Outback Man Seeks Wife

by Margaret Way

  When the time came for the riders to negotiate the turn in what was essentially a wild bush track, half of the field started to fall back. In many ways it was more like a Wild West gallop than the kind of sophisticated flat race one would see at a city track. The front runners had begun to fight it out, showing their true grit. Scott, his polo team mates and Jack Butler, who was Carrie’s father’s overseer on Victory Downs. Clay Cunningham’s black gelding was less than a length behind Jack and going well. Carrie watched him lean forward to hiss some instruction into his horse’s ear.

  ‘Oh dear!’ Carrie watched with a perverse mix of dismay and delight as the gelding stormed up alongside Jack’s gutsy chestnut, then overtook him. Jack, who would have been thrilled to be among the frontliners, was battling away for all he was worth. At this rate Clay Cunningham was a sure thing, Carrie considered, unless Scott could get some extra speed from his mount. Scott was savagely competitive but the newcomer was giving every indication he’d be hard to beat. One thing was certain. Clay Cunningham was a crack rider.

  Natasha, too, had drawn in her breath sharply. The possibility Scott could be beaten hadn’t occurred to either woman. Golden Boy Harper, as he was popularly known, was captain of their winning polo team and thus had a special place in Jimboorie society.

  ‘Your cousin looks like winning,’ Carrie warned her, shaking her own head. ‘Damn it, now, Scott! Make your move.’ Carrie wasn’t sure Scott was riding the right race. Though she would never say it, she didn’t actually consider Scott had the innate ability to get the best out of a horse. He didn’t know much about coaxing for one thing.

  Natasha belted the air furiously with her fist. ‘This shouldn’t be happening.’

  ‘Well it is!’ Carrie was preparing herself for the worst.

  She saw Scott produce his whip, giving his horse a sharp crack, but Clay Cunningham was using touch and judgment rather than resorting to force. It paid off. The big black gelding had already closed the gap coming at full stride down the track.

  ‘Damn it!’ Natasha shrieked, looking ready to burst with disappointment.

  Carrie, on the other hand, was feeling almost guilty. She was getting goose bumps just watching Clay Cunningham ride with such authority that Scott’s efforts nearly fell into insignificance. That feeling in itself was difficult to come to grips with. The fast paced highly competitive gelding, like its rider, looked like it had plenty left in reserve.

  Carrie held her breath, still feeling that upsurge of contrasting emotions. Admiration and apprehension were there aplenty. Sharp disappointment that Scott, her fiancé, wasn’t going to win. Elation at how fast the big gelding was travelling—that was the horse lover in her she told herself. That animal had a lot of class. So did its rider. There was a man determined to win. After the way Jimboorie had treated him, Carrie couldn’t begrudge him the victory. She liked a fighter.

  Two minutes more, just as she expected, Lightning Boy flew past the post with almost two full lengths in hand.

  What a buzz!

  ‘Oh, well done!’ Carrie cried, putting her hands together. For a moment she forgot she was standing beside Natasha, the inveterate informer. ‘I wonder if he plays polo?’ What an asset he would be!

  ‘Of course he doesn’t play polo,’ Natasha snapped. ‘He’s a pauper. Paupers don’t get to play polo. Where’s your loyalty anyway?’ she demanded fiercely. ‘Scott’s your fiancé and you’re applauding an outsider.’

  ‘Insider,’ Carrie corrected, looking as cool as a cucumber. ‘He’s already moved into Jimboorie.’

  ‘For now.’ Natasha made no effort to hide her outrage and anger. ‘Just see if people deal with him. My father has a great amount of influence.’

  Carrie frowned. ‘What are you saying? Your family is readying to make life even more difficult for him?’

  ‘You bet we are!’ Natasha’s blue eyes were hard. ‘He’d be mad to stay around here. Old Angus only left him Jimboorie to spite us.’

  ‘Be that as it may, your cousin must intend to stick around if he’s looking for a wife,’ Carrie said, really pleased that after a moment of stunned silence the crowd erupted into loud, appreciative applause and even louder whistles. They were willing to give the newcomer a fair go even if Natasha’s vengeful family weren’t. ‘Well there you are!’ she said brightly. ‘No one rated his chances yet your cousin came out the clear winner.’

