The Australians Convenient Bride

by Lindsay Armstrong

  ‘No thanks to you!’

  ‘Nothing I could say would have made any difference.’

  ‘I don’t know about that.’ Chattie sat down and smiled at him delightfully. ‘I get the feeling you’re the blue-eyed boy around here.’

  ‘But you don’t have to agree?’ he hazarded.

  ‘Bingo!’

  ‘Chattie—’ he laughed ‘—I am not an ogre.’

  ‘What’s that?’ Brett asked.

  ‘A scary person,’ Chattie said.

  ‘Mum says he can be,’ Brett contributed. ‘Mum says the only person she’d really rather not get on the wrong side of is Steve. Dad said he was amazed to hear it.’

  Chattie shot Steve an I-told-you-so look.

  But Brett continued, ‘I can’t see that he’s worse than anyone else; actually I think he’s a lot better.’

  ‘Thank you, Brett. Do you think you could be parted from Rich long enough to come out into the paddocks with me this afternoon?’ Steve asked.

  Brett jumped up in his chair. ‘Yes, sirree!’

  ‘That way Chattie can have a bit of time to rest and recover her good humour.’

  They gazed at each other until Chattie looked away and said stiffly, ‘Thank you. I appreciate that. I haven’t even unpacked yet,’ she added with some amazement.

  ‘By the way, please feel free to play the piano.’

  Her eyes widened. ‘Thank you again, but I haven’t seen one.’

  ‘The music room is off the dining room.’ Steve finished his meal, drained his teacup and stood up. ‘Let’s go, young man.’

  That was how, since Merlene had already left noisily on her bike, Chattie came to be alone in the homestead, apart from Rich, and able, for the first time, to think articulately about the surprising about-turn of events.

  She poured herself another cup of tea and considered the fact that, whatever fix Steve Kinane found himself in, she would have thought one Chattie Winslow would be the last person he’d turn to for help.

  Of course it was quite a fix but he could have contacted a pastoral employment agency, one would have thought, and have someone flown in. So, what did it have to do with her, personally?

  She put her cup down and moved restlessly. Contrary to her ‘certain sureness’, a phrase she and Bridget had used as kids, that she could no longer feel one smidgeon of attraction towards Steve Kinane, there was still something there, to her amazement, something angry but electric at times.

  Or was he, as his brother apparently was, a man who couldn’t help sending out sensual vibes to any passable woman? Maybe it ran in the family, she mused. In which case, why was she responding? It didn’t make sense. OK, he might be dynamic, but he could also be lethally insulting. He was also virtually hogging the high moral ground on the subject of his brother’s love life, so…

  She shook her head and got up to clear the lunch things and stack the dishwasher.

  Then, in a bid to distract herself from all the things she didn’t understand, she went to find the piano. The door from the dining room to the music room was closed. She opened it gingerly—and gasped with delight.

  The piano was a black baby grand in a perfect setting. It stood in the middle of the room. French windows with white curtains opened onto a side veranda and there was one divine armchair covered in navy velvet with a matching footstool. Like the dining room, the walls were covered with paintings but these were all vibrant, exotic ones of fruit and flowers, trees, gardens and birds.

  A rosewood desk stood against one wall and another wall had built-in shelves laden with silver-framed photos interspersed between books and some lovely objets d’art.

  It came to her from nowhere as she looked around that this had been the lady of the house’s private retreat, and that lady had to have been Mark and Steve’s mother, a lady she was starting to feel curious about.

  She walked over to the instrument and lifted the lid. The keys were yellow and some of the ivories thin with much use but the tone, as she struck several, as clear as a bell.

  She sat down on the stool, also upholstered in navy velvet, and played an air from Handel’s ‘Water Music’, noting as her hands moved up and down that one B flat was a little stiff but otherwise it was the best piano she’d ever played.

  She took her hands away from the keys and laid them in her lap as she looked around again, and came to a rather surprising decision. While she was in charge of the well-being of this house, she would take the opportunity to show Steve Kinane that she wasn’t too good to be true.

