Princes of the Outback Bundle (29 page)

“I thought about it.”

“But?”

“I wasn’t sure about getting back in,” she admitted in a rush. “I know you told me about the security, but my mind was so thick from flying and I…I didn’t want to end up locked out.”

Rafe swore silently. He’d been so busy keeping his instinctive responses in check, so busy thinking ahead to the contract that would set them straight again—that would get her moved upstairs and into his bed tonight—that he’d neglected the basic essentials. Like introducing her to the doorman and ensuring she knew her way around. Making sure she had money. “I’m sorry. I should have—”

“It’s not your fault. This morning was…”

Her voice trailed off and Rafe chuckled. He found that lack of description oddly descriptive. “Yeah. It was.”

“I didn’t want things to be like that between us, because of what I said in Vegas,” she said softly. “I’m sorry.”

“Me, too.” And thinking about all the things he was sorry about chased the earlier amusement from his voice. “I will make it up to you, baby.”

Silence followed, a quiet flavored with his fervent hope that she was on the same wavelength when it came to making it up.

“The contract should be ready this afternoon,” he told her.

“That quick? Will I get to see a draft?”

“If you want.”

“Of course I want,” she retorted.

Now that sounded more like the old Catriona! With a soft grunt of satisfaction, Rafe kicked back in his chair. “We can do that after lunch. Give them time to make amendments—”
while I take you shopping for a ring
“—so we can sign before the end of business.”

“After lunch…with your brother?”

“Yeah. Do you like seafood?”

A two-note laugh bubbled from the phone.

“Is that a no?”

“No. That was just my nervous commentary on how little we know about each other!”

Not the response he’d expected, but… “Here’s your chance to fill in another blank…seafood or Japanese? Or would you rather—”

“I’d rather not go at all.”

Rafe frowned. “Is this about meeting Alex? He isn’t as scary as he looks, you know. There’s even the occasional strange woman who finds him charming.”

“It’s too soon to be meeting family,” she said in a rush. “I need to get used to the notion myself first.”

“So this is a postponement?”

Silence.

“I want to introduce you to my family.” And he hadn’t anticipated her resistance. Nor had he anticipated the primitive cut of emotion that snapped on its heels. “I want to introduce you as my wife. As Catriona Carlisle.”

Her sharp intake of breath hissed through the receiver. “Catriona
McConnell
Carlisle.”

“If you like.” Rafe didn’t care what she put in the middle, but he did care about the spark in her comeback. That was the Catriona he knew, not the stiff, polite stranger of this morning. Now all he had to do was figure out a way to get that spirited woman to the restaurant. “So, what have you been doing all morning?”

“Nothing.”

“I bet you don’t get to kick back nearly enough. Feet up, eyes closed, nothing to do but pass the time—”

“I’m not coming to lunch,” she said, obviously seeing right through his ploy. “No matter how bored I am.”

“What are you going to do, then?”

“I need to get out, take a walk.”

Rafe sighed. Okay, so she wasn’t about to relent on the lunch date, but he could at least make sure she found her way back inside after her walk. That she was there when he dropped by after lunch to take her into the city. Those plans he wasn’t changing. “I’ll get Milla to come up and walk you through the security thing again.”

“Who’s Milla?”

“Just a friend who lives downstairs. She looks after Tolstoy when I’m away.”

For some reason her lack of response felt meaningful, although for the life of him Rafe couldn’t figure out why.

“Catriona?”

“This…Milla. She isn’t the lady who owned your cat. You know, originally?”

“Hell, no.” He laughed softly, tickled with that notion. And with the motivation behind her question. His voice dropped a semitone to ask the question he couldn’t resist. “Jealous?”

“Should I be?”

“No, but I like that you are.” Yeah, he liked that spark of possessiveness a lot. But he also remembered in Vegas when she’d cut into him about the women in his past. He didn’t want her sitting there, alone in his apartment, getting crazy thoughts. “I’ll ask Milla to come up,” he told her. “And, Catriona…”

“Yes?”

