by Valerie Parv
He made a shushing sound and pulled her to the ground with him. From his pocket, he took out a pair of compact binoculars and trained them on a distant cluster of paperbark trees.
She dropped her voice to a whisper, although no one could possibly hear them. “What do you see?”
He handed her the glasses. “Movement at twelve o’clock.”
Positioning herself to face the direction he indicated, she adjusted the powerful glasses to her vision. A lone man in khaki clothing jumped into focus. He had a sack slung over his shoulder and was retreating into the trees. “It’s the man I saw watching our camp,” she murmured. If he’d been visiting the creek again, his intentions—whatever they were—had been thwarted because she was up and about instead of sleeping.
Blake nodded confirmation. “Eddy Gilgai. Take a good look so you’ll know him if you see him hanging around again.”
She did so, then lowered the glasses. “You sound as if you expect to see more of him.”
“If Max put him up to this, we will. Max isn’t the type to give up easily.”
“Shouldn’t we try to catch Eddy now?”
“That stand of trees is farther away than it looks. By the time I get there, he’ll have melted into the bush. One of his clan could track him but I doubt that I could. And besides even if we did catch him, we couldn’t prove he was up to no good.”
“Even though Des asked him to leave?”
“Visiting his relatives isn’t a crime, and that’s what he’d claim to be doing.”
“If feeding a wild crocodile isn’t illegal and you can’t arrest him for trespassing, how will you pin anything on him?”
His mouth tightened. “Tom’s the lawman. I have my own methods.”
Not entirely orthodox, she deduced. “I don’t think I want to know.”
“No reason you should. None of this need concern you, provided you stay well clear of the creek.”
A vision of a prehistoric killer rearing out of the water made her shiver. “Don’t worry, I intend to.” She wasn’t sure about taking the rest of his advice.
His dark gaze told her he suspected what she was thinking. “I’ll be around to make sure you do.”
“I don’t need a minder.”
“No? Then show me the direction that takes us back to camp.”
She stood up and looked around. “Should be easy enough. We climbed up here from that side.” A network of creeks bordered their location. And all the clumps of trees looked alike. Surely there should be a glimpse of the tent from here? A faint track gave her more confidence. “That way,” she said, pointing.
He looked amused. “The trail does lead to a camp, but it’s about three times as far away as yours and only used at cattle mustering time.”
“Smart-ass,” she muttered under her breath. Then remembered her resolution and folded her arms. “Okay, Crocodile Man, how do I work it out?”
In a fluid movement, he uncoiled from the ground and picked up a stick. Pushing it vertically into the ground, he placed a stone at the end of the shadow cast by the stick. “Now we wait twenty minutes.”
She was intrigued. “For what?”
“Patience,” he counseled.
Easy for him to say. She wasn’t known for patience. She wondered if he knew it and was testing her. She decided not to give him the satisfaction of being right and schooled herself to remain still, although her awareness of him grew to agonizing proportions.
He stood statue-still, his gaze on the far horizon. How could he be so at ease when her muscles twitched with the need for movement? The twenty minutes seemed like an eternity.
When her watch indicated the time had passed, although he hadn’t even glanced at his watch, he placed another stone at the slightly changed angle of shadow cast by the stick, then drew a line from the first stone to well beyond the second.
“This line runs west-east.” He turned her until the shadow stick was behind her and she was standing with her left foot halfway between the stones and her right foot on the line the same distance again past the second stone.
Warmth flooded through her from his touch, and her concentration wavered. His breath was hot on her cheek, his smell invitingly masculine. She dragged in a steadying breath. “Now what?”
“Now you’re looking north, in the direction of the camp.” Hunkering down he drew a line at her feet bisecting the first line, indicating north-south, she assumed.
When she said so, he nodded. “This is how you make an earth compass.”
Trying not to focus on the luxuriant spill of his hair, or give in to the temptation to run her fingers through it—an entirely new temptation for her—her brows knit. “How would this help us at night?” They had climbed the hill before dawn.
He stood up, standing a fraction too close to her for comfort. “The earth compass works in moonlight, too. Once you decide in which direction to travel, you stand on the compass and face the way you intend moving. Look for a bright star, or better still, a group of stars in that direction and move toward them.”
Follow your star, she thought. Was there a message here? “Won’t the trees get in your line of sight?” she asked, annoyed at the husky way her voice came out.
He nodded. “Good thinking. You don’t choose stars that are right on the horizon, or you’ll lose sight of them behind the trees. You also need to remember that stars move east to west at about fifteen degrees an hour, the same as the sun. I’ll show you how to measure degrees using your hand span.”
He took her hand and the world lurched again. Much more of his touch and she would be in his arms again, not answerable for the consequences. She tugged free, feeling heat flood into her face. “Show me later. I think we should get back to camp and make sure Eddy hasn’t disturbed anything.”
Blake saw the telltale color stain her cheeks and felt an inner swell of satisfaction. She would be his before this adventure was over. She might not be sure if she wanted him, but he had no doubts. What happened after that was up to fate, although he had ideas about that, too.
“You’re the boss,” he said. For now, at least.