  ‘We’ll see what Scott has to say,’ Natasha snorted with indignation, visibly jangling with nerves. ‘For all we know there could have been interference near the fence.’

  ‘There wasn’t.’ Carrie dismissed that charge very firmly. ‘I know Scotty doesn’t like to lose, but he’ll take it well enough.’ Some hope, she thought inwardly. Her fiancé had a considerable antipathy to losing. At anything.

  ‘I’ll be sure to tell him how delighted you were with my cousin’s performance,’ Natasha called quite nastily as she walked away.

  ‘I bet you will,’ Carrie muttered aloud. Since she and Scott had become engaged, two months previously, Natasha always gave Carrie the impression she’d like to tear her eyes out.

  A tricky situation was now coming up. It was her job, graciously handed over to her by her mother, to present the Cup. Not to Scott, as just about everyone had confidently expected, but to the new owner of historic Jimboorie Station. The Cunningham ancestral home was falling down around his ears and the once premier cattle and sheep station these days was little more than a ruin said to be laden with debt. In all likelihood the new owner would at some stage sell up and move on. But for now, she had to find her way to the mounting yard for the presentation and lots of photographs. Come to that, she would have to take some herself. For two years now since she had returned home from university she had worked a couple of days a week for Paddy Kennedy, the founder and long time editor of the Jimboorie Bulletin. Once a senior editor with the Sydney Morning Herald, chronic life-threatening asthma sent him out to the pure dry air of the Outback where it was thought he had a better chance of controlling his condition.

  That was twenty years ago. The monthly Jimboorie Bulletin wasn’t any old rag featuring local gossip and kitty-up-the-tree stories. It was a professional newspaper, covering issues important to the Outback: the fragile environment, political matters, social matters, health matters, aboriginal matters, national sporting news, leavened by a page reporting on social events from all over the Outback. The rest of the time Carrie was kept busy with her various duties on the family station she loved, as well as running the home office, a job she had taken over from her mother.

  Her work for the Bulletin stimulated her intellectually and she loved Paddy. He was the wisest, kindest man she knew whereas her father—although he had always been good to her in a material fashion—was not a man a daughter could get close to. A son maybe, but her parents had not been blessed with a son. She was an only child, one who was sensitive enough to have long become aware of her father’s pain and bitter disappointment he had no male heir. He had already told her, although she would be well provided for, Victory Downs was to go to her cousin, Alex, the son of her father’s younger brother. Uncle Andrew wasn’t a pastoralist at all, though he had been raised in a pastoral family. He had a thriving law practice in Melbourne and was, in fact, the family solicitor.

  Alex was still at university, uncertain what he wanted to be, although he knew Victory Downs would pass to him. Carrie’s mother had fought aggressively for her daughter’s rights but her father couldn’t be moved. For once in her married life her mother had lost the fight.

  ‘You know how men are!’ Alicia had railed. ‘They think women can’t run anything. It’s immensely unfair. How can your father think young Alex would be a better manager than you?’

  ‘That’s not the only reason, Mum,’ Carrie had replied, thinking it terrible to be robbed of one’s inheritance. ‘Dad doesn’t want the station to pass out of the family. Sons have to be the inheritors. Sons carry the family name. Dad doesn’t care at all for the
idea anyone other than a McNevin should inherit Victory Downs. He seems to be naturally suspicious of women as well. Why is that? Uncle Andy isn’t a bit like that.’

  ‘Your father just doesn’t know how to relax,’ was Alicia’s stock explanation, always turning swiftly to another topic.

  It had been strange growing up knowing she was seriously undervalued by her father but Carrie was reluctant to criticise him. He was a good father in his way. Certainly she and her mother lacked for nothing, though there was no question of squandering money like Julia Cunningham, who spent as much time in the big cities of Sydney and Melbourne as she did in her Outback home.

  People in the swirling crowd waved to her happily—she waved back. Most of the young women her age were wearing smart casual dress, while she was decked out as if she were attending a garden party at Government House in Sydney. Alicia’s idea. Carrie’s hat was lovely really, the wide dipping brim trimmed with silk flowers. She wore a sunshine-yellow printed silk dress sent to her from her mother’s favourite Sydney designer. Studded high heeled yellow sandals were on her feet. Her long honey-blond hair was drawn back into a sophisticated knot to accommodate the picture hat her mother had insisted on her wearing.

