by Valerie Parv
Andy handed the glasses back to Ryan. “Sure thing, boss. There’s more rain on the way later, so we’ll be back before sunset in any case.”
Ryan didn’t bother asking how Andy knew what the weather would do. He and his people possessed an almost mystical rapport with the land, linked to it by millennia of living here since the Dreamtime. Ryan and his people were the latecomers, and he felt privileged to be allowed to share their land.
“You know what you’re doing,” he said to Andy, meaning it on every level.
He swung himself back into the saddle and turned the horse’s head for home, resisting the temptation to urge the animal into a gallop. Mick Coghlan had been heading away from the homestead toward Bowen Creek. For the moment, Judy was in no danger. He thought about calling her, but decided against adding to her concerns.
Thinking of her, he felt his mouth curve into a smile. She may not be able to imagine herself as a mother, but he had no trouble visualizing her in the role. Last night with the kids from Tracey’s former school, Judy had looked perfectly at home. She’d be even better with their own kids, he thought.
His mind flashed on Horvath twisting her arm behind her back. She’d tried not to cry out, but her whimper had cut Ryan to his heart. He’d wanted to kill Max with his bare hands for hurting her.
He forced his mind to more pleasant thoughts. What was she doing now? Feeding the kids breakfast, probably sharing girl talk with Tracey? Judy was more likely to want to discuss the mechanics of Tracey’s minivan than those dress designs he’d been told she did, he thought.
He swatted flies away from his face, wondering why he bothered. They only settled again as soon as he dropped his hand. He pictured Judy in her jeans and one of those skimpy T-shirts she liked. His favorite was a pale blue one that showed a band of midriff whenever she moved. He amused himself by imagining her in his arms wearing the T-shirt, how warm she’d feel as his hand slid over that enticing strip of bare flesh. A little higher and he could cup her small, firm breasts. Lower and…
He pushed the thoughts back. She’d been a part of him for as long as he could remember. He’d even dreamed they’d be together some day. Had he feared it was only a dream? Was that why he’d stayed away from her for so long? Afraid reality would bring his dreams crashing down to earth?
More than most men, he knew you didn’t always get what you wanted, no matter how intensely you wished for something. As a boy, he’d wished having his father back home so hard he’d felt tears squeezing out from under his closed eyelids as he’d tried to manifest his heart’s desire. Yet his father had never come back. By the time his mother died, he’d known better than to wish things could be different and had set about coping without her as best he could.
But with Judy, he couldn’t stop wishing. He wanted her more than he could remember wanting anyone. Not only because she was beautiful, which she was. Her beauty stemmed from an inner glow, like a light burning inside her for everything life had to offer. She was passionate about everything she did, and her enthusiasm rubbed off on those around her.
Her intelligence was keen, too. He respected her quick mind and eagerness to learn. She’d been fourteen when he’d lived at Diamond Downs, fifteen when he’d left. Too young, according to Des, to start flying lessons. Undeterred, she’d started teaching herself flight theory ready for the moment when she was allowed to take to the skies.
But even her formidable combination of brains and beauty didn’t explain how she managed to dominate Ryan’s attention so completely. When he wasn’t around her, she was in his thoughts or haunting his dreams. He hungered for her, only feeling complete when she was with him. The best word he could find to fit was the old chestnut, chemistry.
He’d tried dating other women, getting involved in relationships that might have become serious if he’d let them. The women had complained he didn’t pay them enough attention. How could he, when most of his attention was already spoken for? More recently, he’d limited himself to dating women who were content to enjoy his company without demanding more. The only problem was he’d ended up dissatisfied. Coming back to Judy had been as inevitable as breathing.
Convincing her that teaming up with him would enlarge her horizons, not limit them, was going to be difficult, but he would do it because he had run out of choices. This business with Horvath had helped him to reach a decision. He was through leaving her behind. Next time, she would come with him, or he wouldn’t leave. Starting again from scratch around here would be easier than giving her up.
