Outback Bride

by Jessica Hart

  Copper couldn't help thinking that a house or even a crocodile would be a lot easier to deal with than the particular dad in question as she dialled her parents' number on her mobile phone. She wasn't going to ask their advice-they would be appalled if they knew what she was considering-but she needed to talk to them before she made up her mind one way or the other.

  'Dad's much better,' said Jill Copley in answer to Copper's determinedly casual enquiry. She lowered her voice so that Dan couldn't hear from the bedroom, where he was resting. 'You know what a worrier he is, and he'd been fretting about what would happen if you didn't manage to set up this deal with Matthew Standish, but ever since you rang and told us you were staying on up there for a while he's been so much more relaxed. He seemed to think that it was a good sign and he's been driving me mad with plans for once the site's agreed. I haven't seen him this positive for a long time,' she confided. 'It's done him so much good and we're both so grateful to you, dear.'

  'Mal-Mr Standish-hasn't committed himself to any definite agreement yet,' Copper said. She felt she had to warn her, but her mother was apparently in as confident a mood as her father.

  'He'd hardly say no when you've been up there nearly two weeks, would he? What's he like, anyway?' she went on, before Copper could answer. 'Your father's not much help. He just says he's no fool. Is he nice?'

  An image of Mal burned behind Copper's eyelids: the stern angles of his face, the impenetrable brown eyes, the corners of his mouth that dented into something that was almost but not quite a smile, the way he picked up his daughter, the way he rode his horse, the way he settled his hat on his head. 'He can be.'

  'Is he married?'

  Copper hesitated. 'No.'

  'Ah.' Her mother managed to invest it with at least six syllables, not to mention a question mark and an exclamation mark.

  'Don't be silly, Mum,' said Copper, a little too sharply. 'Is Dad there?'

  Dan was delighted to hear from her, and was bubbling over with so many plans that Copper had a hard time getting a word in edgeways. 'Now, how are you getting on with Matthew Standish?' he asked buoyantly at last. 'Have we got to the stage where we can start drawing up a contract yet?'

  Copper looked at Megan's dark head bent over her picture, and then at the phone in her hand. 'Just one or two details to sort out, Dad,' she said slowly, 'and then we'll be ready to sign.'

  'Good girl!' Dan was bursting with pride and excitement. 'I knew you wouldn't let me down.'

  'No,' said Copper almost to herself as she pressed the button to cut the connection. 'I won't let you down, Dad.' Very carefully, she pushed the antenna back into place and laid the phone on the table. It looked as if her decision was made.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Copper edged warily around the holding yards, eyeing the milling cattle with distinct nervousness. She had watched, awed, from the verandah as they had come pounding in a cloud of snorting, stamping red dust. It was hard to believe that so many animals could be controlled by a mere six men on horses, but now, a couple of hours later, they were all firmly corralled and the noise and confusion had slowly subsided to an occasional aggrieved bellow.

  Two of the jackaroos were perched laconically on a fence, enjoying a smoke with the satisfaction of a job well done. 'Have you seen Mal?' she asked.

  'Last time I saw him, he was heading towards the paddock,' said one out of the corner of his mouth.

  So he was back. Copper's mouth tightened. It was two days since Mal's proposal-or rather, his ultimatum- and since then he had made no effort to get her on her own. Copper had been gripped by a kind of nervous energy after making her decision, and all she'd wanted was to tell Mal so that she could stop thinking about whether it was the right one or not. But they had been out mustering in the far paddocks yesterday and had slept in their swags under the stars. This was her first chance to talk to him.

  Copper had been tense all day, waiting for him to come home, and since she had heard them come in her nerves had reached snapping point. But Mal, it seemed, was in no hurry to find out what she had decided, and in the end she had come in search of him herself, unable to bear the waiting any longer.

  The paddock where the horses were kept was irrigated, and in the late afternoon light, it looked peaceful and still and very green in contrast to the red dust around it. Copper could see Duke grazing in the shade, flicking his tail against the inevitable flies, and she called his name, absurdly gratified to see his head come up. He gazed at her for a moment with liquid brown eyes and then calmly resumed his placid chewing, having obviously decided that it wasn't worth the bother of coming over to say hello.

