Princes of the Outback Bundle

by Bronwyn Jameson

  Whatever the reason, she didn’t much like it. Whatever the reason, she had to get over it and start acting more like herself again.

  “Relax, Catriona.” His mouth quirked, amused and reassuring at the same time. “I know I’m starving, but I promise not to bite.”

  “Easy for you to say.”

  His fork paused, halfway to his mouth. “About biting?”

  “About relaxing. You aren’t the one with a strange man sitting at your breakfast table!”

  “I should hope not,” he drawled. “Strange women are much more my taste.”

  “I thought you didn’t bite.”

  He laughed at that, the same rich sound of appreciation as earlier in his bedroom. Cat wasn’t sure which affected her more—the warm-honey tone of his laughter or the fact that he appreciated her quick retort. Whichever, the man was lethal.

  Lethal and obviously as hungry as he’d intimated, given the way he tucked back into his breakfast. And since the short exchange of banter—plus his rather gratifying appetite—had settled her uneasiness, Cat joined him in several minutes of almost companionable eating. She, too, was starving.

  “Glad you’ve gotten over the strange-man thing.”

  Cat stopped chewing.

  “I wondered about that before,” he continued, piling his plate with seconds. “When you were in my bedroom.”

  “Wondered about…what?” she asked slowly, suspiciously.

  “If you lived here alone. And if so, why you weren’t more concerned about having a strange man in your house.”

  “I can look after myself.”

  “Yeah?”

  She met his eyes with unflinching directness. “I’ve lived here on my own for the last four years. So, yeah, I can look after myself.”

  “You don’t find it lonely here, on your own?”

  “Sometimes.” Her shrug was a bit tight, a bit not so casual, but her direct gaze turned rueful. “Then my stepmother comes to visit and I get over it real quick.”

  “You have a wicked stepmother?”

  “Good guess.”

  “Any evil stepsisters?”

  “Just the two.”

  Rafe ate in silence for a minute, digesting all she’d said. “And you run this place single-handedly?”

  “What,” she said, bristling, “you don’t think I’m capable?”

  Rafe held up his hands—with knife and fork—in mock defensiveness. “Hey, keep your panties on. That’s not what I meant.”

  “Yeah, well, if I had a dollar…”

  “For every man who didn’t think you capable?”

  “Everybody,” she growled. “No cause to be gender specific.”

  “Well,” Rafe started slowly, carefully picking his way around what was obviously a sore spot. “You’ve got to admit it’s not the usual career choice for a young woman.”

  “It’s all I’ve ever wanted to do, since I was a little girl.”

  “You didn’t want to be a ballerina or a supermodel?”

  “Oh, please!” She didn’t exactly roll her eyes, but the gesture was implicit as she rocked back in her chair, a mug of tea cradled in her hands. “Do I look like the supermodel type?”

  Trick question, Rafe decided. Wisely he let it slide right by. “You must have had some fantasy occupation, though. I was going to be a fighter pilot.”

  “See Top Gun one too many times?”

  “Is that possible?” Smiling, he met her eyes across the remains of their breakfast. “Come on, I’ve shared my boyhood fantasy. Your turn, Catriona.”

  “Cat,” she corrected. “Everyone calls me Cat.”

  “I’m not everyone.”

  This time she did roll her eyes. Then she surprised him by admitting, “I did go through a rodeo stage once.”

  “You wanted to be a cowgirl?” In jeans and check shirt, with her freckled nose and her hair tightly braided, that wasn’t a stretch. All she needed was the big hat and boots.

  “A cowgirl? Are you kidding?”

  “A rodeo clown?”

  Over the rim of her mug she grinned at him, genuine amusement lighting her eyes. “A bull rider, actually.”

  “I should have known.” Rafe shook his head, entertained by the notion but not surprised. His gaze drifted away, toward the kitchen and the picture he’d noticed earlier. “Don’t suppose that has anything to do with the cowboy on your fridge?”

  “Not really.”

  “Is he your boyfriend?”