“You know there are women in my past—not as many as you’d like to believe, but enough. They’re in my past. They stay in my past. There’s only one thing to remember.” He paused a beat. “I chose you, Catriona Carlisle. Only you.”

A part of Cat wanted to believe his deep note of sincerity, and for a while after she hung up the phone, she indulged that fanciful place by stretching out on the plush sofa and enjoying the little thrills of he-picked-me delight. She wanted to believe in the fairy tale where the wildly handsome prince chose the plain but plucky heroine as his soul mate and rescued her from her loneliness.

Then the neighbor came visiting and knocked that silly little fantasy right back where it belonged.

Rafe had described Milla as “just a friend who lives downstairs.” Cat didn’t think she could be described as “just” anything. Not “just” svelte, not “just” stylish, not “just” as darkly exotic as her name. She was stop-and-stare stunning.

Especially when she smiled with what appeared to be genuine warmth as she introduced herself. “Rafe said you needed some company, but please let me know if I’m intruding. He tells me to get lost quite regularly. I expect you to do the same when warranted!”

Cat doubted that any male would ever tell a woman who looked like Milla to get lost. Tolstoy illustrated that point by—after taking a wide and exaggerated path around her to get to their visitor—winding his lithe body around her legs and mewing to be picked up.

With a soft peal of laughter and a few crooned words of greeting, she complied. Tolstoy purred in her arms. Any male would do the same, Cat figured.

And she realized that her silence had stretched too long. “Sorry,” she said quickly. “You caught me unawares a bit. I’m Catriona McConnell.”

“Hmm. A little bird told me you were Catriona
Carlisle
.” Milla wrinkled her perfect nose disarmingly. “It takes a bit of getting used to the change, doesn’t it?”

“You’re married?”

“I was. Twice, actually. Probably best you don’t ask. I’d hate to color your newlywed bliss with my cockeyed cynicism.”

Cat didn’t know quite how to respond. In the space of a minute her emotions had rocketed all over the universe. From her pleasurable little fantasy after Rafe’s phone call to stunned awe at Milla’s appearance. From depressed how-can-I-compete to aren’t-I-a-goose, she-isn’t-competition relief.

Now curiosity licked through her blood, lighting dangerous need-to-know spot fires. About Milla’s twice-married state, but mostly about her relationship with Rafe.

“Would you like coffee?” she asked. “Or something to drink?”

“We can do that or would you rather go out somewhere? I don’t mind waiting while you get ready.”

Cat wondered how long she was prepared to wait, given that her hair was an unbrushed mess from her shower and she didn’t have a clue what to wear. Milla wore casual, but her jeans were white and designer smart. Her T-shirt a statement in less is more. Her straight, midnight-dark hair was clipped into one of those artless messes of a ponytail that only suit the sleek and beautiful. On Cat, that style would have attracted nesting birds.

Feeling decidedly overwhelmed and underprepared, she took the easy route. “I’d as soon stay in, if that’s all right with you.”

“Settled.” And with easy confidence Milla headed for the kitchen. “I’m a tea drinker myself—what about you?”

Cat followed slowly. Stood at the edge of the terrazzo tiles watching the downstairs neighbor put her hands on everything she needed as if she’d done the same a hundred times before. All the while Milla chatted—effortlessly—about varieties of tea and the merits of drinking from fine bone china. Elegant and expensive, she fit the decor as smoothly as the black marble countertops and sleek silvery backsplashes.

She fit the apartment and Rafe’s lifestyle in a way that Cat never would, no matter how many shopping expeditions or
spa visits he treated her to. Her heart did a heavy-handed stop-start maneuver high in her chest as she recalled his words on the phone earlier, his comment about the women in his past and how he had chosen her.

Could she believe him? Did she trust his word? Would she ever fit into his life?

Or was she setting herself up for another failure, a second heartbreak at the hands of a smooth-talking charmer?

W
ith Milla leading the way, they took their tea upstairs to a rooftop terrace beyond the master bedroom. Since she hadn’t allowed Rafe to take her up those stairs, she didn’t know about the terrace…not that she was about to let on. She was, after all, supposed to be enjoying newly wedded bliss. And she should have experienced some of that newly wedded bliss in the big, bold bed that dominated his sparsely furnished bedroom.

