Princes of the Outback Bundle (20 page)

Rafe woke with a start, dazed and disoriented for the seconds it took to register his surroundings and the woman shaking him by the shoulders. Slowly the pieces came back to him, a series of snapshots that blurred in and out of focus.

He remembered landing the company jet at Bourke Airport, remembered heading out again in the Cessna. The storm he’d thought he could outrace. A hazel-eyed angel of mercy and rain so loud he’d thought it was pounding holes in his skull.

Vaguely he recalled waking at his angel’s homestead and the struggle to get him inside. Less vaguely he recalled the cold compress she applied to the side of his head. Such a promising start, spoiled when she insisted he sit still, stay awake and answer the same questions over and over with a persistency that hammered worse than his killer headache.

Realizing she’d succeeded in waking him, Nurse Naggard stopped the shaking and leaned back out of his face. This brought her into clearer focus, and Rafe blinked with surprise. “You showered.”

“Only because you kept nagging,” she said archly.

He
kept nagging? That was rich!

He thought about telling her so, but she shifted again, totally distracting him with the sharp, sweet scent of whatever she’d showered with. And her hair…he hadn’t noticed she had so much of it. The mass of damp, brown curls hung almost to her waist. Pity about the twin furrows of worry and annoyance between her brows—they completely ruined the pretty effect.

Rafe started to shake his head with regret, then stopped himself. Any movement caused a rolling wave of nausea, as if his brain hadn’t regained its balance after whatever walloping it had taken. She’d told him he’d been out cold for a minute or two, that he must have hit his head during what had been a rough landing.

He didn’t remember.

He did remember she’d been wet, right through. Now she wore a green sweater that looked soft and pretty and dry. “You changed,” he said. “Good.”

“You slept,” she countered. “Bad.”

Ah, yes, his nagging angel of mercy had a quick mouth. He remembered that now. “I was just resting my eyes.”

A lie, but a fair one, given the way she kept trying to blind him. Right on cue she picked up a flashlight and tapped it against the palm of her hand. Her very own instrument of torture.

“No.” He held up a hand, keeping her at bay. “Enough is enough. I remember where I am and who I am. I remember my mother’s name, my brothers’ names, and even my third cousin Jasper’s middle name.”

The last was an exaggeration, but he’d had it with this routine. Every half hour, her same questions, his same answers, while the beam of light burned a hole clear through his pupil and into his brain.

“Don’t be a baby.” She picked up his hand and turned it over. Despite the “baby” barb, Rafe let her take his pulse. He liked the cool press of her fingers against his wrist, liked the serious intensity on her face and the infinitesimal movement of her lips as she counted the beats. “Only one more hour, as per the doctor’s instructions.”

The doctor she’d called when the weather defeated her aim of driving him to the nearest hospital. The instructions involved basic observations and this neuro-responsive BS that he’d endured for at least three hours. And that, he decided, was long enough.

“My pupils are equal and reacting?” he asked.

“Last time I checked, yes, but—”

“Has anything changed in the last half hour?”

“No, but—”

“Fine.” Rafe wrested the flashlight from her hand. “No more. I’m going to sleep.”

He started to lift his legs, angling himself to lie down, and her voice rose in alarm. “You’re not sleeping here. The couch is too short. It’s not comfort—”

“It’s horizontal.” And at the moment that’s all Rafe required. To shut his eyes, to stop talking and rest his aching brain—

“There’s a bed made up,” she relented with a heavy sigh. “But first, are you sure you don’t need to call anyone?”

He’d radioed when the storm came up, signaling his intention to land and his location, and she’d since notified authorities. That would suffice for tonight. If he let one of his family members know, he’d end up having to field a barrage of concerned calls. His mother, his big brother, his little brother. His personal assistant. His neighbor. His housekeeper.

What they didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them. Trying to explain would hurt him. “No calls,” he said.

“What about food?”

“Just bed.”

He got to his feet. And when his brain took a moment to adjust to the new upright perspective, she helped him steady. He didn’t mind the solicitous hand at his elbow, and he liked the sweep of her hair against his shoulder and the scent—peaches, he decided—that drifted from her skin. He enjoyed the brush of her hip against his thigh as she ushered him to a hallway off the living room. And when he started to turn into the first doorway, when she stood her ground and blocked his progress, he
really
enjoyed the soft pressure of her breast against his ribs.

“That’s my room,” she said, a bit breathless as if she, too, was aware of that unplanned contact. “You’re next on the
right.” She steered him that way. “And it would ease my mind if you could stay awake ten minutes so I can do one more check.”

“I’ll be asleep in five.”

She made an impatient sound, tongue against teeth. “Are you always this difficult?”

“Are you?”

