My Fair Aussie: A Standalone Clean Romance (Millionaire Makeover Romance Book 3)

by Jennifer Griffith

  “You’re a romantic at heart, Liam?”

  “Totally. Especially if you’ll let me start writing my romance with you, Eliza. I mean, you, in that dress. Do you have any idea how good the sparkling blue dress makes your eyes look?”

  His words sent me shooting back into the past to the day Henry had said almost those exact same words to me the night of the premiere.

  Uh-oh, the tears were starting again. I had to sniffle them away.

  “You all right?” Lieutenant Liam pulled me to the side of the dance floor. “Oh, I get it. You were being serious. Well, I have to say, any sailor who left you after a kiss on a cliff, and with unanswered questions—he won’t just be thinking about you six weeks later. He’ll be thinking about you six months later. Possibly six years.” He pulled an apologetic grimace almost identical to the one Polly had just given me. “I’m guessing it can’t be me in your romance, but good luck, Eliza. He’s a lucky guy. And if he hasn’t called, maybe it’s because he’s assigned submarine duty or there’s no ship-to-shore privileges right now.”

  I didn’t want to explain much. Instead, I merely said, “If he was a sailor, I’d make that excuse for him. Instead, he’s just someone I can’t seem to find now.”

  “Ghosted you, huh?”

  “Yep.”

  “Did his phone break?” Liam brightened, like this was a sudden new mystery to solve.

  “It did, but he got a new one, and I never had his number.”

  “That’s harsh. Do you have a mutual friend who would have it?”

  “I don’t really know anyone—”

  Wait. Stop the presses.

  I totally knew someone who knew Henry.

  In a fit of excitement, I threw my arms around Liam, almost dancing as I jumped for relief and joy.

  “You are brilliant! Has anyone told you that today? Because you are.” I kissed him hard on the cheek and then wiped off the lipstick stain with my thumb. “You’re the best, Lieutenant Liam.”

  “What’d I do?” His eyes were bright with surprise.

  “You gave me the answer to my problem.” I kissed his cheek again, hard. “I know you’ll find someone great, someone who will give you your mind-blowing kiss on a windswept cliff someday.”

  ACT III: Scene 1

  On the Street Ranch [Station] Where You Live

  CHERRINGTON DOWNS, STATION, VICTORIAN ALPS, VICTORIA, AUSTRALIA

  In which our hero picks up the thread of the tale once again, hurrah! And finally! Because isn’t he the most delicious part of the story?

  “Hyah! Hyah!” The confounded steer had its horns caught in the honey myrtle bush near the creek-side where it had gone to water, and I cracked my whip to scare him into backing up, but he was having none of it. “Hyah, get shut of there, you little—”

  “Henry. Give the creature a break.” Jonno rode up beside me, too close to my whip to be flinging lectures at me. “You’ve been off your game ever since you came back from the States. Did something worse happen to you than losing your favorite sunglasses in that big pit they call the Grand Canyon?”

  I shot him a look. Yeah, I was cranky, but Jonno wasn’t going to know why. Some things a man didn’t tell anyone, even his top hand on the station.

  “Hyah!” I cracked the whip one more time, and the steer finally got the message and backed his way out of the brush. “There you go. Now, get on. Get on.”

  Down at the stable a few hours later, Jonno offered me a cold drink while I rubbed down the lather on Gypsy’s flanks. She’d worked hard today, after being out of practice for a couple of weeks while I was gone. She’d get back in shape again.

  “Quite heroic the way you saved that steer today. He was young enough if we’d left him there, the dingoes would’ve made a meal of him overnight.”

  Heroic. I scoffed.

  “It wasn’t any heroism.” It didn’t involve a vertical horse ride, a snowy field or a calf in distress away from its mother. Which still made me a liar to Eliza, and that stuck like a bone in the throat, even though I’d hinted that I’d swiped that fabrication from a movie. I’d misled her, at least for a while, and that didn’t sit well.

  Jonno left me to go attend to other things. I put Gypsy in her stall and headed back to the house. Home felt big and hollow.

  It needed someone else there. I needed someone else to be there.