He saw her eyes widen as if she’d picked up his thought. “You don’t have a problem with that?”
His shoulders lifted. “Why should I? I’m a sensitive new-age kind of guy.”
“Yeah, right.”
Feigning hurt feelings, he stuck out his lower lip. “You don’t believe me.”
“I believe you’ll let me lead as long as it suits you.”
Keeping the grin off his face, he said, “I might surprise you.”
The skeptical look she gave him only made him want her more. He’d take the greatest delight in breeching that tough journalistic facade to connect with the woman beneath. She’d be all softness, all warmth, all passion. An all-or-nothing kind of lady. His kind.
But first he’d have to win her trust and make her want him as much as he wanted her. Then he’d see who led and who followed.
He couldn’t stop himself. He brushed his thumb along her jawline and saw her shudder. Dark, potent desire leaped into her gaze and he watched her master it with an effort. Or thought she had. She would never know how tempted he was to show her how thin her veneer of control really was. He knew because his own wasn’t much better. The awareness was in his gruff tone as he said, “Let’s get back to camp.”
Chapter 5
Blake’s survey of their campsite showed no signs of disturbance, although he frowned when he spotted fresh footprints near the perimeter. “Unfortunately, they don’t tell us anything except that someone was here.”
“And we already know that,” she said, setting the ingredients for the bush bread called damper out on a folding table.
In the middle of starting the fire, Blake paused. “Don’t take this too lightly. What Eddy’s doing has more than nuisance value. If I had my way, feeding wild crocodiles would be illegal in Australia.”
She mixed flour and water, plunged elbow-deep into the sticky mix and began t
o knead. “It’s already illegal in countries like the United States, but it’s popular with tourists.”
“Who have no idea of the risks involved,” he said. “Teaching crocodiles to jump creates an association between people and food. When they do what they’ve been trained to do and eat someone, the same people training them will be baying for their blood.”
She kept kneading, sprinkling extra flour over the ball of dough as she worked. “I’m starting to feel sorry for the crocodiles.”
The fire flared to life and he stood up, dusting off his hands, a hunter in his element, performing the most primeval of tasks. “I’ll make an outback woman of you yet.”
A twinge shot through her as sharp as a knife thrust. She masked it by slamming the dough into a cast iron pan ready to cook in the coals when they were hot enough. “No way. This lifestyle is strictly temporary.” Was she protesting too much? She didn’t really want to spend more than a month living in the Kimberley, did she?
He didn’t seem troubled by her certainty. “That’s what they all say.”
“All your lady friends?” she asked, carrying the pan to him.
He took the pan from her. “How did you learn to make bush bread?”
He hadn’t answered her question, she noticed. “I looked the recipe up when I was doing my research.” At his look of surprise she added, “I told you I do my homework. I also know how to make tea in a billycan by covering the tea leaves in boiling water and swinging it around my head to help it brew.”
He laughed. “The first time I tried that, I nearly scalded myself.”
He hadn’t been bred to outback life any more than she had, she remembered. “Did it take you long to settle in?”
He poked among the coals, making a place for the bread pan. “I fought like hell against doing any such thing.”
Surprised by his response, she almost cut herself on the old-fashioned can opener she’d been using to open a can of beans and bacon. “You? But you fit in so well.”
“When Des Logan brought me to Diamond Downs, I didn’t want to fit in anywhere. I did everything I could to make him and Fran throw me out, short of setting fire to the homestead, and I seriously considered that.”
She paused in the act of spooning the beans into a saucepan. “Didn’t you like living in the outback?”
“I liked it far too much.”
“Then why…”
He came to stand beside her, the folding table rocking as he planted his palms on it. “I’d been happy with the couple who found me, but then unexpectedly they had a child. I realized later they were afraid I’d be a bad influence on their precious heir. Oh, they didn’t mean to shut me out. They tried to keep everything the same, but I knew it wasn’t.” His gaze grew distant. “She even called the new baby her ‘Number One Son.’ It was supposed to be a joke. So I started acting up, being what they expected me to be.”
“How old were you?” she asked.
“Six or so. When you’re branded a troublemaker, it’s hard to find another foster family willing to take you on.”
She winced. “How can anyone label a six-year-old a troublemaker?”
“Easily enough for the next couple of years, I was fostered by a professional caregiver who was in it for the money. She was already looking after three kids from the system, all older and tougher than me.”
“So you became even tougher,” she surmised. “Hardly surprising.”
He lifted the saucepan out of her hands, his fingers brushing hers and eliciting a wave of warmth. “Want this on the fire?”
“In another ten minutes, when the bread’s closer to being done.” She opened a folding chair and sat down at the table. “How did you get out of the second foster home?”
“By making the woman’s life hell until she gave up on me. Then I was moved to a halfway house for problem kids. It was run on tough love principles supposedly designed to keep us from graduating to jail. Some of the kids had already been arrested. The rest were well on the way. I acted as mean as they were. Better than letting them know how scared I was.”
