Her Outback Protector

by Margaret Way

  She brought the Jeep to a halt a little distance from the pens. To one side she could see a calf cradle, a ratchet locking device that restrained the calves due for earmarking, branding, dehorning and castration. She slid out of the Jeep and stood with her back against the passenger door watching Daniel stride towards her. Back in the city any guy that looked like him would be mobbed on a daily basis she thought with wry amusement. She had never seen anyone so young exude so much authority. It was strange to think Daniel didn’t know who his father was. He had to be a six footer plus, strikingly handsome. From which parent had come those extraordinary eyes? They were the colour of sun on water.

  “Hi!” He sketched a salute, forefinger to the brim of his cream akubra.

  “Hi, Daniel,” she replied, not a whit disconcerted by the way he towered over her. Authority emanated from Daniel, never menace. “When you stalked off, you missed lunch so I brought you some sandwiches.”

  “Now aren’t you kind.” He smiled at her, wondering if her beautiful skin was as cool and soft as it looked. “The men are about due for a break. I’ll get Nat to make us a cup of tea. You can meet the men in the break.”

  “I’d like that,” she said, following him over to an area of deep shade. The thick stubby grass that surrounded the tall gums was studded with the all embracing wildflowers, their pretty faces brighter in the refreshing shade. The men had looked up at her arrival, but when she looked back, they had their heads down, hard at work.

  Nat turned out to be a wiry jackeroo of around twenty whose duties included making the billy tea for the men when they were out on the job. He had recently perfected an old-fashioned camp fire damper which he offered to Sandra spread with lashings of jam. She accepted tea and the damper with a smile not about to tell him she rarely drank tea and never ate jam. Somehow she’d choke it down.

  She and Daniel made themselves comfortable beneath the shadiest tree, Sandra thinking there was no one she’d rather share the moment with. How did one reach such a point so early in a friendship? she thought in some wonderment. All she was absolutely certain of, was, she had.

  Daniel, oblivious to her soul searching, opened out his packet of sandwiches kept fresh by cling wrap. “These look good,” he said appreciatively, getting a kick out of the fact she had thought of him. But then she was thoughtful. And very kind. He remembered her little friend Nikki and the sacrifice Sandra had made of her crowning glory.

  “Eat up!” she said happily.

  His smile was beautiful. The towering gums were beautiful, the crush of wildflowers at their feet were beautiful. The cooling breeze was beautiful, the aromatic smell of the camp fire. Everything was beautiful she thought ecstatically.

  “You must be hungry?” She stretched out a little, revelling in the vast landscape.

  He held a protective hand over the package. “I’ll just down a few of these before you start to pinch them.”

  “It’s okay. I had lunch.”

  “How did it go?” He shot her a sidelong glance thinking her profile was like a perfect cameo.

  Sandra swallowed a mouthful of tea, finding it surprisingly good. “Uncle Lloyd was in a conciliatory mood. Bernie was Bernie and Elsa made a few surprising comments that struck home. As a child I couldn’t make her out. I can’t now. She’s so quiet, but I have the feeling a lot is going on in her head.”

  “Well it can’t be good. She looks positively haunted to me.” Daniel picked up another sandwich, deriving a great deal of pleasure in the company of his new boss. Even in the heat of the afternoon she was as bright and fresh as the daisies that ringed them round. She had a tiny beauty spot high up on her right cheekbone just beneath the outer corner of her eye. It emphasized the porcelain perfection of her skin and the natural darkness of her lashes and brows. Quite a contrast with the buttercup coloured hair that clung to her beautifully shaped skull. Not many could look so good with so little hair.

  Sandra, while endeavouring to appear not to, was intensely aware of his leisurely inspection and was just as intensely satisfied. She wanted him to notice her. She was actively willing it. “Why are you looking at me like that?” she asked.

  He laughed. “May a cat not look at the queen?”

  “I suppose so if it gets the opportunity. This damper is very good but I don’t actually eat jam. Would you like it? Then I can have one of those sandwiches.”

