Master of the Outback

by Margaret Way

  Trevelyan would be dropping the cattlemen off along the way. He made brief introductions, and all four men responded with genuine friendliness and courtesy.

  Less than five minutes later they were all seated in a superior styled and fitted-out cabin. She could see that the very comfortable fully articulated club seating had been configured for the cattlemen to continue their discussions in private. She sat farther back in the aircraft, pretty well on her own, which suited her, marvelling at the state-of-the-art technology—fingertip controls, an audio-visual system, LED lighting, etc. Aft was a restroom, no doubt offering toilet, vanity and other upmarket amenities.

  They were underway. The aircraft was taxiing down the runway, then within moments, smooth as silk, it gained height, fast climbing into the dazzling blue air. There was no loud drone from the twin turbo props. Inside the aircraft it was remarkably quiet. She could even darken the window, if she so chose. Derryl had elected to take the trip in the cockpit with his brother, which told her he wasn’t about to waste time on her. She was grateful for that.

  Some change in the aircraft woke her. A change in altitude. She straightened up, amazed to find she had drifted off. Smoothing her hair, she stared out of the window. Trevelyan was bringing the King Air around in a slow tilting curve, making a descent onto what appeared to be a fairly large settlement in the middle of nowhere. A whole collection of buildings sprawled beneath her, and further off mobs of cattle browsed peacefully on a lushness she had not expected to see. But then this was Australia—a continent of searing drought and raging floods.

  The great irony was that the arid red landscape had turned into a wild paradise. The Three Great Rivers system of the Outback—Georgina, Diamantina, Cooper Creek—now mostly dry, had run with water in some places fifty miles wide. What lay beneath her was the nation’s fabled Channel Country in the remote south-west. It was the country’s leading producer of beef, the home of the cattle kings.

  The Great Flood, as it was now called, had filled every channel, billabong, waterhole, and clay pan. The floodwaters had even reached the ephemeral Lake Eyre at the continent’s centre, the lowest point. Lake Eyre filled rarely—maybe twice in a century. She had seen pictures published in all the newspapers of the thousands and thousands of birds, including the wonderful pelicans that had flown thousands of kilometres to breed there. How did the birds know? They had to fly continual reconnaissance missions. But this was Australia—a land of ten-year droughts and monstrous floods. Somehow the land and the people came back.

  She found herself gritting her teeth as they prepared to land on the all weather airstrip. She had never been ecstatic about flying, even in the Airbus. This flight had been remarkably smooth, but she wasn’t at home in light aircraft, however splendid. Landing was more dangerous than taking off. The four cattlemen were ready to disembark, all four remembering her name, doffing their akubras politely. Painted on the corrugated iron roof of the hangar below, she had seen the name of the station: Kuna Kura Downs.

  Derryl Trevelyan followed the disembarking cattlemen, talking all the while, Trevelyan came last. He beckoned to her, brilliant dark eyes continuing to measure her, the sort of person she was.

  “Opportunity to stretch your legs,” he said, a smile deepening the sexy brackets at the sides of his mouth.

  “Thank you.” God, how a smile could challenge one’s composure! “But the seating is anything but cramped.”

  “You enjoyed the flight?”

  She nodded. “I have to admit it was so smooth I fell asleep.”

  “Flying conditions were excellent,” he said. “Come along. You might like to meet our friends and closest neighbours to the north-east—the Rawleighs. We won’t be staying more than ten minutes. I want to get home.”

  She did what she was told. Trevelyan commanded. People obeyed. She felt a touch jittery, as though he knew all about her but had still allowed her to come. Surely that couldn’t be so? He couldn’t know about Catherine and the family connection? A man like that would be too busy to check out a mere ghostwriter. Something he might think akin to a ventriloquist’s dummy.

  A tall, athletic young woman, with long dark hair worn in a thick plait down her back, detached herself from the small group, running towards Trevelyan, arms uplifted in greeting, her lightly tanned face wreathed in welcoming smiles.

  All hail the conquering hero!

  Genevieve guessed he was long used to it.

