by Margaret Way
“There.” She pointed, grief locked away inside for now.
“You’re sure?” His expression was grim. The memory of his uncle David had assumed almost mystical proportions for him. David had been such a peaceful person, with great charm of manner. He had died far too young.
As had Corrinne, the love of his life who had nonetheless betrayed him.
The huge boulder they were staring at was perfectly round, a giant’s marble standing about six feet high, dwarfing the other rocks and decaying pinnacles that surrounded it. Above them soared a wedge-tailed eagle, leisurely riding the wind. No sign of the falcons, the fastest birds of prey on earth.
Nicole and Drake contemplated the desert floor for quite a while in silence, Drake with his arms locked securely around her, holding her back against him. “What brought them here, do you suppose? The view, or was one or the other issuing an ultimatum about ending the affair? Your mother was married. She had you.”
“She would never have lost custody of me,” Nicole said passionately. “Granddad would have seen to it. Anyway, my father wouldn’t have wanted custody.”
“Why not?” Drake countered. “You don’t really know that with certainty, Nic. In many ways your father was put in an impossible situation.”
“Did he tell you that when you talked?” She twisted her head back to look at him. Drake had been on Eden since ten that morning.
“Not in so many words, but we covered a lot of ground.”
“I told him I was in love with you,” she admitted.
“Pity you haven’t told me. Did you also tell him you don’t trust yourself with me?”
She shook her head, her long hair arranged in a heavy braid. “You made a great impression.”
“I wasn’t trying to make an impression, Nicole,” he said dryly.
“Maybe that’s why you did. You don’t give a damn what anyone thinks.”
“Not true. I value the opinion of my friends and the many people I admire.”
“You can’t admire me. I’m a mess.”
His hands came up under her breasts, encircling her rib cage. “On the contrary, I think you’re very brave. I admire that.”
She leaned back against him, reveling in his strength. “I’m glad you’re here.”
“That gives me comfort.”
“My mother’s last words keep coming back to me. ‘We need to choose new clothes for you, darling. You’re growing out of everything!’ She had that lovely little smile on her face, so loving. ‘I think that calls for a trip into Sydney.’ Then she laughed and mussed my hair. How could she say such a thing if she was contemplating ending her life? She would never have left me. I’ve never for a minute believed otherwise.”
He turned her about. “Why have you never said this before? Your mother’s last words to you, I mean?”
She knew he was waiting for a response she couldn’t give. “Because they were really private. Something between my mother and me. Just the two of us, mother and daughter.”
He gave her a deep searching look. “It was all so very hard for you, Nic. You were just a child.”
“I dream of her, too,” she confessed. “She’s always trying to tell me something, but just as she’s about to, I wake up. Do you think we’ll ever know? I confronted Joel about seeing Dr. Rosendahl.”
“And?” he prompted.
“At first he was livid, then he settled down. Sometimes I wonder if I know Joel at all. I certainly don’t know Alan. He’s endlessly playacting. It’s just so slick. You’ll see at dinner. Family discussions have been extremely intense of late. I know I’m stirring things up, but I can’t seem to stop. I thought Heath would find it draining, but he seems to have gone into some kind of remission.”
“That can happen, Nic, before the end,” Drake said quietly.
“I know. He volunteered a DNA sample.”
“He told me.” He guided her gently toward the car, intent on finding a way down into the valley. “Getting you to believe the truth has been one long battle.”
“I accept it now.” She drew a deep breath. “But I want it made official.”
“You’re going to tack the results on a bulletin board or run it in the local rag?”
“You know what I mean.”
“Sometimes I do. Other times you speak in tongues.” His dark-tanned skin glittered with a light sweat. She found it incredibly erotic, imagining her tongue licking it off. She was madly, incurably in love with him, no matter where it took her.
When they reached the Land Cruiser, he took her into his arms and looked down at her intensely. “Could you love me, Nic?”
“If our lovemaking means anything, the answer must be yes.” It wasn’t commitment, but it wasn’t denial.