Surprise swung her gaze up to meet his. A pretty mix of gray and green and brown, her eyes, in the muted light of the hallway. “I’m not difficult.”

“Huh.” Whirring head notwithstanding, he felt an urge to tease—to look into those pretty eyes and ask if that meant she was easy. But she nudged the door to his room open, flicked the light switch, and the sudden brightness knifed through his brain.

A short uncensored curse hissed from his mouth. Muttering a quick apology, she turned the light off, but Rafe had caught a glimpse of the bed. Big, broad, dressed in a mile-thick quilt, it crooned,
Come to Mama
.

“Oh, yeah,” Rafe murmured, pushing off the doorjamb to answer that sultry siren’s call.

Catriona, apparently, moved too.

Perhaps she thought he needed help negotiating the semidarkness. Perhaps she was still hand-on-elbow in case her patient fell. Whatever the reason, she was there at his side, fussing about extra blankets and bathroom directions, when he made it bedside.

And when, with a blissful moan, he collapsed into the thick folds of feather-down comforter, she overbalanced and went down with him. He heard the heavy hitch of her surprised breath as the bed came up to greet their fall. Horizontal at last, engulfed in sweet-smelling quilt and sweeter-smelling female, Rafe couldn’t bring himself to move.

He should, he mused, at least move his hand—the one resting atop a very sweet curve of breast. And he would, just as soon as he summoned enough energy. Meanwhile his eyes
drifted shut and the night he’d planned before leaving Sydney drifted through his dwindling consciousness.

If not for the storm he’d be at his destination now. His unexpected arrival would have shocked the blazes out of his onetime girlfriend, Nikki Bates, but not nearly as much as the reason for his visit. Right about now he’d have been getting to that point. Despite a mountain of reservations and providing he could wring the words from his resistive mind, he’d have been asking Nikki how she felt about having his baby.

C
at woke in her own bed, lost for several seconds in the realm where dream and reality collided. It all came back to her then, and she sat up in a rush of shed bedclothes and remembered anxiety.

Rafe Carlisle. Concussed. In her guest room.

She’d last checked on him—she glanced at her watch and sucked in a quick breath—more than five hours ago. Blast. She hadn’t expected to sleep so soundly. She hadn’t expected to sleep much at all.

Concern sent her scurrying from her room. Caution sent her back to grab her robe, which she pulled on and secured with a double knot as she paused to listen at his door. The silence was rendered oddly loud by the thick thud of her own heartbeat. She tapped lightly on the door, tucked a mass of sleep-tangled hair behind her ear and pressed that ear flush against the timber.

Not a sound.

Quietly she pushed the door open and realized she’d been holding her breath when it rushed from her lungs in a whoosh. Relief, she told herself, since he was still in bed, asleep, not standing there in some state of undress.

And he had moved since her last check in the early hours after midnight. “Good,” she breathed, still holding on to the doorknob, warring with herself over what to do next.

Leave him to sleep? Wake him to ensure he wasn’t comatose? Stand here and stare at the highly unusual and hugely stareworthy sight of a naked man in her bed?

Not
my
bed, she corrected quickly. And not quite naked.

She had, after all, done the undressing. After she’d managed to rouse him with a solid elbow to his ribs. After she’d recovered from the shock of finding herself pressed deep into the thick eiderdown by his relaxed weight.

Heat tingled through her skin as she eyed that same relaxed weight in the yellow-tinged light of early morning. The long stretch of his legs outlined beneath the loosened bedclothes. The bare olive skin of his back, exposed all the way down to the dip below his waist. Broad shoulders and nicely muscled arms spread high and looped around his pillow.

His head was turned away, his face hidden by the dark sweep of his hair. Not sleep mussed like hers—she lifted a hand to the tangled curls—but as long and sleek and smooth as the rest of him. Her hand stilled mid tidying-comb, her gaze riveted on his hand, on the long fingers that loosely gripped one corner of his pillow.

The same fingers she’d felt, last night, flex ever so slightly against her breast.

Awareness tingled warm in her skin, thick in her belly, heavy in her breasts, as she remembered the heat of his body against hers, the heavy slough of his breath, the low moan that had sounded almost sybaritic. Because he was lying down and a matter of seconds away from sleep, not because he’d landed facedown on top of her!

Cat shook her head and huffed a disdainful breath at herself, much the same as she’d done last night right before she elbowed him aside. Then, when he’d looked like falling asleep where he rested, she’d pulled back the bedclothes and made him comfortable.

Starting with the shirt, ending with the jeans, she’d stripped him. Right down to a pair of white cotton boxers. The snug-fitting variety.

Cat’s fingers tightened on the doorknob. She closed her eyes a second, warm from the core right out to her skin, with the force of
not
remembering his outline in the semidarkness, the brush of her fingers against hot skin, against hair-rough legs, against the smooth cotton of his underwear.

