September Moon

by Candice Proctor

  He hooked his thumbs in his belt, a lazy smile curling the edges of his lips. She had expected to anger him, not amuse him. But she was beginning to realize that most things amused Patrick O'Reilly. "Let me get this right," he said. "You've got a problem with the idea of me walloping these children?"

  "Precisely."

  He straightened up and came toward her, not stopping until he was disconcertingly close. "You won't."

  Her hand fluttered up to clutch at the ribbons of the bonnet she still wore. He was such a large man. He seemed to fill her room, with his size, and his pulsating energy, and his masculine scents of leather and tobacco and the dusty essence of the Australian bush. "I—I beg your pardon?"

  "I said, you won't object to it. In fact, I'd bet anything you like that inside twenty-four hours you're actually going to be glad to have me physically chastise them."

  She didn't realize she was backing up until her bottom bumped into the bedside table. "I do not believe in gambling." Her voice sounded breathless, unlike her own voice at all.

  A dimple appeared beside his sensuously curved mouth, and she found herself staring at his lips, watching them as he spoke. "No," he said slowly, leaning into her. "I don't suppose you do, Miss Davenport."

  They stared at each other, the moment heavy with implications Amanda only dimly understood. Then he turned suddenly away.

  "Missy?"

  Amanda hadn't realized Missy was still there until the child's head reappeared around the corner. "Yes, Papa?"

  Sauntering toward the little girl, he reached out to tweak one of her golden curls as he passed through the doorway. "How about showing Miss Davenport around the station?"

  "Oh, there's no hurry," said Amanda, who wanted nothing so much as to be alone, to sort through the day's develop- ments and try to come to terms with the hideous situation in which she had found herself.

  O'Reilly shrugged. "Might as well get oriented before you start lessons tomorrow. Besides, you'll want to find Liam. You haven't met him yet."

  His words brought an uncomfortable hollowness to the pit of Amanda's stomach that she recognized as dread. Her encounter with the other members of this household had been traumatic enough. She was not looking forward to Liam.

  O'Reilly took the track that ran south along the bleached rocks of the creek bed, heading toward the woolshed. He walked slowly, his gaze narrowing as he studied the drooping gums, the cracked, desiccated mud of a vanished water hole, the clouds of dust that kicked up and blew away on the cold dry wind.

  Beside one of the paddocks he paused, his forearms resting on the rough top rail as he squinted beyond the dried-up watercourse to the barren, undulating plains that stretched to the blue-gray shimmer of Wilpena Pound.

  After a good rain, these slopes were covered with waving Mitchell grass scattered with wild parsnips and parakeelya. Cormorants, gray teal, and white-faced herons flicked over the glistening surfaces of water holes hedged with coolabahs and clumps of white and purple flag iris. After a good rain. ..

  But they hadn't had a good rain for more than a year now. A summer of searing hot winds and burning blue skies had given way to a winter that was cold and hard and dry. Grass withered and died, dust lay thick on the flat scruffy leaves of the saltbush, hills turned stark. If the rains didn't come soon, summer would be upon them again. And then anything still left alive would die.

  Looking out over the dying land, O'Reilly felt an ache in his heart. He loved this country. Loved its merciless grandeur and brutal beauty, its magnificent vast emptiness that made a man feel insignificant and yet vitally alive, all at the same time.

  Which made it so bloody ironic, he thought, that he had contributed to this tragedy, with his sheep, and his cattle, and his ignorance.

  He knew better now. Knew the land better. Knew not to overstock the range, knew that the rains could fail. Hed do a lot of things differently in the future.

  Hell, he thought bitterly. If the rains didn't come soon, he wouldn't have a future. Everything he'd spent the last twelve years working and sweating and sacrificing for would be gone.

  He pushed away from the rails. They'd be starting to shear soon, and the woolshed and shearers' quarters needed to be inspected. Normally he'd have put off shearing for another six weeks or more, to avoid the danger of a late cold snap coming through and killing the shorn sheep out on the range. But not this year. This year he'd be killing the sheep himself, as soon as he took their wool.