  That was probably why I’d asked Frank and Georgia and the kids to come eat here practically every night, instead of at their place down the way.

  Dinner smelled like meat and potatoes as I came in through the back to the kitchen. Frank and his family were waiting for me, and we sat down to our steaks. I tried not to be surly, but my attitude must have bled through my exterior.

  “Something’s not right with Uncle Henry.” Frank’s six-year-old son Hollis said, through a mouthful of banana. “It’s like he ate something sour when he went on his trip and now he can’t stop tasting it.”

  Just the opposite. I’d tasted the sweetest thing life had ever offered me, and now I’d never taste it again. That was my problem. Not that I’d tell a six-year-old.

  My brother Frank scooped all the potatoes from the middle, including the entire melting pool of butter atop the mash like he was nine years old, not twenty-nine, and then passed me the dish. Butterless.

  I looked at it in irritation.

  “You bet something’s not right with me, Hollis, my boy. It’s because of your father.” I scooped a dry pile of potato starch and plopped a blob of it on my plate. “He pinched all the butter.”

  I knew I was being unreasonable, and that any food some other kind person made for me should be fine. It shouldn’t trigger surliness. However, I’d been hungry and on the point of delirium once, and a beautiful girl fed me, and since then, no other food had ever quite tasted the same.

  “Maybe he accidentally dropped his good humor in that Grand Canyon.” Hollis had a high, squeaking voice at six. “That’s what Mommy said.” An uncomfortable looking-back-and-forth between everyone at the table ensued. “Maybe he should go back and look for it.”

  A unison chorus of “No!” rose.

  “Fine. Fine. I get it. I’ve been on edge. I’ll buck up.”

  “I know why he’s sour.” Frank’s ten-year-old daughter Matilda poked her head up from staring at her phone. “He met a girl in America.” She looked back down at it immediately, sinking away into texting land.

  Phones! What were young kids doing with them? Didn’t parents know that the only way to make life start to happen was to lose your phone?

  “What makes you say that?” Her mother eyed Matilda, who just shrugged and continued to tap the screen.

  I wondered the same thing, about why some ten-year-old ankle-biter could see through me. I hadn’t told anyone about Eliza. Not a soul. Not about how I felt about her, or anything about the way I’d just left her: homeless, unemployed, on an island of sharks who cared nothing about her—two days before Christmas?

  When held up for comparison, no one alive could be more different to Eliza than I was. Eliza was kind and caring. She noticed people in distress. She helped them, gave them food and clothes, a place to stay—the promise of a phone, even, when she had little to gain. Actually, nothing for herself. All that quid pro quo stuff wasn’t about Eliza herself, it was for the baby girl she nannied.

  She was legend, and I was a jerk.

  Eliza would never up and fly away in a helicopter and not even offer a ride to the mainland to the stranded person. Sure, she’d brushed off my invitation to go see Dr. Smith, but what would she want with a geneticist? Nothing.

  Now, I sat umpteen thousand miles away, and I felt like dirt. Like the clod of dirt I had just pried out of Gypsy’s hoof in the stables.

  How could Eliza think of me as a quality person, caring or genuine, after that? After I’d told her about Cherrington Downs Station, and about my work trying to continue Granddad’s legacy, she’d been confused. Completely. I’d seen that, and instead of clarifying, I
got a little amusement out of it. Her pity entertained me. I loved watching how she’d treat me when she was busy assuming I was down and out, not up and coming—like so many of the girls in Melbourne did.

  I should have insisted she sit down and listen while I told her who I really was; but her misunderstanding had given me a laugh, and so I let it ride. And chances were, that ended up hurting her.

  My dishonesty weighed on me.

  One, I’d hurt her, and two, I’d left her standing in the wind on the cliff, the cliff that scared her more than anything else in the world.

  Jerk.

  So, yeah, I was surly at myself, and my family would just have to deal with it until—well, until I could figure out what to do with my feelings for Eliza. Eliza Galatea was the first girl I’d ever met who really turned my head and kept it turned. Gorgeous, caring, loyal, a beautiful heart—and could shoot a rattlesnake or at a bear to defend a calf on the range. Not to mention the kiss.

