High-Stakes Bride

He could still serve in the regiment as an instructor if he wanted, but the offer hadn’t made Carter happy.

He had lost months of his life in captivity and almost as much again in and out of hospitals. Now he’d been given six weeks to improve his mobility and his attitude.

His jaw tightened as he walked out onto the veranda and stared down the winding shell path that led to the beach. He hadn’t been through months of pain and frustration to keep losing: he liked the life he’d had before and he wanted it back—and that included Dani.

If she would let him in.

She’d always been ultra independent and elusive. He’d had her door slammed in his face more than once—and always with justification. It was a fact that Special Forces was hard on relationships; his job took him away for months at a time. With the length of this last absence, he couldn’t blame her for wanting out, but that didn’t mean he was going to give up. He would bring her around—eventually.

She loved him.

All he had to do was convince her of that fact.

Dani drove the Dinosaur into the implement shed, turned off the ignition and climbed out of the bony metal seat. The silence after the loud rumbling of the engine was momentarily deafening.

She stared out into the soft early-evening light.

Carter was back. Finally.

Letting out a breath, she lowered herself onto an upturned bucket, for the moment comfortable with the dimness and the quiet.

She’d known he’d had to come back some time—she had expected him sooner than this—but still, seeing him had knocked her sideways, and finding out he had been injured had been a shock. Ever since he’d joined the army she’d nursed the fear that he’d get hurt, and now it had happened.

She shifted position and the faint twinge of stiffness in her own leg registered, and other even more unwelcome memories flooded back.

Six years ago she had been involved in a car accident that had killed both her mother and Robert Galbraith, and injured her. She had been home from Mason, taking a break from her first full year in physiotherapy practice. She had volunteered to drive Susan and Robert into town and drop them at the golf club for their weekly golf date before continuing on to pick up David, who had spent the night at a friend’s place. Out of sheer practicality they had taken Robert’s car, since he had had a trunk large enough to hold both sets of golf clubs. She could remember trying to avoid a large truck, the wheels of the car sliding in the layer of gravel on the verge. The car had fishtailed and the truck had slammed into the side of the vehicle. They’d rolled, ending upside-down in the ditch.

Dani had broken a leg and received cuts on her face and arms from the shattered windshield. Her mother, who was seated in the rear, had received the brunt of the impact from the truck and had died instantly. Robert Galbraith hadn’t lasted much longer. The ambulance medics had tried to resuscitate him on the way to the hospital, but without success. When the car had rolled, he’d sustained head injuries that meant that even if they had managed to generate a pulse, it was unlikely he would regain consciousness.

Dani hadn’t been judged to be at fault. The accident had happened on a narrow dirt road that was closer to one lane than two. There had been little room to manoeuvre, but even so, she had never been able to accept the verdict.

She had been an experienced enough driver, but most of her driving had been done on city roads, and in her own small sedan—not Robert Galbraith’s large automatic. At the time she had been feeling her way with the unfamiliar car and the road, which had recently had a new load of gravel spread on it. She had always believed that if either Robert or Susan had been behind the wheel, they would have managed the car and the slippery conditions better and so survived the crash. She wouldn’t have lost her mother and Robert—who had been the closest thing to a father she had ever known—and her much younger half-brother, David, wouldn’t have lost both his parents.

To compound her guilt, she knew that if Robert Galbraith and her mother were still alive, Galbraith Station wouldn’t be in such a shaky financial position.

With the help of a hired hand, Bill Harris, and Aunt Ellen, who had moved out of her townhouse in Mason and into Galbraith, Dani had quit her physiotherapist’s job and taken over the running of the farm while she sorted out the financial tangle of Robert Galbraith’s affairs.

Despite an outward appearance of wealth, neither Susan nor Robert had had a lot of money to spare, nor had ever imagined dying before their time—certainly not in a car accident on one of Jackson’s Ridge’s sleepiest country roads. They’d had insurance but only enough to cover the short-term debt owing on the property. Although it had been in the Galbraith family for generations, it had become heavily mortgaged through Robert’s various business ventures.

The investment structure, which had been solid while Robert was alive, had collapsed like a house of cards when he died. A kiwifruit orchard he’d had shares in had proved successful, but fluctuations in the market had eaten away the slim profits, and without Robert at the helm, the operation had eventually been sold at a small loss. The largest loss had occurred in the most lucrative of Robert’s enterprises and his pet project: his horse breaking and training business.

A renowned horse breaker, Robert had had a lengthy client list and had commanded high fees. The business, which had started out on a shoestring budget, had expanded rapidly. To cope with the demand, Susan had begun working full-time with the horses, and a large amount of investment capital had been sunk into building a set of stables and a covered training facility. While Robert had been alive the income had been steady and substantial, more than enough to cover the mortgage, but, within days of his death, the horses had been removed and the income had dried up.

