“Hi!” He lifted an arm. No smile. Just as well. The smile would have brought her undone.
“Is there a reason for this great honour?” she called, feigning a casual manner when she felt transcendent.
“No need to ask,” he drawled, walking toward her with easy elegance that was a combination of perfect fitness, efficiency and natural grace. “I’m here to see you.”
How did one fight those waves of charisma? Heat blended with the light inside her. “Heavenly! I thought you might be dropping some groceries off. Cate likes to make sure her beloved eats well.”
“She can relax while you’re here to look after him.” He moved onto the veranda, studying her with such intensity she had to blink. If ever a man could make eye contact, he could.
“Come in,” Toni invited as the excitement kept growing. “Kerry’s moving some cattle but he’ll be back late afternoon.”
“I know. I’m a cattleman myself,” he told her laconically.
“I’m just making conversation.”
“And cake, from that great aroma. It smells delicious. I might try some.”
“You’ll have to wait until it cools.” She directed an uncertain glance at him, not sure if he was serious.
“You mean stay to dinner?”
She was filled with incredulous pleasure. “To tell the truth, that you’d want to stay never crossed my mind, but you’d be very welcome.” She motioned him into the living room. “How’s everyone?”
“Wondering what the hell’s going on.” He gave a vaguely discordant laugh.
“What do you mean?”
“Toni, you can’t play dumb. You’re a very smart girl.”
“Ah, yes, but am I sensible, sober, trustworthy?” she asked dryly.
“Would you need to be, with your assets?”
“With you I would.” Her body was stirring under his every glance, her nerves shivery with excitement.
“You do well in an emergency,” he pointed out. Her courage had been exceptional.
“Anything else?”
“You’re becoming one big problem.” His tone was different as warring thoughts stirred.
“Why’s that? Or don’t you want to answer?”
“Sure. It’s getting so I can’t take my eyes off you.”
“And you’re used to keeping your distance?”
“Antoinette, I’m responsible for a lot of people’s lives,” he said.
“I know. What I don’t know is why you think I compound your problems.”
“You can see you might?” Attempts at evasion were long past.
“Why, are bad things going to happen?”
“Let’s say we’re too close.” Perversely, attraction flowered more brilliantly each time they met.
“As in family?” she asked. “That’s nonsense, and you know it. I think it’s far more likely you’ll never sell your soul to a woman.”
He laughed again. She wasn’t wrong. “No good could come of it. I keep thinking of the way I froze the other day.”
For an instant Toni couldn’t see a connection. Then she did. “You froze?” she said incredulously. “You moved with the speed of light.”
“I’m not Superman.” His expression was taut.
“Damned near. Perhaps too much responsibility has been thrust upon you. Ever think of that? Your father, like mine, died too soon.”
His eyes narrowed, became hooded. “Are you analysing me? Really? I love it.”
“I think I’m getting somewhere,” she said gently.
“That bothers me all the more.” And it did.
“Come and sit down,” she said in a gentle, coaxing voice.
“Thanks. So why are you sitting way over there?” he asked when they were both seated in the living room.
“You’re the one who warned me, Byme. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.”
“So that much sank in.” Unable to settle, he rose abruptly, all six-foot-three of him, with the prowling grace of a panther. “I don’t want to sit around. I’m too damned restless. Make me a cup of coffee. I need to know if you’re as domesticated as you’re beautiful.”
“A lot of women are both,” she pointed out, trying to loosen her breath from its tight constriction. The tension was staggering.
“Cate tells me Zoe is definitely coming back.”
“She says so, but I don’t know if we can absolutely rely on it.”
“We all learned that.” As they moved into the hallway, he suddenly caught her around the waist. “Hello, Antoinette,” he said in a dark, seductive voice.
“Hello, Byrne.”
“Are you all mended now?” He drank her in, white gold hair, blue eyes.
“Almost better.” Like a child, she turned her left elbow for his inspection. It had been grazed rather badly in her roll under the fence. “I want to be perfect for the wedding.”