Judy sensed, rather than heard, Ryan return. Attempting to bring some order to the house after last night’s barbecue, she lifted her head like a dingo sampling the air and only then heard the whicker of his horse as he let it out into the yard. Tempted to greet him at the door, she made herself continue wielding the vacuum cleaner.
He came up behind her and kissed her neck. “What a picture of domestic bliss.”
She leaned across and hit the power button, turning the appliance off. “Domestic bliss, nothing. I’d rather assemble a Cessna from spare parts than do this stuff.”
His gaze went to where the denim of her jeans was stretched over her shapely rear. “Pity. You do it so well.”
“Sexist brute,” she snapped, straightening.
Without a word he lifted the wand out of her hand, kick-started the cleaner and went to work on the floor, finishing where she’d left off. Welcoming the breather, she watched him, amused in spite of herself. Her father was largely responsible for all the boys being domesticated, believing they should be able to run a household when needed. When a teenage Ryan had complained about doing women’s work, he’d earned himself a week of cleaning bathrooms for his pains.
She wasn’t the only one with an admirable rear, she thought, as he bent to slide the nozzle under an armchair. He was dressed in khaki work shirt and moleskins, his R.M. Williams boots dusty from the trail. His sleeves were rolled back to the elbows, revealing tanned forearms dusted with fine red-gold hairs. As she watched, he crouched and pulled a pen out from under the chair, the moleskins tightening like an invitation.
A shudder traveled through her in response, firing her with defensive anger. She didn’t want him here, either helping her or tantalizing her. Wanting what she wasn’t prepared to give. She tried to wrest the cleaner out of his hand and a tug-of-war ensued, ending when he pushed her backward onto the sofa cushions.
He swiftly silenced the cleaner and let the wand drop to the floor before flopping down beside her. He stretched his arm along the back of the sofa behind her. “Got you where I want you at last.”
She tried to match his light tone, suspecting she didn’t succeed all that well. “Sitting down on the job, you mean?”
“Blame it on all that sucking, blowing and rigid steel wands putting ideas in my head.”
She pretended irritation. “Only a man could link cleaning with sex.”
“A man can link anything with sex, with the right woman.”
Desire flared again, too strong to deny. She tried anyway. “First you need to find the right woman.”
His expression became serious. “I already have.”
His mouth came down on hers, so strongly possessive that her senses reeled. She didn’t want to prove his point but couldn’t stop her lips from parting under his, not only accepting but returning his kiss out of her own deep needs, inviting him into the barren place in her heart.
The room reeled. Logic crumbled into nonsense as emotion took over, and she poured into the kiss all the longing that had been building up since he came back. Where was the logic in the way she’d followed him around the Kimberley, telling herself she was keeping in touch for his sake? Her own was more likely. He’d been fine without her. She was the one who’d needed to see him again and again as obsessively as the need to probe a sore tooth. Being with him had hurt, but not as much as being without him.
Her hands slid up around his neck and she turned into the embrace, feeling her hard-won barri
ers start to crack.
Ryan felt the moment when she changed. From resisting him, she suddenly melted into him as if reaching some kind of decision. The right one, he prayed. The only one he would accept.
He tore his mouth from hers and kissed her face, her closed eyelids, her throat, with growing urgency. The taste and feel of her filled him, making him want more, want to give her more. In his arms, her pliancy gave him hope. This time, she would let him show her what was in his heart.
“Where are Tracey and the kids?” he murmured against the satin of her throat. He didn’t want to hurry his gift to Judy. For their first time together, she deserved better than a hasty, fumbling race against the clock. Still, he hadn’t given their visitors a thought until this second. What was he thinking? He was shaken by how easily Judy had dominated his attention, and how completely.
Her eyes fluttered open and she seemed to have the same difficulty in focusing her thoughts. “They said to say goodbye. They’re driving back to Halls Creek.”
