The Bridesmaid's Wedding

by Margaret Way

  Rafe came up behind them, his tall figure silhouetted by brilliant sunshine. “Guilty,” he said with satisfaction.

  “Once he knew he’d left a little calling card, he folded.

  The police will let us know when the case comes before the court but Ally doesn’t have to go.”

  “Well, it was a dreadful thing to happen.” Cheryl looked dismayed at the cast on Ally’s forearm. “Not that you haven’t done damage to that before. Now…” She started to bustle towards the rear of the house with them following her up, a small wry woman with a cap of salt and pepper curls, snapping dark eyes. and a network of fine lines etched into her face. “I made a lovely cake first thing this morning. You’ll love it, Rafe, men have such a sweet tooth, and a batch of biscuits. You can have them with your cup of tea. I’m happy to make it for you,” she offered.

  “That’s all right, Cheryl.” They moved into the huge, shining kitchen and Ally patted Cheryl’s shoulder. “I’m not an invalid and It don’t want to put you out. It’s a comfort to know you’re around if I get into any trouble but mercifully it’s my left hand.”

  “Don’t try to be too independent, dear,” Cheryl warned her. “Don’t forget I’ve known you al your life.”

  “Are you saying I misbehaved?”

  “You’re telling me.” Cheryl clicked her tongue.

  “Wasn’t it Rafe here who christened you the naughtiest little girl in the world.”

  Ally smiled sadly. “Most of the time I was trying to get my father’s attention.”

  In the end Rafe made coffee for them both, slicing a couple of thick slices of Cheryl’s delicious cherry and ginger cake.

  “Let’s have it on the verandah,” Ally suggested. “I want to breathe in our wonderful air.”

  “You’re not a bit daunted at the prospect of staying here on your own?” Rafe asked when they were comfortably settled. He wasnt’t too happy about it himself but Ally was very stubborn.

  Ally shook her head, her mass of curls piled untidily but very fetchingly on top of her head. “This is my home, Rafe, it might be full of ghosts. I’m sure I’ve seen little Mary Louise Kinross playing .in the garden even if she did die at age six over a century ago. Kimbara’s ghosts and I understand one another.”

  Rafe sighed in agreement. God knows his own heart jumped around Opal. “I know what you mean. But it so happens, I’m talking about your managing with that hand out of action.”

  “Give me a little credit, darling.” She spoke briskly. “I’m Ally, remember?”

  He gave her a very attractive lopsided grin. “You have to be feeling a little emotional to call me darling.”

  “You’re kidding me.” Ally shrugged, setting her cup down. “I’ve called you darling a million times.”

  His expression was frankly mocking. “Strange, I haven’t heard it since you were a teenager.”

  “When I thought you; had an excellent memory, Rafe?”

  “You mean the night of Brod’s Wedding,” he retorted smartly, “it was never too clear what you were saying.”

  “You’re not curious?” she asked, trying to sound casual, leaning back in the white peacock chair.

  “Too damned scared to be curious,” he drawled. “I remember the last spell you laid on me.”

  “Now you’re too proud.” A stray ray of sunlight was makings a glory of his thick golden hair, gilding the fine modelling of his face with its distinctive cleft chin. She took great pleasure in the shaping of his wide shoulders, the hard muscles of his arms and chest..He was as wonderful-looking man. The same tough Outback stock as herself. She began to feel her emotions churning and it showed in her eyes.

  “Don’t try to pick a fight with me, Ally,” he warned lazily, watching the breeze further tousle her hair. She was wearingr a pink cotton shirt and a matching full skirt. Clothes she must have found easy to get into. He couldn’t help noticing through the unbuttoned neckline she wasn’t wearing a bra. A problem with the cast on her wrist. Again it was there. The quick rush of desire, the waves of urgency that made him want to sweep her into his arms. They had been so companionable these last few days, but he knew how easy it was to get swept into the rapids. “Let’s have a pleasant time,” he now murmured. “We might take a walk later if you’re up to it. I’d like to have a look around.”