He never thought. It shocked him, the rush of sensual pleasure. He took her slender arm and lightly kissed the rapidly healing graze. She had skin like a baby, another thing to stimulate the senses that threatened to swamp him. He had become totally used to holding the power. Taken it for granted. “If I were someone else I’d be thinking of marriage proposals myself,” he said, wryly.
“Don’t be too sure I’d accept.” Her tone was a mix of spirit and confusion.
“You’d do exactly what I say.”
She stared into his brilliant, mesmerizing eyes. “Never!” Then she spoilt it by taking a ragged breath.
“Let’s see.” He seemed to consider. “Kiss me.” It wasn’t entirely gentle, the way he said it, but shivery.
A great wave of feeling overtook her. “Byrne, you scare me,” she said truthfully.
His beautiful mouth twisted in derision. “You might as well know you scare me, too.”
“And you don’t like it. Byrne Beresford, who pushes buttons and everyone jumps.”
He gave an exaggerated sigh. “It seems to have progressed to that stage, Antoinette. But I can never forget the job. It’s a big job. A lifetime job. You can appreciate that. I don’t have to spell it out.”
“No.” She looked down. “Attraction comes, attraction goes, but the job remains forever. What I don’t understand is, what’s the foundation for your mistrust of women?”
He took his time answering, studying her face intently. “Early experience, maybe. It’s not all women. It’s the woman. The one who gets under my skin. Who gets in the way of my identity.”
She stood utterly still as though to move would threaten them both. “You’re an egotist, Byrne Beresford.” She thought totally otherwise.
“Or I have a strong sense of my own survival. Males develop that early. You know why? We associate women with goddesses. Beings who can take a man to heaven or hell. It only takes one turn.”
“And me. What sort of woman am I supposed to be?” Was she again being linked with her mother?
His silver-gray gaze seemed to look into her soul. “You’re beautiful. Loving, giving, vital, brave.”
“There has to be a down side.” Already she was bracing herself for it.
He gave a short laugh. Lifted a long, sliding lock of her hair and put it over her shoulder, where it fanned into a gilded curtain. “You’re twenty-two years of age.”
“In addition to which, I’m Zoe’s daughter?” she challenged him quietly.
“Clearly Zoe couldn’t ask for a more loyal daughter. No, Antoinette, I look at you as a person in your own right. Your character, your personality are unique to you.”
“Then you must have noticed I’m very bright for my age?” She tried to smile.
“The brightest of all,” he answered, his voice smoky with sensuality.
“And you, of course, are the one seducing me.”
At that he laughed, dancing lights in his eyes. “God, when I pray every night my self-control will prevail.”
Toni let her gaze slip past him white she tried to say what was in her mind. He was playing her like a flute. “Tha
t may be your intention, but you send out two abundantly clear, conflicting messages, Byrne. One is, Come here to me. The other is, Don’t encroach on my male space.”
He gave a heart-stopping smile. Totally unfair. “Well, it just reveals my disordered frame of mind. Your fault, Antoinette. Having said that, you can stop trying to analyze me. What you really have to worry about is this.”
The heat of his kiss seemed to peel her skin. There were no stages of response. Passion exploded like flame to gasoline. He pushed her head into the crook of his arm, a tall, strong man overpowering a slender young woman, delicate in comparison. No goddess in terms of control, but mortal woman dominated by a man’s sensational primal sex drive.
Yet her body didn’t resist him. It curved closer, like Leda curling to embrace the swan. There was no rational answer to the flame that ignited them, nor even some interacting chemical charge that mastered them. It was magic. A fantasy realm. For lovers alone.
She wanted him so badly she was facing total surrender to the mastery he could summon so effortlessly. He was crushing her, kissing her as though his tight control had fractured, threatening to split asunder, catching them both up.
