The Outback Engagement

by Margaret Way

  “Oh…Darcy,” he said in exasperation. “Don’t make yourself suffer any more.” He was driven to catch her by the shoulders feeling the delicate bones beneath his hands. “Do you think I didn’t want to tell you? Do you think I wanted to carry the burden?”

  “Why the hell not?” she cried explosively. “You tell me everything else!” Darcy felt the angry tears spring to her eyes. “You criticise me at every turn. You criticise my father. You’ve questioned every aspect of our relationship. You’ve made me so mad! Why I damned nearly let you mess up my life. I enslaved my pride.”

  She saw the mirror of her anger in his brilliant green eyes. “That’s good coming from you!” The hands that had been so gentle turned to steel. “I can’t imagine your life more messed up than it already is.”

  For a moment Darcy stared back at him in sheer hate. Driven to frenzy she raised her hand, cracking it across his handsome, determined, arrogant face.

  That got a bitter derisive laugh. “At least I got some passion from you,” he taunted with angry triumph.

  She experienced a great pang of conscience and self-disgust. “I’m sorry.” Her heart was banging against her rib cage so hard it might have been trying to get out. “I’m not myself. Let me go.” She tried to pull away but he held on, shaking his head.

  “Why?” Curt too was fighting for composure. “Why can’t you look at me? Is it because when I touch you, you can’t pretend any more?”

  The truth, the truth and nothing but the truth! She was vibrating all over when she well knew the dangers of provoking Curt. It played havoc with her. “Take pity on me!” It came out like a lament.

  “You don’t deserve pity. You deserve a good shake up.”

  “I am shaken up!” A helpless desire reached out its tendrils for her. “My whole world has been turned upside down. I hate to be deceived.” By Curt of all people.

  “No one could be better at deceiving herself than you.” Curt threw up his hands, his contempt barely veiled. “Maybe you’ll feel differently about things when you calm down.”

  She took great care to move out of his orbit though Mars wouldn’t be far enough. “My sister too has kept me in the dark. Another thing I have to grapple with. She could have told me right at the start she’d met up with you and your mother over the years.”

  “Like me she’d been instructed not to,” Curt argued their case. “Hell, it couldn’t have been more than a dozen times. I wasn’t part of the meetings. Certainly not for years. Of recent times I’ve been the one collecting my mother to take her back to our hotel after their rendezvous. It was a courtesy to say a few words at the same time.”

  “Yet a friendship developed, damn it! Courtney went into your arms like she belonged there.”

  Curt shook his head in disbelief. “You can’t be jealous?”

  There was nothing she could say to that but admit it. “You have to love someone to be jealous,” she told him, still wearing her scars. “There’s no point in taking this any further. I’m bitterly disappointed in you.”

  “It would be a miracle if you weren’t!” His face grim Curt took charge of the trolley. “You’re not going to take it out on Courtney, are you?”

  Darcy tried desperately to gather herself in when she really felt like letting out a great cry of anguish. Courtney’s blue eyes had smitten their father. Now it seemed Curt had fallen under their spell. “You make it sound like I’m a real bitch.”

  “To be honest, sometimes you are. It’s about the only time you get in touch with your feminine side. Courtney on the other hand is a very sweet girl. You can’t look at her without smiling.”

  That fairly summed up Courtney. Child and woman. Dread was like ice water in Darcy’s veins and under that a blind fear. “Don’t men love sweet little things,” she said mournfully, trying not to crumble.

  “Can you blame us?” Curt mocked. “Most men go in search of peace.”

  “And I hate men!” Blue lightning flashed from her black fringed eyes. “A little while ago that hell raiser, Jock McIvor, was playing the part of the loving father to the hilt. Unlike the bad old days he and my little sister got on just fine. In fact all it would take is a little planning and a little help for Courtney to scoop the pool. A fortune awaits her. I daresay Dad who has re-invented himself as the long suffering father will want her to sit by his bedside.”

