With her face shmooshed up against his ribs, she could hear the solid thud of his heartbeat and feel the vibrant heat of his body right through his butter-soft suede jacket. And with every breath her lungs filled with the scent of hot skin and, well, hot man.
Yup, woozy about summed it up for her, too.
Thankfully, he regained his balance as quickly as before, easing the pressure on her shoulder. Together they shuffled to her truck, and he eased himself gingerly into the passenger seat. Cat had to work to extricate her arm from under his and then, as she dashed around to the driver’s side, she filled her lungs with cool, rain-wet air and cleared her head of that giddy reaction.
By the time she’d waited the obligatory tick-tick-tick to warm the diesel engine, the rain was bucketing down. “Lucky,” she said, turning to check her passenger as she found first gear and the truck lurched into motion. “We’d have been drenched in no time.”
His head was back, propped against the top of the seat, but slowly it rolled toward her. His eyes opened and focused with some effort on her face. “Rafe…Car…lisle.”
For a second Cat gazed back into his eyes—she’d never seen the Mediterranean, but her imagination painted it that exact sea-green hue—before it struck her that he was introducing himself. Her heart stuttered a half beat. Of course. That’s why she’d felt that niggle of recognition.
No, she hadn’t met him, but she’d seen enough pictures plastered through the media to know exactly who Rafe Carlisle was. Middle son of one of Australia’s richest and most newsworthy families. The media loved to refer to the Carlisles as Australia’s “outback royalty” since they owned so much of the northern cattle country, as well as hotels and property and God knows what else.
But this particular Carlisle brother didn’t get his Gucci footwear dirty in outback dust or cattle pats. Rafe Carlisle might hold some fancy executive title in the family’s hotel group, but from what she’d read he didn’t get too close to anything resembling work. Play was more his thing—playing in nightclubs, playing in casinos, playing with women.
And wasn’t that just a measure of the way her luck was hanging? One of the notoriously rich and handsome “princes of the outback” drops out of the sky into her paddock, and it has to be the lightweight glamour boy!
“And you are?” he asked faintly, obviously wanting her side of the introduction.
“Catriona McConnell.” Impoverished, nonnewsworthy, hardworking pastoralist, with not a drop of blue blood to bless myself.
Except what did it matter which Carlisle had landed in her paddock? He wasn’t the answer to her barrage of messages or to her prayers. He wasn’t Drew Samuels. He was simply a stranger—albeit a rich stranger—in need of her help. She had to get him medical attention, which meant getting through this deluge to the sealed road before the red dirt track bogged.
She would make it unless…
Hardly daring to look, she squinted at the fuel gauge and swore silently at the inaccurate flicker of the needle. How much was in the tank? When had she last filled up? She’d been budgeting, rationing, and she prayed fervently that this latest cutback wasn’t about to bite her on the backside.
Rafe woke with a start, dazed and disoriented for the seconds it took to register his surroundings and the woman shaking him by the shoulders. Slowly the pieces came back to him, a series of snapshots that blurred in and out of focus.
He remembered landing the company jet at Bourke Airport, remembered heading out again in the Cessna. The storm he’d thought he could outrace. A hazel-eyed angel of mercy and rain so loud he’d thought it was pounding holes in his skull.
Vaguely he recalled waking at his angel’s homestead and the struggle to get him inside. Less vaguely he recalled the cold compress she applied to the side of his head. Such a promising start, spoiled when she insisted he sit still, stay awake and answer the same questions over and over with a persistency that hammered worse than his killer headache.
Realizing she’d succeeded in waking him, Nurse Naggard stopped the shaking and leaned back out of his face. This brought her into clearer focus, and Rafe blinked with surprise. “You showered.”
“Only because you kept nagging,” she said archly.
He kept nagging? That was rich!
He thought about telling her so, but she shifted again, totally distracting him with the sharp, sweet scent of whatever she’d showered with. And her hair…he hadn’t noticed she had so much of it. The mass of damp, brown curls hung almost to her waist. Pity about the twin furrows of worry and annoyance between her brows—they completely ruined the pretty effect.