  He and Mal had a lot in common, thought Copper with an inward sigh, and turned away from the fence only to see Mal himself coming round the corner of the paddock on his great chestnut, Red.

  The paddock, the yards, the dusty track beneath her feet all dropped abruptly into nothingness, and there was only Mal, very distinct against the blue outback sky. Copper felt oddly weightless, suspended in thin air, and something clutched at her heart as the nerves that had buoyed her up all day collapsed into sudden shyness. Two whole days she had been waiting to talk to him, and now that he was here, she couldn't think of anything to say.

  'Hello,' was all she managed, shading her eyes against the glare with one hand as he brought Red to a halt in front of her.

  High up on the horse, Mal seemed impossibly remote and unapproachable as he looked down at Copper, standing slender in jeans and a pale, long-sleeved T-shirt. The sunlight glanced off her thick brown hair, turning it to bronze, and tipped her lashes with gold. Very conscious of his scrutiny, Copper found that she couldn't look back at him. Instead she stroked Red's nose and fiddled with his bridle.

  'Where's Megan?' asked Mal after a moment.

  'I left her with Naomi.' Bill, the "married man", and his wife had two toddlers and another baby on the way, and when Copper had seen how tired Naomi looked she had felt rather guilty about asking her if she could keep an eye on Megan for a few minutes. 'I…1 wanted to talk to you on our own.'

  'About our marriage?'

  'Yes.'

  Without a word, Mal swung easily off the horse and led it into the paddock. Copper had to wait and watch as he took off the bridle and hung the saddle over the fence. The men were notoriously unsentimental about the animals they worked with, but she was oddly touched to see that Mal fed Red something from his shirt pocket and let the big horse nuzzle his arm before he gave it a final pat and a slap on the rump to send it cantering off into the field.

  Only then did he close the gate behind him and join Copper where she stood watching the way Red kicked up his heels and revelled in his freedom. He leant his arms on the fence and glanced at her from under his dusty hat.

  'Well?' he said.

  'There's no need to sound so anxious to find out what I've decided,' snapped Copper, whose nerves had snarled up again as soon as Mal came near her.

  Mal sighed. 'What would be the point of me getting in a state about it?' he asked. 'Nothing I can do is going to change your mind, whatever you've decided.'

  'That's good coming from a man who wrapped up a proposal of marriage in a neat bit of blackmail!'

  'It wasn't blackmail,' said Mal evenly. 'It's your choice whether you marry me or not.'

  'Some choice!' muttered Copper.

  His eyes rested on the grazing horses beneath the trees. 'Are you trying to tell me that your answer's no?'

  'Are you sure you can be bothered to hear the answer?' she retorted, and he frowned.

  'What do you mean by that?'

  'You make me a bizarre offer of marriage and then ignore me for the next two days,' she accused him. 'Hardly the action of a man who's particularly interested one way or another!'

  Mal's jaw tightened ominously. 'I've been mustering for the last two days,' he pointed out. 'How could I ignore you when I wasn't even here?'

  'You ignored me all evening before you left,' Copper countered sullenly. 'And thi
s afternoon! You've been back for hours but you never even tried to find me!'

  'I've been back just over half an hour,' said Mal, tight-lipped. 'I brought in the stragglers at the rear, so I've only just got them in and finished checking the others. That hasn't left me much time to ignore you, but, since you ask, even if I'd got back with the others I wouldn't have rushed straight up to the homestead to demand an answer only to be accused of pressurising you! I reckoned you needed time to think things through and I was prepared to wait until you were ready to tell me what you'd decided.' His voice acquired a certain steel. 'Now that you are ready-presumably-perhaps you could tell me what you've decided. Or am I expected to guess?'

  'Under the circumstances, that shouldn't be too hard,' she snapped back without thinking.

