Princes of the Outback Bundle (35 page)

“Not the Carlisle way?”

“I grew up in the outback, Zara, on a cattle station. No Boy Scouts out there.”

“But plenty of fires?” She gave up and turned her curious gaze his way. Still too attractive—far too attractive, squatting there by the hearth, one hand holding a solid fire iron in a loose grip, turning it over and over in a slow, measured motion.

“The campfire was one of our first lessons, the first year we were allowed out on a muster.”

“You mustered cattle?”

He huffed out a soft sound. “Is that so hard to imagine?”

So, okay, she’d known the Carlisles owned oodles of cattle country up in the north—the tabloids loved to refer to the brothers as “Princes of the Outback”—but she’d never pictured them taking an active role. If she’d pictured them at all. Now the figure of Alex the cowboy rode into her imagination, and strangely she didn’t laugh. An hour or two back she would have.

Another layer peeled away, revealed, disturbing.

“How about you, Zara?” he asked, poking at the fire now. “Were you a Girl Scout?”

She smiled, despite her unsettling thoughts. “No. Obviously I wasn’t.”

“You like the bush, though?”

“How did you know that?”

“You said you like coming up here.”

Ah, right, so she had. Earlier, out on the porch. When she’d been ferreting out the key with her frozen fingers. “Here it’s like each day stretches ahead with all these hours and the freedom to do whatever I want with them. No pressure, no timetable.”

“You don’t mind the lack of amenities?”

“No.” She smiled and shook her head. “And that’s a straight-out lie. I do miss a decent shower. Steamy. Hot. Indecently long.”

She finished on a husky note of yearning and looked up to find him watching her, his eyes so still and intent that she felt a hot, liquid curl in her belly. A chocolate response, she thought. Rich and sweet and tempting at the moment, but sinfully bad for her body in the long run.

“Do you come here alone?”

“Look around, Alex.” She looked at the one bed and her pulse fluttered. “This is hardly the place for a group getaway.”

“I wasn’t talking about a group.” No, she could tell he was talking about a man. About hot and steamy, one-on-one getaways. And if he weren’t watching her with those deeply shadowed eyes, if she weren’t sitting here naked with her sinfully chocolate thoughts, she would have laughed out loud.

She didn’t.

“I come here when I want to be alone, to escape,” she explained softly.

The fire crackled and hissed, the only sound for a long time. Until he asked, “What do you need to escape from, Zara? When you come up here?”

“Life. Schedules. Busy, busy, busy.” She shrugged. Kept on talking when she probably should have shut up. “The last time was after my mother passed away and I was trying to escape the…” She paused, frowning as she tried to find the words to explain how she’d felt, the emptiness, the knowledge that she was all alone in the world. No family, no connections. “This might sound weird, but I was trying to escape the aloneness. Up here that’s okay, but not at home. Not in the house where there’d always been us.”

“Only the two of you?”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry about your mother,” he said softly, after a pause. “Was this long ago?”

“Three years.” Sometimes it felt longer. Other times she could picture her mum so vividly, hear her voice so clearly, Ginger might have been sitting at Zara’s side, nudging her with an elbow, making her laugh at a witty observation on the world. Or on the men who ran the world.

She had been some cynic, her mum, the ex-stripper!

“You have good memories?”

“Oh, about a ton of them.” She started to smile, but then her gaze snared with his and her pulse flickered and leaped like the flames in the fireplace. Like the flames reflected in his eyes.

For a long moment—too long—she couldn’t look away, couldn’t smile, could barely breathe. She recognized the danger in the moment. Knew her emotions, her heart, her soul were laid open and wanting by memories of her mum. And just when she thought he might say something he shouldn’t, something dangerous and inadvisable, a log snapped and broke in a shower of sparks.

Alex reacted instantly, swearing roundly as he jumped to his feet. Zara couldn’t contain the bubble of laughter, born partly of tension released and partly of the sight of him swatting at his trousers where the hot embers had hit.

Hunkered down, as he’d been, that was a rather delicate spot.

He shot her a filthy look. “I’m glad you find this amusing.”

“Better you than me,” she said, grinning. Until his expression changed and she knew he visualized her jumping about swatting at her slithery covering. Or her jumping about without the slithery covering.

“Yeah,” he said softly, seeing she’d got the message. “Exactly.”

And he turned back to the fire, squatting down again to poke the burning logs into submission with a fiercer than necessary hand. Despite the previous moment, she couldn’t help smiling at his take-that brand of vengeance. So very un-prince-like, so very male.

“Lucky you didn’t take my advice before,” she said.

He paused in his energetic fire-taming to cut her a questioning look.

“When I suggested you should take your wet trousers off.”

He huffed out a half laugh and muttered something that sounded like, “Self-preservation.”