  “Bret!” the young woman exclaimed in a kind of ecstasy, launching herself at him.

  Genevieve waited with great interest for Trevelyan’s response. He didn’t draw her to him, as the young woman clearly hoped. He didn’t go so far as to give her the salute with a kiss on both cheeks either, but he did dip his handsome head to brush her cheek. “How are you, Liane?”

  Information started to drill through Genevieve’s brain. Rawleigh? Hadn’t he once been engaged to a Liane Rawleigh?

  No time to ponder. There were introductions to be made. Up close, Liane Rawleigh put her in mind of a sleek thoroughbred. She was exceptionally good-looking, with ice-blue eyes in stunning contrast to her dark hair. She appeared unable to extricate herself from Trevelyan—indeed she was clinging to him with possessive pride. The engagement might well be off, but it was obvious Liane hadn’t fallen out of love with him. So who had ditched whom? How had it come about?

  Liane continued to hang off his arm while he introduced Genevieve as the writer his great-aunt had hired to help her with her book. Liane regarded her with what Genevieve interpreted as an expression of guarded superiority. Genevieve wasn’t an invited guest.

  Ms Rawleigh had an educated, rather assertive voice. “Have you ever done anything like that before?” she questioned, as though Genevieve’s chances of successfully ghosting a distinguished biography of the Trevelyan family were extremely slim. Her air of general disregard struck Genevieve as very off-putting. In a way it was much like Derryl Trevelyan’s manner. Liane’s tight smile to her was a far different variety from the one bestowed upon the cattle baron Trevelyan. She couldn’t see why, but Genevieve thought there was something vaguely malicious about it. Maybe it was a trick of the heavy-lidded eyes.

  Super-athletic in her sapphire T-shirt and skin-tight jeans, she had a high full bust over an enviably narrow waist and slim hips, and as Genevieve was appraising Trevelyan’s ex-fiancée, Liane Rawleigh was giving her a comprehensive once over. Women were much harder to fool than men. Liane would have checked her eyes, skin, hair, her figure and either consider she had deliberately played down her looks or she had little style to speak of.

  “I’m confident I can do the job,” Genevieve responded pleasantly, without actually answering the question.

  “Well, I wish you luck.” Liane spoke like a woman who never ceased to be amazed. “Come over and meet Daddy. He wants a word with you, Bret, if you have a moment. I should warn you, I think it’s about Kit.”

  Trevelyan responded with an elegant shift of a wide shoulder. He had beautiful, thick raven hair that curled up at the collar of his bush shirt. No time for the hairdresser, like his brother. He didn’t have his younger brother’s insufferable arrogance either—and he was the boss.

  “Well, he is having a very tough time of it,” Trevelyan commented.

  Genevieve liked his compassion.

  “Wallowing in it,” Liane offered derisively.

  Trevelyan didn’t respond. He began to move off—a man blessed with vibrant energy.

  Lew Rawleigh looked the part of a prominent, prosperous cattle man. The surprise was he was short. No more than five-nine in his high boots. Trevelyan towered over him. But his body was substantial—heavy shoulders, tightly muscled arms, trim through the middle—and he had iron-grey hair, charcoal-coloured eyes. He greeted Genevieve in cordial fashion. Certainly he was friendlier than his daughter.

 
“Ms Grenville.”

  “Please—Gena.”

  “Good to meet you, Gena. We hope to see more of you while you’re here.”

  “I’d like that.” A white lie. She knew Liane Rawleigh hadn’t taken to her, nor she to Liane.

  Genevieve had her hand pumped twice. She just managed not to wince. Trevelyan, a big man, hadn’t subjected her to a bonecrusher, though she was sure Lew Rawleigh was unaware of his vice-like grip. His gaze was keen, as though he was trying to place her. That would be an ever-present anxiety. Some flicker of recognition. She was a woman harbouring a secret. Some might call it a guilty secret. She did bear a resemblance to her great-aunt Catherine. But her colouring was of a different palette. Anyway, Lew Rawleigh was somewhere in his mid-fifties. He would have been a small child at the time.

