Princes of the Outback Bundle (37 page)

“You’ll go looking for her? Do you still think you can change her mind?” she asked on a rising note, alarmed at the prospect that nothing had changed.

“Yes, I’ll look for her. We need to talk. But I can’t make her marry me, Zara.”

No, but if he looked at her with that intensity, if he spoke to her in that low, smoky voice… “I’m sure you can be very persuasive.”

“When I want to be,” he said, and that confidence shivered through Zara in a contradiction of desire and disquiet.

Yet she couldn’t leave it alone. Despite the moody heat that licked between them, she was enjoying this soft-voiced exchange in the near dark. “Do you want to be married?” she asked after a second. “I mean you, yourself, not because of the will or your family.”

“Yes. I want a family, a wife, a marriage.”

“You’re…how old?”

“Thirty-five.”

“And you waited this long to decide you want to marry? Forgive my bluntness, but I imagine you’ve not been starved of opportunity.”

This time he didn’t answer straight away, and she sensed a different tension in his hesitation. “I almost married once before.”

Zara felt an odd pressure in her chest, a tightness, a lack of breath. “What happened?”

“She married someone else.”

Oh, Alex. What could she say? She recalled his closed, hard expression when he’d asked if Susannah had met someone else. The second woman to have changed her
mind. How could Suse have done that to him? The day of the wedding, no less.

Yet she knew he wouldn’t want her sympathy. Knew that reaching out to touch him would be a bad, dangerous move. Instead she shrugged, as best one can when lying down, and said, “Her loss.”

“Yeah,” he agreed, and Zara sensed an ease in his tension. Her heart skipped with a kind of gladness because she had picked the right tone, because she had lifted the mood out of murky waters. “I couldn’t marry a woman who didn’t want me.”

She wasn’t sure he meant Susannah and she didn’t ask. Suddenly she felt less sympathetic toward her friend and much too sympathetic toward this man she’d grossly misread. So many layers, every one more intriguing, every one adding to her fascination.

“I believe I owe you an apology,” she said softly. “I misjudged you.”

And Lord help her, this time she couldn’t help turning and touching. Just her hand on his. A brief touch, a quick kiss of heat in the dark.

He didn’t thank her. He didn’t say anything for a moment and then he shook his head and she heard the heavy expulsion of his breath. “I want to get an early start in the morning. How about we try to get some sleep.”

“I’ll try,” she said dubiously and closed her eyes.

Amazingly she slept.

Hours later Zara woke and for a long moment lay perfectly still while she made sense of her surroundings. The storm had passed, leaving behind a quiet broken only by the creak of wet timber expanding and the faint drip, drip, drip of water somewhere outside. The darkness was more
complete, and she realized the fire had gone out. Not even an ember sparked to break the solid wall of black. Yet she wasn’t cold.

Oh, no, she was very, very warm, snuggled as she was against the intense body heat of the man in her bed.

Surreptitiously she stretched a hand toward the edge of the mattress. The distance she needed to stretch confirmed her suspicion. She had backed into the center of the bed. She had spooned into his hips and curved her legs to trace the line of his.

His arm was thrown over hers, trapping her there. So close she swore she could feel the hard line of him against her backside. Despite at least one sleeping bag in between.

Heart thudding hard in her chest, she fought an almighty surge of temptation to press back against him. To unzip the cursed bag. To turn and touch.

No, no, no,
she whispered silently in time with the dripping rainwater.
Move your backside forward. Away. A little wriggle forward, one hip and then the other—

“Zara.” The hush of her name washed over her, quiet as the night. Dark as temptation. She stopped wriggling but the impact of his voice—the notion that he too lay awake, hard and hot at her back—rolled through her like molten chocolate. Sweet and thick in her veins and her senses.

“Yes?” she managed to breathe.

“Best you don’t do that.”

Oh, man, did he think she was shimmying up against him on purpose? That was altogether possible seeing as he still lay on his side of the bed.

Mortified at being caught out, at unconsciously seeking his heat and shelter while she slept, at thinking of doing exactly what he suspected, she resumed her effort to twist away. He made a sound low in his throat that might
have been a groan of discomfort. Or disapproval. Then the arm impeding her escape tightened, pulling her back against him.

Zara swallowed. Yup, he was definitely aroused. Very much so.

“I thought you didn’t want me to know about that,” she said.

The hand at her waist twitched, but when he spoke, his voice was coated with dry amusement. “I think you pretty much know every inch by now.”

What could she say to that? Certainly not the wicked response that leaped into her mind and pooled low in her body. Nope, she better not make any crack about how she could get more intimately acquainted with those inches.

“What did you mean by ‘best you don’t do that’?” she asked.

“You were squirming.”

“I was trying to move away without waking you. Why did you pull me back?”