As they passed, Cat couldn’t help taking a peek. The bed sat on a platform one step up, so that at first glance it appeared to float above the ebony floor. Heat trickled through her senses as she imagined Rafe lazing back on the heaped cushions, his mouth curved in a come-hither smile….

“Great bed, isn’t it?”

Like a bucket of cold water, Milla’s voice washed down on that warm sensual image. Milla, whose relaxed attitude in this apartment was raising little prickles of alarm along Cat’s
nerve endings. The kitchen was one thing. Hopping uninvited to the master bedroom level with “great bed” comments something else again.

Feeling vastly out of sorts with the whole setup—and with herself for allowing her visitor to take charge—she took a seat and pulled the tea tray to her side of the table so she could pour.

Unperturbed, Milla waved an elegant arm at the vista. “What do you think? It’s bloody stunning, isn’t it?”

Cat’s sound of agreement was probably colored with her testy mood because her companion slanted her a long, measured look. “Too much?”

“Higher rent than I’m used to.”

Milla asked about where she was used to; Cat told her about Corroboree. A nice, polite, innocuous conversation over tea that lapsed into silence, neither awkward nor comfortable. Cat decided that—on her side at least—it was wary.

“I imagine you’ll be going to the Wentworth show on Friday night,” Milla said eventually.

She would?
To hide her cluelessness Cat took a long sip of her tea. Made a noncommittal sound.

“If you need a hairdresser—” Cat felt the other woman’s gaze drift over her tangled curls “—I can recommend my gal. And since she’s coming here to do me, she might be able to fit you in, as well.”

If she were going to any Friday-night “show”—this had to mean a society party of some kind—Cat would need help. Big help. But sharing that help with this woman… “Thank you for the offer.” She put down her cup. “But I’ll manage.”

“Sure?”

“I haven’t even decided if I’m going.” Hardly a lie, since she didn’t yet know what Rafe expected of her, socially. “I’m not so big on parties.”

“You know, I don’t blame you. Those things can be brutal at the best of times and you will be the center of attention.”

“Because I’m with Rafe?”

Milla laughed. “Because you’re
married
to Rafe, sweetie. Everyone is going to want to size up the lucky duck who snagged bachelor number one!”

Despite the balmy spring temperature, Cat felt herself go cold. Why hadn’t she thought of that? She’d read the articles, damn it, on the Internet. All that interest in the Carlisle brothers’ private lives. All those insinuations she’d sniped at him about in Vegas. She’d been so busy worrying about meeting his family that she hadn’t spared a thought for the larger population.

The laughter faded from the other woman’s face. She leaned forward a little, her voice gentle. “Hey, I was joking, you know.”

“Were you?”

Milla grimaced. “Not about the interest in you, unfortunately. But about snagging Rafe, yes. We both know that happened the other way around!”

That Rafe had snagged her? True, she supposed, in a way. But now she wondered how much Milla knew. How much her husband had shared with this just-a-neighbor he’d sent to keep her company. “Rafe told you how we met?”

“You rescued him from a crashed plane, I believe. How romantic!”

No, it hadn’t been romantic. It had been practical. But Cat bit her tongue from making that distinction out loud.

“I’m glad he found you.” A surprising sincerity steadied the other woman’s exotically dark eyes as she held Cat’s gaze across the table. “Rafe is a much better man than he lets on, even to himself. He deserves someone gutsy and real. He deserves better than a bimbo like Nikki!”

Cat’s heart began to soar like the gulls over the harbor before them, then dipped and dove on the last word. She had to ask. She couldn’t not. “Who is Nikki?”

Slowly Milla put down her cup. Her expression looked pained, caught out, and she took a long time to answer. As if
she were choosing her words with deliberate care. “He was flying out to see her…when he met you.”