  Nevertheless he would know of that early tragedy on Djangala Station. She supposed everyone in the Outback would have accepted it as a terrible accident. Sadly, people all too frequently stood too close to rocky ledges, shelves of cliffs, even precipices. The thrill was in the danger.

  Liane had lifted her dark head eagerly to Trevelyan, all sweetness and light. “You’re going to come up to the house for coffee, aren’t you, Bret?” she urged. “Derryl said he’d like some.”

  Trevelyan declined. “I’m really sorry, Liane, but I need to get back. Another time, perhaps?”

  The sweetness vanished. Liane couldn’t control her reaction. “God, you spend too much time on Djangala as it is!” She couldn’t hide her disappointment, or the edge of anger in her voice.

  “That’s my job, Liane,” he said smoothly, but with an air of finality.

  Clearly this was a very sore point with Liane. To Genevieve’s keenly observant eyes Trevelyan looked utterly unmoved, although Genevieve could sense upset as well as sexual excitement in Liane.

  “Is there something you wanted to say to me, Lew?” He turned back to Liane’s father with an entirely different expression.

  “If you wouldn’t mind sparing me a few minutes?” Lew Rawleigh shoved his large hands into the pockets of his dusty jeans. “I just heard the stock squad have frozen Kit Wakefield’s account. Just about everything has gone wrong for poor Kit.”

  “All the afflictions of Job,” Trevelyan remarked, placing a hand on the older man’s shoulder to lead him a short distance away to discuss the financial plight of the man Genevieve supposed was a fellow cattleman.

  “Poor old Kit be damned!” Liane huffed and puffed. “He’s only himself to blame. His wife drowned in a freak flash flood last year. She paid a lethal pride for a piece of utter stupidity, but she wasn’t an Outback girl. Everyone rallied around Kit—we were all very supportive—but before long he was hitting the bottle big-time and making a lot of bad decisions. I’m not the least surprised he’s in trouble, and expecting us to bail him out.”

  For a moment Genevieve was at a loss for words. She felt an urgent need for Liane to stop. A young woman had lost her life. God knew the terror that young woman must have felt with a wall of water coming at her, the depths of anguish her husband must feel now. Genevieve shuddered in horror. Where was the sympathy? The compassion?

  “Surely a year is a very short time to mourn the death of a wife in such devastating circumstances?” she said. “Heartbreak is very difficult to overcome. Lives get derailed. It would take a long time to get back to even a semblance of normal life.”

  Liane’s blue eyes snapped back from staring after Trevelyan’s shot daggers at her. Obviously he was the only one worth paying attention to. Everything and everybody appeared to be only a background for Bret Trevelyan.

  “Armchair psychologist, are we? He didn’t love her,” she stated, flicking aloft an impatient hand. “He married her on the rebound. A case of catch-as-catch-can,” she added cruelly.

  Genevieve stared back through her round glasses, thoroughly dismayed. What had Trevelyan seen in this woman? What had inspired his love, even if it had only been for the short term? Okay, she was physically very attractive. And he’d probably known her all her life. The Outback was vast, but there were very few people in it. Proclivity? Everyone would know everyone else?

  And Liane’s way with him was vastly different from her way with anyone she didn’t consider important in the scheme of things.

  “What was his wife’s first name?” Was it because of Catherine she had instantly identified with the drowned young woman, as if they had once been friends? Was she already drawing a connecting line?

  “Sondra. Silly name.”

  “I like it.”

  “You would.” Liane gave an acerbic laugh.

  “And so would countless numbers of people,” Genevieve said, torn by an urge to rattle Liane Rawleigh’s cage.

  Here was a woman potentially dangerous. A snap judgement, but she was pretty sure her instincts were spot-on. Liane Rawleigh was a proud woman, a vengeful woman. A woman who barely beneath the surface was filled with discontent, possibly a total dissatisfaction with her life. And why not? She still loved Trevelyan. The break-up of any engagement was an emotionally wrenching turn of events. No one knew that better than she. She started to look for excuses. Maybe the abrasive manner was a cover-up? It wasn’t easy dealing with a sense of failure, hurt and humiliation. But where was the compassion for Sondra Wakefield, let alone the grieving living Kit? Liane sounded as if she despised Sondra Wakefield. That telling catch-as-catch-can. What could have inspired that?