Crikey.

She started to turn, to leave, then stiffened at the sound of life from the bed. A muffled movement of sheets…or of a body moving against sheets. Her eyes rocketed back to the bed.

Rafe Carlisle was stirring.

His lazy stretch started with a tensing in his shoulders and eased down his backbone, lifting the tight arc of his backside and kicking one leg free of the bedclothes. Cat held her breath in a tense mix of anticipation and apprehension, but he didn’t turn his head. He settled in a reverse ripple of muscles, all olive-skinned, languid beauty against her snowy white sheets.

Still asleep, she deduced after another minute, and she suddenly felt uncomfortable standing there watching him. It wasn’t as if he knew, but nonetheless she felt as if she was taking advantage. And standing around watching was not at all like her.

Galvanized into action, she hurried back to her room where she dressed, plaited her hair and splashed her face with cold water. In practical clothes and ready to face her working day, Cat felt much more like herself. Her first task was to check for storm damage and assess the state of the roads so she could work out the quickest way to get Rafe Carlisle out of here.

Alone again, with nothing to worry about but her own set of troubles, she would truly feel like herself again.

After the previous night, the thought of getting outside and doing something more active than checking her patient’s pulse rate and pupil reaction beckoned as brightly as the spring after-storm sunshine. Cat hit the back veranda at such a pace she almost tripped over the red-and-tan Kelpie waiting on the welcome mat.

The startled dog jumped to attention, tail wagging, instantly alert. A smile curved Cat’s mouth as she dropped to her haunches and scratched his neck. This was the only male she was used to seeing first thing in the morning.

“And a mighty handsome male you are, too.”

Bach only put up with the petting to humor her, then he gave a let’s-go yip and trotted down the steps where he waited, rocking from side to side, eager to start work.

“Okay, I’m coming, I’m coming.” She pulled on her boots, still smiling at Bach as she straightened…until she caught sight of the branch that had collapsed across her fence. “Blast.”

On closer inspection the branch turned out to be half a tree—a lot more than one strapping woman could shift on her own. It would have to wait. What worried her more than her flattened fence was the merry havoc such a strong wind might have wrought on a light plane.

“That,” she told Bach, “is where we’re heading first, mate.”

Halfway to the airstrip, she heard her call sign over the UHF radio and recognized the laconic voice of her neighbor’s foreman. Bob Porter was a good man, despite working for the king of reptilian life forms, Gordon Samuels. A good friend of her father’s, Bob made a point of looking out for her, especially since she’d been living on her own and running Corroboree without any permanent help.

They swapped greetings and rainfall measurements before she asked about the state of Samuels’s airstrip.

“You expecting a visitor?” Bob asked.

“I have one already.” She explained, long-story-short, about the man asleep in her guest room. “I imagine he could have a plane out here to collect him in a matter of hours.”

“Well, it ain’t landing anywhere around here,” Bob drawled. “Not today or tomorrow.”

Blast. “I’ll have to take him into Bourke then.”

“You in a hurry to get rid of this bloke for any reason?”

Yes, he’s a distraction. “No, except he’s concussed and should see a doctor.”

“Hang on a sec.”

In less than that second, his wife was on the radio. “I’m going in to town later, Cat. I wouldn’t mind a passenger if that helps you out.”

“You bet it does.” Cat didn’t know if she had enough fuel to make the trip herself, and she sure couldn’t book anything else up. Not when she hadn’t paid her last bill. Not when she didn’t know when she would have the money to pay it. “Call me when you’re leaving, Jen, and I’ll meet you at the crossroads.”

Ninety minutes later Cat shifted the designer overnight bag she’d found in the Cessna from right hand to left, squared her shoulders and knocked on her guest room door. This time she
would
wake him. He’d slept long enough and she needed to know he was all right. She needed him dressed, fed and ready to go when Jennifer Porter called.

Again, no answer.

She edged the door open and found the bedclothes flung back, the bed empty. Her attention flew straight to the bathroom door. She couldn’t hear any sound of activity from beyond—no hiss of the shower, no running water, no telltale clank of pipes.

What if he’d done the wonky thing again? What if he’d passed out in there? What if he’d knocked his head falling?

“What if you get your butt over there and find out?” Cat muttered. It was the logical thing to do, the sensible thing to do, the practical thing to do…which all added up to the Cat thing to do.

And she would do it, right after she put his bag down. And neatened the bed. Not that she was procrastinating. Much.

She was smoothing the bottom sheet and pretending not to notice the lingering warmth from his body when she sensed or heard…something. Slowly she straightened and turned and there he was. Standing in the bathroom doorway, watching her. Wearing nothing but the gleam of residual moisture from his shower.