  “Maybe atonement has gone to his head,” Curt suggested acidly. “It’s not such a bad idea anyway. You might be able to get some sleep at night. You sure need it. You’re nearly jumping out of your skin.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  IT SEEMED entire Outback Queensland came to the funeral. Trucks, buses, four-wheel drives private and charter planes. And that was without counting the inter-state mourners who knew better than to ignore Big Jock McIvor even in death. They all toiled in procession in the blazing sun to the McIvor family cemetery, a distance from Murraree’s homestead. Several of the mourners, big serious-faced, superbly fit cattle men, Curt one of them, carried the ornate casket with what appeared to be surprising ease. The casket was fit for a king. Beautifully grained polished wood, bronze handles, a gleaming brass plaque. The deceased had insisted upon it being carried, though it could just as easily have come on the back of one of the station’s utes Darcy thought keeping her half hooded eyes trained on the ground.

  I am not going to break down. Not now.

  She had expected tender-hearted Courtney who in their father’s last days had established herself as Jack McIvor’s favourite to be weeping copiously—she must know every eye was on her—but Courtney did not. She stood at her elder sister’s shoulder, dry eyed.

  Not a hypocrite anyway.

  They were both dressed head to foot in black. Another final edict from Jock. Black dresses, wide brimmed black hats, black pumps. The sombreness of the outfit was unbelievably becoming to Courtney with her halo of shining blonde hair and big cornflower blue eyes. Darcy thought she looked more like a crow, several of which were circling overhead. Adam Maynard stood next to Courtney, tall and elegant, making her look touchingly small.

  Impossible to believe you’re dead, Dad.

  But he was dead. Darcy had stood at his bedside, hearing him breathe his last. Her tears had been on full view then. They had rolled unchecked down her face so that Curt’s mother, Kath, who had flown over to Murraree with her son to be with the sisters, Darcy in particular, had passed her a handkerchief and Courtney who felt herself unaccepted had grasped her sister’s hand, trying to give as much love and support as she could.

  Finally they were all gathered around the open grave while the pall bearers lowered the casket with slings into the ground. Now the robed minister, a handsome man with a large steel grey head and the pious expression of someone in daily communication with God, began to speak. Unbelievably ponderously. To Darcy’s ears it sounded like an unnatural voice. An actor playing an eccentric vicar perhaps, but Jock had wanted this particular churchman, celebrated for his eulogies, to conduct the service. The minister lived up to his reputation, giving weighty significance to Jock McIvor’s extraordinary and blameless life. It was a view that could only be brought out for special occasions when one only speaks good of the dead.

  Dad is at last respectable.

  Someone, Darcy didn’t look up to see who it was, had a coughing fit. Maybe there was only a certain amount the mourners were prepared to accept without registering a veiled protest. Darcy was glad of the shade of a huge desert oak. It was one of many that encircled the graveyard that was enclosed by a black wrought iron fence so tall it could have kept out a team of camels. This quiet place looking out over the rolling red sand hills held the remains of generations of McIvors including in one small section guarded by a beautiful white marble angel, the children who had not survived their infancy in the far off days when the Outback was without the mantle of safety of The Flying Doctor.

  When the time came McIvor’s older daughter Darcy emptied a small scoop of red ochre earth on top of the gle
aming casket, handing the brass scoop to a pallbearer and stepping quietly back.

  Whatever you were, Dad, I loved you. Go in peace.

  Just when she thought she couldn’t take anymore without fainting—she’d been unable to eat properly for days—it was over.

  At least it was over until they all toiled back to the house.

  “Darcy?” Katherine Berenger’s voice was solicitous, tender with affection. “You’re very pale, dear. You can’t walk back to the house.” Katherine looked about for her son, who was standing several feet away at the centre of a group of men.

  “Neither can I in these shoes.” Courtney, who was also pale and shaken, pulled a little face. “Was that, I wonder, our father, the minister was talking about?”

  “I expect Dad wrote the whole thing and the minister delivered it,” Darcy answered.