  “That would nice a.” Nice? When being here with Rafe was some way to a miracle. Ally turned her head, looking towards Kimbara’s historic homel.gardens. Five acres in all. She could see three cowboy-gardeners going about the never-ending job of maintenance. It was a wonderful view from the wide verandah; great stands of native gums, tea-trees and palms, sweeping lawns kept green with bore water, a million blue and white summer-flowering agapanthus, the same huge semicircle of hydrangeas given welcome protection from the big heat by the trees. There were hundreds of flowerbeds, providing brilliant splashes of colour, a formal rose garden to the rear of the house with pergola bush roses everywhere, the sparkle and sound of running water, meandering Barella Creek with its flotilla of black swans and a small colony of ducks, its clumps of bullrushes; arum lilies and other water plants like the wonderful tropical blue lotus.

  With all the nectar-yielding shrubs in the grounds it was a garden of birds. They filled the dry aromatic air with their songs and whistles, the flash of their brilliant plumage. As a child she had run around the garden imitating the bird calls, delighting in confusing them so they actually answered back. She had been a wonderful mimic. Still was for that matter.

  Rafe was following her gaze, soaking up the garden’s beauty and tranquility. “Every time I come here I mourn what’s happened to Opal’s garden,” he said. “It sorely misses my mother’s presence. I detail some of the men but they’re no gardeners. They just know how to just clean up.”

  “You need a woman, Rafe,” she said gently. “You need a wife.”

  I want you back, he thought with a harsh throb of pain. Instead he nodded “I’ll have to give it serious thought: I’ve let things drift so long. Ours was one hell of an emotional entanglement, Ally, I can understand sornetimes how you had to flee from it.”

  “Can you?” She turned her head to stare at him with her green eyes.

  Underneath he was a touch hostile. “It frightened you as much as it gave you excitement. We always had easy communication. Sex just turned our world topsy-turvy.”

  Her glance wavered. “I never wanted to leave you, Rafe I never wanted to make you unhappy. Making people unhappy isn’t part of my nature. You had such strength, such maturity beside you I guess I felt like a wild kid out of school. I was the chosen one. I had the greatest joy and pride of being your choice for a bride.”

  He carefully suppressed the old anger. “Ally, darling. You weren’t a shy awkward kid,” he drawled, “you weren’t any quiet little virgin blushing when a man sought you out. You weren’t a young woman just beginning to explore your sexuality. You were born knowing the lot! I didn’t seduce little ole you. You were dead set on getting us both into bed.”

  She laughed mirthlessly, unable to deny it. “You can say that again. You were everything in the world I wanted. I couldn’t wait to know your body.‘ God knows

  I’d admired it often enough. I thought l had it all figured out.”

  “Then you got swept up by something else. The big career. You were always full of wild enthusiasms. Marrying Rafe and settling down on the farm didn’t seem like such a good idea, after all.”

  “You hurt me as much as I hurt you.” She turned her face to him.

  “Lovers usually do. Anyway we’re older and wiser now, Ally. Unloved. Unattached.” He was simply teasing but she reacted sharply.

  “Don’t make it sound like it’s all too late!”

  “No, there’s always Lainie,” he said in deliberate provocation. “Now there’s a girl with a lot of colour in her cheeks. A healthy girl with a good womanly body.”

  “A good breeder?” she asked. ironically.

  “A man needs children, Ally.�
�� Abruptly he sobered. “They provide us with an excellent reason for living, for striving. I like to think my genes are immortal.”

  “Well, you’d better get a move on, then,” she answered tartly, unable to catch herself.

  “All I need is your blessing, Ally. Now,” he side-tracked. “Don’t be surprised if Lainie decides to call on you. All that business with Harper hit the papers. She’s

  bound to want to call. She’s a very sweet girl.”

  An hour or more later when Rafe was leaving she made him take Cheryl’s cake and her homemade biscuits. No cake-makers on Opal. No live-in girlfriend. No wives.

  “Wouldn’t you rather keep it?” he asked as she went about putting the biscuits in tins, crisp cookies in one, raspberry coconut slices in the other.

  “No, these will be at treat for you and Grant. I love cake but I don’t eat a lot of it. I have to watch my figure.”

  “What figure?”

  It was just a little joke but some deep ache quickened. She turned abruptly away.

  “Ally?” He couldn’t imagine that he had hurt her. His beautiful Ally.

