But O'Reilly had looked. All evening she had been conscious of his lounging in his chair at the far end of the table, a heated intensity to his gaze as he stared at her. He'd looked at her like that before, she knew, but briefly, and always when they were alone.
Tonight he hadn't been able to take his eyes off her. At times she'd had the distinct impression he was picturing her not as she was, sitting at table in her prim gray-and-white- striped satin, but as he'd seen her before. With her skirts thrown up around her waist or her nightshirt unbuttoned.
She felt her body grow warm and tingly just at the thought.
Her hand tightened around the brush handle and dropped. Admit it, she told herself. You didn't dress so carefully or loosen your hair tonight for some unknown Englishman passing through. That had been only an excuse. An excuse to make herself more attractive to Patrick O'Reilly. Because she had wanted him to look at her. She wanted O'Reilly to look at her the way a man looks at a woman.
And she had succeeded. Far better than she'd expected.
"Good Lord," she whispered to the woman in the mirror. "What have you done?"
And exactly what, she wondered, was she going to do now? Because there was no going back. Something had altered between them tonight. Something subtle and unspoken, but nonetheless real.
She flipped all her hair forward over her left shoulder and began braiding it for the night. The unexpected sound of male voices coming from the parlor made her pause, her head tilted, listening. She heard glass clink against glass. Someone laughed. A whirling sound, like a deck of cards being shuffled, followed, and a mysterious clacking, as if something were being stacked.
She told herself to ignore it, that it was none of her business, but she could not. She heard Patrick O'Reilly's rich, deep laugh, almost as if he were tempting her. She could resist no longer.
Quickly tying off her hair, she shrugged into her wrapper. She started to open the door, hesitated, and reached over to extinguish the lamp first. Back at the door, she turned the handle carefully and eased the door open a tiny crack.
The scene that met her eyes was like something out of a Bosch painting of sin and iniquity. Four men sat huddled around the cedar table in the center of the room. Smoke swirled slowly on an unseen updraft, giving an otherworldly, almost sinister cast to the dim lamplight. Brandy fumes hung heavy in the air; Amanda could see a glass half-filled with the thick golden liquid beside each man's elbow. As she watched, the man with his back to her—Sweeny, she realized—emptied his glass and reached to refill it from the bottle that stood near at hand.
The other bullocky—Jessup, she thought O'Reilly had called him—was on Sweeny's left. On his right sat Mr. Lumley, his oiled black locks gleaming in the lamplight. O'Reilly himself faced her. He held a deck of cards in his hands, and as she watched, he sliced the deck in two and sent the halves whirling together and then snapping back in a startlingly professional shuffle.
"Draw poker, gentlemen?" he said, the stem of his pipe clamped tightly in his teeth. He never raised his eyes from the other men, never glanced her way. But she saw a dimple wink in his tanned cheek, and in the same, pleasant, even voice, he added, "Unless you'd care to suggest a different game, Miss Davenport?"
Amanda jumped and slammed her door.
O'Reilly reached his hands high over his head and gave a long, back-unkinking kind of stretch. The rising sun threw rectangles of clear, bright light across the floor of the adjacent dining room. Christ, it had been a long night. But profitable. Very profitable. Not only had he won the stallion, but a tidy sum of cash, too. He smiled and pushed back his chair.
"Good game," he said, stretching to his feet. "Thanks, gentlemen. We'll have to do it again sometime."
Lumley, his oily hair hanging in frantic clumps against his forehead, muttered something obscene and stumbled off toward the guest room. O'Reilly looked at Jessup and shrugged. The two bullockies stretched, belched, and farted, and took themselves off.
Whistling softly to himself, O'Reilly stacked the banknotes and coins that littered the table in front of him. The sound of a door opening made him look up.
Miss Amanda Davenport paused just inside the room, her glorious auburn hair scraped back once again into that uncompromising knot he hated. She held her shawl clutched around her thin shoulders, and she had her mouth screwed into that tight grimace he also hated.
Whatever impulse had led her to loosen her hair last night, she was obviously regretting it now. She looked determined to pretend it hadn't happened, determined to act as if he hadn't had a glimpse of that other Miss Davenport—what he'd come to think of as the real Amanda. It was as if she actually were two women, he decided, watching her now. One determinedly uptight and frigid: a disapproving and ostentatiously moral English gentlewoman. But the other...
It was the other woman who intrigued him and attracted him more than he wanted to admit. The repressed, hidden woman who wore a red satin petticoat and a gaudy Chinese silk wrapper and scratched dogs behind their ears. He could practically count the rare glimpses he'd had of her ... That night in the garden when she'd been so delightfully rattled by her encounter with the Aborigines. And again in her room, when he'd been as naked as a man could be, and her body had quivered and yearned toward him even as she forced herself to turn away.
Well, she wasn't quivering today. She was stiff with outrage. He saw her gaze travel from the pile of empty bottles to the splattered spittoon on the floor—Jessup and Sweeny tended to miss after a few hours of throwing down drinks—to the cards spilled across the tabletop. When she got back to his own unshaven and probably disheveled person, her lips were pressed so tightly together, he was surprised they didn't squeak in protest.
