‘And who are you?’ she smiled. ‘Sir Vance of the valley?’
They reached the terrace and as she glanced up at him the soft lighting shone on his face and left shadow in the cleft of his chin. His white jacket gave a silvery impression and it wasn’t so very far-fetched that he was like a knight who was going to carry her off to the castle.
‘Joanna,’ he smiled, ‘you are dangerously romantic.’
CHAPTER TWO
DAYLIGHT brimmed and roused Joanna from the sleep into which she had fallen.
‘There’s coffee in that flask behind you.’ Vance shot her a smile as she stirred and opened her eyes, and turned up to him a bemused face framed by her tousled fair hair. ‘Pour out a couple of mugs - soon we’ll be over the valley.’
‘I fell asleep,’ she said drowsily.
‘Yes,’ his eyes held hers a brief moment, ‘on my shoulder.’
‘Oh—’ Somewhat confused, she found the flask of coffee in the satchel he had brought on board last night, along with the roast beef sandwiches they had consumed during the starlit hours of the flight. It had been a strange, magical experience, and Joanna felt the fast beating of her heart as she realized that it was almost over and soon they would be landing on the private airstrip at Raintree.
The coffee had kept nice and hot and it awoke Joanna fully to the scenery they were flying above. She saw the jungle that padded the sides of a mountain range, a rich green denseness where rivers shone like strips of silver, belted by dark mangroves in which lurked the huge, old-as-rock crocodiles.
‘It’s a real jungle,’ said Vance, ‘alive with dinging vines, stinging trees and great fruit bats. The stinging tree is as vicious as its name and hides from the unwary among large ferns and pretty creepers. Quite a place for a hunting trip, but I prefer the open range where you can I see the bulls when they come at you with fire in their eye.’
He laughed at the wide-eyed look Joanna was giving him. ‘I warned you that we’re an untamed lot at Raintree. We’re miles from anywhere and life goes on - except for a few mechanical changes - much as it did when the first Corraine out from England crossed the land by wagon. He had his young wife with him and their first son was born on the trek.’
‘You’re proud of being tough and self-sufficient, aren’t you, Vance?’ His name came to her lips more easily now, for it seemed ridiculously formal to address by his surname a man with whom she had flown among the stars, and whose shoulder had pillowed her head while she slept.
‘It’s in the blood, Joanna. We couldn’t live any other kind of life. When Adam and I were still quite small we went on droving trips with King. We learned young about the night riding, ringing the cattle and singing the old ballads to keep them calm. Sleeping in a swag by a campfire. Knowing the hot gold days, and how cold it could blow at night.’
‘You also seemed very much at home in the water at Hawk’s Bay.’ She looked at his profile and remembered the dean, tanned lines of his body sprayed by the silvery blue water.
‘You saw me?’ he exclaimed.
‘Yes, I watched you riding the waves. There was a girl waiting for you on the beach.’
‘A stockman on leave has to relax, Joanna.’ He looked at her out of the tail of his eye.
‘Of course,’ she said, smiling to herself. ‘What I mean is that you’re far more sophisticated than I imagined.’
‘People rarely are the way we imagine them.’ He grinned. ‘The Boss is in for a shaker when he sees you - look below, Joanna, we’re flying over the herds!’
She peered from the cockpit window and there far below was a moving mass of roan hides against the sun-tipped grassy hills. So many that she caught her breath in awe. Among them rode the horsemen, looking from this height like toy figures.
‘I’ve never seen anything like it,’ she gasped. ‘Isn’t it frightening to be on horseback in that mob of cattle?’
‘You get used to it,’ he chuckled. ‘Droving is the hardest job, when it’s hot and dusty and the mob gets restless and the next waterhole might be dried out. Things have been easier, though, since Adam decided to ship by road from the other stations. King wouldn’t like all the mechanization, but you’ve got to keep up with the times and the cattle get to market with plenty of meat still left on them.’
‘The men begin work early,’ Joanna remarked, for the sun had not long risen above the mountains.