  Then she went to find her own mobile phone, and she spent the next ten minutes talking to Bridget and passing on a limited version of what had happened.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  STEVE dropped Brett off at five o’clock and told Chattie he had a few more things to do but would be back in time for dinner at seven.

  Rich was ecstatic about being reunited with the boy, and Chattie let them play for a while. Then she insisted Brett had a bath and, perceiving signs of tiredness in Harriet Barlow’s otherwise easygoing son, she gave him an early dinner, read him a story and put him to bed. He fell asleep immediately.

  ‘Well, considering you don’t really know me from a bar of soap—to use a well-worn phrase—and your parents have some strange ways,’ she murmured with her finger on the light switch, ‘you’re an amazingly well-behaved child.’

  ‘He is, isn’t he?’

  She turned to find Steve standing behind her. ‘Oh! I didn’t hear you come in.’

  He studied her for a moment, then, ‘Give me ten minutes and I’ll be ready for dinner.’ He turned away.

  ‘Take as long as you like,’ she recommended. ‘It’ll keep.’

  But he was as good as his word.

  ‘I hope this is all right,’ she said as he came into the kitchen where she’d set the table for two. ‘Merlene told me when it was only family that you eat in here.’

  ‘It’s fine. Care for a beer? Or a glass of wine?’

  She looked surprised.

  ‘Slim and I generally have a beer.’

  ‘In that case, thank you, I’ll have a glass of wine. Have you heard how he is?’

  ‘Yes, I just rang the base hospital. He’s resting comfortably but they’ve decided to fly him to Brisbane for a bypass operation.’

  She digested this while she served up the soup and he got the drinks. She’d found some vegetable stock, added some cooked chicken she’d also found, some herbs and at the last minute swirled cream through it. And she placed a basket of crusty rolls she’d made in the bread machine on the table.

  ‘Very good,’ Steve Kinane said of the soup. ‘That certainly didn’t come out of a tin.’

  ‘Is that what you were expecting?’ she asked incredulously.

  ‘My apologies to the cook,’ he replied wryly. ‘It is only your first day.’

  ‘Well—’ she got up to remove the soup bowls ‘—Slim has to take a lot of the credit. He has a very well-organized larder. I do hope you like curry?’ She looked at him expectantly.

  Steve took his time. She’d changed from her jeans into a three-quarter-length floral skirt and a white blouse. Her hair was tied back and she looked fresh and attractive. Also very slim about the waist, he noted, and wondered how he was going to broach the subject that still bothered him…

  ‘Uh, yes, I do,’ he said.

  ‘Good,’ she said briskly and moved away from the table. ‘I make a mean curry. Not that I’ve made this one as hot as I can make them, just in case you’re a mild curry person, but it should still be good.’

  ‘You like a hot curry?’ he queried.

  She came back from the scullery and gestured with both hands outstretched. ‘Love it.’ Then she pirouetted towards the stove and began to dish up her curry.

  Is it unconscious? Steve Kinane asked himself. Is she unaware that she has a lovely figure and does she swing her hips quite naturally because she’s happy at the moment—or full of annoyed hauteur as she was last night—or is she
perfectly aware of the effect she has on men?

  Chattie turned from the stove with her eyebrows raised, to intercept his assessing gaze.

  ‘You don’t really like curry at all?’ she asked with a suddenly and comically anxious expression.

  He looked away. ‘On the contrary, I also like it hot.’

  He started to uncover the sambals already assembled on the table.

  She paused, as if testing the air. As if she knew the atmosphere between them was about more than curry but she couldn’t put her finger on it.

  ‘My curry,’ he murmured, but wondered at the same time what she would make of it if she could read his mind, which had flashed him a mental image of taking her to his bed and exploring every lovely inch of her in a way that would render things very hot between them.

  She relaxed with a laugh. ‘Wish I’d known!’ She turned back to the stove.

  His gaze narrowed on her back and he examined another question mark that had risen in his mind. This morning, he’d assured himself that to be attracted to a girl who was in love with his brother was the height of unwisdom. But was it happening whether he liked it or not, even when he wasn’t sure he could trust her?