  Cowabunga, what a kiss that woman had on her. If I’d ever been kissed like that before in my life, I would have fallen on my knees and asked the woman to marry me. It was a brain-melter—which was my only excuse for climbing in that helicopter and not telling her how I felt, or offering to take her along, or being at all smart.

  That kiss had obliterated all thought, just like the mere memory of it was doing now, blurring out all the voices and eating sounds around me. Eliza Galatea and her thunder-strike of a kiss had ruined me for every other girl from now on.

  “Are you hearing this, Frank?” Frank’s wife’s voice went up a notch, jerking me back into the present. “I told you, we have to take away that phone. She’s not old enough to—”

  I tuned in just in time to see Frank pluck the offending device from Matilda’s hand and see her face fall.

  “GossipMonger.com? Are you kidding me right now?” For a second I assumed he was scolding Matilda, but now I realized she wasn’t Frank’s target: I was. He held the screen up and showed me. “You’re the star of a Hollywood tabloid?”

  “I told you—” Matilda complained “—that’s from two months ago. He’s not the star anymore. He’s old news. So what’s the big deal if I’m just re-reading it now? It’s my uncle. He’s famous, and The Twins are still offering that reward for—”

  “You’re done with this device.” He wrenched aside when his daughter made a grab for it, and Matilda let out a feral whinge. “No more gossipmongering for you, young lady.” Frank turned toward me, but he was still scrolling down the screen.

  “Great honk, brother. How did all this happen and you didn’t tell us?” He wasn’t actually laughing. He was accusing me. “This was what you were doing while we all mourned for weeks assuming you were dead at the bottom of a canyon?”

  “We suffered, Henry,” Georgia said, her voice full of pathos. “For over a week, we pictured you at the bottom of a cliff.”

  Mention of the word cliff bombarded me with memories of Eliza. Again. She was everywhere I looked and heard and thought and felt.

  “He was with a mystery woman.” Matilda apparently didn’t know when to quit. “I saw her picture on a different site. She was way pretty in a blue dress. The Twins hate her.”

  Someone had snapped a picture of Eliza?

  “Show me.” I reached for the phone, but Frank kept it away.

  “Nope. Not until you tell us what was going on.”

  “Or at least what she’s like.” Matilda got a dreamy voice and put her hands up under her chin. “Is she nice? Does she like riding horses? Does she kiss well? Would she make a good aunt?”

  Yes to all of the above.

  “I bet she’s amazing, if you like her, Uncle Henry.”

  “You are not bringing some Hollywood floozy to Cherrington Downs Station. It’s too remote. She’ll be miserable and make all of us miserable. Isn’t that why you refused to date any girls from Melbourne who wouldn’t stop beating down our doors? The fact that they hated being away from the nearest David Jones department store?” Frank’s voice was getting loud now. “It can only be worse if she’s from the States. They’re used to having shopping and internet and fast food needs instantly gratified.”

  That might be true, but not of Eliza. Eliza was not that girl.

  “You don’t know her.” I had to defend her, if only in the abstract, but Frank wasn’t finished berating me.

  “Bringing a girl like that this far into the bush would be considered cruelty to a human female animal.”

  “She’s not like that. I guarantee it. Not Eliza.”

  “Oh, so she has a name.”

  “I was right!” Matilda looked vindicated and triumphant, which seemed to lessen the blow of the loss of her phone.

  “Yes, she has a name. Eliza Galatea.” I hated that saying her name made my skin burn with desire, desire that could never be satiated.

  Whatever I said now wouldn’t matter anyway. I’d hurt her and abandoned her. She’d never want me, whether or not Cherrington Downs and its cattle business life was part of the equation.

  Lucky Eliza had experienced my twisted version of the Golden Rule: Don’t Do Unto Others As She Had Done Unto You.

  I’d never forget the forlorn look on her face as I lifted off in the chopper and left her on the cliff. I’d replayed every minute I’d spent with her over and over on a loop in my head ever since I got back home. The worst was the memory of lying in that so-called guest cottage larger than Cherrington Downs’s bunk house for the station-hands. I’d lain there, trying to sleep when she was in the cottage next door, gorgeous and alone, and so desirable, and yet so untouchable. It killed me, wanting her so much I could give a primal scream right now even at the memory of it.