  She shook her head but he could see her face screwed up fiercely just like when she was a kid and fighting the desire to cry.

  “Ally, I didn’t mean anything at all.” His hand gently cupped her shoulder, turned her to him. “You’ve got a beautiful figure. It’s just that you’re really too thin.”

  “Oh, to hell with my figure!” she burst out, knowing she sounded foolish “Do I have to beg you to kiss me goodbye, Rafe Cameron?”

  “Ah, Ally, what can I say.” Violent longing shook him but he bent his head intending to peck her cheek then fly off home, only she moved. He couldn’t endure not kissing her any longer. Her injuries had quickly gutted his sense of self-preservation. She was always in his heart. Day and night.

  He moved his mouth gently but strongly over hers, finding it waiting, open, as sweet as the fruit from the tree of knowledge. He tried to keep the high level of sensuality down to an manageable level, but it swirled around them like licks of flame. She was standing very quietly, not moving at all, allowing him to kiss her, to slide his hand through the open neckline of her shirt another button coming loose as his hand claimed the warm ivory silk of her breast. He could feel that wonderful sexual energy crackling between them, wrapping them in coils of gold. Ally, intensely aroused. as ever by his ministrations, the highly sensitive nipples of her breasts drawing into dusky peaks as sweet as berries. She was so perfectly shaped for loving. His loving. He took profound pleasure in her.

  She was moaning a little,delighting in sensation, he the expert on her body, the sound rising, circling like a singing bird freed from its cage. It extended his desire, making it terribly hard to retreat. He could feel the tremble in his arms starting, a sure sign passion was eating him up.

  Rafe threw back his head, full of sudden, explosive frustration. “If I don’t get out of this damned kitchen. . ” Ally was the only woman in the world capable of doing this to him. It was enraging, humbling. And yet… .

  “Maybe we should undergo counselling,” Ally suggested wryly, her voice reflecting her own struggle. She was so hungry for him. In so much need. Being apart had been terrible.

  “Maybe we oughtn’t be alone together,” he grated.

  She gasped at the implications. “Don’t say that! It’s horrible. I want to come over to Opal. I haven’t seen it for so long.”

  “Did you really expect to?” He cast a stern eye over her beautiful, flushed face. Deep as his voice was, it rang. “I wanted marriage. You rejected the whole idea.”

  “But, Rafe,” she pleaded, laying her head against his chest, grateful beyond words when his arms automatically enfolded her. “I want to come.”

  “Then how can I possibly deny you.” His smile was grim; Ally, the consummate temptress. Every part of her he knew intirnately, her satiny flesh. The scent of her skin. Her flavour. Would it ever work out or would they always be coming at each other through barriers. “One thing, my on and off lover,” he warned. “You’re not sleeping over.”

  She knew justwhat he meant, her body sparkling with relief. “Would I with Grant in the house?” she joked.

  It was his turn to laugh. He had to. “Ally, you’d dream up a way,” he said dryly. “You’d even risk breaking your bones.”

  For two days Ally roamed the station in the jeep. From cool early morning when the sky was tinged with indigo and yellow to the glorious sunsets that set the sky on fire. There was simply no other place on earth that filled her with such a sense of peace, of belonging, of ancestry. Remote it might be, frighteningly lonely to some, she saw beauty everywhere. Desert, dunes and plain, the ancient eroded hills and the hidden valleys, that magic of the caves with their extraordinary rock paintings, the

  endless chains of billabongs that were a major breeding ground for nomadic waterbirds. Her favourite birds were the ones that didn’t migrate, the sulphur-crested cockatoos, and white corellas, the galahs and the brilliant parrots; the zillions of smal birds: the crimson chats and the wrens, the finch and the quail, the great flights of budgerigar flying in formation over the plains, literally turning the sky overhead to emerald with flashes of gold.

  It troubled her to see scores of pretty little zebra finch feeding on the ground only to have a hawk leisurely swoop on the group. The falcons and the great wedge-tailed eagles liked to take their prey on the Wing. That was nature. She had never become so thick-skinned that she didn’t hate the kill.

  At first, Ted, feeling responsible, was dead against her taking the jeep out, although she promised she would drive slowly to allay his fears.