Her heart bled for the frightened child caught in that hell. She tried to justify her response as professional. His experience would make a riveting human-interest story. But the deep-down tug of emotion felt dangerously personal. “You didn’t want to be farmed out to another foster home, was that the problem?”
He poked at the fire, not looking at her. “The opposite, in fact. By the time Des and Fran came to the house wanting to foster a son, I’d have done anything to get out of the halfway house, so I put on an angelic act and they bought it.”
She got up and moved closer to the fire. Closer to him. “Really?”
Her disbelieving tone earned a raised-eyebrow look. “Not for a second. Des told me later he picked me because he wanted to see how long I could keep up the angelic act.”
“What he didn’t know was that the toughness was the act,” she concluded.
Blake nodded. “Coffee?”
“Thought you’d never ask.”
He poured some into two enamel mugs and handed one to her. She cupped her hands around it, thinking of how far he’d come from his early life to his present one. He looked so at ease as he carried the saucepan of beans to the fire that it was hard to imagine he hadn’t been born in the outback. “What made you think life with Des and Fran would be an improvement?” she asked.
When the beans began to bubble around the edges, he stirred them with a wooden spoon. “Anything would have been an improvement. I’d heard enough of the other kids’ experiences to know I had no future where I was. Then when I got to Diamond Downs, everything was so perfect, I was afraid it was too good to last.”
She fetched enamel plates and cutlery and the folding chairs and set them down beside the campfire. “So you decided to hurt yourself before they could do it.”
“Des couldn’t seem to get the message. No matter what I did, he wouldn’t send me away. He added Ryan, then Tom and Cade to the family and I found myself so busy being a big brother that I didn’t have time to act up anymore.”
He reached for a cloth and pulled the bread pan out of the fire, rapping the top of the loaf with his knuckles. From the hollow sound, she knew the bread was cooked. He tipped it out onto a plate and set it on a rock beside the fire to keep warm.
Recalling Blake’s experience at his first foster home, Jo dragged in a deep breath. “But you still felt insecure,” she guessed.
He tore two chunks off the bread and put them on plates, then added beans and bacon, and handed one of the plates to her. “I couldn’t stand waiting for something to go wrong. So I ran away and persuaded Tom to come with me.”
She pulled up a chair and sat down. Balancing the plate on her knee, she leaned forward. “Obviously, Des found you and brought you back.”
Blake sat down on the other chair and swirled his bread around in the beans although he didn’t eat, caught up in the memory. “Instead of tanning my hide for running away as I’d expected, he made me Judy’s godfather. Can you imagine? Me, a flaming godfather.”
She could imagine it more easily than she wanted to. For all his tough-guy image and his crocodile-hunting ways, she suspected Blake had a tender heart. He may have had it all but broken on the way to adulthood, but thanks to Des Logan and Blake’s inner strength, he’d preserved a core of decency that touched her more than she was willing to let him see.
A cough stopped her voice from cracking too obviously. “Giving you a role to play in his daughter’s life would have convinced you, more than anything he could have said, that there was room for all of you in the family.”
Blake nodded. “Now you know why I won’t let Max Horvath get his hands on this land.”
Because he owed Des his life, or at least the worthwhile one he now led. She shuddered inwardly, imaging how things might have gone if Blake had stayed at the halfway house. Another question occurred to her. “How did you come by the name of Stirton?”
He ate quietly.
Was he weighing up how much more to tell her, or regretting what he already had? she wondered. She’d decided he wasn’t going to answer when he said, “I chose it myself. I got Blake from a piece of paper pinned to the blanket I was wrapped in when I was found. For the first few years, I went by the surname of my first foster family. But I didn’t want a connection with anyone who didn’t want me. I saw this rugged outdoors man on television, a handler of big cats who ran a wildlife park outside Perth. His name was Bob Stirton, so I adopted his name as my surname. When I joined Des’s family, he offered to make me a Logan but by then, I was used to my name.”
“A true self-made man,” she mused.
He gave her a sharp look. “Haven’t you heard the saying that a self-made man has a fool for a maker?”
Chasing beans around her plate with the bread, she said, “Nobody can accuse you of being a fool. Behaving like an angel around Des was pretty darned smart.”
“Even though he didn’t fall for it.”
“You caught his eye, so it worked. And you’ve made the most of the chance he gave you.”
“Now it’s my turn to give something back.”
He’d been doing that for a long time, she gathered, although he didn’t seem to think it was enough. She was fairly sure Des was content that his oldest foster son had grown up to be a decent, hard-working human being who cared as much for others as for himself. From what she’d seen of the older man, he would consider that ample reward for any sacrifice he’d made.
Blake had other ideas. “I’m going to stop Max Horvath in his tracks if it’s the last thing I do.”
Light suddenly dawned and with it, a blinding sense of disappointment. She hid it by pouring more coffee into their mugs. “That’s why you want to stay here with me, to catch your neighbor up to no good. This has nothing to do with helping me put my story together, has it?”
He took the mug. “You’ll get your story.”
Wrapping her hands around the mug was more comforting than drinking the murky fluid, although she did both. First he would get what he wanted, she reasoned. She had a job to do and so did Blake. No reason to feel slighted.