  At least she had the satisfaction of provoking Mal to exasperation. 'Look, Copper, why don't you just give me your answer?' He sighed. 'Are you going to marry me or not? Yes or no?'

  There was a pause. This wasn't how the conversation had been meant to go, Copper thought desperately. She had intended to be cool and crisply business-like and look what had happened! She had ended up sounding like a petulant child instead.

  She scuffed one foot against the bottom rail of the fence. 'Yes,' she muttered. Oh, God, she still sounded like Megan after a tantrum. She cleared her throat. 'Yes, I will marry you,' she said more clearly. 'But only if you sign a formal agreement allowing Copley Travel access and control over the site.'

  'Fine,' said Mal.

  Copper waited for more, but apparently that was it. 'Fine?' she repeated, her voice rising in outrage. 'Fine! Is that all you can say?'

  'What else do you want me to say? I've got no objection to a formal agreement-quite the opposite. I suggest that before we get married we get a legal contract drawn up that specifies the conditions that we've both agreed to in advance. I'm not risking another divorce settlement like last time, so when we agree a date to end the marriage, we can agree the financial implications as well.'

  'I don't want your money,' said Copper with distaste. 'AH I'll want is assurance that Copley Travel can continue to use Birraminda after the marriage is over.'

  'That's something that can be discussed when we draw up the contract,' said Mal indifferently. 'AH I'm saying is that we should know exactly where we stand before we get married. I'm sure a woman of your business acumen will see the sense in a legal contract.'

  The prospect of reducing a marriage to a number of clauses in a contract chilled Copper to the bone, but, having brought up the idea of a written agreement, she was hardly in a position to object. 'Right now I think we've got more important things to discuss than a pre-nuptial contract,' she said.

  'Like what?'

  'Like…well, like everything' said Copper in frustration. She lifted her arms and then let them drop helplessly to her sides. 'For a start, what are we going to tell everybody?'

  Mal turned so that he was leaning back against the fence and considered her. 'We just tell them we're getting married,' he said, and Copper hugged her arms together edgily.

  'We'll need to do more than that to convince my parents that I'm serious about going to live with a perfect stranger! They'd be horrified if they knew why we're getting married,' she pointed out. 'I'll only marry you on the condition that they never, ever guess what I'm doing-and that means convincing them that we're a genuine couple.'

  'What's a genuine couple?' asked Mal with a sardonic look. 'Every marriage is different, so why should we be any less genuine than the others?'

  'You know what I mean!' said Copper crossly. 'My parents need to believe that we're getting married because we're madly in love, not because we've agreed some cold-blooded business deal.'

  Mal hooked his thumbs into the pockets of his dust-encrusted jeans. 'That's not a problem, is it?'

  How could he sound so casual about it? Copper eyed him resentfully. 'No, but I'm wondering how good your acting is!'

  'We're both going to have to get used to acting,' said Mal, unperturbed. 'There's no point to the whole exercise unless everyone believes that you're a suitably loving wife-particularly Brett. Do you think you'll be able to convince him that you're more interested in me than you are in your business?'

  'That depends on whether you'll be able to convince him that you're a suitably loving husband,' she said tartly.

  'I expect I can manage that.'

  Copper was stung by his laconic attitude. They might have been discussing the chances of rain-although, come to think of it, Mal would probably get a lot more excited about that! 'There's a bit more to marriage than just behaving affectionately in front of other people, you know! I think we should establish now just how "married" we're going to be. Real wives aren't just housekeepers with rings on their fingers,' she went on with some difficulty. 'They share things with their husbands in private as well as in public…like bedrooms, for instance.'

  'We're not likely to persuade Brett that you belong with me unless we share a bedroom,' Mal agreed dryly. 'And a bed.' He glanced at Copper, who was picking a splinter of wood out of the fence post, her face averted. 'Or is that the problem?'