  A stillness tightened her expression, and Rafe was surprised to feel an echoing tension in his body as he waited for her answer. As she lifted her mug and took a long deliberate sip before lowering it to answer. “He’s a…friend.”

  Ahh. “A friend you’d like as more?”

  She snorted. “A friend I thought was more!”

  The front legs of her chair hit the floor with a sharp rap, and she was halfway to her feet, gathering cutlery and plates before Rafe stopped her with one hand over both of hers. “I didn’t mean to hit a nerve.”

  Her eyes whipped to his. “You didn’t.”

  Oh, yes, he had. “Where is he now, your cowboy?”

  Beneath his hands he felt her tension, felt it gather then ease as if by force of will. She slumped back into her chair, exhaled on a relenting sigh. “Drew’s my neighbor—was my neighbor. We grew up together. We went out for a while. Then he went to America, on the rodeo circuit.”

  Her flat, just-the-facts delivery didn’t fool Rafe. The neighbor, the ex, the cowboy with the big black hat had let her down. Badly.

  “You want me to find this Drew, beat him up for you?” he asked, wanting to make her smile again, and rather liking the notion of playing her champion. “I do owe you.”

  “For coming to your rescue?” She smiled, not the dazzler of before but a smile that held a sharp wry edge. She tugged her hands free and rocked back in her chair. “You want to hear something funny? Yesterday, when I heard your plane, I thought you were Drew.”

  “You were expecting him?”

  She shrugged. “Not so much expecting as hoping.”

  “Ah, so finding me must have been a huge disappointment.”

  “It wasn’t all bad,” she said with that same wry smile. “At least you and your head gave me something else to worry about. I didn’t have much time to be disappointed.”

  “Ouch,” he murmured, without a lot of conviction. “I knew you wouldn’t be good for my ego.”

  “I imagine your ego is in as fine shape as the rest of you.” And with that matter-of-fact diagnosis, she started packing up their plates and taking them to the kitchen.

  Rafe bit his tongue. He didn’t need to ask how she knew about his fine shape. She’d seen pretty much all of it in the bathroom earlier. But he did need to ask what she’d meant earlier, before she walked out of his bedroom.

  “The last time we were discussing my ego, you said I wouldn’t be sticking around long.”

  “That’s right. A neighbor’s going in to Bourke today. I’ve arranged a lift for you.”

  It was Rafe’s turn to rock back in his chair. She sure hadn’t wasted any time. “When?”

  She looked up from the sink where she was stacking dishes and smiled. “Not too long. I imagine by the time you’ve finished clearing up the table and washing these, Jen will have called with an exact time.”

  With thirty years of practice, Rafe had perfected his helpless-male routine. Catriona McConnell wasn’t the first woman to see right through it, but she’d done so with a remarkable indifference to his charm. Twenty minutes later Rafe still wore a rueful grin. She really was something else!

  When he’d stared cluelessly at the sink and murmured, “Washing dishes, huh? This should be interesting,” she didn’t roll her eyes and nudge him aside so she could take over—which is what he’d been angling for.

  He’d tried another tack. “I’ve never done this before. I don’t suppose you’d care to give some hands-on instruction?”

  “Oh, I’m pretty s
ure you’re smart enough to work it out for yourself.”

  “What if I break stuff?”

  “My stuff is hardly Limoges,” she’d flung over her shoulder on her way to the door. “But if it makes you feel any better, I’ll add any breakages to your bill.”

  “That should make me feel better? With this head?”

  Hand on door, she’d paused, frowning. “Your head’s aching? Perhaps you should go and lie down.”

  “Will you bring me a cold compress and take my pulse, Nurse?”

  She made an impatient sound, tongue against teeth. “Don’t you ever give up?”

  “What?”

  “The lines. We both know they’re wasted on me.”

  Rafe shook his head sadly. “You’re a hard woman, Catriona McConnell.”

  She’d smiled and thanked him, as if that were the greatest of compliments, before closing the door behind her. Ten seconds later it opened again—and, yeah, she caught him still grinning and shaking his head over that exchange—so she could remind him about the phone calls he’d been deliberately forgetting.

