Heart Of The Outback, Volume 2

by Margaret Way

  He’d been away only a couple of days. He’d seen most of his family during that time. What more could they possibly need from him? In an instant he felt the walls cramping in on him again. Whatever they wanted he would get to it later. Right now he had plenty else on his mind.

  Staring at his big new king-sized bed, her “we really ought not to consummate” suggestion came slamming back to him.

  Okay, so he was frustrated on more than one level. He was a man after all. With needs. And desires. And overnight those desires had reached a point the likes of which he had never known. And for the one woman who had very decidedly told him that it would be better for him if it never happened.

  He rolled his tense shoulders, shaking off the sexual tension that was binding his muscles in knots now that for the first time in such a long time they were alone without the threat of one or another of her housemates walking in on them.

  His hands dived into his jeans pockets as he sauntered out of the bedroom, past the staircase, and through the lounge to the kitchen where the reason behind his great frustration stood running a hand over the granite bench.

  “Finding your way around?” he asked and was surprised when she turned on him with an accusatory glance.

  “You have a dishwasher!” she said.

  Heath laughed, feeling his tension slipping in the face of her bewilderment. “I do. Is there a problem?”

  She blinked and shook her head. “No, it’s actually wonderful. I just didn’t expect … this.” She swept an arm around his large kitchen gleaming with all the mod cons.

  Why she didn’t expect a single guy to go all out and have every electronic convenience at his disposal he had no idea. If he had to wash the dishes by hand every night, he very much doubted whether he would bother pouring his pre-made dinners onto a plate before eating them.

  As though she had forgotten he was even there, she continued through the swinging doors into the family room at the rear of the house. Her jaw dropped when she took in a pool table, discreet surround sound speakers, and wall-mounted LCD TV. She looked over her shoulder and seemed almost angry.

  “Does this thing have a sports channel?” she asked, irately pushing random buttons on the remote.

  “Several,” he said, leaning over to punch in the channel for ESPN.

  She stared at the TV, her eyes flicking over the timetable of events darting across the bottom of the screen. “Jeez,” she said in a long, slow drawl.

  “What’s the matter now?” he asked, his throat tickling with laughter. She really was the most unpredictable girl he had ever known.

  “But where’s the sawdust on the floor, and your grandmother’s chintz lounge, and the matted old dog curled up on the lambskin rug by the hearth?”

  “What on earth are you talking about?”

  “I feel like I have walked into a pad in Soho, not a home in the middle of the outback.”

  Heath finally caught up. “Don’t tell me you were really expecting kangaroos on the doorstep.”

  Her soft pink mouth twisted as she thought about how to answer. “Well, yes, actually.”

  “Just as I would expect you London gals to have regular lunches with the Queen and have haircuts straight from the eighties like the women who work for British Airways. Why is that?” he asked, taking the opportunity to move closer to her as he spoke. “What is with the bad haircuts, and old fashioned uniforms? Is it some sort of secret weapon so that when we unsuspecting international males finally meet one of you real London gals, we are blindsided by your perfectly contemporary beauty?”

  Jodie blinked back at him, all gorgeous confusion, and mistrust, with just the tiniest hint of laughter beneath it all. And Heath knew that no amount of shoulder-rolling or keeping his hands tucked safely away in his pockets could force down the desire to touch her, hold her, know her as a husband ought to know his wife.

  And at that moment the doorbell rang, sending chimes of his sister Jackie’s favoured Mozart through the house. Heath’s itchy fingers curled into tight palms. He wished he could continue this promising line of conversation with Jodie.

  But the doorbell chimed again, and for someone to be at his door, to have come all the way up his drive, it would be important.

  “Excuse me,” he said, his voice coming out unnaturally deep. He turned, clearing his pesky throat, before he answered the door to find Carol and Rachel Crabbe, cling-wrap-covered crockery dishes in hand.