  “Which one?” he asked with an amused look on his face.

  “Oh any! I couldn’t get my tongue around lunch although I was hungry. Bernie was shouting and shoving his chair around. It put me off.”

  “I don’t want the damper, either,” he told her, passing a ham and mustard sandwich and looking Nat’s way. “I’ll eat just about anything when I’m hungry but not damper. It sticks in my chest.”

  “You’ll have to eat it,” she said. “We don’t want to offend him.”

  He shook his head carelessly. “He’ll get over it. So did you tell them you want me to move into the house?”

  She tossed her head back. “I said you’d fit in like you belonged there.”

  “Like hell I will!” he muttered beneath his breath.

  “No matter, you’re doing me a great service. Elsa took the news with great equanimity. She can’t have much fun with Uncle Lloyd and Bernie who, predictably, had serious misgivings.”

  He drained his mug of tea. “Please don’t tell me on a beautiful day like this.”

  “It is a beautiful day, isn’t it?” She gave a voluptuous sigh, looking utterly relaxed. A gorgeous butterfly drifted by just to add to her happiness. “You can smell all the wildflowers!” She inhaled. “I used to love Moondai when I was a kid.”

  “Why wouldn’t you? It’s a part of you.” He was entranced and entertained by her ever changing expressions. She might be small but there was a lot of life in her.

  “I know that now. Daniel, why do you suppose my mother thought Uncle Lloyd wanted to get rid of my dad? Uncle Lloyd is a passionate botanist for God’s sake.”

  “I can’t imagine him killing anyone, Sandra.” While Daniel didn’t have a lot of time for Sandra’s uncle, he had to say what he believed.

  “He wouldn’t have to do it himself,” she pointed out.

  “No.” He was deeply sceptical. “Your uncle isn’t the most likable man in the world. He’s an appalling snob, but not, I think, a murderer.”

  “Who then?” she asked. “Bernie has more hang-ups than I have, but he was just a kid. Elsa? I can’t imagine Elsa turning into a homicidal maniac. Marrying Grandad had to be one of the worst decisions she ever made. She mustn’t have wanted a man who would play around like her first husband. Sex creates tremendous problems.”

  Daniel leaned back, the more to study her. “When it’s good it beats most things,” he offered casually.

  “I beg your pardon?” Her heart started to make wild little flutters in her chest.

  “You don’t agree?” One eyebrow shot up sardonically.

  She coloured up. “You keep waiting for me to make a slip.”

  “I do.” He looked at her with a mixture of gentle mockery and indulgence.

  “Well you’re not ever going to hear it,” she promised.

  “And here I am the soul of discretion,” he said. “Your secrets are safe with me, Alexandra. Anyway we were talking about more momentous things. Who hated your dad enough to want to see him dead? We already know yours is a highly dysfunctional family but I think you’d have to rule them out. It was an accident, pure and simple. Now you’re a woman as opposed to the child, you have to accept that. Your mother would have been in a highly emotional state. She probably hated your uncle as much as he hated her.”

  “He was right about her behaviour when she was away from us,” Sandra stared down at the tea leaves at the bottom of her tin mug as though the random arrangement held answers. “Mother was a bad, bad, girl. She’s highly susceptible to male admiration to this day. I didn’t see it then of course. I heard what Uncle Lloyd was saying but I c
ouldn’t understand what he was getting at. Heck, I was only a kid. What I did take in was the way he questioned whether Dad was my father or not.”

  “Now that’s really wicked.” Daniel gave his judgment.

  “And just plain wrong.”

  “Sometimes I wanted to attack him with a meat axe,” Sandra confided, watching the beautiful butterfly, a marvellous blue, make another circuit of their heads.

  Daniel ran his thumb along his lean jaw. “You’re a blood-thirsty little thing. I just hope I never fall out with you.”

  She jabbed him in the arm. “You must never, never, do that, Daniel.”