  “If she’s that great, why don’t you call her up?” Hollis said. “I want to talk to her. Can I talk?”

  The mashed potatoes on my plate got even drier.

  “I can’t call her.”

  “Why not, Uncle Henry? If she’s nice, she wants to talk to you.”

  Because she’s nice she doesn’t want to talk to me, I responded silently.

  “Leave Uncle Henry alone. He’ll sort it out.”

  Sort it out, eh. Over the past weeks, I’d sorted and sorted myself thin. I’d come up with exactly one solution. Up until this meal, seeing Matilda and Hollis and how good Frank had it, I hadn’t let myself consider following up on it. If she’s nice, she wants to talk to you, the little voice said.

  I pulled out my phone and scrolled through the contacts, ignoring what a phone-hypocrite I was to use it at the table. There, I found the name: Dr. David Smith, and his number.

  I’d practiced the phrasing a thousand times, asking him to share Eliza Galatea’s dad’s contact information with me, knowing I’d sound unprofessional and possibly bang-on crazy.

  But, I’d been considered crazy by Americans for over a full week, and nothing bad had come of it, so I really shouldn’t get too worried about that.

  “I’m going to make a call,” I said, excusing myself from the table.

  But before I could dial, my phone rang.

  “Henry Lyon? This is Dr. David Smith.”

  Dr. Smith. I bobbled the phone and had to grab it before it dropped.

  “Doctor. How you going? It’s mighty early there in California. Must be four a.m.” It was after eight at night here, and I knew the time difference to be sixteen or seventeen hours.

  At the word California, all the eyes of Frank and family were upon me, and I waved them away and walked out into the stable yard for some privacy.

  “You know a day starts early in this business.”

  “Speaking of business, how’s it looking for ours?”

  “Extremely well. Every time I tell another rancher about your breed with a perfectly marbled beef that can still subsist on high elevation vegetation and not the oat mash and beer the Japanese feed them to create Wagyu, their eyes light up and they ask where they can get the breeding material. You’re sitting on a gold mine. Aussie beef is about to turn
the steak-eating market on its ear.”

  “Exactly what I want to hear.” I meant that truly, but he’d also emailed similar sentiments, so they weren’t news. Why was he calling? There might be a follow-up but. “Did you want me to do something else to make these deals?”

  “Actually, ah,” he was hemming and hawing, which raised my worries. “This call isn’t business. I’m not really even sure how I ended up being the emissary for this message.”

  What message? I leaned against my old ute to steady myself, like my body knew something big was coming at me before my brain did.

  “I got a call late last night.”

  “Okay.” This could be good or bad news. I braced myself against my Toyota Hilux, its steel body frame barely enough to keep me upright. Tremors of something big from this call shook me through and through.

  “It was from a young woman I don’t recall ever meeting, though I know her father well. Good cattle man.”

  I planted my feet in the dirt hard. Let it be her. Let it be Eliza.

  “She asked for me to give you her phone number, but I thought I’d check with you first. Do I need to tell you her name?”

  He did not.

  ***

  Seventy-two of the longest hours of my life later, even longer than the hours it had taken me to stumble my way from the rim of the Grand Canyon in northern Arizona to the seediest spot in California’s biggest city, the Cherrington Downs helicopter touched down on its landing pad behind the stables, spooking all the horses, as it always did.

  In all my days, I’d never looked forward to its landing more.

  Seventy-two was twice as many hours as it should have taken to get Eliza here to my side once she’d said yes, she’d come to Cherrington Downs. Jonno was slipping. Maybe I’d have to use that harpy Monique-Noelle’s Three Strikes method on him.

  The helicopter spun a couple of times, and then it touched down on the flat spot west of the stables. My breath lodged in my throat, and my heart beat faster than that of a trapped rabbit.

  Jonno jumped out and came around to unlatch the passenger door. Out tumbled a woozy but gorgeous brunette, whose blue eyes had captured me prisoner two months ago and never for a second let me go.