannah!" she cried, jumping up and down in wild abandon beside O'Reilly. "Come on, Hannah. Come on, you can do it! Come on. Come on."
A sonnet of bloodred, rhythmic muscle moving poetically beneath the light, sure hands of a dark-haired slip of a girl, the stallion swept past Cox's Lady. Together, Hannah and Fire Dancer streaked across the finish line, winning easily by two lengths.
Amanda, all her prim, proper decorum totally forgotten, swung around in O'Reilly's arms and laughed up at him with such unselfconscious happiness, it stopped his breath. "She won! Hannah won."
Wordlessly, he stared down into Amanda's radiant face, at her full lips trembling with emotion, at her fine gray eyes glistening with tears of joy. Around them, the shouting, bustling crowd streamed down the bank toward the foam-flecked, steaming horses and their heaving riders. But O'Reilly's gaze stayed locked with Amanda's as his feelings for her swelled inside him, warm and filling and exciting. Laughing, he closed his hands on her waist and lifted her up into the air, high up, spinning around and around with her in a dizzy, triumphant circle.
She gave a wide-eyed gasp of surprise and clutched wildly at his shoulders. But then her head fell back in delight and her laughter mingled with his, spontaneous and uninhibited and exuberant as for one stolen moment, Amanda soared free.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Memory of where they were returned to Amanda far too quickly.
She could not believe she had allowed O'Reilly to display such familiarity toward her in public. "Mister O'Reilly," she said with a horrified gasp as she stared down into his handsome, laughing face. "Please put me down. You are making a spectacle of me."
He let her slide slowly down the length of his long, hard body, but he didn't let her go. "Relax, Mandy," he said against her ear. "No one's looking."
She was excruciatingly aware of the heat of his lean, muscular body pressed against hers. She batted his hands from her waist and jerked away from him to follow the crowd rushing down the slope. "You mustn't call me Mandy in public," she hissed at him. "It is not proper." She fussed with her skirts and st
raightened her bonnet and did anything she could think of to avoid looking at the man keeping pace with her.
"Do you always have to be proper, Amanda?"
"Of course."
"Why?" He grabbed her arm and pulled her around to face him again. "What happens if you're not? What happens if you just let go like everyone else and have a bit of fűn? Are you afraid people will think you've stopped being a proper, precious bloody Englishwoman? Is that what really scares you about this country? The way it makes you feel? The way it makes you want to behave?"
She knocked his hand from her arm. "Don't! " she cried, 249
meaning not just don't touch me but also don't say these things to me.
They stared at each other, eyes wide. Down by the empty creek bed, a magpie broke into song, its joyous melody joining with the sound of Hannah's high, light laughter.
"There's Hannah," Amanda said, swinging away to walk stiffly to where the girl was just sliding down from the back of the big stallion.
Hannah spotted Amanda and her father through the crowd and started forward, Fire Dancer's reins still clutched in her hand. "Did you see me, Miss Davenport?" she asked, her cheeks flushed, her chest heaving with the effort of the hard ride, her eyes glowing with pride. "Did you see, Papa?"
Amanda smiled and nodded, but she held back, letting Hannah's father be the first to congratulate her.
Amanda had expected O'Reilly to sweep his daughter into his arms in an exuberant display of affection and pride. She watched, stunned, as he simply sauntered over to casually clamp one arm around Hannah's shoulders and pull her against his side in a rough hug. "Good onya, mate," he said, as if she were Liam, or even just one of the stockmen.
A wave of indignation swept over Amanda. How could he treat Hannah's win so casually? Didn't he know how much this meant to the girl? Couldn't he have done something, said something to show how proud he was of her?
Then Amanda saw Hannah's glowing face, and she understood.
Australian men never called a female mate. It was a man's word, a word reserved exclusively for other males. A word that somehow embodied all the comradeship, all the pride, all the quiet strength, all the exclusivity that was part of being a man.
O'Reilly probably couldn't have said anything that would have gratified Hannah more.
Patrick O'Reilly's after-shearing dance was unlike any ball Amanda had ever attended.
It wasn't just the venue—the woolshed. Or the band, which consisted of a redheaded Irish miner with an accordion and a skinny, gray-whiskered fiddle player Amanda recognized as Ichabod Hornbottom, the proprietor of the Brinkman Inn. The main problem was that the number of men present outnumbered the women by about five to one.
If they wanted to dance, most of the men had to dance with each other. That might have been all right, except that when the men weren't dancing, they spent their time clustered around the long refreshment tables set up just outside the great eastern doors. Every once in a while they'd stagger back into the golden light of the woolshed, reeking of tobacco and rum and laughing so hard, they had to hold each other up as their wayward feet tried to follow the instructions of the caller guiding the dancers through the rounds. When a couple of children playing tag darted across the dance floor, four all- male couples trying to pivot in a square collided into one another and toppled over like skittles.
Amanda choked on a laugh and quickly raised one white- gloved hand to hide her smile.
"Appalling," muttered an outraged female English voice to her right. Someone else tssked audibly. Amanda cleared her throat and carefully schooled her features.