  “The phone is in my office—” she pointed off to her right “—through that second doorway over there.”

  “Will the calls be on my bill?”

  “Of course. Knock yourself out.”

  Rafe had winced at her unfortunate wording, but that was all for show.

  After finishing his phone calls, as he headed out the door where she’d disappeared earlier, he remembered her words with a grin of approval. It didn’t surprise him that he liked her—he rarely met a woman he didn’t like on some level—but it surprised him how much this smart-as-a-cardshark woman tickled his fancy.

  On the back porch he paused to look around, seeing her place for the first time. Seeing what lay beneath and beyond the debris scattered by last night’s storm with another jab of surprise. The paint peeling from the outside walls. The empty garden beds. Beyond the back fence, what looked to be the remains of an orchard, the trees long dead. Catriona’s home wore an air of disrepair like a patched-up coat and he hadn’t expected that. She seemed so on top of everything.

  Then he remembered the moment at the breakfast table, when he’d asked about her cowboy and he’d felt the tension—and her disillusionment—hovering in the kitchen air. Things weren’t any more shipshape in her world than in his, and it struck him that fate—or his most faithful mistress, Lady Luck—might have landed him here for a reason. Nine times out of ten he would have backed himself to outrace a storm. But yesterday he’d been flying with his mother’s words soft in his memory.

  Take care, Rafe. Please, don’t do anything harebrained that you might come to regret!

  He knew she’d been talking about more than his daredevil ways with a joystick, yet her message of caution and the accompanying concern—in eyes already pierced with grief from her husband’s recent death—had led him to search out a strip when the storm billowed quicker and wilder than predicted.

  That strip was Catriona McConnell’s.

  And as he crossed the yard with its random patches of would-be lawn, as he sidestepped sheets of roofing steel blown clean off a nearby shed, he decided that fate had put him here for more than washing her dishes. More, even, than shifting the uprooted tree that lay crushing her fence.

  This trip had a purpose, one he’d resisted for the first month or more since his father’s death. Since he and his two brothers learned about the will’s clause and the baby they needed to produce. Needed, not wanted. Rafe couldn’t see himself in the role of father, which meant he needed to choose very wisely.

  More wisely than Nikki Bates. More wisely than any of the women in his past.

  Yup, he decided as his narrowed gaze fixed on Catriona down by the kennels. Fate had come to his rescue in the nick of time.

  Four

  Cat was sitting cross-legged on the concrete stoop outside her kennel enclosure, her lap filled with sleeping puppies, when she heard the distant slap of the kitchen door closing. Blast. She’d hoped that the washing-up and his phone calls would have kept him occupied for longer. Another five minutes enjoying the simple, comforting warmth of the morning sun and her canine company was all she wanted. Five minutes before she faced up to the consequences and cost of last night’s storm. Before making the tough decisions on what to do next, how to find Drew, who to believe.

  With a heavy sigh, she lifted one chubby tan body close to her face. “Not that I have any idea where to start on that one, little mate.” Everything about her dealings with Drew had turned out to be so much less than she’d bargained for.

  For some reason that turned her thoughts right back to Rafe Carlisle, who had turned out to be so much more than she’d bargained for. It was one thing to enjoy looking at him, appreciating his beauty the same as she would a sleek Thoroughbred or an exquisitely formed sculpture or some out-of-her-reach trinket in a shop window. It was another entirely to enjoy his company, to sit at the breakfast table trading quips and confidences. To stick her head through the door and see him with sleeves pushed up, hands in her sink, that lethal grin lifting the corners of his exquisitely formed mouth.

  Knowing that she’d put the grin there.

  That memory mingled with the crunch of his footsteps on the gravel approach, and Cat shivered—not in her skin but somewhere deeper. For a wisp of time she buried her nose in the puppy’s fur, absorbing its comforting warmth, centering herself so that when she turned and peered up at him none of that unease showed in her expression…despite the way her heart revved up a gear.

