Outback Husband

by Jessica Hart

  They gave the boys their first swimming lesson, holding them underneath their tummies until they learnt how to kick with their legs while Natalie splashed encouragingly around them. Juliet tried to concentrate on Kit, but she kept catching sight of Cal out of the corner of her eye. He seemed to be outlined against the red rocks behind him, and everything about him stood out in unnatural clarity, the breadth of his shoulders, the texture of his skin, the droplets of water catching in the dark hairs on his chest.

  Cal was having just as much difficulty keeping his mind on Andrew. He tried not to look at Juliet, but he knew every time she smiled, every time she shook her damp hair away from her face, or leant away from Kit’s inexpert splashing.

  Sunlight dappled the water through the trees, but the sun was too fierce for them to stay in the water long, and Juliet laid out the picnic in the shade of the overhanging rocks. Cal stretched out on the rug with a beer while she leant back on her hands and the children bobbed up and down, eating on the move.

  Afterwards, the children splashed around in the shallows together, while Juliet and Cal watched them from the rug. It was easier than watching each other. Neither of them spoke. The silence between them seemed to stretch, charged with a simmering awareness.

  Cal thought about Juliet, about how near she was. If he stretched out his arm, he could touch her knee. His hand could curve down to her calf, or slide up along the smooth length of her thigh…

  Juliet thought about Cal, and the lean strength of his body, so tantalisingly close. She thought about what it would be like to lean over and let her fingers drift over the flat stomach, and then she thought she had better stop thinking about anything at all, and went to join the children, diving into the deep water and letting the cold shock her out of her fantasies.

  Watching from the rocks, Cal saw her emerge, gasping. She flicked the hair out of her eyes, and even from a distance he could see the drops of water clinging to her lashes, sparkling like diamonds in the sun. He thought it was probably time to give the twins another swimming lesson. He badly needed a distraction.

  Seeing him encouraging Kit, Juliet swam over to help Natalie with Andrew, and for a while they gave a pretty good impression of having absolutely nothing on their minds but teaching two little boys to swim. Juliet even pretended that she had forgotten Cal was there until, stepping back to let Andrew paddle towards her outstretched hands, she brushed against Cal, who had stepped back at the same time.

  Their bodies barely glanced against each other, but they both flinched as if from an electric shock. Juliet half expected to hear a crackle of sparks.

  ‘Sorry—’

  ‘I’m sorry—’

  They started to apologise at the same time. Juliet’s back was sizzling where Cal’s had touched her, and all at once she knew that the pretending hadn’t worked at all. It was useless trying to deny the attraction between them any longer, and, when she looked at Cal, she saw the knowledge reflected in his eyes as the air between them jangled with tension.

  Juliet looked away first. ‘I…I think it’s time we went back,’ she said in an unsteady voice.

  On the surface, everything was the same. Natalie and the twins were cajoled out of the water with the promise of birthday cake, and they drove back to the homestead to the sound of hilarity in the back seat. Maggie came up for the birthday tea, and Juliet was glad that she had invited the stockmen too. They were rather shy at first, but with all the other people around she could avoid Cal and the terrible temptation to reach out and touch him again.

  It meant, too, that she could busy herself with the tea, with lighting two lots of three candles on the cake and supervising the blowing out, which was only achieved with a lot of huffing and puffing. But afterwards, when she put Kit and Andrew to bed, it was harder to distract herself. She bathed them, combed their damp hair and read their favourite story, and all the time the thought of Cal simmered in her mind. Her back still tingled where his skin had grazed hers. She had seen in his eyes then that he wanted her; she knew that she wanted him. The only question now was whether they were going to do anything about it.

  Kit and Andrew were tucked into the curve of her body, heads drooping with tiredness but determined to get to the end of the story. Resting her cheek against their hair, Juliet breathed in the warm, rosy, clean smell of her sons and felt guilty about thinking about anything but them.