  Excellent. Mandy and Lisa were bad enough, but the Crabbe sisters? He had every idea that their intentions on intruding at exactly this time were nowhere near as innocent. But they were neighbours, and in a tight community such as this he had to be polite.

  “Carol. Rachel. What can I do for you on this fine sunny day?”

  “We’ve come to welcome your wife to the community,” Carol said.

  Rachel tried peering around his shoulder. “Is she in?”

  Looking at them now in their matching floral dresses and low buns, he wondered how it had ever entered his mind that when the time came to find a wife one or the other of these women might do the trick.

  “She is. We actually only just drove in from the city a few minutes ago. So now is perhaps not the best time—”

  “Nonsense,” Carol said, using her broad shoulder to muscle Heath out of the way while the much smaller Rachel snuck through the gap at his back.

  On a resigned sigh, he closed the front door and followed them into the lounge to find Jodie in the kitchen doorway with an apple halfway to her mouth looking from Rachel, who had taken up residence on one of his couches, to Carol, who busied herself putting the casseroles in the fridge as though she had done so a hundred times before.

  Carol moved back into the lounge and pushed Jodie along in her wake with a firm hand at Jodie’s back. “Come sit,” she insisted.

  Heath wandered more slowly in and watched and waited for the train wreck that would undoubtedly come.

  “So,” Rachel said, her smile sickly sweet. “How did you two lovebirds meet?”

  “It was a blind date,” Heath said, joining Jodie on the couch. “Elena set us up.”

  “Oh,” Carol said, her face pinched as if she had swallowed a lemon. “I am surprised Elena would have needed to look beyond the local township for such an endeavour.”

  “Well, look she did,” Heath said, “and she found me a winner.” He reached out, took Jodie’s hand, and held on tight. He could feel the tension streaming from her. She knew that these two “friendly neighbours” were only here so they could spread the word to the rest of the neighbourhood about Heath’s new bride.

  “So, Jodie,” Carol said. “I assume you haven’t had a chance to meet the horses as yet. Heath is a great lover of riding.”

  Jodie shook her head. “I’ve only met the furniture so far,” she said, and Heath choked back a laugh. Oh, Jodie knew exactly what she was dealing with.

  “So which horse will be hers, do you think?” Rachel asked, batting her lashes and puckering her lips in his direction.

  “I don’t ride,” Jodie butted in.

  The younger of the sisters raised a bushy eyebrow. “You don’t ride?”

  “Sorry,” Jodie said. “No. I really ought to have taken time out from croquet lessons and etiquette class.”

  Heath watched her in mute fascination as her voice came out loud and imperious, perfectly resonant of the Queen’s English and quite unlike her own, much more jaunty accent.

  “But Mummy never deemed riding a necessary pursuit for a young lady in the quest for a husband nowadays.” She reached back and hooked her hand through Heath’s arm and he had little chance but to go along with her odd charade. “And as it turned out, she was right.”

  “So that’s the trick,” Rachel said, smiling sadly at Heath, who wasn’t quite sure how to react so kept his features schooled into the blankest expression he could muster while dying to laugh. Rachel was thankfully silenced when her older sister shot her the evil eye.

  After five minutes
more of off-the-wall pleasantries, the Crabbe sisters showed themselves out. Heath had never managed to have them stay for less than two hours, and he was utterly thrilled that the addition of Jodie to his home seemed to have put a nix on that little inconvenience for ever.

  Or the time being at least, he thought, feeling crabby all of a sudden. For ever certainly had a nicer ring to it.

  Once the sisters” car was so far in the distance he could no longer see their dust, Jodie begged, “Please tell me that is not your version of the welcome wagon?”

  “No. That is our version of the ugly stepsisters. Though I have the feeling they won’t come around without an invitation next time.”

  “I know I ought to have held my tongue as they are your neighbours, but they were hardly backward about being forward themselves.”

  “They’re your neighbours now too.”

  With a groan, Jodie buried her face in her palms. “The whole township will know by now that your new wife is nothing but a stuck-up boor who can’t ride a horse.”