"Mornin', Miss Davenport." He gave her a big grin. "Hope we didn't keep you awake last night."
She took three steps forward, stopped, and threw a quick glance at the children's bedrooms, as if to make certain their doors were still closed. "Mister O'Reilly," she hissed, her voice low. He hated it when she called him Mister like that— as if she were according him an honor he didn't deserve. It really set up his back. "Mister O'Reilly, have you no thought for your children?"
Slowly, deliberately, he folded the pile of banknotes in his hand and stuffed them into his pocket. "Course I do. Why do you think we played in here, rather than in the dining room, where we might have kept 'em awake?"
She turned so white, he figured she must have laced her stays too tight. "I am speaking, sir, of the example you are setting for them. You have been gambling and drinking all nighty
He ran his hand over his beard-roughened jaw. "Yeah. Well, it took longer than I figured."
"To do what? Fleece your guest?"
He really was in no mood for this. His head hurt like hell, and his mouth tasted as if a possum had died in it last week. "Come on," he coaxed, propping one hip up on the edge of the table. "I didn't fleece the Honorable Mr. Robert Lumley." He gave her a broad grin. "I just won his horse and beat some of the arrogance out of him. After the way he treated you at supper last night, I wouldn't think you'd make such a fuss."
She plucked at the fringe on her shawl. "In England, guests are not made to sit at table with the governess."
He knew she was acting so prickly because she regretted letting her guard down last night, but he could not believe she'd defend that pompous ass. "No? Well in the bush, they are."
She bent one elbow and propped her hand up on her hip. She had such nice, slim hips. And a great backside, too, as well as those full, luscious breasts he'd glimpsed through the open placket of her gown the other night. He smiled at the memory.
She couldn't know what he was grinning about—thank God. But she obviously knew it wasn't anything she liked. Her eyes narrowed. "Just as it is the custom in the bush to take nine-year-old boys into the local pub for a drink?" she demanded.
So they were back to that, were they? He blew out a long, exasperated breath. "Look, lady, I'm as drunk as a red-back spider in a whorehouse pi
ss pot, and twice as ornery. Don't start on me."
He could practically hear the starch crackle and the whalebones stiffen as she drew herself up like an affronted prickly pear. "Mirier O'Reilly. More profanity?"
He pulled back his lips in a smile that showed his teeth. "Why not? It goes with the gamblin' and the drinkin', doesn't it?"
"I would not know," she said in her loftiest, most insufferably condescending manner. "Not being addicted to vice myself."
"I reckon that's your problem right there."
"I beg your pardon?"
He pushed away from the table. "The way I see it, life must be mighty dull without a bit of vice livenin' things up every once and a while." He sauntered toward her and didn't stop until his thighs pressed against her crinolined gown. He knew it rattled her when he got too near her, and he did so love to shake her up, even though he knew it was a dangerous game he played, and one he couldn't clearly see the end of.
If he pushed her too hard, he knew she was liable to leave. But then, a part of him wanted her to leave. Wanted to scare her away from him.
"Tell me, Miss Davenport," he asked, dropping his voice to a whisper. "Don't you find your life dull?"
She stared up at him, her lips parted, her breath escaping in a long sigh that left her body trembling. He let his eyes rove over the features of her face. Her large, clear gray eyes fringed with thick lashes. The high, wide cheekbones. The full mouth that was surely made for something besides censorious frowns and petty moralizing. A mouth like that was made for pleasure.
And it came to him that, as badly as he wanted her to leave, he also wanted to kiss that mouth—had wanted to kiss it for days. But he wanted more than that. He wanted to strip away this ugly old maid's dress of hers and reveal the vital, beautiful woman beneath. He wanted to shake her up, wake her up. He wanted to make her laugh, sigh, moan. He wanted this woman.
He saw the pink tip of her tongue peek out, and watched as it slid along her full lower lip. "If..." She stopped and swal- lowed, the muscles of her slender white throat cording with effort. "Even if my life were dull, I would not seek the remedy in vice."
When she wasn't preaching, she had a nice, husky voice that by itself would be enough to make a man hard, if he weren't already. A voice like that came from someplace deep inside a woman.
A voice like that could throb with passion.
He gave her a slow, lazy smile. "You know what I think, Miss Davenport? I think you're a fraud."
Her delicate brows snapped together. "A fraud?"
"That's right." He splayed his hand against the wall beside her and leaned into it. "I think that somewhere, buried beneath all that starch and whalebone and those prissy governess ways of yours, is another woman you don't want anyone to see."
"Don't be ridiculous," she said, twisting her head away. But he noticed the telltale blush of color that tinged her cheeks, and she would not look him in the eye.
He bent toward her, close enough to see the flecks of black that shot out from her pupils like sooty sparks in the gray of her irises. "A woman who's soft, not hard. A woman who's passionate, not prudish." His voice took on a silken edge. "A woman with a secret craving for vice."
"No," she whispered, her hand creeping up to grasp the meager lace collar of her prim gown. She sucked in a quick breath of air and her breasts lifted. God, she had nice breasts. He could imagine how they'd feel in his hands. Warm and heavy and full. He knew what they'd taste like, too. And he knew the kind of breathy, erotic noises she'd make when he sucked one of their dusky peaks into his mouth.