  She lingered in their room until they were asleep, ridiculously nervous about facing Cal alone and wondering how to make it clear that the attraction running between them could not go any further. She even rehearsed a little speech, being very adult about acknowledging the physical attraction but insisting—in the most mature way—on the need to be sensible and think about the children.

  As it turned out, she needn’t have bothered. When Juliet finally summoned the courage to go down to the kitchen, she found that Cal had invited Maggie to stay for supper. She normally spent Sundays alone in her house, but he had found her dourly clearing away the debris from the tea party and insisted that he would cook something for her for a change.

  Juliet wasn’t sure whether she felt relieved or disappointed to discover that Cal had arranged a chaperon. From the dry way Maggie looked between the two of them, Juliet guessed that Cal’s aunt knew perfectly well why he was so anxious for her to stay, but, being Maggie, she said nothing.

  At least she wasn’t going to have to say anything either, Juliet comforted herself as she toyed with the omelette Cal had made her. He couldn’t have made it clearer that he didn’t want to take things any further either.

  ‘Was it that bad?’ he asked, looking at the remains of the omelette on her plate.

  ‘No.’ Juliet flushed. ‘No, it was great. I’m just…not hungry.’

  Cal pushed his own unfinished meal aside. ‘Me neither,’ he said.

  Maggie looked from one to the other and shook her head.

  As soon as she had gone, Cal disappeared into the office, muttering something about paperwork, and Juliet was left to wash up and reflect that it was all for the best. Sleeping with Cal would have been a terrible mistake. Everything would have got complicated and awkward, and they would have both ended up regretting it. Much better to stick with the businesslike relationship they had at the moment. Much better, she told herself again, as if she hadn’t really been convincing enough.

  She sat on the verandah for a while, but she couldn’t concentrate on the book she had taken, and in the end there seemed nothing to do but go to bed. Alone. Juliet sighed and put the book back on the shelf. She would have a shower. That might make her stop feeling so twitchy.

  It didn’t, but at least she felt clean, she thought as she dried herself and shrugged on a fine cotton robe. Still tying the belt around her waist, Juliet walked barefoot down the corridor to check on the twins. They were both sound asleep, and she was smiling as she tiptoed out of their room and turned for her own.

  It was then that Cal’s door opened.

  Cal had done his best to concentrate on the accounts, but Juliet’s face kept shimmering between his eyes and the figures. He had waited for Juliet to be safely in bed before he gave up and went to his own room, but he’d been too restless to sleep, and in the end he had got up and pulled on a pair of shorts and a shirt once more. He would go for a walk and try to remember all the reasons why making love to Juliet would be a bad idea.

  So he opened the door, and there she was.

  Juliet stopped dead at the sight of him, the smile dying from her lips. She hadn’t expected to see him, not there, not now, and she was seized by something like panic. Unprepared, she could only stare at him with eyes that were huge and dark with desire.

  Cal stared back. They had done everything they could to avoid this moment, but here it was all the same, the two of them, alone, wanting each other, with nothing to keep them apart. For Cal it was as if everything that had happened since he came back to Wilparilla had led inescapably to this moment. He couldn’t fight it any more, and he didn�
�t want to.

  Without a word, without taking his eyes from Juliet’s, he stepped back into the room and opened the door wide. She could walk past, or she could walk in. It was her choice.

  Juliet knew it too. It didn’t feel like a choice, though. It felt utterly inevitable. With an odd, detached part of her mind, she wondered why she had resisted for so long when this moment had been waiting for them all along. All that agonising, all that frustration, all that pretending that she hadn’t wanted this to happen…what had been the use of it all?

  There was no point in pretending any longer.

  Juliet walked across the corridor and into the room. It was very quiet. Trembling, she stood just inside and waited for Cal to move. Neither of them spoke.

  For one terrible moment she wondered if she had, in fact, misunderstood, and that he was working out how to ask her to leave, but after what seemed an age he pushed the door slowly shut with the flat of his hand, and then, just as slowly, he turned the key in the lock. The click sounded preternaturally loud in the silence. Juliet tried to swallow but her throat was too dry, and her legs were trembling so much that she had to lean back against the wall for support.