  “Even if it’s a lot to ask?”

  He didn’t smile. He appeared to be taking her seriously.

  “Even then.” She nodded as though she could see into the future. “You’ve signed on for another year. I won’t be twenty-one until August. A journey of six months. You have to stick around for another six after that.”

  “Will do. Hey, sit still,” he urged in a hushed tone.

  “What is it? What’s the matter?”

  He sat up straight. “A butterfly has been hovering around. It’s alighted on your head. Probably thinks it’s a chrysanthemum.”

  “Oooh!” She drew in her breath and held it. “Is it still there?”

  “Want me to catch it?”

  “You might damage its wings.”

  “No, I won’t!”

  He sounded very sure. Still she shut her eyes. When she opened them again, their heads were very close together, the sable and the golden yellow. “All right, ready?” he murmured.

  “Ready.”

  He opened his hand slowly, revealing the butterfly in all its beauty. It clung to the skin of his hand for barely a second, brilliant blue, yellow and black wings with a glinting yellow body, before it flew off.

  “Surely that’s a good omen,” she whispered, staring into his eyes. They were so close she held her breath. This man was beautiful! He made her insides ache.

  “I’m sure it is,” Daniel said just as softly.

  Something in his eyes, in his voice, made a thousand tingles run up and down her spine. Neither of them moved—it was as though movement was impossible—then Daniel pulled back, casualness falling over his intense expression.

  Sandra followed his lead, though the tingles hadn’t gone away. She sat back, her shoulders pressed against the trunk of the tree. “By the way, Grandad didn’t approach you with any deal, did he?” she asked after a moment.

  “What sort of deal, Ms Kingston?” He was all crisp attention.

  “Oh forget it,” she said, taking swift note of the crease between his brows. “Just me being paranoid. Bernie took one hell of a crack on the head when he was a kid. Fell off his horse. Maybe that explains why he too is wandering around in an emotional fog.” She broke off, as the stockmen started coming around for their afternoon tea break. “Time to meet the men,” she said.

  “Right you are, ma’am.” Daniel stood up, offering her his hand. “Some of them were around when you left.”

  “I’ve already met quite a few people on my way out here,” she told him. Now the tingles spread from her spine to her hand, to everywhere! “I loved the babies. I’ve been invited to a getting to know you morning tea. The schoolteacher wants me to look in on the lessons. I mean to meet everyone on the station. That includes the aboriginal people who pass through on walkabout.”

  “Seems more and more like you intend to stay?”

  “Who knows!” She took a very deep breath. “One thing I do know with certainty. My life has changed forever.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  DANIEL had been expecting a bedroom modest in size—or as modest as the rooms at Moondai homestead could get—and furnished in a way that reflected the taste of a very young girl. Maybe not lots of pink, painted furniture, decorations, a collection of dolls and so forth, given Sandra’s self confessed tomboy qualities. What he got was the stuff of dreams. Ms Alexandra Kingston’s childhood bedroom was very large and very grand. So large in fact she must have been lost in it.

  “Think you can get used to it?” She circled the huge four poster bed with its draped canopy, giving the beautiful embroidered silk cover several good thumps while she was at it.

  “Dressing room adjoining, the bathroom pretty small for a big man but it will do.”

  “I’m sure.” He looked about him with the same sense of wonder he had once felt wandering around an Adelaide art gallery. The bedroom walls were hung with paintings. Not any old paintings. He had a naturally good eye, or so he had been told, but art works as good as the ones he was looking at immediately declared their quality. A magnificent antique chest stood at the foot of the bed. She could easily have hidden in it as a child. Maybe even now. A splendid crystal chandelier hung above his head.

  “Baccarat,” Sandra said nonchalantly, as he tilted his head.

  “Of course, Baccarat!” he mocked. He’d never seen anything like it before.

  There was a big comfortable cushion laden sofa upholstered in the same gold silk as the bedspread, two armchairs to match and a wing back chair covered in a bold tapestry obviously designed for a man. “I had the wing back chair brought in especially for you,” she explained, moving to grace it.