  “So what?” he asked. “I thought you wouldn’t care what others think.”

  “Yeah? Well, it turns out I do care,” she bit back, now looking him dead in the eye. Slight chin squared, her bright eyes flashing with indignation.

  He fought the urge to lean over and kiss the expression from her adorable face. But in such a mood she was as likely to slap him as not. So instead he moved out of range, heading down the front steps, hoping she would give into curiosity and follow.

  Jodie watched Heath amble away from the house for five seconds at most before jogging after him. “How about you introduce me to your horses so the next time I am asked I don’t make such an ass of myself?”

  She was mighty happy to change the subject. It had been jealousy, pure and simple, that had led her to puff out her feathers. If she had come from nowhere to marry the man that doe-eyed Rachel Crabbe had wanted for herself, then she was the one who ought to have left feeling guilty, not Rachel. And by Heath’s reaction she was fairly certain he would have pinned her motives in a heartbeat. But either he was too much of a gentleman, or hopelessly oblivious.

  When they reached the stables one of the horses ambled over to say hello. She reached out and ran a tentative finger down the nose of the massive bay. “So who’s this?”

  “Esmeralda.”

  Jodie blinked, then looked over the stable door and checked between the large horse’s legs. “But it’s a boy horse,” she whispered.

  Heath laughed. “You don’t need to whisper. He knows he’s a boy. And to answer your next question, after my parents died, I promised my littlest sister Kate that she could name the next foal that came along. She was fourteen and I thought she needed something positive to focus on. Then out came this brute, and Esmeralda he was.”

  “From The Hunchback of Notre Dame?”

  “Mmm. I have often dreamed that she had been so taken with Aladdin instead.”

  Heath held out a hunk of broken carrot on the flat of his hand and Esmeralda nipped it into his big soft mouth in one bite. Heath held out another chunk to Jodie, who shook her head. She was happy to watch.

  “What was it like growing up in a large family?”

  Heath raised an eyebrow. “Great. Never having your own room. Fighting for seconds at dinner. Girls hogging the bathroom. For evermore having people depend on you for every little thing. A big family is precious.”

  Jodie knew he was kidding. The fact that so many of them had come to the wedding proved that. His family was everything to him.

  “How about you?” he asked, slipping through the swing door to give Esmeralda a pat on his massive flanks. “What was it like with just you and your mum?”

  “Similar in a way. When family calls, I can’t say no either,” Jodie said, not wanting to admit to him how hard it had been. But he was watching her with that wide open face of his. The truth every time, he had once told her.

  “It was tough,” she said, finding the admission less forced than she would have imagined. “She needed constant care, and someone else to give her boundaries, as she was completely unable to enforce them on herself. But Mum has held up really well since I’ve been away and for that I will be for ever grateful to her new husband Derek.”

  I only hope he can keep it up. I only hope she doesn’t exhaust him with her neediness and changeability. I only hope he loves her enough to overlook those things because if he ever falters, if she ever sees a chink in his armour …

  No. Her mother would just have to be grown up enough to make it work. She just had to!

  “And do you think Louise will stay in London now?” Heath asked.

  “Yeah. She will. She has a lot of ties keeping her there. Her other family is there, and her work. And she has a lot of sorting out to do on both counts, which she can’t possibly do from here.”

  “Well, it sounds as though things are working out well for everyone. So let’s hope none of them call you home then, hmm?”

  Though he was busy brushing down Esmeralda’s nose, Jodie heard the edge to his voice. He was saying he wanted her to stay. Not just because he was a nice guy and he knew she was wishing and hoping for it to be so. But for his own reasons. Of that she was becoming more and more sure. Perhaps he wasn’t nearly as oblivious as she had hoped.