When his hand sought her breast, she trembled like a sapling in the wind. The level of excitement was so high great bursts of heat radiated to all parts of her body, like a churning current overloading her veins. Such arousal demanded release. His hands were moving over her hips, defining the shape of her body, drawn impetuously, compulsively to her quivering core.
Where this would inevitably lead had already filtered into her overheated brain. She was leaving him in no doubt of her desperate need, but to be cast aside afterward would surely kill her. She knew she couldn’t endure it. Desire was mutual. She could hardly fail to know that from the arousal of his hard, hungry body, the faint tremble in his powerful arms, but this was desire working on two levels. She loved him. She was absolutely connected to her feelings, openly expressing them, but his feelings weren’t the same. Maybe he could never bring himself to put his heart into a woman’s hands. Maybe he valued self-denial, if self-denial was necessary to protect his male supremacy. Yet he carried his passion into immediate action. Sweeping all before him.
“Byrne!” She had to gasp, partly out of excitement carried to extremes. She had almost added, My love. Her pride stopped her.
He held her very tight, his body molten. “I won’t hurt you. I can’t hurt you.” But every time they came together he found it harder and harder to ride the rapids. The fact she responded to him so ravishingly beat up powerful waves of urgency. That fragrance on her skin. It was extraordinary. God, she was so sweet, incredibly endearing, a little shy of her own beautiful body. Slowly, very slowly, wishing to protect her, he got control of his caressing hands, fighting the almighty urge to carry her to her bedroom. It wasn’t normal to him to put all considerations aside, but he almost had. It was a mark of his intense involvement. He drew back his head, staring into her rapt face. Her eyes were tightly closed and she was breathing through parted lips. The intensity of their lovemaking had robbed her of natural colour. She was as pale as porcelain.
“Open your eyes, Toni. Please.” He sounded shaken even to himself.
“I don’t want to.” For the first time in her life she was frightened of confronting reality. To look at him was to drown in a silver lake. “I feel as though you put me under a spell.”
A sensation common to him. He couldn’t deal with it, either. “From now on I think we oughtn’t to be alone.”
“I think you may be right.” She gave a little trembly laugh and permitted her eyes to open on his marvelous face.
She didn’t know it, but her arousal was such the pupils of her eyes, the focus of her face, had invaded the violet-blue irises. “Now we know how strong our feelings are, we’ll have to work at keeping them under control,” he said a little harshly.
“I don’t see it as easy!” Her breath fluttered in her throat.
“No.” He felt as protective of her as when she had surprised and delighted him as a little girl with her beauty and charm. “I’m sure you have a very nice bed,” he said with something close to self-mockery, “but what do you say to a spin in the helicopter? We need a diversion. I’ll take it out over the desert.”
Where he led, she had to follow. “I’d like that, Byrne. If you give me a moment to catch my breath and maybe change out of this dress.”
He looked at her. Springtime in a gauzy low-necked flower-patterned dress that revealed her peaking breasts.
His mouth twisted. “You’d look lovely in an old burlap bag.” Her beauty wasn’t made up of lighting, of makeup, of colour, it was simply there. Absolute.
CHAPTER SIX
FLYING over the desert, Toni remembered trying to explain to one of her French friends, who held the traditional concept of a desert as a Sahara of shifting sand quite devoid of vegetation, what her desert home was like. The Australian desert landscape was quite different to anywhere else on earth. There were sand hills to the horizon, but equally there were ancient colourful ranges, splendid gorges, flat-topped mesas and awe-inspiring monolithic rocks presiding over vast spinifex plains and mulga flats with their diversity of vegetation. And in the depths of the gorges, water. Precious water. Here permanent pools were the fabled oases, the jade green water surrounded by lush rainforest growth—white-barked, green-foliaged gums, palms and pandanus, a profusion of ferns and mosses and orchidlike lilies. These were places that stole the breath away with their unexpectedness. This was the driest continent on earth, but an island, which permitted rain to reach the so-called Dead Heart from any direction. The phenomenal transformation of the desert after rain held them all in awe each time it appeared, the brief glory as uplifting and indelible as a deep spiritual experience, an affirmation of the survival of man, of the land, of the soul.