Rafe started to shake his head with regret, then stopped himself. Any movement caused a rolling wave of nausea, as if his brain hadn’t regained its balance after whatever walloping it had taken. She’d told him he’d been out cold for a minute or two, that he must have hit his head during what had been a rough landing.
He didn’t remember.
He did remember she’d been wet, right through. Now she wore a green sweater that looked soft and pretty and dry. “You changed,” he said. “Good.”
“You slept,” she countered. “Bad.”
Ah, yes, his nagging angel of mercy had a quick mouth. He remembered that now. “I was just resting my eyes.”
A lie, but a fair one, given the way she kept trying to blind him. Right on cue she picked up a flashlight and tapped it against the palm of her hand. Her very own instrument of torture.
“No.” He held up a hand, keeping her at bay. “Enough is enough. I remember where I am and who I am. I remember my mother’s name, my brothers’ names, and even my third cousin Jasper’s middle name.”
The last was an exaggeration, but he’d had it with this routine. Every half hour, her same questions, his same answers, while the beam of light burned a hole clear through his pupil and into his brain.
“Don’t be a baby.” She picked up his hand and turned it over. Despite the “baby” barb, Rafe let her take his pulse. He liked the cool press of her fingers against his wrist, liked the serious intensity on her face and the infinitesimal movement of her lips as she counted the beats. “Only one more hour, as per the doctor’s instructions.”
The doctor she’d called when the weather defeated her aim of driving him to the nearest hospital. The instructions involved basic observations and this neuro-responsive BS that he’d endured for at least three hours. And that, he decided, was long enough.
“My pupils are equal and reacting?” he asked.
“Last time I checked, yes, but—”
“Has anything changed in the last half hour?”
“No, but—”
“Fine.” Rafe wrested the flashlight from her hand. “No more. I’m going to sleep.”
He started to lift his legs, angling himself to lie down, and her voice rose in alarm. “You’re not sleeping here. The couch is too short. It’s not comfort—”
“It’s horizontal.” And at the moment that’s all Rafe required. To shut his eyes, to stop talking and rest his aching brain—
“There’s a bed made up,” she relented with a heavy sigh. “But first, are you sure you don’t need to call anyone?”
He’d radioed when the storm came up, signaling his intention to land and his location, and she’d since notified authorities. That would suffice for tonight. If he let one of his family members know, he’d end up having to field a barrage of concerned calls. His mother, his big brother, his little brother. His personal assistant. His neighbor. His housekeeper.
What they didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them. Trying to explain would hurt him. “No calls,” he said.
“What about food?”
“Just bed.”
He got to his feet. And when his brain took a moment to adjust to the new upright perspective, she helped him steady. He didn’t mind the solicitous hand at his elbow, and he liked the sweep of her hair against his shoulder and the scent—peaches, he decided—that drifted from her skin. He enjoyed the brush of h
er hip against his thigh as she ushered him to a hallway off the living room. And when he started to turn into the first doorway, when she stood her ground and blocked his progress, he really enjoyed the soft pressure of her breast against his ribs.
“That’s my room,” she said, a bit breathless as if she, too, was aware of that unplanned contact. “You’re next on the right.” She steered him that way. “And it would ease my mind if you could stay awake ten minutes so I can do one more check.”
“I’ll be asleep in five.”
She made an impatient sound, tongue against teeth. “Are you always this difficult?”
“Are you?”
Surprise swung her gaze up to meet his. A pretty mix of gray and green and brown, her eyes, in the muted light of the hallway. “I’m not difficult.”
“Huh.” Whirring head notwithstanding, he felt an urge to tease—to look into those pretty eyes and ask if that meant she was easy. But she nudged the door to his room open, flicked the light switch, and the sudden brightness knifed through his brain.
A short uncensored curse hissed from his mouth. Muttering a quick apology, she turned the light off, but Rafe had caught a glimpse of the bed. Big, broad, dressed in a mile-thick quilt, it crooned, Come to Mama.
