Princes of the Outback Bundle

by Bronwyn Jameson

  “You still have to stop at the lights,” he pointed out. Enjoying the banter, enjoying her eyes on him. “In my car, I can make a phone call, dictate some notes.”

  “I can study on my bike.”

  Study? This he couldn’t resist. “What do you study?”

  “At the lights? Something I’ve learned by rote. Like anatomy.”

  “The ankle bone’s connected to the calf bone?”

  He cut her a quick glance and saw that her smile was as big as the rest of her and packed the same level of impact. “Something like that.”

  “You’re studying medicine?”

  “Yup. Third year.”

  “Dr. Lovett,” he mused.

  “Okay, okay.” She probably rolled her eyes—there was that in her voice—although with his attention back on the road, Alex didn’t see the gesture. “I’ve heard it all before.”

  He bet she had. And the thought of a bunch of smart-mouth medical students ribbing her with “love-it” gags disturbed him on some primal level.

  “You and Susannah,” he began, linking their names, reminding himself who she was, why he had no business letting her disturb him in any way. Reminding her that she’d not yet answered his question about their friendship.

  “We’ve been friends for years,” she said.

  “You were at school together?”

  “No.”

  She didn’t elaborate and he needed to concentrate on a tricky section of road. The car rocked hard in the wind and he eased off the gas.

  “It’s getting wild out there. I’m glad I’m not on my bike.” As if to punctuate her words, a sizable branch flew into their path. Then, caught in the wind’s bluster, it was gone. He sped up a little, accelerating out of a curve and—

  “Look out!”

  He saw the fallen tree that blocked the road in the same instant that she gasped the warning. Too late to avoid, but not too late to lessen the inevitable impact. Braking hard, he battled to direct the slewing car away from the thick hardwood trunk, battled to regain control when the tires lost traction and they started a slow-motion sideways slide.

  Two

  Half expecting air bags to deploy all around her, Zara remained braced with her eyes squeezed shut long after the car slid to a final tree-assisted halt. Apparently they hadn’t hit hard enough because nothing happened. Nothing except a hissing fizz from under the hood and what sounded like the thump of a fisted hand against the steering wheel.

  A second later his seat belt clicked undone.

  “Are you all right?”

  The tight note in his voice hinted at concern, and it brought an ache to the back of Zara’s eyes that felt very much like tears. Delayed reaction, she diagnosed, since she did not do tears. Slowly she opened her eyes. “I will be.”

  “Are you sure?”

  She managed a faint smile. “Just give me a minute.”

  She saw his brief hesitation before he attempted to open his door. Without success. His side of the car was jammed against the hefty branches that had halted their progress, and although he applied his shoulder to the door, the only result was an earsplitting wrench of timber against metal.

  “I’ll need to get out on your side,” he said matter-of-factly, and Zara snapped to attention, opening her door and sliding out. The wind lashed at her hair and her unzipped jacket but she paid little heed. Her gaze had fixed on the unscathed panels on her side of the car, still gleaming despite the murky light.

  Unmarked because the man currently maneuvering his body across the central console and out the passenger side hadn’t panicked. He’d calmly controlled the car’s slide. To protect her? That notion weaved a disquieting path through her consciousness and played games with her emotional stability.

  To protect them both, she reminded herself. Nothing personal. Nothing to get unsettled and prickly throated about.

  Straightening her shoulders, she followed him up front to see the real damage. The car had come to rest bumper-deep in the tree’s dense foliage. One jutting branch, it seemed, had pierced the grill and the radiator still hissed its pained response.

  She rested a consoling hand on the hood. “Doesn’t look as if we’ll be going any further. At least, not in this car.”

  “It could have been a lot worse,” he said with a quiet intensity that brought her eyes around to meet his. “I’m rather glad you were in the car.”

  And not on her bike, without the protection of these sturdy metal panels.

  The intensity of his look, of his unspoken message, pounded so powerfully in her chest that she had to look away. To gather her defenses with several deep breaths before she could speak. “It would have been a lot worse but for your quick reflexes.”