“You had a premonition that the fire might attack?”

He put down the tool with what looked like slow and deliberate care. Then he stood in the same measured way, and looked down at her with unflinching directness. “No. I thought one of us bare-assed was more than enough.”

Zara swallowed. She hadn’t expected such a forthright admission, such forthright language, or to find this new layer he’d revealed so deadly attractive. So insidiously tempting.
No, no, no.
She swallowed again and pushed that chocolate-coated temptation right to the back of her mind.

“My clothes—” Dipping her head in that direction, she tucked her legs underneath her, preparing to stand. “They should be almost dry.”

Since he wasn’t trussed up like a mummy, Alex got to her things first…which wouldn’t have been so bad if the clothes were, say, like his shirt. Or his suit jacket or her leather jeans and jacket or even her shorts.

But, no, by the time she’d struggled to her feet, by the time she’d shuffled to his side and freed a hand, by the time she’d said, “Here, let me get them,” he was holding her underwear.

Her panties to be exact. And, okay, they weren’t violet lace or a scarlet G-string or anything remotely racy. They were just your practical, black, boy-leg hipsters prettied up with a pink bunny-ears appliqué. But they were in his hand and that felt incredibly intimate. The way his thumb stroked over the satin bunny ears and onto the cotton even more so.

“They appear to be dry.”

“Then I’d best put them on,” she managed to say, low, husky,
bad.
“Self-preservation, you know.”

His nostrils flared slightly. His eyes darkened with heat and knowledge and approval, but then he shook his head as if to clear it and pushed the panties into her hand. Closed her fingers around the soft fabric with the insistent pressure of his own. And the combination of that slightly rough-textured touch and the rueful note to his final words held her rooted to the spot long after he’d walked away. Long after he’d walked out into the cold, wet twilight and closed the door behind him.

“You’d best put on everything you can find, Zara, of yours and mine. If this storm doesn’t ease up soon it’s going to be a hellishly long night of self-preservation.”

Z
ara dressed quickly, although not in everything she could find. Still, her brief athletic top and snug shorts seemed vastly inadequate. She fingered the sleeve of his shirt and fought the temptation to wrap herself in the fire-warmed fabric. Wrapping herself in anything that smelled of Alex Carlisle’s expensive blend of man and cologne would not do her any favors.

She let go of the sleeve and reached for her jacket instead. The leather jeans, however, were too much. A minute after pulling them on, her skin felt clammy and uncomfortable. She unzipped her jacket, she moved away from the fire. Pressing her cheek against the cool glass of a window helped marginally but in the end she took the jeans off.

Self-preservation be damned. Nothing was going to happen between them, whether they were here all night or
not. Nothing was going to happen because neither of them wanted it to, right?

“Right,” she affirmed.

But when she pressed her face back against the window-pane, the hot-cold contrast sent a shiver of reaction through her flesh. She leaned closer to the glass and listened to the elevated thud of her heart. That, she acknowledged, had nothing at all to do with the roaring fire.

Outside, the wind drove intermittent blasts of rain hard against the log walls of the cabin and slapped wet gum branches over the corrugated iron of the outhouse roof. Alex stood in the sheltering lee of the porch and considered his options. One insistent side of his brain wanted to keep on walking, out where the icy squall might cool the heat in his skin and his blood. The other side asked what good a chill would do when the fever’s source lay inside his pants.

Or inside the four sturdy walls of the cabin.

Zara Lovett with her whiskey eyes and husky laugh and steady I’ve-got-your-measure gaze. Zara Lovett who’d strode into his life on killer legs and lit a powder keg in his gut.

Chemistry. The kind of powerful, explosive mix Alex made a habit of avoiding. He didn’t like fireworks. They reminded him of his birth father’s fierce temper, of the heat he feared in his own nature, of the passion he’d worked long and hard to control.

He liked smooth and easy. He liked stability. He liked his relationship with Susannah for those very reasons.

Nothing had changed in the last six hours. He still needed to satisfy the terms of his father’s will; he still wanted that within the confines of a stable relationship. A marriage to the right woman. One with the same goals and beliefs, the same background and values. One who re
spected the time and energy he spent on his career and who didn’t demand any more than he could give.

Nothing had changed. Just because he’d crossed paths with a golden-haired beauty who made his male glands jump to attention didn’t mean things would change. Once the storm cleared he would ride out of here and find Susannah and convince her all over again that they had the goods to make a marriage work.

That was his goal. That was his duty. That was what mattered. Alex set his expression to match his mindset and went back inside.

Eventually Zara gave up the pretense of ignoring him. What was the point? She’d accepted that nothing was going to happen between them and since he’d returned from outside he’d given off the same vibes.

Why not enjoy the only available form of entertainment? He was, after all, eminently watchable.