“Oh, yeah,” Rafe murmured, pushing off the doorjamb to answer that sultry siren’s call.
Catriona, apparently, moved too.
Perhaps she thought he needed help negotiating the semidarkness. Perhaps she was still hand-on-elbow in case her patient fell. Whatever the reason, she was there at his side, fussing about extra blankets and bathroom directions, when he made it bedside.
And when, with a blissful moan, he collapsed into the thick folds of feather-down comforter, she overbalanced and went down with him. He heard the heavy hitch of her surprised breath as the bed came up to greet their fall. Horizontal at last, engulfed in sweet-smelling quilt and sweeter-smelling female, Rafe couldn’t bring himself to move.
He should, he mused, at least move his hand—the one resting atop a very sweet curve of breast. And he would, just as soon as he summoned enough energy. Meanwhile his eyes drifted shut and the night he’d planned before leaving Sydney drifted through his dwindling consciousness.
If not for the storm he’d be at his destination now. His unexpected arrival would have shocked the blazes out of his onetime girlfriend, Nikki Bates, but not nearly as much as the reason for his visit. Right about now he’d have been getting to that point. Despite a mountain of reservations and providing he could wring the words from his resistive mind, he’d have been asking Nikki how she felt about having his baby.
Two
Cat woke in her own bed, lost for several seconds in the realm where dream and reality collided. It all came back to her then, and she sat up in a rush of shed bedclothes and remembered anxiety.
Rafe Carlisle. Concussed. In her guest room.
She’d last checked on him—she glanced at her watch and sucked in a quick breath—more than five hours ago. Blast. She hadn’t expected to sleep so soundly. She hadn’t expected to sleep much at all.
Concern sent her scurrying from her room. Caution sent her back to grab her robe, which she pulled on and secured with a double knot as she paused to listen at his door. The silence was rendered oddly loud by the thick thud of her own heartbeat. She tapped lightly on the door, tucked a mass of sleep-tangled hair behind her ear and pressed that ear flush against the timber.
Not a sound.
Quietly she pushed the door open and realized she’d been holding her breath when it rushed from her lungs in a whoosh. Relief, she told herself, since he was still in bed, asleep, not standing there in some state of undress.
And he had moved since her last check in the early hours after midnight. “Good,” she breathed, still holding on to the doorknob, warring with herself over what to do next.
Leave him to sleep? Wake him to ensure he wasn’t comatose? Stand here and stare at the highly unusual and hugely stareworthy sight of a naked man in her bed?
Not my bed, she corrected quickly. And not quite naked.
She had, after all, done the undressing. After she’d managed to rouse him with a solid elbow to his ribs. After she’d recovered from the shock of finding herself pressed deep into the thick eiderdown by his relaxed weight.
Heat tingled through her skin as she eyed that same relaxed weight in the yellow-tinged light of early morning. The long stretch of his legs outlined beneath the loosened bedclothes. The bare olive skin of his back, exposed all the way down to the dip below his waist. Broad shoulders and nicely muscled arms spread high and looped around his pillow.
His head was turned away, his face hidden by the dark sweep of his hair. Not sleep mussed like hers—she lifted a hand to the tangled curls—but as long and sleek and smooth as the rest of him. Her hand stilled mid tidying-comb, her gaze riveted on his hand, on the long fingers that loosely gripped one corner of his pillow.
The same fingers she’d felt, last night, flex ever so slightly against her breast.
Awareness tingled warm in her skin, thick in her belly, heavy in her breasts, as she remembered the heat of his body against hers, the heavy slough of his breath, the low moan that had sounded almost sybaritic. Because he was lying down and a matter of seconds away from sleep, not because he’d landed facedown on top of her!
Cat shook her head and huffed a disdainful breath at herself, much the same as she’d done last night right before she elbowed him aside. Then, when he’d looked like falling asleep where he rested, she’d pulled back the bedclothes and made him comfortable.