“Would you want to marry me?”
“The impossible dream.” There was a fluttering just above her heart. “My greatest love, my greatest fear.”
“You have to break out of your prison, Nic. Others find ways to live their dream.”
“I’m trying to,” she said. “Desperately.”
“And I’m committed to helping you.” He continued to stare down at her, thinking the world was vast, but if he searched through every corner of it, he wouldn’t find a woman he wanted more than Nicole Cavanagh, daughter of the woman his uncle had lost his heart and his life to. “You have a siren’s eyes, do you know that?” he asked with a twisted smile.
“Sirens aren’t human. I am. Only too human.”
The lids of her eyes closed as his hungry mouth came down over hers.
Gold dust fell from the sky. It spilled down over them like a silky inescapable web.
Drake pulled his mouth away. “Isn’t there someplace we can go?” he asked huskily, the urgency in his voice sending thrill after thrill through her. “I want you so badly I’m going to go up in smoke.”
“I’m the same.” Impossible to deny it.
“Tell me where.” He was already starting to move.
“I’ll tell you when we’re driving.” She ran on ahead, her eyes suddenly teasing, taunting, free of all melancholy.
Making love to her was the nearest he had come to paradise, Drake thought.
STRANGE HOW HISTORY repeats itself, the figure buried deep in the cover of the bushes agonized. His rage was so acute it felt as if a horse had fallen on him, crushing his chest.
The faithless Corrinne, the temptress who wanted every man she saw, and McClelland. He hadn’t seen either of them in the longest time. Fourteen years, to be exact. Laughable, really, how people had never suspected him! He was family, after all. Only much later had Rosendahl started to piece things together. Rosendahl, with the most benign of expressions and yet piercing eyes that could beam down to a man’s soul. That couldn’t have been allowed to happen; Rosendahl had to be removed. Just like Corrinne, who’d been planning on sending them away from Eden.
Heartless bitch!
Bright noon. It was suffocatingly hot in his place of concealment. He was sweating heavily in the dense shelter, down on his haunches. He shifted his grip on a sapling and a branch whipped back fiercely, stinging his face. He wiped off a smear of blood.
Damn! he snarled to himself. That hurt. Not a breath of breeze reached him. But as he watched, a snake came close. So close he instinctively shrank back, holding his breath in sudden panic. The thing slithered away as it sensed the unwelcome presence of a human, disappearing into the thick screen of grasses. Bloody snakes and lizards! He never felt secure with them about. Goannas could grow to a massive six feet long and were known to attack.
He hadn’t sighted a living soul on his way here. Only the cattle, and they weren’t about to tell. Just like the lovers of old, they were parked only a few feet from the cliff face. Almost the same spot. Uncanny! He fancied he could still see his footprints on the baked red earth, except he’d taken good care to get rid of them using the leafy head of a broken branch as a broom. He wasn’t such a fool he didn’t know Judah, the tracker, would cotton on to them at once
.
He’d gone to David McClelland’s side of the Land Cruiser first. Though startled, neither of them had suspected a thing, nor did they show the slightest shame at being discovered together. He was scarcely a risk to them, after all. He was nothing.
How many times had he relived every minute of that short encounter? He’d waved, as good as a sympathetic squeeze of the shoulder, saying he was going on his way. McClelland, always the gentleman, had actually waved back.
Nudge nudge, wink wink. The poor fool!
All it took was for him to get back into the four-wheel drive, reverse, then roar dead ahead, the massive bull bar on his vehicle slamming into the rear of the Land Cruiser, pushing it inexorably over the stony crest, just like that. Too easy! The realization of what was happening to them came too late, but he fancied he’d heard her sobbing. She continued to sob in his nightmares. It was getting so bad he had daytime echoes in his head.