Understanding cannoned through Cat, tightening her chest and her throat. A constriction that squeezed every last remaining drop of her earlier fantasy from her consciousness. “He was flying to see her…to ask her…when the storm put him down? At my place?”

The answer was obvious. Milla didn’t have to say a word, although she made a rueful moue. “Rafe has always had the most sensational luck!”

Yes, Cat couldn’t help thinking. How lucky to have landed on the doorstep of a sucker. A sucker who hadn’t even seen it coming. Even when he’d lazed against her kennel enclosure and joked about paying someone to have his baby. Even when he’d stood in the middle of a Las Vegas casino and offered her one “win-win” spin of the wheel.

Even when he’d said,
I chose you, Catriona. Only you.

It was another of his lines, another of his sweet-talking, get-his-own-way lines. And she, prize sap number one, had fallen for it body and soul.

Milla left, but her impact remained, as subtle as the lingering scent of her perfume, as pervasive as the hurt centered in Cat’s chest. It wasn’t her heart, though. It was her pride that hurt, because she’d wanted to believe in those momentary senses of connection. She’d wanted him to have chosen her for something more personal than convenience. She’d wanted it to have been
only you
.

But no, he’d intended to ask someone named Nikki. Then, because of circumstances, luck, fate, the vagaries of weather, he’d landed at her place and transferred his goal onto her. She tried to remember that morning in the guest room, the kitchen, the kennels. Tried to recall if he’d said where he was going before the storm hit. Perhaps she hadn’t ever asked.

“Can you believe that?” she murmured, but nobody heard.
Tolstoy had skulked out of the living area after Milla’s departure, and that desertion felt like another crushing blow to her pride. Silly, since the cat’s only previous communication was via a disdainful stare.

Silly, too, that she should feel this alone in the center of Australia’s biggest city.

At Corroboree she’d spent years on her own but she’d never felt this thick choking sense of abandonment. At home her
alone
was filled with the morning call of birds, the background chatter of open radio, the bellow of cows calling to their calves. The creak of old boards shifting with the change of temperature. The sound of the lilac tree scraping against her bedroom window, or Sheba yapping at a possum as it scampered from rooftop to orchard.

Suddenly Cat felt an intense yearning for the familiarity of the outback where she belonged. Sitting on his plush sofa, she closed her eyes and tried to force it aside, to remember that Rafe would be back in an hour or two to take her to check the contract.

The contract that would bind them together, that would make this marriage more real than their Vegas vows.

Her need to escape, to go home to the place where she was herself—the strong and capable Catriona McConnell, a woman she liked—came back at her again in a great big wave that rocked her with its force. She didn’t belong here in this expensive world filled with beautiful people and Friday-night “shows” that required hairdressers and promised to put
her
in the spotlight.

Not Catriona McConnell, not even Catriona Carlisle, but Mrs. Rafe Carlisle.

Her mind and her stomach churned. This wasn’t real life—not
her
real life. She should never have agreed to live here for a week. She should never have agreed to this marriage as a quick fix for her financial problems or to fill the void of her missing family.

Marrying him was a dumb rebound thing that could only end in heartbreak. A couple of days in his company, one night with him in her bed, and she’d tumbled halfway into love. Or lust. Or something somewhere in between the two.

She shot up from the sofa and started to pace.

Surely they could annul this sham of a marriage. People did that spur-of-the-moment Vegas thing all the time and got out of it.

And what about your debt? What about Corroboree?

Slowly she sank back down onto the sofa and clutched her head in her hands. She couldn’t think straight here. She had to get away—except how? She didn’t have enough money in her bank account to pay a bus fare, let alone a plane ticket.

Fraught with anxiety she scanned the possibilities and came up with only one.

Was she that desperate?

Did she need to escape to her home that urgently?

Sick with the decision she needed to make, her stomach pitched. But she sucked in a breath and reached for the phone. Waited an agonizing beat of five seconds before her stepmother answered. Before she sucked up her pride and asked her to buy the ticket that would take her home.

“What the hell happened, Catriona?”

When she finally answered her phone, it was after nine that night and Rafe didn’t bother with preliminaries or small talk. He’d spent close to seven hours trying to read between the lines in the short message she’d left on his voice mail.