So, she’d watched him mess with the fire, watched him fetch more wood, watched him build neat symmetrical stacks beside the hearth as if rationing the supply for the hours ahead. He’d even fiddled with the broken stand on her bike, until she’d forced him to acknowledge that he couldn’t fix it without a welder.

Alex Carlisle was hot, but not that hot.

For the past ten minutes she’d watched him pace, appreciating the way he moved and the muscular definition of his deltoids, his pectorals, his biceps. Obviously he worked out. Obviously he wasn’t used to doing nothing.

“You’re not used to having all this time on your hands, are you?”

He answered with a soft grunt of assent, essentially male, ridiculously attractive.

Zara hadn’t moved far from the window, but now she leaned back against the wall and crossed her arms over her chest. “What would you be doing if we weren’t stuck here?”

He stopped pacing, turned slowly and stared at her. “You mean tonight?”

His wedding night.

That significance struck her in a wave of hot-cold shock. She thought about grabbing one of her joggers—no, better make it one of her biker boots!—and shoving it in her mouth.

“How much detail do you require?” he asked with a surprisingly wry cut to his mouth. So, okay, it didn’t quite make up for the dark heat in his eyes and the flare of response in her body, but she could play along with it. She could pretend she didn’t notice. And if she kept on talking, maybe she could distract herself from further wedding-night imaginings.

“I meant some other night. An average night.”

“I’d be working.”

“Even on a Saturday?”

“Possibly.” He shrugged as if the day of the week made no difference. “Depends where I am, what I’m working on. Whether there’s a function I’m obligated to attend.”

Obligated. What an interesting slant on social life. Not that she had a social life, but still… “No wild rave parties then?”

His lips quirked. “Not that I can recall.”

“Why do you work so hard?” she asked after another moment. A moment of watching him snag his shirt from the back of the chair, of feeling the skim of sensation in her own skin as he pulled it on. Of forcing herself to say something, anything, to distract her from the thick beat of awareness in her blood.

He gave a loose-muscled shrug, one that punctuated his next words perfectly. “It’s what I do.”

“Work is your life then?”

“Is that a bad thing?”

“Not at all,” she said quickly. “I’m pretty much the same. Dedicated—” she almost said “married,” but rectified that at the last second “—to my work.”

“Your dedication shows,” he said slowly and she frowned, not understanding how her dedication to medical studies would show. “Your fitness,” he clarified.

Ah, he was talking about the run back to the cabin. “You didn’t do so badly yourself. For a desk jockey.”

“Surprised I kept up?”

Zara met his eyes and smiled. “You were wearing a business suit and leather loafers. You had no business keeping up!”

“Will it make you feel any better to know I’m suffering for that now?”

For a second she became a little lost in the shadowy hint of his smile, in the delicious energy that seemed to pump between them, and then she got his meaning. Her nose wrinkled in sympathy. “Blisters?”

“A couple.” His shrug was a bit tight and she figured he was uncomfortable drawing attention to anything less than a broken bone or dislocated joint. He was, after all, a man. That was something you tended to notice about Alex Carlisle.

Pivoting off her leaning post, she headed toward the cupboards. “I’ll get the first-aid kit.”

“It’s only a couple of blisters.”

Which Zara preferred to see for herself. She retrieved the kit and marched over to the chair near the fire. “Step into my consulting room and I’ll take a look.”

“Forget it, Zara.”

“I’m training to be a doctor. I need practical experience.”

“I’m sure you do,” Alex said, not moving a muscle. “But you’re not getting that hands-on training with me.”

It took a moment, but then she got the veiled meaning in his words. He saw the little jolt of reaction, the flicker of her gaze from him to the chair and back again. He knew she’d caught a glimpse of the picture slow-burning through his brain.

Him sitting on the chair. Her kneeling at his feet, her head bent so her long hair swung loose and honey-gold in the firelight. Close enough that it brushed and snagged against the dark cloth of his trousers.

She got that he was talking about self-preservation again.

The knowledge flashed in her eyes, softened her lips, grabbed him by the throat with soft female teeth and growled in his most masculine parts. Just the image of her kneeling at his feet. He hadn’t even reached the part where she placed his foot on the smooth stretch of her bare thigh.

Hell.

A couple of minutes ago they’d been talking, just talking. How did they get to this point? The point where he felt he might have to walk out into that icy slash of rain. He crossed the room, turned, paced back. They’d started out talking about what they’d normally be doing on an average night.

“You haven’t told me—” he stopped and looked at her again, sitting by the fire, the first-aid kit open in her hands “—how you spend your nights.”

Carefully she closed the lid and set the box aside. “Mostly I’m studying.”

“You can’t study all the time. What do you do to relax and take your mind off the books?”

“I visit with friends. Or listen to music. Sometimes I knit.”