  ‘I want you to look really, really good!’ Alicia, a classic beauty in her mid-forties and looking nothing like it, fussed over her. ‘Which means you have to wear this hat. It will protect your lovely skin for one thing as well as adding the necessary glamour. Never forget it’s doubly essential to look after one’s skin in our part of the world. You know how careful I am even though we have an enviable tawny tint.’

  Indeed they had. Carrie had inherited her mother’s beautiful brown eyes as well. Eyes that presented such a striking contrast to their golden hair. Carrie, christened Caroline Adriana McNevin had no look of her father’s side of the family. She didn’t really mind. Alicia, from a well-to-do Melbourne family and with an Italian Contessa as her maternal grandmother, was a beautiful woman by anyone’s standards.

  ‘You’re a lucky girl, do you realise that? Scott Harper for a fiancé.’ Alicia fondly pinched her daughter’s cheek. ‘I don’t think the Cunninghams will ever get over it. Julia worked so hard to throw Scott and Natasha together.’

  As if you didn’t do the same thing with Scott and me, Mamma, Carrie thought but didn’t have the heart to say. Scott Harper was one of the most eligible bachelors in the country. His father’s property ventures were huge. Even Carrie’s father had been ‘absolutely delighted’ when she and Scott had become engaged. Obviously the best thing a daughter could do—her crowning achievement as it were—was to marry a handsome young man from a wealthy family. To prove it her father seemed to have a lot more time for her in the past few months. Could he be thinking of future heirs, not withstanding the fact he had already made a will in favour of Alex? It wouldn’t be so bad, would it, to pass Victory Downs on to someone like Scott Harper, rich and ambitious?

  Sometimes Carrie felt like a pawn.

  Clay was agreeably surprised by the number of people who made it their business to congratulate him. Many of the older generation mentioned they remembered his father and added how much Clay resembled him. One sweet-faced elderly lady actually asked after his mother, her smile crumpling when Clay told her gently that his mother had passed on. He hadn’t received any congratulations from the runner-up, the god in their midst, Scott Harper, and didn’t expect any. Leopards didn’t change their spots. Aged ten when his parents uprooted him from the place he so loved and which incredibly was now his, Clay still had vivid memories of Scott Harper, the golden-haired bully boy, two years his senior. Harper had treated him like trash when he’d never had trouble from the other station boys. For some reason Harper had baited him mercilessly about his parents’ marriage whenever they met up. Once Harper had knocked him down in the main street of the town causing a bad concussion for which he’d been hospitalised. His father, wild as hell, had made the long drive in his battered utility to the Harper station to remonstrate with Scott’s father, but he had been turned back at gunpoint by Bradley Harper’s men.

  Clay’s taking the Jimboorie Cup from Scott this afternoon was doubly sweet. Soon the surprisingly impressive silver cup would be presented to him by Harper’s fiancé. He had been amazed to hear it was Caroline McNevin, whom he remembered as the prettiest little girl he had ever laid eyes on. How had that exquisite little creature grown up to become engaged to someone like Harper? But then wasn’t it a tradition for pastoral families to intermarry? His father—once considered destined for great things—had proved the odd man out, struck down by love at first sight. Love for a penniless little Irish girl now buried by his side.

  There was a stir in the crowd. Clay turned about to see a woman coming towards him. He drew himself up straighter, absolutely thrown by how beautiful Caroline had become. Her whole aura suggested springtime, a world of flowers. Her petite figure absorbed all the sunlight around her.

  She seemed to float rather than walk. For a moment an overwhelming emotion swept over him. To combat it, he stood very, very still. He wondered if it were nostalgia; remembrance of some lovely moment when he was a boy. The hillsides around Jimboorie alight with golden wattle, perhaps?

  Now they were face-to-face, less than a metre apart, and he like a fool stood transfixed. He was conscious his nerves had tensed and his stomach muscles had tightened into a hard knot. She was tiny compared to him. Even in her high heels she only came up to his heart. She still had that look of shining innocence, only now it was allied to an adult allure all the more potent since both qualities appeared to exist quite naturally side by side.