  “Not many people have a bedroom like this,” he said, brushing long darkly tanned fingers across the pile of a cushion.

  “I didn’t want my bedroom to look like anybody else’s,” she said.

  His mouth twisted. “You certainly got your wish. What is extraordinary is, you wanted all this when you were what—?”

  Sandra rested her bright yellow head against the striking tapestry, the fabric a complementary mix of golds, bronzes and deep crimsons. “Around eight, I guess. I asked my dad if I could have a look around the stuff in the storeroom and he said, ‘I’ll come with you.’ We picked the furniture together. I spotted the chandelier in a big box. Dad had it repaired and in no time at all it was up.”

  “Where was your mother when all this was happening?” he asked thinking her father’s sudden death must have left a tremendous void in her life.

  “Oh around,” she said vaguely. “Mama said my taste was unbelievable.”

  “It was very exotic for a small girl.”

  “That’s exactly what I wanted. Exotic, like the old travel books I read in the library. Something from an Arabian bazaar or Aladdin’s Cave. Don’t you just love the Persian rug under your feet?”

  “Don’t tell me.” He moved backwards so he could study the central medallion and the floral arabesques. “It flies?”

  “No, no,” she said, laughing. “It’s a late nineteenth-century Isfahan. My great-great-great-grandmother, Alexandra, was a rich Scottish lassie who was the big collector in the family. That’s her portrait over there.” She pointed to a large painting of an aristocratic looking young woman with a thick mane of bright red hair, narrow green eyes, very white skin and a pointed chin. She wasn’t a beauty, her features were too sharp, but she was certainly striking as was her richly decorated dark green velvet dress.

  “Nice to have ancestors,” he said dryly.

  “Have you never tried to find out who your father was, Daniel?” she asked, hearing the darkness in his tone. “I thought you could find out anything these days.”

  “Did you now?” he said, turning away from this young woman who was right out of his league. Outback royalty no less. Even the ancestor looked impossibly classy. He moved closer to inspect a gilt framed equine painting of a magnificent white Arabian stallion in a half rearing—neck bent stylised pose. In the background beneath a darkening turquoise sky was its dark skinned handler, with a bright red fez on his head. A fine horseman and a great lover of the most beautiful of all animals this was the one painting he coveted.

  “French,” Sandra said seeing his interest. “Late 1800s. I absolutely love it. Do I take it you tried but got nowhere?”

  “Nowhere at all,” he said briefly, turning back to face her. Her eyes
were like precious gems, so dark a blue in some lights and depending on what she wore, they were violet. Did she know she looked like a painting herself framed by the antique armchair that all but swallowed her up?

  “I’m sorry, Daniel,” she said, those huge eyes sad and serious.

  “I’ve dealt with it,” he said brusquely, wanting yet not wanting her sympathy.

  “How?”

  “You ask too many questions.” He began to prowl around restlessly.

  “What happened to your mother?”

  He picked up a silver object, put it down again. “She just died. I don’t like to talk about it.”

  “Maybe you should. I hoped you would talk to me. After all I know a lot about death. Your mother must have been very young?”

  “She was,” he said sombrely, wanting her to leave it alone.

  “But I can hold on to her memory.”

  “Yes, you can,” she agreed, turning her face more fully towards him. “I remember as clearly as though it were yesterday the afternoon my father was buried. All the Kingstons are buried on Moondai.”

  “I know.” He was familiar with the family cemetery where Rigby Kingston had been buried alongside his first wife, Catherine, who had died of cancer, his favourite son, Trevor, not far away; his ancestors around him. His mother’s ashes he had tossed on a desert whirlwind for that was what she had wanted. No trace left.

  “Of course, you were there,” Sandra realized. “My grandfather obviously didn’t want me at his funeral. Maybe he was trying to spare me something Lord knows! But I held his hand the day my father was buried.”