Starting with the shirt, ending with the jeans, she’d stripped him. Right down to a pair of white cotton boxers. The snug-fitting variety.
Cat’s fingers tightened on the doorknob. She closed her eyes a second, warm from the core right out to her skin, with the force of not remembering his outline in the semidarkness, the brush of her fingers against hot skin, against hair-rough legs, against the smooth cotton of his underwear.
Crikey.
She started to turn, to leave, then stiffened at the sound of life from the bed. A muffled movement of sheets…or of a body moving against sheets. Her eyes rocketed back to the bed.
Rafe Carlisle was stirring.
His lazy stretch started with a tensing in his shoulders and eased down his backbone, lifting the tight arc of his backside and kicking one leg free of the bedclothes. Cat held her breath in a tense mix of anticipation and apprehension, but he didn’t turn his head. He settled in a reverse ripple of muscles, all olive-skinned, languid beauty against her snowy white sheets.
Still asleep, she deduced after another minute, and she suddenly felt uncomfortable standing there watching him. It wasn’t as if he knew, but nonetheless she felt as if she was taking advantage. And standing around watching was not at all like her.
Galvanized into action, she hurried back to her room where she dressed, plaited her hair and splashed her face with cold water. In practical clothes and ready to face her working day, Cat felt much more like herself. Her first task was to check for storm damage and assess the state of the roads so she could work out the quickest way to get Rafe Carlisle out of here.
Alone again, with nothing to worry about but her own set of troubles, she would truly feel like herself again.
After the previous night, the thought of getting outside and doing something more active than checking her patient’s pulse rate and pupil reaction beckoned as brightly as the spring after-storm sunshine. Cat hit the back veranda at such a pace she almost tripped over the red-and-tan Kelpie waiting on the welcome mat.
The startled dog jumped to attention, tail wagging, instantly alert. A smile curved Cat’s mouth as she dropped to her haunches and scratched his neck. This was the only male she was used to seeing first thing in the morning.
“And a mighty handsome male you are, too.”
Bach only put up with the petting to humor her, then he gave a let’s-go yip and trotted down the steps wh
ere he waited, rocking from side to side, eager to start work.
“Okay, I’m coming, I’m coming.” She pulled on her boots, still smiling at Bach as she straightened…until she caught sight of the branch that had collapsed across her fence. “Blast.”
On closer inspection the branch turned out to be half a tree—a lot more than one strapping woman could shift on her own. It would have to wait. What worried her more than her flattened fence was the merry havoc such a strong wind might have wrought on a light plane.
“That,” she told Bach, “is where we’re heading first, mate.”
Halfway to the airstrip, she heard her call sign over the UHF radio and recognized the laconic voice of her neighbor’s foreman. Bob Porter was a good man, despite working for the king of reptilian life forms, Gordon Samuels. A good friend of her father’s, Bob made a point of looking out for her, especially since she’d been living on her own and running Corroboree without any permanent help.
They swapped greetings and rainfall measurements before she asked about the state of Samuels’s airstrip.
“You expecting a visitor?” Bob asked.
“I have one already.” She explained, long-story-short, about the man asleep in her guest room. “I imagine he could have a plane out here to collect him in a matter of hours.”
“Well, it ain’t landing anywhere around here,” Bob drawled. “Not today or tomorrow.”
Blast. “I’ll have to take him into Bourke then.”
“You in a hurry to get rid of this bloke for any reason?”
Yes, he’s a distraction. “No, except he’s concussed and should see a doctor.”
“Hang on a sec.”
In less than that second, his wife was on the radio. “I’m going in to town later, Cat. I wouldn’t mind a passenger if that helps you out.”
“You bet it does.” Cat didn’t know if she had enough fuel to make the trip herself, and she sure couldn’t book anything else up. Not when she hadn’t paid her last bill. Not when she didn’t know when she would have the money to pay it. “Call me when you’re leaving, Jen, and I’ll meet you at the crossroads.”
Princes of the Outback Bundle Page 21