‘And get most of it behind them by noon, when the sun is high and we relax for a siesta. Now we’re flying right over the valley, Joanna! See those sandstone cliffs and the gorge ... there’s a bridge across it leading to the house, and back of the house, like a great wild garden, there’s a rain-forest. The valley, the forest, and all the surrounding land belongs to the Corraines. This is our world. No one gets in unless we allow them in.’
‘Like the Doones,’ she said wonderingly, and thought of the girl Bonney who felt lonely here. For what was she lonely, when she lived among all this wild beauty? The city and the bright lights? The shops, restaurants and gaiety beloved of Joanna’s own sister?
Vance circled right round the valley before coming down on the runway a couple of miles from the house, with fronded trees of a tropical look lining the strip and bowing in the breeze created by the passage of the plane.
‘Here we are.’ Vance turned from the controls and quirked an eyebrow when he found Joanna smoothing her hair into her chignon and assuming again her unruffled look. ‘Y’know, I rather like you with your hair out of place,’ he drawled.
‘It’s your cousin I’ve got to impress. There, I’m made all new.’ She patted her hair, dropped her lipstick and comb into her bag and smiled at Vance before glancing away from his intent look. She wore a sheep-lined canvas jacket he had loaned her for the flight and it was too big for her, so that she looked rather helpless in it. Sunshine lit the cockpit and her hair and skin were very fair ... she had an untouched look and Vance leaned forward as if she drew him like a magnet.
‘It’s none of Adam’s business if I want to fraternize with the home-help,’ he said wickedly.
‘I’ve not been hired yet.’ She drew back from him, alarmed because the cockpit was small and he was broad across the shoulders, and his eyes were the dark blue of a deep, drowning sea. ‘Hadn’t we better get out?’ she asked nervously.
‘Are you so anxious to meet Adam?’
‘Strong medicine is best swallowed quickly, as my grandmother would say.’
‘The medicine upon this occasion might not have a beneficial effect.’ He fingered the sheep’s wool collar against her throat. ‘Do you remember what I said last night, if Adam turned you down?’
‘That was so much nonsense,’ she scoffed. ‘Champagne bubbles.’
‘Want me to prove that it wasn’t all champagne?’ He came even nearer and Joanna was holding him off with her hands against his shoulders when a fistful of small stones rattled against the cockpit window. Vance glanced round and there on the runway below the plane stood a man waving his arms about.
‘No peace for the wicked,’ Vance growled. ‘The boys want to unload the cargo, and I suppose I’d better take you to meet the Boss. He isn’t like me, Joanna - except maybe to look at, in a sundown light. What I mean is—’
‘I know what you mean.’ Her heart was beating in her throat. ‘He won’t make allowances for the fact that I’m far from home, or that I have blonde hair.’
Vance grinned. ‘You have grit and a sense of humour, Joanna. I could marry a gal so gallant.’
‘Marriage is a serious business, Mr. Corraine. You don’t take it up like golf or polo, and drop it if you find it bores you. It’s a relationship meant to last a lifetime.’
‘Alas, a girl with ideals!’ His smile was wickedly attractive. ‘We make our own hell, eh? Someone else has to make our heaven?’
‘That’s love, isn’t it?’ she said simply.
‘It sounds great, if it’s for the finding.’ He swung open the cockpit and the sudden warmth of the sun and the tang o
f Raintree caught at Joanna as she followed Vance out of the plane. The men who had come to unload the cases of provisions and machine parts stared at her, a slim figure in a canvas jacket over a pleated dress, there against the wasp-gold of the monoplane. There was no doubt in any of the eyes that looked at her that nobody like her had been seen at Raintree for many years. Her fair, reserved looks were utterly English, and her wide eyes were inquiring yet shy as she looked about her and realized that she was actually at Raintree.
The men looked dumbfounded, and then into the silence broke the sound of pounding hooves and heads turned to watch the rapidly approaching horseman.
Joanna blinked as the blue and gold of the sky dazzled her eyes, and then she heard someone say, ‘It’s the Boss — better start getting them crates out of the plane!’