  He planned to cull his herds hard, cutting them down to the fittest and the best. But if the rains didn't come soon, even that wouldn't be enough. Soon the brush would be gone as well as the grass. The few remaining water holes would dry up. And then the animals on the range would die of thirst as well as of starvation. Eventually even the hay in the barns would be exhausted. Which meant the saddle horses and breeding stock would die, too, adding their bones to those of the tens of thousands of sheep and kangaroos and emus bleaching out on the ranges.

  He stooped to pick up a twig, breaking it over and over again in his hands. He'd send the children south, to Hetty, before things got to that point, he decided. He wouldn't want them to have to watch it happen.

  Hetty had been after him for years now to let her have Hannah and Missy. "A station in the wilds of the outback is no place for two motherless girls," she was always saying to him. The last time they'd gone to visit her, she'd tried to get him to leave the girls behind in Adelaide. Go back to Penyaka without them.

  She'd come upon him in the stables, when he was inspecting one of the horse's hooves, and started in on him about it. "Hannah and Missy belong with their father," he'd told her, trying hard not to get angry with her, trying hard to remember that she meant well.

  "Patrick." She laid her hand on his shoulder, her voice gentling. "I know how much you love those children, and I know what an important part of your life they are. But can't you see that what I'm suggesting would be better for them?"

  "No, I don't see it, Hetty." He let the horse's hoof drop and straightened up. '^Katherine hurt those children terribly with what she did six years ago. What kind of an effect do you think it would have on them if their father were to abandon them, too?"

  "You wouldn't be abandoning them."

  "As far as they're concerned, I would be. They love Penyaka. It's their home. They love their brother, and they love me. We belong together."

  Hetty tightened her jaw, causing two long lines to appear, bracketing her mouth. "I can understand why this is hard for you, feeling the way you do about family. You were so young when Mother left—"

  "Bloody hell. Leave her out of this." He spun about, startling her so much, she took a quick step back. Seizing a curry comb, he went to work on the chestnut's broad back. "I can lake care of my own children."

  "Can you? Then why won't any of the governesses I send up to you stay?"

  "Because you're always hiring some damned Englishwoman who can't take life in the bush."

  "I hire English gentlewomen because I believe that if you insist on raising those children in the outback, the least you

  can do is provide them with a genteel governess. And while I've no doubt that such women find the conditions at Penyaka trying, the truth is that the main reason they leave is because your children are totally undisciplined and unmanageable, and you know it. You indulge Missy shamelessly. Liam you treat more like one of your roustabouts than a nine-year-old boy, and as for Hannah—"

  "Now, don't start on me about Hannah," he warned, shifting around to the horse's far side. "She's never been an easy child, even when she was little, and you know it."

  "And now she's growing up, Patrick. She needs a woman's guidance and understanding."

  "So, she'll have this Miss Soursides I just hired, or Sour- bottom, or whatever her name is."

  "Sourby," Hetty corrected, crossing her arms to cup her elbows in her palms. "Unfortunately, Miss Sourby resigned ten minutes ago. Someone filled her teapot with—well, let's put it this way, it wasn't
tea."

  "Shit." O'Reilly tossed the curry comb at the tack box.

  "Yes, that's probably what it was," Hetty said, surprising him by cracking a smile. "Diluted to the proper color and consistency, of course."

  At that, they'd laughed together. After another ten minutes, Hetty had given up trying to get him to leave the girls, and even agreed to find him another governess. Miss Westbrook, her name had been, and she'd been from New South Wales, not England. She'd stayed five months.

  He closed his palm around the broken lengths of twig in his hand, then tossed them away, wondering how long this new governess would last. She was a queer one, he thought. So ostentatiously virtuous and genteel and rigid that she made him want to shake her up, just for the sheer joy of watching her get rattled.