  “I didn’t fancy going head-to-head with that piece of lumber.” He indicated the bulk of the trunk with a brief nod, and then turned toward the towering forest that edged the road. “Or any of its mates.”

  She watched him walk back down the road, hands on hips, and knew he’d be reaching the same conclusion she’d just worked her way around to. This back road saw little traffic. They could wait days and not see another vehicle.

  “How far to the cabin, do you think?” she asked slowly. At least the cabin had her bike, wheels they could use to get back to civilization.

  “Seven miles. A decent walk.”

  The wind gusted up again, whipping at his suit jacket and bringing up goose bumps on Zara’s bare stomach. She cast a quick glance at the sky, at the lowering ceiling of gray, and sucked in a breath thick with the scent of eucalyptus and imminent rain.

  “If we don’t want to get wet,” she said briskly, turning back to the car to fetch her backpack, “we might want to make that a decent run.”

  They started out at a walk, but with the threat of a cloudburst hanging over their heads—literally—they picked up the pace after the first mile, despite the flinty ground that shifted underfoot and despite Alex’s footwear. Zara listened to those leather soles, designed for nothing more vigorous that stalking the corridors of business power, striking out a solid beat at her side.

  As luck would have it, she’d pulled on her leathers over shorts and a workout top before leaving the city. Now those leathers, and his suit jacket and tie, were in her backpack. The biker boots she’d swapped for joggers but he kept up easily, his breathing measured.

  Somehow she wasn’t surprised. Alex Carlisle looked like a man who took everything in his long, capable stride.

  She stepped up the pace again. He, naturally, kept up. From the corner of her eye she caught the easy swing of his arms, bare and tanned beneath rolled-up shirtsleeves, and her chest tightened from more than the aerobic workout.

  It mystified her, the intensity and immediacy of this attraction. Sure, he was good-looking. Sure, he oozed testosterone. But she dealt with such men on a daily basis in her work. Beneath the five-thousand-dollar suits they were all just flesh-and-blood men. Not a single one affected her like this.

  Why Alex Carlisle?

  Because she couldn’t have him? Or because she sensed a multitude of layers beneath the expensive veneer and the buff body?

  In ten minutes or so they would arrive back at an empty, isolated cabin. This storm might well prevent them from leaving and they would be alone, together. That knowledge jittered through her senses, drove her to run even harder, but she couldn’t outrun the man at her side or her extreme awareness of him.

  Nor could she outrun the weather.

  The sky broke without warning, releasing a short burst of rain that lasted only long enough to soak her to the skin. Then it turned to icy sleet. Head down for protection from the biting wind-driven slush, she might have run right by the turn into the driveway if Alex hadn’t called out her name, bringing her head up and around.

  At first all she saw was the man stopped by the half-secreted entrance, his dark hair whipped into disarray, his soaked shirt clinging to the hard planes of his torso. A man whose chest worked noticeably with each breath but who sti
ll managed to say in a perfectly even voice, “I don’t know your plans, but this is as far as I’m going.”

  Zara shoved a dripping hank of hair back from her face. “I was thinking of going around the block again,” she managed to gasp. “But if you’ve had enough, let’s call it quits.”

  Zara had stayed at the cabin enough times to know what to expect. One room, one bed, one outside bathroom. No electricity, no hot water, no neighbors. One key hidden in the same spot behind the wood box on the porch.

  Three-quarters of an hour after Alex took the key from her useless, numb fingers to open the door, Zara thought she might have stopped shivering. Finally. The fire he’d patiently built and nurtured from damp kindling into a blazing inferno helped. So had losing her wet clothes and wrapping herself snugly in one of the pair of thick sleeping bags Alex had found.

  Draped over the handlebars of her bike and a chair he’d dragged fireside, her thin gym clothes would soon be dry. So would his shirt, which meant she could stop not watching him prowl around the cabin, all bare-chested and beautiful in the rusty firelight. She’d decided it was much safer and more relaxing to watch the flames flicker and dance over the logs in the fireplace.