He frowned. “I didn’t pass them on the way from the muster camp. And the road is still a bit of a mess.”
Her hand splayed across his chest as she levered herself upright. “They didn’t take the main road. Heather Wilton arrived with Daniel and stayed for breakfast, then they decided to go back by the Bowen Creek Road. It’s longer but easier for Tracey’s minivan to handle.”
In his mind, he saw Mick Coghlan and his men driving in the same direction. He dragged his fingers through his hair. “Bloody hell.”
All attention now, she stared at him. “What is it?”
He told her what he and Andy had seen earlier in the day. “I thought there was no danger because they were heading away from the homestead,” he rasped.
“You think Horvath would order Mick to harass two women and a bunch of kids?” Her tone mirrored the disbelief Ryan saw on her face.
“He was willing to hurt you last night.”
Instinctively Judy’s hand went to her shoulder where an ache from her run-in with Max still lodged, forgotten in the throes of passion. How effortlessly Ryan could make her forget everything. She should be glad a more urgent concern had stopped them. They’d been seconds away from making love; then where would she have been? Past the point of no return and hurtling at full throttle toward a terrifying unknown.
“But surely children…” She couldn’t finish.
He handed her the phone. “Call Tracey. Heather said she’s staying there, too. If all went well, they should be back at Halls Creek by now.”
Judy struggled to make her fingers cooperate. She compressed her lips into a tight line as the ringing tone went on and on before an answering machine clicked on. She left a message in case they’d been delayed somewhere, refusing to consider what the delay might be. Ryan watched intently. “I’ll try her cell phone,” she said. Seconds later, she reported the same frustrating result.
He was up and pulling her to her feet in one swift movement. “They could have stopped to sightsee along the way.”
Still she clung to wishful thinking. “Even if they met up with Mick Coghlan, they couldn’t be any help to him. They don’t know anything.”
“Horvath is desperate. He’d use any advantage he could.”
“We’d better get out to Bowen Creek.”
“You read my mind.”
Chapter 11
Banks of clouds rolled over them from the inland as they drove in Ryan’s car at breakneck speed in the wake of the little convoy. It seemed like a lifetime, instead of a few short hours, since she’d waved them away this morning.
She looked at Ryan hunched over the wheel like a racing driver. The car handled like one as well.
The road was in better shape than the one leading to the homestead, but yesterday’s downpour had churned tire tracks into mud valleys that were slowly drying into corrugations. The time before the wet season was the most trying of the year. They were often threatened with clouds like the ones building up overhead; then the clouds rolled on leaving the air barely breathable, clothes clinging wetly and hair limp in the soaring humidity. The rain, when it came, was a blessed relief.
Thinking of trivial matters like the weather helped, she found. Better than imagining what could have happened to Tracey and Heather if they’d run into Mick Coghlan and his cronies.
“I should have sent a man with them,” she berated herself.
He took his eyes off the road long enough to shake his head. “Spilled milk now. No point worrying until we find out what we’re dealing with.”
She hugged her arms around herself. “This is too much.”
“What?”
“Dad’s illness, the race with Horvath to find those bloody diamonds. If I could, I’d let him have them.” She didn’t add that the pressure from Ryan to return his feelings wasn’t helping.
He concentrated on a churned-up stretch of road before answering. “That doesn’t sound like the Judy Logan I know.”
“Then maybe you don’t know her as well as you think,” she snapped, nerves stretched to breaking point.
“I know she doesn’t give in without a fight. I haven’t forgotten the fencer with blood poisoning.”
A chill snapped through her. “How could I forget, either?” The man had injured himself on fencing wire and been prescribed penicillin by the Flying Doctor. Believing himself healed, the man hadn’t finished the course of treatment. Not surprisingly, infection had returned. Where he was located, the airstrip was only a bare patch of earth, so the Flying Doctor’s plane had been unable to land. They’d chartered Judy’s Cessna to fly a nurse to the delirious patient, then airlift them both to the hospital. “I don’t know which was worse, landing on that apology for an airstrip, or trying to hold the plane on course while the patient thrashed and screamed,” she said.