  Yet he couldn't quite figure her out. Because while she might come across as an insufferable, dried-up old prude, the truth was that she was still fairly young. Even pretty, when one took a second look at her. Only the way she dressed and acted seemed to be precisely calculated to discourage any man from taking a second look at her.

  And that made O'Reilly wonder why.

  Amanda had never thought of herself as one of those people who considered wealth more important than birth and breeding. Yet, she had to admit that she was quietly impressed by the extent of Mr. Patrick O'Reilly's holdings.

  In addition to the main house, storeroom, and office building, the walled garden compound also enclosed an outdoor kitchen and, beside that, the rooms of the two Chinese men Missy told her served as the household help.

  "They're called Ching and Chow," volunteered Hannah, reappearing suddenly as Missy led Amanda along the cobbled alley that ran the length of the southern side of the house. "They originally came to work the Victoria gold fields, but Chow is afraid of small spaces. He says he gets to where he can't breathe."

  Missy glared at her big sister. "Han-nah. Papa said I was apposed to take Miss Davenport around."

  "Well, excuse me all to Melbourne and back," Hannah said, shoving her hands into her pockets and scowling.

  Amanda expected the older girl to wander away again. Instead, Hannah stayed with them as Missy led the way down the hill to a scattering of outbuildings. She showed Amanda the workers' huts and men's kitchen, took her on a tour first through the stables and barns, then the cart shed and dairy, the smokehouse and pigsty and "chook" houses—which turned out to be chicken coops. The winter sun shone dazzlingly bright out of a clear blue sky, but the wind was raw and cold. ( 'old enough to chap Amanda's cheeks as it kicked up little eddies of red dust. She began to think longingly of the wash- stand in her room.

  "I had no idea there was so much to see," she said, drawing i he back of her gloved hand across her gritty forehead.

  "There's still the woolshed and shearers' quarters." Missy tugged on Amanda's arm. "They're this way."

  "I think she's tired, Missy," said Hannah with unexpected sensitivity. "And the woolshed's miles down the creek yet." She turned to give Amanda a smile that was dazzling in its brilliance. "If you like, you can just walk to the top of that bare hill there, and you ought to be able to see them."

  "But—" Missy began.

  Hannah clamped her arm around Missy's shoulder and smiled again at Amanda. "Can you see them?"

  "No. Where?" Amanda took a few incautious steps forward, her gaze firmly fixed on the distant line of white-barked gums and dry, tumbled stones.

  "There." Hannah backed away, her arm still tightly wrapped around Missy's shoulders.

  Amanda lifted her hand to shade her eyes from the glare of the sun and squinted, but she could still see nothing except dry hills, blue sky, and dust blowing in the wind.

  Something tickled her leg, then her arm. It was a curious sensation. An uncomfortable feeling, as if something were crawling on her. Amanda glanced down.

  And screamed.

  Scores of big, black things swarmed over her. They were so big, in fact, that it took her a moment to realize what they were. Ants. She was crawling with ants. Only these were unlike any ants she had ever seen in England. These were as long as her thumbnail and almost half as wide.

  "Oh, my goodness," she cried in barely controlled terror, twisting this way and that, slapping frantically at her arms, her bodice, her skirt. "They're all over me!"

  She was dimly aware of Missy staring at her, her hands clapped over her mouth, her eyes wide with horror. But the two older children were laughing so hard, they had to hold each other up.

  Yes, there were three of them, Amanda realized suddenly. Liam had finally put in an appearance.

  "Help me," she called, swatting madly at her skirt. But for every one she brushed off, it seemed as if there were another dozen to take its place.

  She glanced toward the children again. They hadn't moved, and she noticed they were being very careful to keep well back from the circle of bare earth. Suddenly, she knew why. The mound was bare because every trace of vegetation had been worn away by the passing of millions of tiny feet.

  The children had tricked her into standing on an anthill.