"Yes," he said.
His breath stirred a rebellious strand of hair that fell in an almost frivolous curl against her forehead. Her head swiveled back around to look at him, although she didn't say anything. They stared at each other for a long moment. He dipped his head. Close enough to kiss her, although he didn't try because he knew she wasn't ready forthat yet. "Yes," he said again, his lips hovering over hers. "And I'm going to prove it to you."
Then he pushed off from the wall and left her there, clutching her shawl to her heaving breasts and staring after him.
CHAPTER TEN
Amanda stood with one arm wrapped around a veranda support, her gaze fixed on the Ranges turning blue and purple as the western sky whitened toward evening. She sucked in a breath of crisp, dry air scented with all the elusive fragrances of the bush, and let it out with a sigh.
It was as if the haunting beauty of this ancient land stirred her soul, she thought; as if it struck at some wild, lonely chord deep within her that shed thought long dead. As if the sheer, humbling, frightening timelessness that pervaded this place were calling her, tempting her. The way O'Reilly tempted her.
I'II prove it to you.
His low, rough voice was there, whispering with the wind that rustled the dry leaves. Taunting her, exposing her for what she really was.
She squeezed her eyes shut, her grip on the post tightening. Oh, God, how had he known? What had she done, what had she said, how had she betrayed herself? Until coming here, she'd honestly believed she'd overcome her weakness, left it behind as part of the hidden, shameful past. She'd believed herself to have become exactly as she appeared to the world: prim, respectable, ruthlessly controlled.
Yet this uncouth Australian, this convict's grandson with his wild, irreverent ways and healthy, virile body had awakened what she'd thought long dead. Exposed her for what she really was.
A chorus of voices broke the relative stillness of the bush. Amanda looked up, her eyes squinting against the glare as she scanned the evening sky. It was a sound she had learned to recognize as the homecoming call of the great flocks of corellas that came flying in to roost for the night in the line of gums along the creek bed.
She always heard them before she saw them—hundreds of them, screeching and honking almost like geese. Suddenly, the sun caught the sweep of their snowy feathers and they appeared like a great, noisy white sail, billowing through the clear sky. Her breath clogged her throat with awe.
"Missy said Id probably find you out here."
She whipped around to discover Patrick O'Reilly watching her from the corner of the house. She had not heard his approach. He could move as silently as Sally when he wanted, a trick she found unsettling.
He strolled forward to stand beside her at the edge of the veranda and gaze up at a sky now filled with thousands of the chattering, darting white birds. Side by side, they watched silently as the corellas fluttered and squawked around the gracefiil, white-barked limbs of the gums. She did not glance at him again, but she remained intensely aware of his body beside hers, of the heat of his nearness.
She was conscious of a disturbing sense of intimacy in the sharing of this moment of natural splendor and beauty. To break it, she said, "Did you wish to speak to me?"
He nodded, his attention seemingly focused on the gums down by the creek, their branches glistening white with row after row of jostling, preening corellas. "It's about this morning. I—"
"Please, Mr. O'Reilly," she said hastily, her hands gripped together in front of her. "I would rather not talk about it."
He swung his head to look at her. "No. Hear me out. I just want to say I'm sorry. I was out of line. I know I was drunk, but I still shouldn't have said what I did."
They stared at each other. She found herself oddly disconcerted by his words. Disconcerted, and... She tried to define what she was feeling and realized with a sense of shock that it was disappointment. Heaven help her, she thought with despair. She was in far worse straits than she'd realized.
"I should probably apologize for my own behavior this morning," she said stiffly. She had never found it easy to apologize. "We seem to bring out the worst in each other. I must have sounded insufferably hoity-toity."
He tilted his head to slant a glance up at her from beneath his hat brim, and she saw he was smiling. "Do you ride?"
It was the last thing she had expected him to say. "I beg your pardon?"
"Can you ride a horse?"
"Yes. Why?"
"There's a water hole a few miles from here that's fed by a natural spring the Aborigines say never runs dry. It's called Cadnowie. I was plannin' on ridin' out there later this week with Missy to take a look at it, and I thought you might like to come with us."
"Oh, but I couldn't."
"Why not?"
"I have lessons—"
"We'll leave after lessons. Take a picnic supper."
"My preparations..."
He grinned at her. "You can't really ride, is that it?"
"Of course I can ride," Amanda said indignantly, turning away with something perilously close to a flounce. "I shall be ready on the day of your choosing."
Alone in her room that night, Amanda shook out her old riding habit and held it up to the lamplight. It was a good seven or eight years out of fashion, with a narrow skirt and a jacket that closed down the front with small buttons. But the hunter-green cloth was unworn, the collar and cuffs of fine black linen, and there was even a jaunty black grosgrain cravat.
A thrill of excitement shot through her as she lifted the beaver hat with its slightly crumpled green gauze veil. She set the hat at a rakish angle on her head and held the riding habit up against her body as she twisted to face the washstand mirror. A flushed, animated stranger from out of the past stared back at her.
I'll prove it to you.
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