“I like the feel of you against me,” he said frankly. “If you just lay still like you’ve been doing for the last couple of hours, we’ll do fine.”

Zara exhaled slowly. Felt the spread of his fingers on her abdomen, the tiniest shift in pressure. He expected her to lie still? Now she knew that he touched her, now she knew that he wanted her?

“You’ve been—” she moistened her lips “—lying there…awake…for hours?”

“Yeah. Awake.”

Again that lick of dry amusement. Oh, yeah, he recognized her slight pause for what it was. He knew she’d been thinking of him lying awake and hard for hours.

“Go to sleep, Zara,” he said quietly.

Go to sleep? Was he for real? Or had she missed something in the translation?

Using her shoulder and elbow for leverage, she managed to push free of his hold and roll onto her back. Then onto her side to face him. “You expect me to just go back to sleep? As if I don’t know that you’re aroused?”

“That bothers you?”

She blinked, unsure how to respond. Wishing the night weren’t so dark so she could see more than an impression of his strong, dark face. “Shouldn’t it?”

“I’m not going to use it for anything. No matter how nicely you ask.”

To her credit, Zara’s mouth didn’t fall open. Much. She drew an audible breath and let it go. Replayed that shockingly candid admission in her mind and let its impact settle. She believed him. Even if she made the moves, if she reached out and put her hand on that hot, hard body, he would resist.

Reflexively she curled her fingers tight into the palm that tingled with the suggestion of touch. Deep inside she felt a rush of sensation, not wild and hot like so many times during this long night, but steady and strong.

A knowledge that this was a man she could trust.

“Because of Susannah?”

“Until I talk to her, until I hear it from her lips, we’re still engaged.”

And then?
The words jumped from her mind to her mouth but she bit them off. And then he would be in another city, another state, another lifestyle far removed from hers. Then, no matter how nicely he asked, there would be nothing.

Susannah might keep them apart now, but in the end there was nothing to keep them together. Nothing but a cabin-fever attraction he had the willpower to resist.

She would do well to take a lesson.

A
lex went to sleep hard and woke the same way. No surprise there, since he lay wrapped around a woman who’d stirred his juices from the instant he’d clapped eyes on her.

He wasn’t sure why he’d insisted on dragging her back into his embrace when she’d woken in the night, except that he did enjoy the feel of her long, strong body matched to his. In his sleep he’d enjoyed the fantasy of unzipping her sleeping bag and running his hands over that amazing body.

The fantasy of starting the day with long, slow morning sex.

With a low groan, he edged away from that fantasy and the torturous pleasure of her derriere nestled against him. He must be turning into a masochist. And a supreme optimist if he imagined himself capable of long and slow anything right now.

Rising on one elbow, he stroked a fall of hair back from
her face, then held his breath when she stirred. She slept on but with a frown puckering the skin between her eyebrows. Tension ticked one of the fingers curled around the top of her sleeping bag and her legs shifted restlessly inside its bulky warmth.

She’d moved in her sleep too, not only snuggling closer to his body heat but shifting uneasily as if her mind never rested. Perhaps it was his presence or the aftermath of what must have been a harrowing day. Or perhaps she was simply reciting her anatomy lessons, like she’d told him she did at the traffic lights.

Smiling at that, he slowly traced the length of her exposed arm with the back of his hand.
Scapula. Humerus. Radius and ulna.
He stopped at her wrist, frowning in concentration as he struggled to remember the name of the next bone. She shifted again, rolling her shoulders slightly as if responding to the light pressure of his touch.

He gave up on the bone thing to watch her face, unobserved, in the thin dawn light. To torture himself with not touching more of her smooth skin, with not kissing the sleep-soft fullness of her lips, with not flicking his tongue against that beauty spot on her cheek.

He wanted all that, and sometime during the night he’d accepted that he could want more. He’d entertained the notion that his first gut instinct may have been wrong. That she might be the right woman, but at the wrong time. But until he’d talked to Susannah, he could not tempt himself with possibilities.

I’m sorry, Alex, but I can’t marry you today.

In his head he heard Susannah’s voice, heard her emphasis on that last word. Until he found her, until he heard her voice finish that statement with
any day,
he was bound to her and to his marriage proposal.

He rolled from the bed, stood and stretched a dozen tight muscles, and watched Zara come awake. It didn’t bother him that she caught him standing there beside the bed, sporting only underpants and a massive morning erection. Apparently it didn’t bother her either because she took her time looking.

Alex finished rolling his head and shoulders and smiled down at her. “Good morning.”

He liked the hazy distraction in her eyes when they rose to meet his. The husky morning edge to her voice when she returned his greeting. “What time do you want to get going?”

He reached for his trousers and started to pull them on. “What time do you suppose that roadhouse will be open for breakfast?”