  Would he be contemplating hot, steamy sex with her otherwise? he asked himself cynically. And was he imagining it or was she not entirely immune from his physical appreciation of her?

  ‘You’re right, it’s very good,’ he said some time later as he forked up some perfectly cooked, fluffy rice. ‘You also seem to be in a very good mood, Chattie.’

  Her eyes widened, then she looked wary as she remembered she should be posing as Mark’s, possibly abandoned, girlfriend. ‘I shouldn’t be, I know. I guess I lost myself in my cooking.’

  Steve Kinane went to broach one of the subjects he had on his mind but the phone rang, and Chattie sat up expectantly.

  He took the call on the kitchen extension but it was Harriet.

  ‘Are they—reconciled?’ Chattie asked as he came back to the table.

  He shrugged. ‘They’re talking, at least.’

  ‘You didn’t mention Slim,’ she pointed out.

  ‘Deliberately. In the event that Harriet felt she had to hare home before it’s all resolved so we’d have to go through it all over again. Brett’s no trouble, is he?’

  ‘No. Not at all. Actually I like having kids around. He seems to be pretty keen on you.’ She pushed her plate away and propped her chin on her hands. ‘So I gather you like kids, too?’

  ‘I like Brett, anyway.’

  ‘Can I ask you something?’

  He nodded.

  She thought for a moment, unwilling to return to what was such a controversial issue between them, but it was concerning her. ‘It seems an awful long way away for a fiancée to live, western Queensland to Broome, W.A.’ She folded her napkin into a triangle.

  ‘They met at university in Darwin. Mark got a place there he couldn’t get in Queensland and, in Bryony’s case, Darwin is closer than Perth.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Chattie,’ Steve said and paused for a moment to watch her carefully, ‘is there something you haven’t told me?’

  Her lashes lifted. ‘Like what?’

  He finished his beer and twirled the glass in his fingers. ‘You denied last night that you were pregnant, but is it true?’ He raised his eyes to hers.

  She swallowed as she wondered whether it was an opportunity to put Bridget’s case and meet a rational response—but the events of the previous evening were too close to allow her to take the risk. ‘No. I mean, no, I’m not pregnant.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Of course I’m sure,’ she said as colour rushed into her cheeks to think of him considering the state of her body in this light.

  ‘Accidents do happen,’ he said with irony.

  ‘I’m sure they do.’ She couldn’t help herself from making the point with some emphasis and, on an impulse, added, ‘If I were pregnant to Mark, what would you do?’

  ‘Chattie—’ his gaze was suddenly harsh ‘—it certainly won’t help things if you’ve been lying to me.’

  ‘I’m not,’ she said quietly, but very conscious that she was, in a way. Then she frowned. ‘Why do you seem to be so concerned about it?’

  ‘I couldn’t help wondering if it was why you wanted to speak to Mark so desperately.’

  She stared at him.

  ‘Because,’ he added, ‘if I’d received the news you had, I don’t think I’d have been that keen to speak to him at all. I mean, to all intents and purposes, he had a bit of a fling with you, invited you up here, then forgot all about it and took off.’

  She folded her napkin into a smaller triangle. ‘I see. Well, it’s not that I’m pregnant but, speaking theoretically, how would you handle it if it—had happened?’

  He smiled dryly. ‘I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it—if I ever come to it, and I just hope to hell I never do. May I ask you one more time—are you sure?’

  More than ever sure I need to find Mark Kinane, she thought, but said, ‘I am not pregnant.’

  At that moment Merlene’s motor bike made itself heard—her unlikely duenna had returned from the bunkhouse.

  Chattie rose and added, ‘I hope you like sticky date pudding?’

  For a second Steve Kinane looked quite menacing, then he started to laugh.

  He also said something that startled Chattie.

  ‘I wonder if Mark knows what he’s missing out on? Yes, I do like sticky date pudding, Miss Winslow.’