She formed one of a row of sedate English governesses who sat, stiff and disapproving, on a line of wool bales shoved up against the wall to form a makeshift bench. She had told the children she would not dance tonight, and she meant it. But as the fiddle wailed faster and faster, her rebellious feet picked up the beat and began tapping surreptitiously beneath her drab skirts.
She rested her hands on her knees to still them.
Across the room, she could see Christian Whittaker talking to some of the managers from the Brinkman mine. He was dressed in neat gray pin-striped trousers and a matching coat with a burgundy brocade vest over a striped shirt, and she found his familiar, respectable appearance both calming and reassuring. He was such a comfort. When she'd told him of her decision not to dance, he'd assured her that he understood her sentiments exactly. One could always rely on Mr. Whittaker, Amanda thought, to act the perfect gentleman.
Unfortunately, O'Reilly was no gentleman.
"That's the stupidest bloody thing I've ever heard," he'd announced, hands on hips, when he found out.
" Mister O'Reilly," she'd hissed, quickly glancing around to see if he'd been overheard.
"Why the hell won't you dance with me?"
"I told you. I do not think it appropriate for me to dance at all."
"Oh you don't, do you? Well, I'll tell you what's inappropriate." He jabbed one finger into the air before her nose in a way that was becoming a habit with him. "It's inappropriate for one of the few pretty young women in a room full of men to announce she's going to sit against the wall all night like some dried-up old hag who gave up on having a life twenty years ago." He flung his hand out in the direction of the line of stern-faced, faded governesses.
" Mister O'Reilly." But the protest was more obligatory than real, because inside, her heart gave a little leap of pleasure. So he thought she was pretty, did he? It was difficult to force her face into a frown. "I am here as a governess, not a guest. I belong with those women."
He pursed his lips and blew out a long sigh. "Don't you understand? No one is making those damn women sit there. They're the ones who decided it's not proper for them to have any fun."
"Quite rightly."
"Who says?"
"Not who, Mr. O'Reilly. What. Something called propriety. Custom."
"English custom, maybe. Not Australian."
"But I, sir, am English." And with that, she spun about on her heel and stalked over to join that depressing line of desiccated, lifeless gentlewomen.
Suppressing a sigh, Amanda tilted back her head against the rough stone wall and half closed her eyes until the interior of the woolshed was only a blur of golden light and bare timber and stone and the whirling, laughing, gaily clothed splashes of the dancers.
She knew the building had been thoroughly scrubbed in preparation for the dance, but the scents of the shearing lingered still, she decided, faintly detectable beneath the ladies' perfume and the gentlemen's hair oil and the hot press of dancing bodies. She imagined that if she tried, she could almost catch the faint echo of clicking shears and bleating sheep beneath the swish of the ladies' satin gowns and the stomp of the men's boots and the cheerful, energetic wailing of the fiddle and accordion.
A querulous but well-bred English voice intruded upon her thoughts. "One would think the least they could do is provide us with decent seats."
Amanda swiveled her head to look at the lady who sat beside her, stiffly sharing the same wool bale. Miss Iantha Thorndike was governess to the Browne family of Wilpena Pound. A spare woman with a long face and eyes as tiny as a ferret's, she'd kept her mouth crimped into a pained scowl for so many years that it now seemed little wider than her thin nose. Her dress was a dull brown, the same dull brown as her hair and her beady little eyes. In age, she could have been anywhere between thirty-five and fifty-five. Looking at her, Amanda found it difficult to believe that this severe, joyless woman had ever been really young.
"It is so typical of life in the colonies, is it not?" continued Iantha, taking Amanda's silence for agreement. "This strange mixture of refinement and roughing it which one finds here. In England, of course, as governesses, we would never have been invited to attend a ball. But then again, in England no one would think of expecting a gentlewoman to sit on a wool bale, of all things."
Amanda stared at the arrogant, mean-souled Englishwoman beside her and felt a rush of u
nexpected antipathy, mingling with a righteous urge to leap to the defense of the man who had provided the wool bales, and the music, and the endless flood of food she'd noticed Miss Thorndike enjoying all day long.
"Actually, they smell better than the parlor sofas," said Amanda, her tongue pressed against her cheek in an effort to keep a straight face. "I'm afraid Liam's dog sleeps on them most of the time."
"Hhmm." Iantha contracted her dried-up mouth like a pale raisin. "I suppose one must learn to expect almost anything when dealing with such a collection of parvenus and mushrooms." She threw a speaking glance toward the dance floor, where a boisterous Irish jig was in progress. "Oh, there are a few ladies and gentlemen from good families, of course. But as for the rest! One grows so tired of the pervading vulgarity of mind and general want of intellect and breeding that most squatters betray." Iantha leaned in closer and lowered her voice. "I have heard that Mr. O'Reilly actually employs black savages. How trying it must be for you."
Black savages. It was an expression Amanda had used herself. But for some reason, hearing Iantha Thorndike condescendingly refer to Jacko and Sally and Pinba in that way suddenly made Amanda understand fully, for the first time, exactly why O'Reilly hated that phrase so much.
"True," said Amanda. "But he does ask them to put on their clothes when they come up to the house itself."
Iantha's eyes widened in horror. "Do you mean they are actually allowed on the station in a state of... of nudity?" She splayed one hand across her chest, as if to hide her own meager bosom from view.
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