  Sitting cross-legged inside her downy cocoon, staring into the blaze, she could even put a positive spin to this misadventure. With Alex isolated out here, Susannah had more time to think—or to get wherever she’d gone to do that thinking—without him turning up to influence her decision. Zara might be stormbound with a man who stirred her libido in all kinds of forbidden ways, but she had willpower. She knew what she could have and what was off-limits. Take chocolate, for example…

  Bad example.

  With a wry grimace, she pressed a hand to her empty stomach. Thinking about food reminded her of how little she’d eaten today and how little Alex had found in his preliminary investigation of the cabin. Two pillows, two sleeping bags, two kerosene lamps, no kerosene. One box of matches.

  Right now she could hear him executing a more thorough search of the kitchen cupboards.

  “Any luck?” she asked hopefully, when the sounds of doors opening and shutting ceased.

  “Unless there’s something edible in the first-aid kit, we’re dead out of luck.”

  She turned then to find him leaning back against what passed for a kitchen bench. And for the first time since they’d walked through the door, for the first time since he’d ordered her out of her wet clothes, since he’d busied himself with building the fire and setting their clothes out to dry, he met her eyes.

  Nice that it was across the width of the cabin. Nice that the distance and the shadowy light disguised the hot lick of reaction in her eyes, in her blood, in her bare-naked skin beneath the silky lining of the sleeping bag. She wrapped it more securely around her shoulders and attempted to relax. They were stuck with each other for the duration of the storm; why not make it as easy and comfortable as possible?

  “Not even an out-of-date can of beans?” she asked.

  “Sadly, no.”

  “You know what’s really sad? I stopped on my way out here for fuel and what was allegedly lunch. At the time I thought I was doing myself a favor not eating it!”

  “You didn’t save the leftovers?”

  Zara chuckled at his hopeful tone. “No, although that’s not the saddest bit. In a moment of weakness I almost bought a couple of chocolate bars, you know, for later. But I resisted.”

  “Damn.”

  “You like chocolate?”

  “Like is perhaps too mild a word,” he said with a slow smile. “It’s my sin of choice.”

  Standing there in the shadows with his bare chest and flat abdomen and low-riding trousers, with that deadly little smile exaggerating the sensual bow of his top lip and deepening the grooves in his lean cheeks, he looked like a different kind of sinner. And a different kind of sin.

  Temptation snaked through Zara’s veins, the dark, rich, sumptuous chocolate kind. Temptation to ask how often he sinned, to suggest it had done him no harm, to ask about his second choice. To flirt and indulge herself for once while she stripped away the veneer to the man beneath.

  She didn’t. She couldn’t. He was Susannah’s.

  “I resisted the siren call.” Zara shrugged, a silky slide of her bare shoulders inside the sleeping bag. “It’s not been one of my better days for choices.”

  “I don’t suppose it worked out quite the way you planned when you got up this morning.”

  “We have that in common,” she said, and regretted her candor instantly. The mood changed, grew thick and weighty with the reminder of how his day had started and what had brought them together. His wedding. Her worry.

  “Why did you disapprove of me marrying Susannah?” he asked.

  Zara exhaled slowly. So much for the easy banter. So much for comfortable. She felt the tension in his gaze, in her limbs, and concentrated on how to answer.

  In truth, Susannah hadn’t told her much about her relationship with Alex Carlisle and that was the problem. If Zara ever fell in love, she couldn’t imagine clamming up on her best friend in their regular e-mail or IM or phone updates. She’d have sung it, laughed it, lived it, breathed it. Susannah hadn’t. Sure, she’d mentioned meeting Alex and going out with him a couple of times, then the next thing Zara knew, she’d agreed to marry him.

  “I wouldn’t have disapproved,” she said slowly, “if Susannah had appeared more enthusiastic about her wedding.”

  “She wasn’t happy?”

  “You’re asking me?”