Unable to get around the obstruction of the tree and his incapacitated rental car, they detoured via a longer alternate route. Several miles before connecting up with the highway, they came upon a tiny settlement with a café-slash-petrol-station-slash-general-store and a handmade sign advertising Home Cooked Meals. Carmel, the cook-slash-waitress-slash-store-owner, told them she did a good trade in lumber trucks.

She told them quite a bit, actually, in intermittent slices of monologue each time she returned to plunk something else on their table. In return they told her how they’d missed dinner and she promised to fill them right back up again.

She’d been working on that ever since.

Between feeding their hunger and Carmel’s voluble presence, they’d barely spoken to each other since sitting down at the worn Formica table. But with the edge now off, Alex watched Zara spoon the last of a generous serving of scrambled eggs onto her plate.

She ate with a refreshing lack of self-consciousness, only pausing, her fork midway between plate and mouth, when she caught him watching her. “Please tell me you’re not staring at a big smudge of sauce on my chin.”

“No. I’m enjoying your appetite.” Alex reached across the table and tapped her wrist. “What are these bones called?”

She stared at him, obviously perplexed.

“I was trying to think of the name this morning. Scapula. Humerus. Radius and ulna. I couldn’t remember the wrist bones.”

“Carpals,” she said, frowning.

Carmel returned to gather and stack the finished plates, to ask if they enjoyed it all, to see if she could get them anything else. Alex leaned back in his chair, enjoying the look of confusion on Zara’s face as she tried to work out what the bones thing was about. He decided to let her wonder. He liked the way concentration drew her heavy brows together, giving her an almost fierce look. Like an Amazon warrior queen.

“I wasn’t going to ask.” Carmel paused, her hands filled with plates, her gaze narrowed on his face. “All the while I cooked your breakfast I’ve been trying to work out why you look familiar, and I just can’t work it out.”

Alex gave a casual shrug. “I get that a lot.”

“You’re not on the television then?”

“Not that I know.”

“Huh.” She shook her head. “You must look like somebody famous.”

“I guess that’s it.” He eyed his empty cup. “Could I trouble you for another coffee, Carmel?”

“That won’t be any trouble at all. How about you, love? More tea?”

“Lovely. Thank you,” Zara replied but she continued to study him intently, her frown now about curiosity more than confusion. “Do you get recognized often?”

He tracked Carmel’s exit to the kitchen. “She only thought I looked familiar.”

“Hardly surprising. Your picture’s always in the papers for some reason or other. I recognized you as soon as you stepped out of that car yesterday!”

“You had reason to.”

She dismissed that with a wave of one hand, then sat in silence while Carmel filled his coffee and muttered something about his TV face.

“Why didn’t you tell her who you were?” she asked when they were alone again. “That would have made her day.”

“I suspect my generous tip will do that,” he said dryly.

“Well, yes, but a celebrity sighting would have been the cherry on top.”

“She wanted a TV star.”

“Oh, I think royalty would have done just as nicely.”

Royalty?
Alex made a disparaging sound and shook his head, but her eyes continued to shine with unfulfilled curiosity.

“Does it bother you, the way the magazines love to label you and your brothers with those Aussie royalty tags?”

“No.”

Her
huh
sound could have been acceptance. Or disbelief. “You don’t mind being referred to as one of the ‘Princes of the Outback’?”

“I don’t read that garbage.” He reached for the sugar bowl. “That’s not what bothers me about media interest.”

“What
does
bother you?”

“When someone gets hurt.”

For a second he concentrated on stirring sweetness into
his coffee, ignoring the bitter taste of experience that rose to coat his senses. But he could feel her sharpened gaze on his face, could feel her curiosity change from teasing interest to serious attention. “Anyone in particular?” she asked.

“My mother.” Across the table he met her eyes, sincere and unwavering, and he realized that for once he didn’t mind talking about this. He wanted her to know the truth instead of the half-truths and outright lies that had been printed by the gutter press. “They gave her hell when she lived in Sydney, after our sister died of SIDS. Not a great time to have a dozen lenses trained on your face everywhere you went, but they loved capturing Maura Carlisle looking less than glamorous.”

“I’m sure they loved the whole story,” she said softly. “A beautiful model married to one of Australia’s richest men, suffering the same as any grief-stricken mother.”

“Couldn’t get enough of it,” he confirmed. “In the end Chas moved us all to the outback station where he grew up. Mau’s rarely left there since.”

“Is that why your father wanted this grandchild?” she asked after a thoughtful length of pause. “Because of what losing her baby girl cost your mother?”

“Cost?” Alex frowned at that choice of word.