“I’m sorry, Rafe, but I have to go home. I have responsibilities there and I should never have agreed to stay with you in Sydney. I need to think this whole thing through before we go any further. I can’t think here. I need to be home.”

She—as he’d noted before they went to Vegas—had no fa
cility for leaving messages, so by the time she finally did pick up he was struggling against a wall of simmering emotions. He struggled, too, to contain his impatience while he waited for her response to that straight-to-the-point opening.

“Did you get my message?” she hedged.

“Couldn’t you have waited another hour and told me in person?”

“There’s only one afternoon flight. I had to leave to make the airport in time.”

“Milla said you never mentioned a word to her about leaving. Half an hour later, you’re gone. Why?” He paused, slammed a hand through his hair, forced himself to stop pacing. “Is there something wrong at Corroboree? Did you get a phone call?”

“No. I…” She paused and he heard her draw a breath. “This isn’t going to work.”

“This?”

“Us. This relationship. You should have stuck with Nikki.”

Rafe went very still. “Nikki?”

“Your first choice. Her name’s Nikki, isn’t it? You were flying out to see her, to ask her to have your baby, the day the storm forced you down.”

“Who told you that?”

“Does it matter?”

No, it didn’t. She was right. What mattered was the fact that she was five hundred miles away. That for some reason—maybe it was Nikki, maybe it was more—she’d decided to run away from their deal. “We have an agreement, Catriona. The night you married me in Vegas I told you to be very sure. I said there would be no going back.”

“You also said you chose me. Only me.”

“I didn’t mislead you, Catriona. I decided on you the day after we met. Nothing has happened since to change my mind and I can’t think of anything I’ve done that should have changed yours.”

“It’s not any one thing—”

“Good,” he cut in, not giving her a chance. This wasn’t something he would debate over the telephone. “Because the contract is drawn and ready for signing. I promised you a draft, and
I
honor my promises. I’ll e-mail the document tonight.”

“I won’t sign anything until I’m sure I’m doing the right thing.”

“If you want to keep Corroboree, you don’t have a choice. My lawyer has spoken to Samuels. That part of our deal is already in motion. All you have to do is sign the agreement, Catriona. You have forty-eight hours to request any changes. Otherwise, I’ll see you Friday morning.”

“You’re coming down here?” Her voice rose on a note of anxiety, and Rafe smiled with a perverse sense of satisfaction. She had cause to worry. If he had to chase halfway across the country to make her uphold her end of the deal, then he intended making the trip very worthwhile.

“I’ll see you Friday, Mrs. Carlisle,” he said, and hung up.

Cat returned the amended draft of their contract because she didn’t have any choice. It was up to him now, whether he accepted her changes or not. She didn’t expect he would. She did expect another heated phone call, and spent many agitated hours pacing around her office on Wednesday and Thursday nights, waiting for the instrument to ring.

It didn’t, and his silence caused her even more misgivings.

She did receive two e-mails. The first reported that he’d installed a message bank on her phone service. The second was a scanned invitation for the Friday-night event Milla had mentioned. The “Wentworth show,” apparently, was a fashion fund-raiser for a children’s hospital, and the Carlisle Hotel Group was a major sponsor.

Cat stared at the invitation with intense trepidation—she would rather wrestle a pit full of tiger snakes than a room full of fashionistas all eager to size her up—but that quickly
morphed into consternation. What did this mean? He’d said he was coming here on Friday—had he changed his mind? He hadn’t included any note of explanation. Did he expect her to hurry back to Sydney on the strength of this invitation?

No way. And no way would she give him the satisfaction of calling to find out. Maybe that was stupid and stubborn of her, but she wanted to imagine she could hang on to her pride since he’d taken a grip on too much of her life.

Coming home had not been all she’d imagined while sitting on his plush sofa back in Sydney: she hadn’t slept worth a bean; she’d gained little comfort from the hollow emptiness of her home. Only her dogs made it worthwhile with their enthusiastic adoration.