Cat didn’t think about looking away. He was, after all, something to behold. And she was, after all, completely beholden. Then he cleared his throat and she realized how long she’d been staring and gave an apologetic caught-out shrug.

“I brought your luggage.” She moistened her dry lips and gestured behind her, to where she’d left his bag. “From the plane. I thought you might appreciate some, ah, clothes.”

Despite that rather pointed comment, he took his own sweet time reaching for a towel and wrapping it around his hips. He seemed as comfortable in the altogether as she was in her Wranglers. That, she supposed, came with the territory when one possessed the body of a Greek god.

“Thanks.” His big smile matched the body. Perfectly. “For bringing my bag.”

She probably murmured, “You’re welcome,” or something equally asinine.

Or she might not have, since she’d become totally involved in watching him rake his hair back from his face as he strolled out of the bathroom. He came right up to the bed, to her side, and her mind went completely blank for a second or three. She forced herself to focus, to think. She couldn’t just stand there staring at the dark finger tracks in his shiny wet hair.

Or pretending not to stare.

“You’re looking good,” she said. Then silently cringed at how that could be taken. Ugh. “In comparison to last night,” she added quickly.

He looked as if he knew exactly why she’d felt the need to clarify. The knowledge glinted in his eyes, in the teasing quirk at the corners of his mouth. “What a difference a night makes. I slept like a baby.”

No, Cat thought, not a baby. There was something altogether too wicked, too knowing, completely not innocent, about this man for any baby analogy to stick. “For ten hours straight,” she said.

“That long? Why didn’t you wake me?” Slowly, reflectively, he rubbed his stubbled jaw.” The Sleeping Beauty way would have been nice.”

“Excuse me?”

“While I was in the shower I remembered you calling me that in the plane.” His gaze drifted to her mouth. “Isn’t there supposed to be a kiss involved? Or am I muddling my fairy tales?”

“You were conscious?”
Oh, man, what else did I say? And where did I have my hands at the time?

Damn his smooth, knowing hide, he grinned at her. “Must have been something about your magic touch.”

“I should have left you there!”

“Nah. You enjoyed playing nurse too much.”

“Let me think about that….” Cat tapped a finger against her chin. “Did I enjoy your whining? Nope. Prying your eyes open so I could test your pupils? Nope. Getting crushed when you fell on top of me? Nope again.”

“I fell on you?”

The man remembered one murmured line while coming out of unconsciousness but he didn’t remember lying thigh to thigh, hip to hip, hand to breast with her? Cat shook her head. “I was trying to get you into bed.”

“I gather you succeeded?”

“Eventually.”

One dark brow arched skeptically—as if he didn’t quite believe he’d have put up a fight—and then he gestured toward his clothes, the ones she’d folded and placed on the bedside table. “And you undressed me?”

“Eventually.”

He shook his head slowly, almost solemnly. “Sorry I missed that.”

Oh, he was good. The deep note of sincerity, the way he looked into her eyes. Cat looked right back and wondered how many women had fallen into those sea-green depths and drowned. Not her. She might live in the arid outback, but she wasn’t so parched that she’d swim with sharks.

“I’m not,” she said, smiling a little, letting him know she had his measure. “It was…interesting. With you all but unconscious.”

He laughed, a rich two-note sound of surprise that ended on a slight wince.

Cat’s enjoyment of the moment, the bantering, his laughter, sobered instantly. “How does your head feel?”

“Like it got hit by a plane. Here,” he invited. “Feel for yourself.”

The instant he ducked his head, the mood dipped, too, slowing and swelling with sensuality. She breathed the scent of his nearness—her soap, her shampoo, but all different on his skin, in his hair. And she was suddenly aware, all over again, that he wore only a towel and that his skin was bare and warm, and that he was waiting for her to touch him.

His head, silly. He only invited you to feel the bump on his head.

Gingerly she palpated the lump, breath held, concern for his injury overriding her preoccupation with the slippery wet strands of his hair, with those damn tracks her own fingers itched to trace. With his sudden stillness and the sense of a new tension in the air.

“Well?” he asked, straightening slowly.

“Does it still ache?”

His eyes narrowed with suspicion. “That depends.”

“On?”

“Whether a yes gets me more of your tender loving touch—” Rafe picked up her hand and ran his thumb lightly across her fingertips before releasing it “—or more of that light in my eyes.”

“Testing your responses was on doctor’s order. If I could have gotten you to hospital, they’d have done the same.”

“Except with significantly less wattage.”

She opened her mouth, then shut it, as his point about the flashlight’s power sunk in. “That’s my only torch. And it doesn’t appear to have done you any harm. Anyone else would have had a corker of a black eye.”