  “What if you go over a damned pothole?” Ted said. “What if you run into a bloody camel? They’re ill-tempered beasts at the best of times. There are two big males on heat out in the hills. We came on them only the other day, fighting each other and roaring with rage.”

  “You didn’t shoot them?” Ally well knew the wild camels, descendants of animals imported into the desert in the early days of settlement did a great deal of damage, particularly to fences.

  Ted shook his head. “We try to tolerate them. But they’re a worse nuisance than the donkeys.”

  “I’ll keep to all the recognised tracks,” she promised, full of zeal to oblige.

  “You’ll have to, Ally.” Ted twisted his battered akubra round and round in his hands. “Rafe would tear strips off me if you had an accident.”

  “So who’s going to tell him, then?” Ally asked with insouciance. “Anyway, I haven’t done anything stupid for years. I’ve been driving around the station since I was twelve. I’ll have no difficulty controlling the jeep.

  Besides, when has a broken arm or a broken leg for that matter stopped you?”

  Ted scratched his balding head. “That’s all very well, Ally. I’m a tough old bird.”

  “So am I.” She laughed. “Don’t feel bad, pardner. Your concern is charming.”

  And she was true to her promise. She took care, keeping to the main tracks and limiting her speed. Once a kangaroo leapt out from behind a boulder to stop dead on the track right in front of her, staring at her in the familiar dopey, endearing, fashion as if she could possibly do anything to harm him. Ally obliged by going around the big marsupial. She visited the mustering camps, Watched a couple of fine-looking brumbies being broken in by Barney Crow, their part aboriginal stockman who had a wonderful way with horses.

  The men at first were a little shy of her, even the ones who had known her all her life. She wasn’t one of them anymore. She was Miss Kinross who had gone away to

  become famous. It didn’t take Ally long to make the awkwardness disappear as she enjoyed a cuppa and a slice of damper baked over the hot coals with them during a break.

  Ally had always found it easy to make friends. Her father would have been coldly disapproving. He was one of the old school who kept himself many, many steps

  removed from the station staff. Ted Holland was the
only one who had ever been allowed into the homestead. And then only to give an accounting.

  Her nights were unsettled, the old fears clawing at her dreams. It would take her a while to recover from her trauma, but by day she was always on the move,causing

  Cheryl to remark on her energy.

  “I would have thought your nasty experience would have made you want to relax, Ally,” she called from the verandah of the Holland’s comfortable White timber-framed bungalow.

  “I am relaxing, Chelyl,” Ally answered her. “I adore being home. My biggest fear here is having an emu or kangaroo jump at me.”

  The house was enormous after her apartment. In the evenings she turned cupboards out. Had a look inside.

  She found lots of photographs of herself when she was very small. Many of them when she was a baby. She never realised she was so cute. Even then she had mop of curls. She couldn’t imagine her father had taken them. It had to be her mother or Grandpa Andy.

  Her mother! Even the word was an elegy. Mother. Was it possible her own relationship with Rafe had been influenced by her parents’ disastrous marriage? When it got right down to it, at that point, she was so young; she had feared marriage. There had been such an overload of emotion. All her childhood and early adolescence there had been a near mystical bond between herself and Rafe. The relationship that had been definitely nonsexual, more like family, overnight culminated in Rafe’s becoming her fantasy lover.

  All those hormonal upsurges! She blushed to think of them, the powerful needs and the crazy wishes. In its way growing up had been a traumatic experience for her. She had fallen wildly in love too early when love meant pain. Her mother; going away. Her mother had been passionately in love with her father at the time of their marriage, but in the end she’d been forced into leaving him. Maybe in fleeing Rafe she had been trying to protect herself against such a bleak eventuality.

  Except Rafe was an entirely different being from her father. As a woman who had been intent on mastering a career, she recognised that fully. Even if Rafe had slammed a door on her. Rafe wasn’t into control and dominance that masked a fragile ego. Rafe wanted a wife as his life’s partner, with the full security of his support and love. She thought establishing herself as an actress was a worthwhile goal. Now she found she didn’t want that at all. The Dream was still the same. The Dream was Rafe.