Vance had lit himself a cigarette and now he stood with a thumb in his belt. The pounding of Joanna’s heart blended with that of the hooves as the raking chestnut galloped down the runway as if it were a racetrack, to be pulled up just short of the plane, the girl, and the cluster of men, who set to work at once unloading the cargo. The rider sat there, leaning his arms on the pommel of his saddle, while the chestnut flung up its head and made a huffing sound through proud, arching nostrils. Any man who could handle that horse was iron-fisted, Joanna thought.
‘Hi there, Vance,’ he said, and all the time he looked at Joanna with eyes that seemed to have a light inside them, alert and raking, like the play of lightning. He wore a slouch hat, check shirt and white trousers, and then with a supple deliberation he slid from the back of his horse and held the reins coiled over his left arm as he slowly pushed his hat to the back of his forehead and the sun flared across assertive, sunbitten features, and showed the sunburned brows above the silvery eyes.
He was alarmingly tall and tough as rawhide. The sort of man who liked his heels in the earth and his face to the sky. Boss of Raintree, a man in unshakeable command of himself!
‘You took your time getting back to Raintree.’ He flashed a look at his cousin, and Joanna was startled by the quick flash of resemblance between them. Vance shrugged and lifted his cigarette to his lips.
‘Adam, this is Joanna Dowling,’ he said. ‘The girl who has come to help out at the house.’
Joanna stood very still, at the mercy of her nerves and trying not to show it. This was not a man who would have any patience with feminine fears... it wouldn’t matter to him that he scared the daylights out of her.
‘I take it this young lady kept you so busy at Hawk’s Bay,’ he said to Vance, ‘that you forgot we needed that new dynamo for the bore at Once-Lonely!’
‘I didn’t forget, and Joanna didn’t get in on the bus until yesterday. I had to wait delivery of the dynamo—’
‘Joanna?’ Adam Corraine quirked a sunburned eyebrow, but unlike Vance he looked dangerous instead of quizzically attractive. ‘Well, Miss Darling, you should have saved yourself a long trip for nothing. I don’t employ helpless young things up here at Raintree, no matter how strong my cousin’s wish that I would—’
‘I’m not!’ she broke in, finding her voice and utterly confirmed in her opinion that he was arrogant and hateful. ‘I’m not helpless - and the name is DOWLING!’
‘Oh, do forgive me.’ He smiled deliberately, showing hard white teeth. ‘About the name, I mean - it really sounded as if my cousin called you darling.’
She quivered with dislike and her fingers clenched the strap of her shoulder-bag. ‘As I explained to your cousin, Mr. Corraine, I have lived and worked on a farm since I was a child, and it would at least be a little gracious of you to give me a trial before judging me. I do happen to know which end of a cow to milk and I’m quite at home in a kitchen.’
‘I have a large crew who need feeding several times a day, Miss Dowling, and I can’t see you spoiling those pale hands in buckets of vegetables, or plucking fowls with them and kneading dough for the bread. The baker doesn’t call each morning, this far afield, and often there are two dozen eggs to fry with the steaks my bachelor lads like for breakfast. The rest who have wives eat at their own bungalows, of course. And that is the job! To help out in the kitchen and the house, and maybe ride an hour each day with my ward, and match her in a game of tennis.’
He seemed, from the glint in his sky-grey eyes, to get immense satisfaction out of listing the requirements of the job, and there forked through Joanna a stab of hatred for this autocrat who had probably had things all his own way ever since Kingsley Corraine had died and left him in charge of Raintree and its outlying stations. She wanted to tell him to keep the job, yet on the other hand she wanted to prove that she was up to it.
She tilted her chin and met squarely his challenging eyes. ‘Are you a gambling man, Mr. Corraine?’ she asked.
His left brow slanted and Vance gave a cough as he caught cigarette smoke in his throat.
‘I’m an Australian,’ Adam Corraine drawled.
‘Then take a gamble on me,’ she challenged him. ‘If you’ve got the nerve to let me prove you wrong - for once.’