  Cal must have switched off the light as he opened the door, she thought irrelevantly, for the room was dark, lit only by the moonlight shafting through the window that was open behind its wire screen. It was enough for her to see Cal standing before her, not touching her, just looking at her, while the silence strummed around them.

  Then, very slowly, he reached out and untied the belt of her robe. Juliet’s heart was thudding, her pulse booming with anticipation. She quivered down to her nerve-ends as, still without speaking, Cal slid the robe from her shoulders and let it fall with a soft sigh into a puddle on the wooden floor.

  Her skin was luminous in the moonlight, her eyes gleaming pools of darkness in her pale face. Cal stared at her. Her legs were slender, her hips softly curved, her breasts full. She was more beautiful than he had even imagined and he wondered if he was dreaming. Was this really Juliet, warm, breathing, real, here?

  Juliet couldn’t breathe. She was taut, trembling, gripped by a desire so intense that she was convinced that she would simply shatter into a million pieces if he touched her. Terrified that he would, terrified that he wouldn’t, when Cal finally let his fingers trace a featherlight line of fire along her collarbone, barely grazing her skin, she caught her breath as if at a shock, but she didn’t break.

  Instead, Cal kept her in suspense, on the brink of a dizzying freefall of sensation, while his hands drifted enticingly downwards, circling her breasts, teasing over her stomach, smoothing over her hips and thighs and then around to her buttocks and back up her spine until Juliet could bear it no longer. She closed her eyes with a tiny whimper, and as if at a signal Cal closed the gap between them, so that he could press his mouth to the curve of her throat and shoulder.

  The touch of his lips sent a shudder of pure pleasure through Juliet, and her arms came up to encircle his body and pull him closer against her. Murmuring her name, Cal kissed the arch of her neck, kissed her throat, her jaw, the pulse-point below her ear, tantalising her, making her wait again, but when Juliet gasped he raised his head and looked down into her dark eyes for one long, timeless moment, before the teasing and the waiting was over and his mouth came down on hers at last.

  They kissed with a kind of desperation, as if Cal had been torturing himself as much as her, both goaded beyond the point of resistance by weeks of denying what they had wanted all along. His hands were hard, moving possessively over her body, and Juliet’s fingers twisted in his hair as he pressed her back against the wall, kissing her mouth, her cheeks, her eyes, her mouth again.

  Juliet kissed him back breathlessly, shuddering at every touch of his lips, at the sensation of strong hands sliding up her thigh, lifting her against him. Her fingers fumbled with the buttons of his shirt, but it took so long to get just one undone that Cal ended up tearing it off. Tossing it aside, he pulled Juliet against him once more, and as her breasts were crushed against his bare chest the feel of her naked flesh touching his jolted through her so savagely that she cried out.

  Impatiently, she reached for the fastening of his shorts, but Cal was possessed by the same urgency and was sweeping her up into his arms, carrying her over to his bed. He laid her down, resisting her attempts to pull him down with her until he had stripped off his shorts himself.

  It was all going too quickly, Cal thought. He should slow things down, make it special for her, for both of them, but how could he do that when Juliet was reaching for him and he could feel that her need was as intense as his own? They had no need to talk, and they had waited too long for this already.

  Juliet smiled as she stretched up her arms to him, and with a muttered exclamation Cal stooped to kiss her and let her draw him down onto her. The first unimpeded meeting of their bodies made her shiver. She was flooding, drowning, dissolving in wave after wave of sensation as their hands moved hungrily over each other. Cal kissed her throat, her shoulder, her breasts, the satiny warmth of her stomach until she writhed beneath him, gasping his name in a way that made Cal lose what little control he had left.

  She was ready for him, though, letting out a sigh of relief to feel him inside her at last, wrapping her legs around him as the frantic feeling faded and a new rhythm took over. They moved instinctively together, slowly at first, then faster and faster, as the feeling grew in power and intensity, sweeping them up into a great, gathering wave of need so overwhelming that they had no choice but to cling to each other and let it bear them onwards, until it broke at last, and sent them tumbling, spinning, swirling around in a wild, turbulent explosion of release.