  The line of his surprisingly full lips tightened. “We haven’t spent a lot of time together, not since she moved back to Melbourne.”

  “You spent last weekend together,” Zara pointed out. They’d flown to his family’s outback station so Susannah could meet his mother and apparently there’d been a small engagement party. “Didn’t you notice anything the matter?”

  Heck, Zara had only seen her friend twice during the last week and she’d noticed her quietness, her distraction. That’s why she’d prodded her at dinner last night. That’s why she’d asked if Susannah was very, very sure.

  Obviously her fiancé hadn’t noticed. He stood in stony-faced silence for at least another minute before he asked, “Is there someone else?”

  Even across the room and through the deepening twilight she could see the stormy tension in his eyes. The breath caught hard in her chest and she had to look away. Had to force her focus to that bolt-from-the-blue question. Something had definitely been going on with Susannah this last week, but another man? It seemed so unlikely that Zara hadn’t even considered the possibility. She did so now, for a long intense moment.

  Perhaps she’d needed someone who gave her more time and consideration. Zara could believe that. But she couldn’t believe that Susannah would cheat.

  “No.” She shook her head. “Not when she’d agreed to marry you.”

  The moment spun out, taut and silent but for the whistling howl of the wind and the intermittent crack and spit of the fire. She didn’t know if he believed her, couldn’t tell what he was thinking.

  “What will you do now?” she asked.

  “What can I do?” He pushed away from the bench. “For now we’re stuck here with nothing to do but wait out the storm.”

  All matter-of-fact, all purpose, he crossed the room toward her and Zara jerked up straighter, eyes wide and mouth turning dry. But he skirted around to the side of the hearth, then squatted down to feed the fire with another chunk of wood. She tried to look away, some place where the revitalized leap of flames didn’t limn the hard planes of his torso in golden light. Where she didn’t notice how his midnight-dark hair had dried thick and wavy and ruffled, or how her fingers curled with a need to reach out and touch.

  Zara swallowed and discovered that her throat was as dry as her mouth. She wriggled an arm free of her cocoon and reached for her water. She took a long swig and offered him the bottle. Then watched him drink, watched the slide of his throat as
he swallowed.

  Oh, gads. She had to stop doing that. Watching him. Staring.

  “That’s a first-rate fire,” she said, turning to stare fixedly into the blaze instead. “Were you a Boy Scout?”

  “Me?” He snorted softly. “No way.”

  “Not the Carlisle way?”

  “I grew up in the outback, Zara, on a cattle station. No Boy Scouts out there.”

  “But plenty of fires?” She gave up and turned her curious gaze his way. Still too attractive—far too attractive, squatting there by the hearth, one hand holding a solid fire iron in a loose grip, turning it over and over in a slow, measured motion.

  “The campfire was one of our first lessons, the first year we were allowed out on a muster.”

  “You mustered cattle?”

  He huffed out a soft sound. “Is that so hard to imagine?”

  So, okay, she’d known the Carlisles owned oodles of cattle country up in the north—the tabloids loved to refer to the brothers as “Princes of the Outback”—but she’d never pictured them taking an active role. If she’d pictured them at all. Now the figure of Alex the cowboy rode into her imagination, and strangely she didn’t laugh. An hour or two back she would have.

  Another layer peeled away, revealed, disturbing.

  “How about you, Zara?” he asked, poking at the fire now. “Were you a Girl Scout?”

  She smiled, despite her unsettling thoughts. “No. Obviously I wasn’t.”

  “You like the bush, though?”

  “How did you know that?”

  “You said you like coming up here.”

  Ah, right, so she had. Earlier, out on the porch. When she’d been ferreting out the key with her frozen fingers. “Here it’s like each day stretches ahead with all these hours and the freedom to do whatever I want with them. No pressure, no timetable.”

  “You don’t mind the lack of amenities?”

  “No.” She smiled and shook her head. “And that’s a straight-out lie. I do miss a decent shower. Steamy. Hot. Indecently long.”