  Two days later, Chattie had got quite settled into a routine at Mount Helena, and got to know a bit more about the station.

  She was thinking of it as she, Brett and Rich were having a picnic lunch on the lawn under some shady gum-trees. Steve was away for the day, Rich and Brett were playing tirelessly with an old rubber tube and she gazed around, marvelling again at the colours of the landscape and thinking thoughts along the lines of how Mount Helena represented an empire of its own.

  Yesterday, Steve had given her a short tour of the bunkhouse, the stables, the cattle yards and the mountain from which the station took its name. It was all impressive; you didn’t have to have any experience of a cattle station to appreciate the solid fences, the well-maintained sheds and the expensive machinery they contained, including one helicopter.

  Nor could you fail to see that, although Steve Kinane had an easy manner with his staff, he was still very much the boss. And it came to her again that she must have been mad ever to have mistaken him for one of his workers because there was—how to put it?—a touch of class about him?

  She paused her thoughts in some surprise as this came to her. Considering the hostility she bore towards him, it was a surprising thought and she tried to gauge where it came from. Not solely to do with looks, she decided. So could it be because of a certain reserve about him that she sensed?

  Now she knew him a bit better, he was obviously a more complex person than his brother. Not only that, she now saw that he did bear a lot of responsibility and did it well. He was also, so long as the thorny issue of Mark didn’t rise between them, quite easy to get along with.

  She plucked a blade of grass, chewed it, and wondered what she would have made of Steve Kinane in different circumstances…

  ‘How was your day?’

  ‘Fine, thanks,’ Chattie said to Steve as she brought a chicken casserole to the table for dinner that evening. ‘How was yours?’

  ‘Complicated.’ He lifted the lid on the casserole and sniffed appreciatively. ‘I’m so under-staffed at the moment, I may have to postpone the muster. And it could rain tonight.’

  ‘I noticed the clouds building up.’ She glanced a little nervously out of the window. ‘But rain has to be a good thing for the paddocks, surely?’

  He shrugged. ‘We’ve had a good season, now I need a bit of dry weather to get this mob in, but what will be will be. Looking forward to seeing your mum and dad, Brett?’

  Brett was with them, having
declared himself not tired at all—he was too excited because his mum and dad were reunited and would be returning shortly.

  And as she busied herself serving the chicken, a potato pie and green beans she listened to Brett telling Steve there was only one cloud on his horizon—how was he going to bear being parted from Rich?

  ‘Well,’ Steve said, ‘I would say you’re old enough to have a dog of your own. Mind you, until that happens, you can always come over and play with Rich.’

  ‘A dog of my own,’ Brett mused. ‘But how would I know he’d be as much fun as Rich?’

  ‘Most dogs are pretty good if they’re brought up properly. Isn’t that so, Chattie?’

  ‘Uh—yes,’ she answered with a touch of caution. ‘I did take Rich to training classes, though.’

  Brett sat up excitedly. ‘So you know how to do it? That means you could show me!’

  ‘Well, I won’t be here long enough for that,’ she said, but added as the boy’s face fell, ‘I’m sure your dad or Steve could help. Does your mum—like dogs?’

  ‘She doesn’t like cleaning up after them,’ Brett said. ‘She reckons it always falls to the mum to have to do that kind of thing.’

  ‘I see.’ Steve thought for a bit. ‘Well, maybe I could housetrain it first, then hand it over, but these things don’t happen overnight, old son. First we have to find a suitable puppy.’

  But Brett had stars in his eyes and after dinner the only way they could get him to bed was to play several games of dominoes with him.

  ‘I just hope we haven’t put ourselves beyond the pale with Harriet over a puppy,’ Chattie said ruefully when she finally got him settled for the night.

  Steve glanced at her humorously. ‘So do I. We’ll just have to present a united front.’

  Chattie started to make some coffee at the same time as she examined the strange feeling of being united in humour and a co-conspirator with Steve Kinane. But before she could diagnose the feeling thoroughly, a clap of thunder tore the air, the lights went out and she dropped the coffee-pot.