  Kath had caught her son’s attention. Now Curt strode towards them. Crystal clear green eyes glittered in his tanned face. He too wore black with a black tie and a shirt white as snow. He had to be feeling the full weight of his jacket in the heat, but he gave no sign of it. As usual he looked dynamic, not subject to heat, rain or cold like mere mortals.

  “You’re not going to walk back.” He spoke to Darcy directly, scrutinizing her pale, stressed out face carefully. He laid one hand on his mother’s shoulder. “I’ve organised for vehicles to take the women back to the homestead.”

  “Of course you have, darling,” Kath nodded thankfully. Her son had a habit of never forgetting anything.

  “This is a day that will change all our lives,” Darcy announced to them all in a far-away voice, then in the next instant pitched sideways into Curt’s waiting arms.

  Everyone had moved away from the silent graveyard. Even the birds had left.

  “You don’t really have to attend at the house,” Curt said. They were sitting on a stone bench in the shade waiting for Darcy to fully recover.

  “Of course I do!” She fanned herself with her wide brimmed hat. “What do you think Dad would have said if I didn’t make it? On the other hand, would he even have noticed? It’s not exactly what I expected and certainly Courtney didn’t invite it, but Dad in this last week behaved as though he didn’t know who the hell I was.”

  Curt took her hand in his and shook her fingers. “Jock’s gone. He lived his life like a drama. He was forever playing a part, going for the Academy Award.”

  Darcy frowned. “Wouldn’t you try to be as true to yourself as you could when you were hurtling into eternity? It was all I could do to get near him. It had to be Courtney. Doesn’t that strike you as weird?”

  “Just about everything your father did struck me as weird,” Curt freely admitted. “Don’t take it to heart. He hadn’t seen Courtney since she was a child. He hadn’t forgotten about her for all he said. She’s so like her mother. Don’t let it upset you, Darcy.”

  “Well it does. It makes me feel as though no one wanted me. My mother and at the end, my father. The question is, why? Am I so unloveable?” She began fanning herself again, forcing coolness onto her face.

  Curt took the hat from her, waving it less frantically but more effectively. “Given Jock reared you the wonder is you’re as loveable as you are.”

  “What?” She turned to stare at him, catching the half smile on his mouth. “Gee thanks.”

  “You’re looking better,” he noted with relief her colour was returning.

  “Good thing I have you to fall back on. Literally.”

  “You’re a featherweight, Darcy. You’re burning yourself out.”

  “And you want to change that?” She rose slowly to her feet, testing herself, slender as a lily in her well cut black linen shift.

  “That’s what I wanna do,” he mocked, twirling her hat in his hand. “You don’t want this, do you?” He too stood up, nicely towering over her. He had taken off his jacket, loosened his tie. A lock of mahogany hair fell onto his smooth tanned forehead.

  He looked like a movie star who just happened to be a cattle man. “Not until the next funeral,” she said mordantly.

  “Really it should stay with Jock.”

  To her shocked surprise he used the hat like a Frisbee. She watched it land unerringly in the open grave that station hands would shortly fill in.

  “Hell,” Darcy breathed in amazement. “Now I won’t have any hat to wear.”

  “I’ll buy you another one.” His voice was as smooth as satin. “One that suits you.”

  Colour smudged her cheeks. “It was the best I could do at short notice.”

  “Only kidding!” He glanced down on her. “I’ve never seen you look so exotic. I suppose we’d better make it back to the house. Say goodbye to Jock unless you plan on visiting him every day.”

  Darcy shook her head. “I loved him,” she said. “Muggins is my name. I thought he loved me. I thought I was his only true confidante, not that he consulted me before he made any important decision. Let’s face it. Love was unobtainable from Jock. He was one of those steely hard men who can function without it.”

  Despite the fact she spoke with no trace of self-pity the poignancy of her words pierced Curt’s heart.

  At the homestead Katherine Berenger, a statuesque woman with hair like dark burnt honey, much admired and respected in the far flung community, held the fort effortlessly as was her way. A stream of people were making their way up to Courtney, kindly in their manner, sincere with their sympathies, but unmistakably agog with curiosity at how she’d turned out. The whole Outback knew the story of Jock McIvor’s failed marriage. How the young sisters had been split between both parents with the inevitable traumas. Little Courtney had turned out very well indeed was the general opinion. She was as lovely as her mother, whom many people remembered, and her manner was charming if understandably subdued.