  Still wriggling and brushing frantically at her clothes, she staggered toward her tormentors. But a sudden, sharp pain shot up her leg, stopping her in her tracks. "Agh!" she screamed again, louder this time. The ants weren't just crawling all over her, she realized with horror; they were biting her.

  She felt another bite on her inner thigh, then two more, on her bottom. Oh, the pain. She had never dreamt that ant bites could hurt this badly. A dozen more sharp stabs brought tears to her eyes.

  In a pain-hazed frenzy, she realized the ants had crawled up her legs and were now trapped by the scores in her drawers. And there was only one way to get them out.

  Heedless of the children or anyone else who might be watching, Amanda whipped up her skirt, petticoat, and crinoline, and clawed frantically at the fastening of her drawers.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  O'Reilly was coming back from the woolshed when he heard the woman scream. Curious, he left the track and topped a nearby rise to squint toward the homestead.

  He spotted her right away. She was spinning round and round like a whirling dervish, batting this way and that, hopping first on one leg, then on the other. His gaze focused on Liam and Hannah. He knew exactly what they had done.

  Miss Davenport screamed again, only this time he heard pain in her voice. "Shit," he muttered, and took off at a run.

  He was almost to her when she threw up her skirts. He saw shapely legs clad in black cotton stockings and chaste cotton drawers with only a modest edging of lace. Her crinoline was predictably conservative, but over it Miss Davenport wore a flamboyantly red satin petticoat. Well, well, well, O'Reilly thought, grinning to himself. Who'd have suspected such a painfully proper, plummy-voweled spinster of hiding a red satin petticoat beneath those drab, respectable skirts of hers?

  Then she dropped her drawers.

  She whirled, and he caught a glimpse of a triangle of auburn-colored hair, then a pert, nicely rounded little bottom that looked every bit as good as it'd felt in his hands that afternoon.

  He skidded to a halt at the edge of the bare earth. "Damn it, woman," he yelled. "You're still standing on the edge of the bull ant nest. Move away from it."

  She was beyond hearing him. "They're all over me," she said in an oddly tight, controlled voice. "Get them off me. Get them off."

  "Bloody hell," he swore under his breath, and sprinted toward her.

  He scooped her up in his arms and took off at a run for the nearest water hole. She was such a tiny thing, she didn't weigh much. But she was jerking this way and that, tormented by the ants, and he got an elbow in his midriff and another in his eye before they reached the creek. He could feel the damn things on him now. One bit him on the stomach. Another got him on the thigh.

  "I'm going to kill those kids," he vowed, scrambling over the rocks that edged the water hole. "Let go of me."

  "What?"

  "I said, let go." And with
that, he threw her into the creek.

  She screamed once, a scream mingling shock and outrage, before sinking like a bucket of rocks, the hoop of her crinoline billowing out behind her. An ant bit him on his arm. He swore again and with a flying leap jumped in after her.

  "Christalmighty," he yelled when he hit the icy water. It was deeper than he'd expected, and a hell of a lot colder. He shut his mouth just in time as the water closed over his head. Kicking off the bottom, he clawed his way back up, gasping when his head broke the surface.

  Treading water, he shook the hair out of his eyes and looked around for that damn fool governess. He'd about decided he was going to have to dive down and haul her out when she reared up on his left, her flailing hand grabbing an overhanging rock.

  She was coughing and choking something fierce. He paddled over and helpfully pounded her on the back.

  She swung around, her elbow almost catching his eye again. "Don't you touch me!" she sputtered, water streaming down her face. Her nice, full breasts rose and fell with her heavy breathing; her gray eyes glinted like honed steel. She'd lost her bonnet and most of her hair had come down, no that it floated around her like a silky, weightless aura of glorious fire.

  O' Reilly stared at her, at her wet, fine-boned face and trembling mouth and flame-colored hair so unexpectedly, sinfully vivid that it was like a siren call to temptation. And he was tempted, damn it. Unwillingly, even resentfully.