  The kiss the night before had been an aberration. An exquisite aberration borne of emotional highs and lows that she would always treasure. Now if they only kept their friendship intimate enough to make their marriage appear real, but aloof enough to keep their emotions intact, they would be fine. If only …

  Jodie watched as Heath led Esmeralda to a yard nearby, and, looking as she was at his left hand, she noticed he was not wearing his wedding ring. She blinked. But the image remained the same. Her world tilted at an odd axis for several seconds before crashing back into place.

  Okay, she said to herself, relax. You are at home—his home—in the middle of nowhere with no one to notice such things bar you and the cows. So what’s the big deal? It’s not as though some immigration officer is going to jump out from behind a water tank and see it.

  So why did the sight make her feel so very, very let down?

  Because, damn it, the upset she felt at him not wearing his wedding ring had nothing to do with some strange immigration officer and nothing to do with the appearance of being happily married to the Crabbe sisters and their like. And it had everything to do with his desire to be married to her.

  Somewhere in the back of her mind, since this whole thing had begun, Jodie had had the feeling that Heath was not just in this marriage to do her a favour, or to keep the local girls and his busybody sister at bay, but because maybe, just maybe, this big, beautiful, kind man actually had feelings for her.

  And even though it was the very last thing she had wanted to find in her temporary husband, she had been hooked. Addicted. Enamoured of the feeling that it might be true. The romantic little girl who wished on stars, and found simple pleasure scampering unimpeded through daffodils, had been whispering sweet nothings in Jodie’s ear until she had given in and married the one man of all those she had ever met for whom she had feelings as well.

  So much for being emotionally aloof. Stupid, stupid Jodie.

  “I’m actually feeling a little off all of a sudden,” she said, backing away. “Why don’t you take him for a good long ride, and I’ll make myself a cup of tea and watch the Chelsea match which is about to start on that ridiculously big TV of yours?”

  But before he even had the chance to say if it was all right with him, she turned and stormed back to the house before she said anything more incriminating.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THERE was no way Heath was going to chase Jodie inside while his hands were full with a restless stallion. So he took her words at face value, grabbed his Akubra hat, leapt up into the saddle, tapped his heels into Essie’s side and galloped out into the wide-open planes of the Run.

  A good while later he slowed to a walk as hi
s thoughts were anywhere but on the feel of the horse beneath him. They were tending back to the homestead, to the fact that he would have a woman waiting for him there. Though she was hardly waiting for him—more than a dozen burly soccer players would be keeping her occupied.

  He didn’t blame Jodie for running from him so suddenly to watch a game of football. If he’d had the choice of being right where he was, or being at a match in London, the big smoke would have won in a heartbeat. Well, okay, maybe not that easily. Atop his favourite steed, the midday sun consuming all shadows, and the muted red earth stretching as far as the eye could see, this moment was pretty spectacular.

  But all he had ever wished for was the choice. With four siblings still in their teens, and three of those still in school, on the day his parents had died, there had been no alternative. He’d had to give up his life, so that they could have theirs.

  If he had stayed in the city on the design end of stadiums, high-rise buildings, new parks and the current redevelopment of the city’s docklands, and left his family to their own devices, would every one of them have earned a university degree? Without his backing would every one of them now own their own home? Would he and Marissa have stayed together, and as such would he and Cameron have remained close? Would they be on better terms now? Would Marissa be alive today?

  No. He and Marissa had been friendly, but their relationship had been on the decline even before his parents” deaths. They had both used the distance as an excuse, but even if he had stayed on in the city they would never have lasted. And, worse, Cameron would have missed out on the past five years with the woman he loved.

  The world had turned the way it had for a reason. He had stayed on at the Run, turning it from a comfortable homestead into a grand success, and his whole family had benefited. If Marissa’s sudden passing had taught him anything, it was that his choices were his alone, and there was nothing to be gained by waiting for his life to happen.

  The world turned, but if you didn’t reach out and grab your opportunities by the scruff of the neck they would pass you by. Living on instinct and treating time like something to be grabbed, not something to be endured, he had met and married Jodie.