  “Are you certain it was a marriage on the rebound?” she found herself asking, in perhaps too probing a voice.

  “I should be.” Liane’s glare was hard and intense. “Who are you, anyway? Some sort of counsellor? As far as I know you’ve been employed by Hester to do the job of ghostwriting.”

  “I merely asked a question.” Genevieve’s reply was mild, though she felt exposed to this woman’s dark side.

  Liane lifted a haughty chin. “To answer your question, I turned Kit Wakefield down at least twice.”

  “Oh, I see.” Genevieve spoke as though she’d been offered a more than adequate explanation. “I understood you were engaged to Bret Trevelyan at one time?”

  What did she have to lose by asking a few pertinent questions—or impertinent questions for that matter? She needed to know a great deal more about everyone within the Trevelyan circle. Throw out a few challenges if she had to.

  “Nothing to do with you.” The startling blue eyes flared like the sun off ice.

  “Forgive me. I didn’t mean to upset you.” Genevieve spoke with what she hoped was an appropriate note of apology.

  Liane shrugged, a bitter smile running across her mouth. “What happened was that I got tired of waiting for Bret to set a date for our wedding. It’s always Djangala. He’s married to the place. I admit it’s a huge responsibility. Too much has been put on his shoulders right from when he was a kid. But I wasn’t going to take second place. Not me!”

  She wasn’t speaking the truth. No way had Liane Rawleigh decided to break off the engagement. She was still crazily in love with him. Liane was also sure Trevelyan wouldn’t talk about it, allowing her to put whatever spin she liked on their split.

  “So how long do you think you’ll be here?” Liane’s eyes returned to fixating on Trevelyan’s tall, commanding figure. Obviously every moment of time with him was precious.

  “I have six months at my disposal.” Genevieve felt a stab of pity for her.

  Liane’s head snapped back. “Surely it won’t take that long?” She looked as if she was struggling to come to terms with it. “Hester has gathered all possible documentation. You won’t have to conduct any searches. She’s been at it like a bower bird for years on end. She has the Trevelyan family history at her fingertips—both from Cornwall and Australia.”

  “Six months isn’t a long time,” Ge
nevieve pointed out. “I’m surprised you would think it is. The first draft must be completed. The final draft can be done elsewhere, but I’ll have my work cut out even then.”

  “Well, that’s what you’re here for, isn’t it?” Liane asked with cold rationalisation. “To work?”

  “Certainly. But I intend to take my time off. I want to see Uluru and the Olgas again. Bret did say he would make that possible.”

  The finely arched black brows shot to her hairline. “Bret did?” Liane’s stare could have drilled a hole in a steel door. She actually looked quite savage. They might have been enemies on a battlefield.

  “I imagine he could organise it,” Genevieve responded with composure. “He didn’t say he would take me, of course. I appreciate he’s a very busy man. Maybe Derryl?”

  A look of amusement crossed Liane’s high-mettled face. “You’re not Derryl’s type, my dear. Derryl likes glamour girls, not academics. Besides, Derryl can’t fly the Beechcraft. I wouldn’t go making any plans either. Hester will keep you extremely busy. She’s a very domineering old b—biddy.” She’d nearly said bitch—stopped just in time. “Thinks she’s far more important in the scheme of things than she is. We never did get on. I tried, but pretty soon I didn’t bother. I know she did her utmost to influence Bret against me. Unforgivable in my book. Don’t worry, Ms Grenville, you’ll be expected to toe a fine line.”

  “I assure you I haven’t thought differently.” Genevieve’s answer was mild. “Nevertheless, I’m entitled to my time off. That was part of our agreement.”

  “Make sure Uluru and the Olgas are your only distractions.” Liane’s stare was very direct.

  It was an unequivocal warning.

  “What are you saying?”