  Juliet surfaced to a feeling of physical contentment. Her body was sated, her mind wonderfully blank. She didn’t want to think; she just wanted to lie there and enjoy the silence. Except that it wasn’t silent at all. The air reverberated with the sound of ragged breathing, and it was only slowly that Juliet realised that it was her own. And Cal’s.

  Insidiously, reality crept back, in spite of her attempts to close her mind to it. More and more details filtered through. She and Cal were lying apart, not touching. There was a faint sheen of sweat on his skin in the moonlight. Oh, God, what had they done?

  As if struck by the same thought, Cal swore suddenly under his breath and swung his legs over the edge of the bed so that he could sit up abruptly. Juliet could see the curve of his spine, the hunch of his shoulders as he leant his elbows on his knees and ran his fingers through his hair in a gesture of despair.

  Juliet moistened her lips. ‘I suppose that was stupid,’ she said carefully.

  Cal looked at the wall. It hadn’t felt stupid. It had felt absolutely right. ‘I suppose it was,’ he agreed in an expressionless voice.

  She wanted to kneel up and put her arms around him, to kiss the back of his neck and urge him down beside her again, to close her eyes and find herself back where she didn’t have to think and the only thing that mattered was Cal, his mouth and his hands and the hardness of his body.

  But of course she couldn’t do that.

  Instead, Juliet got up slowly, and went over to pick up her robe, which still lay in a heap on the floor by the door. Cal watched her tie it round her with hands that were not quite steady.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

  ‘You’ve got nothing to be sorry for,’ said Juliet quietly. ‘You opened the door and I came in.’ She looked down at her hands, wanting to be honest, but anxious to make sure that he didn’t think she was going to make a big deal out of it. ‘I should thank you.’ She tried to smile. ‘It’s been a long time, as you probably gathered.’

  What did she think he was, some kind of gigolo? ‘Glad to have been of service,’ said Cal, with an edge of bitterness.

  ‘I didn’t mean that.’ Juliet went over to sit beside him, although not close enough to touch. ‘Look, we both know we wanted what happened. I just…don’t think we should let it ha
ppen again.’

  Cal turned to look at her, his body still burning with the feel of her. ‘Do you regret it?’ he made himself ask.

  ‘No,’ she said honestly, ‘but I don’t want things to change because of it.’

  ‘Nothing’s going to change,’ he said in a hard voice. ‘I’m still your manager; you’re still my boss. Or are you afraid I might forget my place?’

  Juliet linked her hands together in her lap to stop them shaking. ‘No, I’m not afraid of that,’ she said with difficulty. ‘But I need you as a manager, Cal. That’s more important to me than…than…well, you know.’

  ‘Than sleeping with me?’

  ‘Yes,’ she admitted, not looking at him.

  ‘You don’t need to worry,’ said Cal. ‘I understand. It was just a physical thing for both of us, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Juliet. Aware that her voice sounded a little doubtful, she said it again, more positively. ‘Yes, that’s all it was.’ That was all it had been, she reminded herself.

  ‘Then I don’t see why we shouldn’t go back to exactly the way we were before,’ he was saying. ‘We’ll pretend it never happened.’

  ‘I think it would be best,’ she said heavily.

  There was a pause. Cal rubbed his hand across his face. He ought to be glad that Juliet wasn’t going to make a fuss or turn emotional on him, but instead all he wanted to do was pull her back down onto the bed and kiss her sensible suggestions away.

  ‘Come on,’ he said, getting to his feet and helping her up before he succumbed to the temptation. ‘You’d better go.’

  Unselfconscious in his nakedness, he took her to the door and unlocked it. The sound of the key turning made Juliet ache with the memory of the moment Cal had locked it, when she had known that he was going to make love to her. And now it was over, and she had to leave, when all she really wanted to do was stay.