‘Young woman,’ his mouth looked dangerous for a moment, and then he gave a sardonic laugh, ‘you’re a bit of a cool one, aren’t you, to match those looks of yours! What sort of a farm was it you lived on - poultry, a couple of cows, some cabbages and fruit?’
‘Yes.’ She felt stung by the note of lofty amusement in his voice, but remembering the ocean of cattle she and Vance had flown over, she supposed a couple of cows and a hen coop would seem amusing. ‘It might have been a smallholding, but we worked, my grandmother and I, to get a living out of it.’
His eyes flicked her ash-blonde hair, which she wore madonna-style because her hair was of a fine-soft texture that looked childish if she didn’t keep it controlled. It was also a style that made her look far more poised than she felt.
‘Okay,’ there was a sardonic twist to Adam Corraine’s mouth, ‘you can stay for a fortnight, but if you don’t suit and can’t fit into the swing of things, then Vance will fly you back to Hawk’s Bay, where you should have no trouble getting a job in a boutique or one of the hotels that cater for tourists.’
‘Do you think that’s all I’m really suited for?’ she asked indignantly.
‘You’re not used to the big country and not everyone can take to it.’ He held her eyes, made her aware of the sheer vitality of his gaze. ‘In all frankness, Miss Dowling, I would prefer a girl of our own kind at the homestead. The boys will hang round you because you’re something new, and I don’t want any fights or trouble over a female.’
‘I assure you—’
‘Assure me of nothing,’ he broke in, a ring of hardness in his voice. ‘Thirty-three years have taught me that if you let yourself be soft about anything then you’re in for trouble, one way or another. Common sense tells me to pack you off back to the bay, but my aunt’s letter led you to think you’d be suitable, so in all fairness I’ve got to give you a trial.’
‘I don’t want you to strain yourself, Mr. Corraine,’ she said frigidly.
Vance, who had evidently been straining himself not to laugh at Joanna’s daring, now gave way to a chortle that made the other men look over at the Boss and the girl, and then at each other. The situation didn’t take much summing up ... a catalyst had arrived at Raintree in the shape of a slim, fair, cool-skinned Britisher.
Vance drove her up to the house in a jeep, through the honey warmth of the sun that now lay over the morning. She still felt rather shaken up by her first encounter with the Boss and she sat silent beside Vance, seeing the gum trees and casuarinas that shaded the hilly drive to the homestead, the bright flash of birds like bunches of petals on the wing.
‘Rosellas,’ Vance murmured.
She came out of her dream and looked at him. ‘Oh - you mean the birds?’
‘Yes, the birds. Those full of chatter are galahs.’
‘They’re a pretty colour, that mixture of dove-grey and pink.’
‘You seem overcome by you
r first meeting with Adam.’
‘Is he always so - brusque?’
‘Yes, with strangers - especially if they happen to be women.’
‘Is he a misogynist?’
‘No - I sometimes think he’s shy.’
‘Shy?’ Joanna exclaimed.
‘Some men can face a mob of stampeding cattle and not blink an eyelash, but when it comes to a slip of a girl—’ Vance swung the jeep round a bend in the road. ‘I told you he’d reckon you as just a corn dolly.’
‘Nerve!’ she muttered. ‘The implication that I’m suited for nothing but selling beachwear and volley balls!’
‘It might be easier work, Joanna, than being a home-help. And if you were at Hawk’s Bay I could come in on flying visits.’
Her gaze dwelt on the deep, rich valley above which they were driving, filled with green shadow and birds and the bright sparkle of streams. She compared it to the holiday bay filled with people and knew she could be happy here ... if only Adam Corraine would have the patience to let her get used to everything. Shy of women indeed! He was too self-governed to care what other people thought of him ... he was the Boss of Raintree!
He was the favoured grandson of the man who had been the uncrowned king of all this territory. Favoured because he was harder, more ambitious, less likely to care for people more than property.
She looked at Vance and again her liking for him flooded over her. He might bear a fleeting resemblance to his cousin, but he was much the nicer of the two.
‘The valley is beautiful,’ she murmured. ‘Like Shangri-la.’
‘It’s the valley of the wail when the wind is blowing.’
Raintree Valley Page 3