That tickled him. The image of this earthy, sexy, physical woman involved in such a restful, old-fashioned craft. “You knit.”

Defensiveness drew her brows into a solid dark frown. “Is that a bad thing?”

“No. Just…unexpected. Did you learn from your mother? Your grandmother? Great-aunt Mable?”

She smiled. “My mother, in a roundabout way. When Mum was sick, the occupational therapist taught her and I learned as well. You kind of get addicted to the click of the needles and to watching the piece grow. Linda says—” She drew up short and expelled a breath. “You don’t need to hear about this.”

“No, but I’d like to.”

She gave him a come-on-honestly look and he waited, patiently, until she shook her head and continued. “Linda, the therapist, says the key with knitting is that you’re usually making a gift for someone else. Part of the therapeutic deal is that while you knit you’re thinking about the person you’re knitting for. Usually that’s someone you care about so that adds to the positive vibes. Anyway, that’s her theory.”

“What does the doctor in training say about that theory?”

“Anything relaxing is good for a body.” She looked up at him with a deprecating smile. “So, yeah, I knit. There it is—my Saturday-night confession.”

“Not much of a sin.”

“No.” Her answer had a husky edge, and the notion of sin lingered in its aftermath and stretched the moment with dangerous tension. “Is chocolate your only obsession?”

“There’s also the horses.”

“As in horse racing? You gamble?”

He took that note of disbelief as a compliment and smiled. “No, that would be my brother Rafe. I race them. I study form and breeding. I can be obsessive.”

“I imagine so.”

Alex thought he could easily obsess about that husky register of her voice. That particular look in her eyes, part heat, part curiosity. The beauty spot below her left cheekbone that his gaze kept sliding back to, and the long, smooth length of her legs wrapped around his hips while she took him into her body.

“Do you breed your racehorses?”

It took a second to get past the hard hum of lust in his ears and really hear the question. To form an appropriate answer. “I have an interest in several stallions.”

“Intriguing,” she said slowly. But the change in her expression wasn’t curiosity. It was a cooling, a withdrawal, and he had to know what that was about. Had to know what was ticking away in that sharp brain of hers.

“Intriguing…how?”

“I just remembered something Susannah told me. A thought I had at the time.”

“Come on, Zara. You can’t leave that hanging.”

She eyed him speculatively for a beat. “You might prefer that I did.”

“Do I look like someone who can’t handle plain-speak?”

“Okay,” she said, holding his gaze, accepting his challenge to speak her mind. “When Susannah told me why you needed to marry so quickly, when she told me why you’d chosen her, it put me in mind of a stud-breeding enterprise. I thought, this Alex Carlisle has studied the pedigrees. He’s decided that the Horton and Carlisle genotypes would meld nicely.”

Alex stared at her narrowly. Where the hell had that come from? “What,” he asked slowly, “did Susannah tell you?”

“That you and your brothers won’t inherit your father’s estate unless one of you produces a baby. Which, I’m sorry, sounds like a disgustingly commercial reason for breeding
a baby. I mean, don’t you have enough of everything already? Do you really need more money?”

“How do you know it’s about money? Did you ask Susannah? Did you ask me?”

She closed her mouth on whatever else she’d been about to say. He should have done the same. Her opinion of him shouldn’t matter. Her words shouldn’t seethe through him like a wash of acid.

“I owe Charles Carlisle for everything I have, everything I am. His last wish was a grandchild for my mother, and what we’re doing—what
I’m
doing—” he tapped two fingers against his chest “—is honoring that wish. It’s not about any inheritance. It’s about repaying my stepfather. It’s about family.”

Renewed rain struck a staccato beat against the iron roof. Loud enough to mask the crackle of firewood, not loud enough to drown out the heavy thud of his heartbeat or the screaming knowledge that he’d said too much. Revealed too much of himself, of the passion at his heart, of emotions that showed vulnerability.

“I’m sorry I said what I did. That was unfair,” she conceded after a long moment. But then she lifted her chin with a hint of defiance. “I was right in saying you selected Susannah though, wasn’t I? You were looking for a mother for this child, and you cast around for the ideal candidate.”

“You don’t think she’ll make a good mother?”

“She will make a splendid mother, but that’s not what I asked.” She huffed out an exasperated breath, then rose to her feet. “Why did you ask her to marry you? Why didn’t you just offer a business deal and benefits for the child, without the marriage?”

“I believe a child deserves a stable, happy, two-parent home.”

“That is so old-fashioned! Don’t you think a child is better with one parent who loves and cares than in an unhappy home? Look at me.” Eyes glittering with a passionate heat, she moved closer. “I’m the role model for a single-parent family. I never needed a father who didn’t care about me wandering around the periphery of my life. Or in and out of it according to his whim.”