  'It's not a. problem? Copper said, flustered now that she had finally come to the point. She pushed her hair awkwardly behind her ears. 'It's just…well, yes, I think we should decide now whether…you know, whether you…whether we…

  She could hear herself floundering and risked a peep at Mal. There was the faintest suggestion of a smile bracketing his mouth. That meant he knew exactly what she was trying to say but wasn't going to make it any easier for her. He was just leaning back against the rail, looking cool and calm and completely relaxed and watching her with those infuriatingly unreadable brown eyes. A spurt of real anger helped Copper pull herself together and she turned to face him directly.

  'What I'm trying to ask,' she said icily, 'is whether you're expecting us to sleep together?'

  'Why not?' said Mal with the same aggravating calmness.

  'Well, we…we hardly know each other.'

  'That didn't stop us before, did it?'

  There was a long, long silence. Copper froze and then, very slowly, she turned her head to look at him. 'So you do remember!'

  'Did you think I'd forgotten?' There was an enigmatic look in Mal's brown eyes, and a faint smile touched his mouth.

  'Why didn't you say anything before?' she asked huskily. She felt very peculiar, as if the past and the present had suddenly collapsed together into a jumble of conflicting emotions where nothing was certain any more.

  'You didn't.' With a shrug Mal turned back to watch the horses. 'I wasn't sure at first. I recognised your name as soon as Megan told me, but you looked so different,' he said slowly, as if visualising the Copper who had stood clutching the verandah post and comparing her with the girl who had walked out of the crowd towards him across the sand.

  Her hair had been longer then, dishevelled from the sea and streaked with sunshine, and like almost everyone else on her tour she had worn shorts and a faded sleeveless top. Only her smile had marked her out from the ordinary-her smile and the clear green eyes that had looked so directly into his.

  'Your hair's shorter now-smarter, I suppose,' he went on after a moment. 'You had sunglasses on, you were wearing a suit, for God's sake, and I simply wasn't expecting you. It hardly seemed possible that you could be the same girl. And then you took off your sunglasses and I saw your eyes and I realised that it really was you. By then…'

  Mal paused, lifting his shoulders as if searching for the best way to explain. 'Well, by then it was clear that even if you had recognised me, you weren't going to acknowledge it. I don't know-I thought you might feel awkward, even embarrassed about working for me if I raised the subject, and since I was assuming that you'd come as a new housekeeper it just seemed easier to follow your lead and pretend that you were a stranger.' He glanced sideways at Copper. 'It's been seven years, after all,' he added. 'There was no reason why you should have remembered me.'

  No
reason? Copper thought about his lips against her skin, about the mastery of his hands and the sleek, supple strength of his body. She thought about the way he had made her senses sing and the breathtaking passion they had shared.

  She wanted to look at the horses, at the fence, at her hands, at anything other than Mal, but an irresistible force was dragging her gaze round and against her will she found herself looking into his eyes, drowning in the brown depths that sucked her into the past, sending her spinning back seven years to the moment when she had looked up, laughing, from the crowd and seen him watching her.

  Mal had been travelling on his own, Copper with a group due to move on in three days, but none of that had mattered at the time. They had been more than just fellow Australians far from home; they had been two halves of a whole, clicking naturally into place. Being together had seemed utterly right, as if it had been somehow inevitable that they should meet that way. It was like a compass swinging to north, like an arrow heading straight for its target, like walking through a door and knowing that you had come home without even realising that you had been away.

  It had been time out of time. For three days they had talked and laughed. They had swum in the turquoise sea. Droplets of water had glistened on Mal's shoulders as he surfaced and he had smiled as he shook the wet hair out of his eyes and reached for her. They had climbed the hill to the ruined fort overlooking the beach and watched the sunset, and when the soft night had closed around them making love had been the most natural thing in the world. Afterwards they had walked down to the sea again, to sink into the cool, dark water, and the phosphorescence had glimmered around their entwined bodies.

  'Stay,' Mal had said on the last night, but Copper had been part of an overland tour making its way back to London, where friends were expecting her. It hadn't seemed so bad saying goodbye when he had her contact address there and promised to ring her as soon as he got there himself. She had been so sure that they had been meant for each other. How was she to have known that it would be seven years before she saw him again?