Even the glittering gibber plains had an enormous fascination. Here not even the millions of paper daisies, the everlastings, could encroach on the gibber stone desert they were flying over. Since time immemorial the ground was completely covered by stones of all shapes and sizes. The windblown sands had polished them to such a high degree they resembled glossy gemstones, reflecting the brilliant fire of opals, black opals, milk opals, the polished white quartz helping to create the effect of some wonderful mosaic laid down by the Creator. In the distance lay an eroded range, its bright raw earth colours beginning to turn violet as the atmospheric haze increased. The Outback was famous for its daily pageant of changing colour, a display Toni had sorely missed all the time she had been away.
“Seen enough?” Byrne called when they had been airborne some time.
“I’ll never see enough.” She raised her voice above the sound of the whirring rotors. “This is my country, Byrne. Every bit as much as it’s yours.”
He looked at her, smiled, his dark face full of approval.
When they were flying back Toni caught a glitter of light like a laser beam from the vast, empty land below them.
That’s odd Very odd, she thought, touching Byrne’s arm and pointing to the sun-baked earth. “A beam of light.”
“I see it.” He was instantly, sharply alert. “A dog, as well. A cattle dog. No dingo.”
The dog was racing in circles, obviously trying to attract attention, a comment on the dog’s intelligence.
“We’ll go down. Take a look,” Byrne mouthed.
Nearing the ground, they caught sight of a battered four-wheel drive, the chassis coated thickly with the all-pervading red dust There was no sign of life from the vehicle, which appeared to be half tipped into a depression beside a small stand of gnarled mulgas, one dead skeleton stark black against the blue, cloudless sky.
The dog had ceased its frantic circling, staring at the helicopter as it began its descent.
“Stay here,” Byrne ordered when they set down, turning to leave her.
She wasn’t about to disobey. Not a month went by without some tourist getting into serious trouble
trying to explore the desert, not a friendly environment. Incidents Hashed through Byrne’s mind, desert tragedies. It struck him forcibly this could be another. He felt the man’s presence before he saw him, lying on his side close to a sparse thicket of underbrush. Byrne moved to him quickly, speaking words of encouragement as he went. The survivor was maybe in his early sixties with silver hair tied back in a ponytail, and had that sadly shrunken appearance of the badly dehydrated, his skin red and shiny with sunburn.
“How’s it going?” Byrne went down on his haunches, taking the man’s wrist and feeling for his pulse. Slow.
“My nephew.” The man swallowed hoarsely, trying to raise his head. It fell back. “He’s gone ahead to see if he could get help.”
Byrne was already standing, keeping any sharp comment to himself. No matter how many warnings were posted, too few heeded what was a life-and-death warning. Don’t on any account leave your vehicle.
He limited himself to a quiet comment. “Hang in there, I’ll bring water and the first aid kit. Then I’ll track down your nephew. How long has he been gone?”
The man shook his head painfully, having lost all sense of time.
Byrne bent, touched his arm. “Try not to worry. He should be easy to spot from the air.”
He ran to the helicopter, his dark copper skin sheened with sweat by the time he reached it. Toni was already at the door opening, the first aid kit and a canteen of water to hand.
“A survivor?” she asked carefully when Byrne was near. The fact he was running gave her hope.
Byrne removed his Akubra, raked back his dark hair. “Elderly chap. In a bad way. He can’t tell me much. There’s a nephew. He’s gone on ahead.”
“Ahead where?” Toni asked in dismay. Her stomach twisted at the prospect they might have to deal with a dead man.
Byrne declined to answer. He took her hand while she jumped to the ground. “No one listens. That’s the in-credible thing.”.
“So what do you want me to do?” Toni asked briskly, her energy flowing in the emergency.
“Can you take charge of the guy?” he asked, reluctant to leave her but with no other option.
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