“She lost a child, a part of her, a piece of her heart. And she also lost her freedom to live where she chose.” Her eyes, astute and serious, held his across the table. “I can’t help wondering if your father maybe felt some guilt over that. I mean, if he weren’t so high profile, the press wouldn’t have cared and your family wouldn’t have been uprooted.”

“She was famous in her own right.”

“Ah, but never so much as when she married ‘King’ Carlisle,” she said with an edge of wryness. “Then she became the next best thing to royalty.”

It bothered him, that sarcastic bite in her voice. Bothered him because this was his family. His parents. “Sounds like you read too many tabloids.”

“I try to avoid them, actually. I know how bloody they can be.”

“Are you speaking from personal experience?”

She gave the merest shrug, not offhand, not casual. Then she lifted her gaze and the expression in her eyes, fierce and dark as if she were fighting to keep emotion at bay, drove the air from his lungs. “Would you believe my mother suffered at their hands once, too, a long time ago?”

“She was famous?”

“She had her fifteen minutes.” A smile drifted across her lips, a lopsided smile tinged with irony and with a sadness that squeezed tight in his chest. “Nothing in the Carlisle mold, of course.”

He didn’t smile back. “Was she an actor or—”

He broke off when Carmel returned for their cups, tidying and wiping and asking if they needed anything else. “Just the bill,” Alex told her, his eyes not leaving Zara’s face. And when Carmel finally left he leaned forward, intent on finding out what had happened in that fifteen minutes. “Tell me about your mother.”

“Oh, that’s a long story,” she said with another smile.

“It’s one I want to hear.”

Something shifted in her expression, opened and softened for a singular second. Then she gathered herself and shook her head. “Don’t you think we should be going?”

“I’m not in that big a hurry.”

“You’re not afraid Carmel will suddenly look up in the middle of washing dishes and go, ‘I remember now. It’s Alex Carlisle. One of those filthy-rich princes!’”

“All right,” he said agreeably after a short pause. He saw
her surprise in the slight widening of her eyes and smiled as he got to his feet and walked around to pull out her chair. Then, when she was on her feet, he looked right into those eyes and said, “You can tell me the whole long story another time. When we’re alone and won’t be interrupted.”

Zara told herself it was a throwaway line. He didn’t mean that he intended seeing her again, but that didn’t prevent the swift grab of longing that shadowed hard on the heels of his words. Not that it mattered. There would be no “another time.” No more sharing of confidences or beds.

No more desiring what she could not have.

The ride back to the city, unfortunately, only served to intensify the potent physicality of that desire. Mile after mile, she became more aware of his solid presence at her back, his hands spread over her rib cage, the vibration of the bike between her legs.

Oh, God.

Heat shuddered through her. Heat and memories and the knowledge that only inches separated their bodies. No. She huffed out a quick breath. She did not need to think about the intimacy of his body hard against hers. Or the edge of vulnerability she detected deep in his storm-gray eyes when he talked about his mother’s loss.

She needed to picture him looking ridiculously out of place riding pillion in a business suit. She needed to picture him looking out of place on her bike and in her life. In the living room of her tiny Brunswick terrace, for example, among the eclectic mix of furniture slung together from estate sales and secondhand shops.

She needed to picture him sitting on her red leatherette sofa surrounded by her mother’s collection of cushions, a rainbow palette of silky fabrics and girlie adornments,
while she told him the story of Ginger Love, the stripper. Except she wouldn’t because after she dropped him at his hotel, she would never see him again.

Providing Susannah doesn’t change her mind.

The possibility fluttered through her consciousness, then lodged tight in her brain and her throat. If Susannah changed her mind and married this man, how could she face them? Her best friend—
her only known family
—and the man she’d fallen in lust with.

Last night he’d told her he couldn’t marry someone who didn’t want him, but what if Susannah returned ready to wed him and have this baby that mattered so much to his family? How could he refuse?

Sucking in a hard breath, she forced herself to grab hold of the wild black churn of resistance before it spun out of control. She had no business craving Alex Carlisle, even if Susannah didn’t want him back.

His home was in Sydney, hers in Melbourne. Their lifestyles were diametrically opposed, their goals in conflict. He needed an immediate family, she needed her degree. She barely kept up with study and the work necessary to pay her bills without thinking about a relationship.

She told herself all this, silently reciting the logic point by point as the miles whizzed by, as the landscape changed from bushland to paddocks to suburbia. Less than twenty-four hours since they’d met, so why did she feel as if she’d known him so much longer? Why did she feel a gathering anxiety as the suburbs turned to cityscape, as they drew closer and closer to their destination?

To the moment when she would say goodbye.

That restless stir of nerves and blood and mind made her drive a little too fast, zipping in and out of traffic and taking side streets to avoid the lights. But no matter how many
turns she made, she could not escape the pervasive sense that this last twenty-four hours had changed something key to her happiness.