Momentous events could be over in seconds. He’d yanked open his door, sneezing violently at the cloud of red dust, walked to the very edge of the escarpment and peered down. In the brilliant light, he saw her splayed across a boulder, just like a sacrifice, clearly dead. He didn’t have to check on McClelland. The windshield had caved in on his head. No one could have survived that crash. He had expected and hoped the Land Cruiser would catch fire, but somehow it didn’t. They’d really deserved to be immolated together. Still, he felt his cup of bitterness that had for so long overflowed, miraculously emptied….
Now Nicole. The most beautiful of women, with far more spirit than her mother. More aggression. Time for her to get what she deserved. She, too, was playing the part of whore, responding passionately to McClelland’s kisses, her beautiful body delivered up to him, to his mouth and his hands. It was sickening, the two of them locked in each other’s arms. She was as faithless as her mother. He was overcome by a feeling as powerful as grief, only lethal. But for the fact he didn’t want to get caught, he felt like shooting them now. Or McClelland, at least. He had other plans for Nicole, the mirror image of her mother, though she was as good as dead. The heiress to a ruthless dysfunctional family hiding behind their name and privileged background, the veneer of polished gentility.
He could never try the same game with McClelland. Drake McClelland, unlike his wimp of an uncle, would be on to him at once. Even his hatred was mixed up with respect. He had to think of something else. After all, he specialized in ideas.
THEY DROVE THROUGH Shadow Valley, avoiding the area littered with boulders, traveling along the cliff face with its numerous wind-carved caves, until Nicole pointed to one of the largest. The hollowed-out entrance was almost entirely decorated with the feathery green plumes Outback people called pussytails. The plants were whipped about in the driving wind that had suddenly sprung up, companion to the rapidly advancing storm.
The sky was spectacular, shafts of brilliant sunlight like spotlights piercing the towering giants’ castles of livid charcoal, purple and metallic green with slashes of silver. Rather like the palette she used in her own canvases, Nicole thought, finding great excitement in a scene that mirrored her tempestuous feelings. Anywhere else but the desert one would have battened down against an onslaught in the face of that savage sky, but both of them had witnessed countless desert spectacles in the past that had never yielded a drop of precious rain.
They parked beneath a broad overhang in the cliff face, reaching the entrance to the cave just as the sky released the first heavy drops.
For long moments neither of them took shelter, Nicole holding up her face in ecstasy at the long-awaited shower burst.
“Rain!” she cried. “It’s actually rain. Isn’t it wonderful!”
“And it’s coming down harder!” He laughed heartily, a man of the land sharing her joy and relief, then drew her back into his arms. Neither cared they were getting wet. It was only when the sky was ripped asunder by a dangerous fork of lightning so lurid and intense it burned itself on the retina, followed by a barbaric clap of thunder, that he hauled her into the cave, shouting to her above the wind to mind her head.
Even then the storm and the rain lured them to the entrance to rejoice in the spectacle. They knelt in the soft sand, staring out at the valley lit up intermittently by extraordinary incandescence. Lightning seethed and spat, the smell of the rain intoxicating to both of them.
He turned his head to soak her in like the rain. She was so achingly beautiful, so begging to be touched. “Take off your clothes,” he said, face taut, reaching out to help her with her shirt. “I want to make love to you. I don’t want it to ever end.”
Within moments, the storm raging outside the cave, she was naked. As she lay back on the powdery dry sand, he began to stroke her body—her shoulders, her arms, her throat, the rounds of her breasts, the slight curve of her stomach, her delicate hips—marveling at the color and texture of her skin.
“God, I’m a caveman compared to you,” he murmured wryly, conscious of the dark mat of hair that covered his chest and ran in a thin deep V into his groin and down his long legs.
“I should be terrified of you, in that case.” She smiled back at him, astonished by her abandon.
“I thought you were.”
“Not at times like these.”
He smiled and reached back for his hat; crystal-clear rainwater was still trapped in the wide brim. “Where would you like this?”
Before she could answer, languidly, erotically, he began to pour little streams of rainwater across her breasts and stomach, watching it run like a silken banner.