  In a rare moment when she was briefly on her own, Adam Maynard found his way to her side, not so much to engage her in conversation but continue his study of her. “For a wake everyone appears to be eating and drinking with abandon,” he murmured near her ear. “How are you bearing up?”

  She tilted her blonde head to look at him, meeting brilliant dark eyes she found strangely unfathomable. “It’s Darcy I’m worried about.”

  “Curt will look after her,” he said soothingly. “They should be here soon.”

  “I don’t know where she finds the strength,” Courtney said, still in a worried tone. “She’s hardly slept and it’s been difficult to get her to eat. Father meant so much to her.”

  Adam inclined his head. “He was all she had. It’s a very lonely isolated existence out here. It must have been extremely difficult for Darcy growing up without a mother. A mother’s influence and gentle ways. You at least had that.”

  Oversensitive to the issue Courtney thought she detected an edge in his suave tones. “I had to learn how to survive, too, Adam. Neither Darcy nor I had a choice. It was our parents who separated us.”

  “Could neither of you—your mother and you—ever find the time to contact her?” he asked, looking down into that exquisite, flower-like face that could be hiding so much.

  “What are you waiting for, Adam?” Courtney wasn’t a McIvor for nothing. She fired up. “For me to say how guilty I feel?” Although he had been courtesy itself to her during his stay-over at Murraree Courtney had the sinking feeling Adam Maynad was highly suspicious of her. A state of affairs that made her uneasy. “I do feel guilty. More than you realize apparently. You don’t like me, do you?”

  His dark eyes held hers keenly. The sombreness of her silk dress only accentuated the enchanting blue and gold of her colouring and the apple blossom skin. “Why would you say that? If I’ve offended you, I’m sorry.”

  She shook her head dismissively. “You don’t expect me to believe that, do you, Adam? Everything you say has planning behind it.”

  “You don’t find lawyers attractive as a species?” He smiled at her.

  “How can you expect me to find you attractive when all along I
’ve had the feeling you’ve been silently judging me.”

  “I hope you’re not going to pretend you haven’t been sizing me up as well?” he countered with a lift of one eyebrow. “I have noticed the sharp intelligence in those flower blue eyes.”

  The normally sweet natured Courtney bristled. Arresting as he was, she didn’t have the friendly rapport with him as she had with Curt, for instance. Beneath the civility a strange antagonism ran like an electric current. “Don’t put too much store on it. The fact Father seemed to need me around in his last days wasn’t something I invited.”

  “I’m sure I’ve never suggested any such thing,” he answered suavely. “Where did you get that idea?”

  “Maybe it’s the way you look down your arrogant nose at me,” she said. “If you’re looking for an angle, you won’t find one. I am not an opportunist. Father wanted me here. It’s on record in your letter.”

  “He was such an unpredictable man,” Adam murmured.

  “You don’t have to tell me that. We must suppose he felt guilty about me.”

  “He had reason to,” Adam said dispassionately.

  “And I don’t want his money,” Courtney continued in a low, tight voice that was not characteristic of her. “Money had nothing to do with why I came here.”

  He bowed slightly. “I stand chastised.”

  “I was longing to see my sister,” she said. “I idolized Darcy when I was a child.”

  “She’s a remarkable young woman,” Adam agreed quietly, staring over Courtney’s head. “She and Curt have just entered the house,” he informed her, his eyes returning to Courtney’s expressive face.

  “Then you’ll excuse me, Adam.” Courtney’s voice and manner couldn’t have been cooler. She turned on her high heels and walked away.

  Adam looked after her, her chin in the air, all graceful scorn. She had the serene beauty of an angel but was she as innocent as she seemed? Adam couldn’t get the question out of his mind. Particularly when at the last moment Jock McIvor had required changes to his will.