“But you did it.”
She got the message. Having flown countless hair-raising missions in her charter business, she could handle one avaricious neighbor. But oh Lord, she was getting tired of the necessity.
She pulled her shoulders back and lifted her head. “Next thing you’ll be quoting the code of the outback at me.” But her voice was stronger, the moment of weakness already passing.
He shifted gears. “I only heard it once, when Blake was trying to get me to shape up. I told him it was a load of cr…rubbish.”
This was news to her. “You did?”
“Given my experience, I wasn’t about to live by some code he’d made up, when I had no intention of joining their boys’ club.”
“I had to threaten to tell Dad about their hideout cave before they’d let me join,” she admitted. “Ironic, isn’t it? They used the hideout without knowing the Uru rock art was in the cave right next door. And you came to live by the code. Do you remember how it goes?”
He gave a rueful chuckle. “You don’t back down, you don’t give up and you stand by your mates.”
She wasn’t about to let him off so lightly. “What about the last rule?”
“No mushy stuff? I abandoned that rule long ago.”
Thinking of the mushy stuff that had preceded their headlong flight, she felt herself heating. “Considering that Tom and Blake are both engaged, you’re not the only one.”
Suddenly, she leaned forward, knuckles whitening as she gripped the dash. “There’s Tracey’s minivan and Heather’s car.”
“Both empty,” he said as he pulled alongside the other vehicles. “At least there’s no sign of Mick Coghlan and his men.”
He parked the car and they got out. Judy’s heart was racing. Where could the others be? Surely Coghlan hadn’t taken them away somewhere? Then an alien sound shattered the silence.
Relief surged through her as the sound came again. Not screams of distress. She looked at Ryan in confusion. “Can you hear children laughing?”
Ryan nodded, breaking into a smile that reflected her relief. “They must have decided to detour to the waterhole.”
Setting aside the question of how T
racey and Heather had found the swimming spot, Judy scrambled through the tangled greenery until in front of her lay a sparkling expanse of water. Not really a single waterhole, the place consisted of a series of shallow billabongs or ponds flowing across wide, rocky bars linked by miniature waterfalls. To children, the resulting frothy, fast-moving playground was as entertaining as any commercial water theme park.
As children, Judy and the boys had swum there often, naming the area the Rapids, after how the watercourse had seemed to them. Now, under lowering skies, against a backdrop of towering ochre cliffs festooned with vines, the green waters looked as inviting as ever.
Unlike many waterways on Diamond Downs, this one was not concealing death beneath the surface. The dangerous saltwater crocodiles mostly preferred to live and hunt in deeper waters, although the name saltwater was a misnomer. The man-eaters could be found in brackish or freshwater, or even well out to sea. But only the freshwater or Johnstone River crocodiles lived in these pools. Growing to a dozen feet long at the most, they gave humans a wide berth unless cornered; even then, they were more interested in escape than attack.
Even the freshies, as they were known locally, wouldn’t have stayed around in the face of the mayhem greeting Judy’s eyes as she emerged from the bush. Slipping and sliding over rocks worn smooth by the water, the children chased one another from pool to pool, splashing and shrieking with delight. Judy saw Sunny, in the care of the motherly Matilda, throw himself into a pond, more than living up to his name.
Heather looked up and saw them, her expression reflecting surprise and pleasure. She nudged Tracey who stood up. Leaving the other woman keeping an eye on the children, she came to Ryan and Judy. “This is the most wonderful place. Have you come for a swim, too?”
A quick glance at Ryan had confirmed their silent understanding that the women and children weren’t to be alarmed by needless imaginings. Nothing had happened. They would enjoy their swim in peace before continuing their journey back to town. “We wanted to make sure you didn’t run into any problems with the road. We didn’t bring our swimming things,” Judy said.