Her mouth pursed in a delighted gasp. The sensation was irresistibly delicious. He leaned into her, kissing her deeply. Scores of kisses. Soft. Tender. Fierce. Slowly he lowered himself over her, all male splendor and dark energy, his sex heavy at his groin. He bent his head so he could lick her rain-slicked skin with his tongue.
Her answer was a slow groan. Radiance spread through her. She could feel herself starting to enter another dimension. Her every nerve jumped as her muscles contracted. Sparks exploded behind her tightly shut lids.
Tiny rivulets of rainwater ran down over her thighs and into her cleft, soaking the light whorl of rose-tinted hair.
His eyes followed the water’s progress, burning a sizzling trail. He gripped her slender hips, hands electric, then lowered his head, his tongue slipping deeper into her with every sharp catch of her breath.
“Drake!” Her back arched up from the sand as she called her lover’s name. She was trying ineffectually to hold his head from her, startled beyond belief by the degree of sexual pleasure. The excitement was too primitive, too deliriously high. She felt she was losing her grip on reality. She was lost, craving all the things he was doing to her. He had shattered her illusions that she was a low-key, cool person with a take-it-or-leave-it attitude toward sex.
Drake acting quite naturally had raised lovemaking to an art form, and such was the force of her passion she couldn’t argue with it. It devoured her, changing her inner landscape forever.
Little pulses flicked here and there all over her body. He felt the shock of her beauty, her nakedness, take his breath away. Her luminescent skin gleamed in the dimness of the cave, and her masses of auburn hair formed a halo around her face. This was the woman straight out of his dreams. Miraculously, mysteriously Nicole. Both of them had traveled a long way.
The muscles in his forearms rippled as he lifted her supple legs to his shoulders.
All around them like incense was her fragrance, a powerful aphrodisiac. He inhaled it deeply, but desire was the sweetest scent of all. Now that he had found her, he knew he could never be denied her.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
BY THE TIME he returned to the homestead, life seemed almost too difficult to bear. His sense of oppression—he’d developed it early in his godawful childhood—had never been stronger, the pressure on his aching temples like screws holding his brain together. The pain was unbearable. He’d had to drive with the storm raging all aroun
d him, despite the very real danger the chain lightning presented, pulling into makeshift shelters when visibility was next to nothing. It had been all he could do to control the vehicle, slipping and slewing, the wheels fighting for purchase in the mud.
He’d made it back to the homestead, pretending he’d been out near the JumpUp, miles away from the escarpment. God knows where they were. They weren’t back yet, though the storm had settled to light rain and then the sun was out again in all its incredible brilliance. That was the Outback—drama, extremes, drought and floods, no in-betweens. His mouth tightened into an ugly line. They’d probably found themselves a nice little cave where they could shelter. At least that’s what they’d tell the rest of them. He knew what they were about. Bloody sex. Even from a distance, kissing madly on the escarpment, they’d reeked of it. Lovers. She hadn’t tried at all to stop McClelland disrupting their world. She’d offered herself up to him, as wanton as her mother.
God, how he hated her! He’d renounced every other feeling.
Fifteen minutes later he began to relax when he learned one of the stockmen had been attacked and badly gored by a feral boar. This wasn’t the first time that particular animal had threatened a stockman who found himself in its territory. A shooting party was to be organized for the next day. Wild boar were vermin, and a real danger.
The shooting party also offered an opportunity for some unfortunate young woman known for her recklessness to be caught in the crossfire. It was almost certain McClelland could be talked into taking part. Harder to involve Nicole, who hated killing, but the powerful desire to be with her lover might swing things in his favor. He’d have to direct his attention to getting the two of them involved. In the old days Heath, a true hunter, had relished going after feral pigs. These days Heath would find it difficult even to sit on a horse. He’d come to understand life must have been very hard for Heath, as well. The Cavanaghs knew how to treat people badly.
A HALF A DOZEN stockmen waited for them at the Five Mile.