  From her position down on the ground, it was a perilously long way up to his face. A long traverse past thighs and hips encased in expensively aged denim. Past that buttercream knit that should have made him look soft but—damn it—didn’t. And by the time she’d taken that all in, by the time she’d arrived up at his face with all its dark planes and masculine angles, he was ducking down to her level and reaching out to stroke the puppy in her hands.

  “So…Cat is a dog person,” he said, sea-green eyes awash with amusement.

  Cat tried to smile back, but she was transfixed by those eyes and then by the gentle stroke of one large fingertip over the tiny puppy’s head. Snared by the magnetic power of his proximity. Even in the bedroom he hadn’t been this close, his head almost grazing hers as he bent to study the bundle of puppies in her lap.

  “How many have you got there?” he asked, his voice as slow and mesmerizing as that caress.

  “Seven, all up.”

  “Huh. My lucky number.”

  Probably another line, but she had to admire the finesse of his delivery. The smooth way he had of drawing her in with what appeared to be genuine attentiveness. Why not enjoy it? Any kind of attentiveness was a novelty, and dogs she could talk about until the cows came home!

  “Where’s their mama?” he asked, and Cat looked around for Sheba.

  “She won’t be too far away. Especially if she gets a whiff of a stranger lurking near her babies.”

  “Ah, a warning. Should I step back slowly, hands in the air? Before or after she bares her teeth?”

  Cat smiled. “I think the worst you’ll suffer is a severe growling.”

  “From a mother, growling can be scary stuff.”

  Although he grinned back at her, she sensed a truth in his words. And glimpsed another element she hadn’t bargained for—the disquieting element of Rafe Carlisle in family mode. Carefully she settled the puppy from her hand back with its siblings. “Yeah, well, Sheba’s growl is much worse than her bite. She’s only ever taken a violent dislike to one man.”

  “Your cowboy?”

  “His father, actually.” Cat met his eyes and saw a stillness, a seriousness, she hadn’t expected. Saw questions she didn’t want to answer…and was saved by the distraction of a low canine whimper. The perfect segue. “Speaking of fathers—” she nodded toward his right “—that’s the pups’ daddy over there.”

  As expected, Rafe turned to inspect the daddy. Head on
paws, Bach treated them to his best put-upon look and another pitiful whine.

  “Oh, please!” Cat shook her head at her dog before explaining to Rafe. “I have to lock him up while Sheba goes for a run, otherwise she won’t leave her puppies. Bach thinks it’s the height of indignity.”

  “You called your dog Bark?” he asked on a note of disbelief, although a smile lifted the corners of his lips.

  “B-A-C-H. Like the composer.”

  “Awful pun.”

  “Yes, but Wagner would have been worse.”

  He laughed at that, a rich rumble of amusement that warmed her from her inside out. Oh, yeah, the man knew how to laugh, how to smile, how to charm. “At least my cat has a dignified name.”

  That laconic admission whipped her attention from his lips to his eyes. “You have a cat?”

  His eyes narrowed. “Don’t tell me you’re one of those dog people who look down their noses at cat owners?”

  “Not at all. I just didn’t picture you with a cat, is all.”

  Cat didn’t want to picture him with a pet any more than being growled at by his mother. She much preferred her preconception of Rafe Carlisle as a superficial, self-obsessed rich kid. Entertaining, likable, highly watchable, but essentially lightweight. She really wished she didn’t have to ask, “What is your cat’s dignified name?”

  “Tolstoy.”

  “Is he a Russian blue?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Then why did you name him Tolstoy?” she asked, hope stacked upon hope that he didn’t enjoy the classics, because that would be too much on top of all his charm and wit and the pet-ownership thing.

  “I didn’t. He belonged to a woman I knew. I guess she named him.”

  Cat’s heart put in a funny little kick beat as she wondered what, exactly, the word knew meant in Rafe-Carlisle-speak. “And she gave her cat to you?”

  “She left, and the next day Tolstoy was back.” He gave a careless little shrug, like the shift of spare muscle inside his silk sweater. “Apparently he preferred living with me.”