  He couldn’t seem to take his eyes off her while she consolidated her hold over him.

  Caroline had beautiful large oval eyes, a deep velvety-brown. They were doubly arresting with her golden hair. Her skin, a tawny olive beneath the big picture hat, was flawlessly beautiful. Her features were delicate, perfectly symmetrical. No more than five-three, she nevertheless had a real presence. At least she was running tight circles around him.

  ‘James Cunningham!’ The vision smiled at him. A smile that damn near broke his heart. What the heck was the matter with him? How could he describe what he felt? Perhaps they had meant something to each other in another life? ‘Welcome back to Jimboorie. I’m Carrie McNevin.’

  Belatedly he came back to control. ‘I remember you, Caroline,’ he said, his voice steady, unhurried, yet he was so broadsided by her beauty, he forgot to smile.

  ‘You can’t!’ A soft flush rose to her cheeks.

  ‘I do.’ He shrugged his shoulder, thinking beautiful women had unbounded power at their pink fingertips. ‘I remember you as the happy little girl who used to wave to me when you saw me in town.’

  ‘Really?’ She was enchanted by the idea.

  ‘Yes, really.’

  Her essential sweetness enfolded him. Her voice was clear and gentle, beautifully enunciated. Caroline McNevin, the little princess. Untouchable. Except now by Harper. That made him hot and angry, inducing feelings that hit him with the force of a breaker.

  ‘Well, it’s my great pleasure, James, or do you prefer to be called Clay?’ She paused, tipping her golden head to one side.

  ‘Clay will do.’ Only his mother had ever called him James. Now he remembered to smile though his expression remained serious even a little sombre. Why wouldn’t he when he felt appallingly vulnerable in the face of a beautiful creature who barely came up to his heart?

  Carrie was aware of the sombreness in him. It added to the impression he gave of quiet power and it had to be admitted, mystery. ‘Then it’s going to be my great pleasure to be able to present you, Clay, with the Jimboorie Cup,’ Carrie continued. ‘We’ll just move back over there,’ she said, turning to lead the way to a small dais where the race committee was grouped, waiting for her and the winner of the Cup to join them. ‘They’ll want to take photos,’ she told him, herself oddly shaken by their meeting. And the feeling wasn’t passing off. Perhaps it
was because she’d heard so many stories about the Cunninghams while she was growing up? Or maybe it was because Clay Cunningham had grown into a strikingly attractive man. She felt that attraction brush over her then without her being able to do a thing about it. She felt it sink into her skin. She only hoped she wasn’t showing her strong reactions. Everyone was looking at them.

  Natasha might well continue to denounce her cousin, Carrie thought, but the family resemblance was strong. The Cunninghams were a handsome lot, raven haired, with bright blue eyes. Natasha would have been beautiful, but her fine features were marred by inner discontent and her eyes were strangely cold. Clay Cunningham had the Cunningham height and rangy build—only his hair wasn’t black. It was a rich mahogany with a flame of dark auburn as the sun burnished it. His eyes, the burning blue of an Outback sky, were really beautiful, full of depth and sparkle. He looked like a real man. A man women would fall for hook, line and sinker. So why wasn’t he married already, or actively looking for a wife? If indeed the rumour were true. Something she was beginning to doubt. He had to be four, maybe five years older than she, which made him around twenty-eight. He was a different kind of man from Scott. She sensed a depth, a sensitivity—whatever it was—in him that Scott lacked.

  It had to be an effect of the light but there seemed to be sparkles in the space between them. Carrie never dreamed a near-stranger could have this effect on her. Her main concern was to conceal it. Up until now she had felt safe. She was going to marry Scott, the man she was in love with—yet Clay Cunningham’s blue gaze had reached forbidden places.

  Their hands touched as she handed over the Silver Cup to the accompanying waves of applause. She couldn’t move, even think for a few seconds. She felt a little jolt of electricity through every pore of her skin. He continued to hold her eyes, his own unfaltering. Had her trembling transferred itself to him like a vibration? She hoped not. She wasn’t permitted to feel like this.