The final nail in the coffin was an ostrich contract Robert had bought into just before he’d died—a deal which required the purchase of a bird a year for a further period of five years at an exorbitant fixed price. So far the venture had failed to make anything but a loss. The ostrich industry had folded, and prices for the birds and the products had plummeted, leaving investors with a financial lemon that continued to squeeze them dry. The contracts were cleverly executed and legally binding, creating a financial drag that tied investors into paying for birds that were more use in a zoo than on a farm. For years Dani and the group of investors had waited for the syndicate that had set up the farm to fold, so freeing them, but against the odds the ostrich facility continued.

The easy option would have been to sell off a parcel of land to cover the debts, but over the past few years Robert Galbraith had already sold off the maximum amount of land allowed under the local authority rules to help fund the costs of the new businesses—the farm could no longer be subdivided. Any debts now had to be met out of farm capital.

During Dani’s first interview with the bank, the possibility of bankruptcy and a mortgagee sale had been suggested, but she had refused to give in to that option. Her reaction had been knee-jerk and fierce. In his will, Robert Galbraith had entrusted her not only with David’s care, but with Galbraith Station, which had been left jointly to both her and David. If Robert and Susan had still been alive, Galbraith Station would have prospered not only in a business sense but as the warm hub of their family.

The fact that they had died and she had had a part in it haunted her. For years—a shadowy carryover from childhood—she had quietly kept a watch on Susan, Robert and David. The vigilance had been habitual and ingrained. Sometimes Susan had chided her about being overprotective, but she’d accepted the way Dani felt: they were her family, and doubly precious to her because of the past.

But no amount of checking on the people around her family or personally ensuring their safety had helped in the few seconds it had taken for Susan and Robert’s lives to end. As hard as she’d tried, she’d been powerless to save them, but she was determined to help David—and to save Galbraith.

Pushing to her feet, Dani walked out into the dusty area in front of the barn and stared at the clear blue sky. The shadows were lengthening and the air had cooled slightly, but it was still unseasonably hot.

Brown hills, the texture of the grass like velvet with the low angle of the sun, rolled into the hazy distance. Diminished as the property was, it was still substantial enough to provide a good income—provided there was rain.

The drought couldn’t have happened at a worse time. The slow death of Galbraith Station was excruciating. Sometimes she felt as if the place was sucking every last iota of strength and endurance from her.

Directly after the funeral, when the will had been read, she’d been surprised to discover shares in the station had been left to her, but once the financial situation was sorted out she would hand them over to David. He’d need every resource at his disposal to keep the property, let alone farm it, and once he’d completed his agricultural diploma, she meant to see that he got his chance.

Methodically, she checked the tractor’s diesel tank and refilled it ready for the morning. With fingers that were annoyingly clumsy, she reversed the pouring spout on the diesel container, screwed on the lid, and stored it in the corner of the shed. Picking up a rag, she wiped her hands, nose automatically wrinkling at the strong smell of the diesel.

Blankly, she stared at her hands. Her fingers were long, the shape of her hands elegant. As hard as she’d tried she could never get comfortable with the acrid smells, or with what the oil and diesel did to her skin and nails. Every now and then she rebelled and put on a coat of nail polish, only to go through the anger/denial thing when the next day the colour gradually chipped, peeled or dissolved away. Lately, she’d stopped bothering. Like her life, her beauty regime was pared down to the basics.

Absently, she strolled back to the house, taking a circuitous route through the vegetable garden. On the way she stopped to pick a lettuce, sprigs of basil and several ripe tomatoes for dinner—the habit of never walking anywhere without a purpose ingrained.

A practical task or not, for long moments she simply soaked in the pleasure of the garden, her arms filled with salad vegetables, eyes half-closed as she listened to the sound of the wind sifting through the trees and the melodic whistle of tui birds.

A faint click, as if a door had just been softly closed, jerked her head around.

Frowning, she studied the corrugated iron back of the barn, which provided a wind-shelter for the garden. The main doors, which were around the other side, were open, and usually stayed open unless the weather was wet.

On Galbraith Station theft had never been a problem; it was too isolated for casual thievery and, in any case, Jackson’s Ridge was hardly a breeding ground for criminals. The town itself was small and sleepy—a coastal hideaway that attracted a few regular holidaymakers each summer and little else. Added to that Galbraith Station was a good twenty-minute drive out of town on a dusty dirt road. Apart from the occasional boatload of picnickers who landed on the beach below the house, Dani was lucky to see a stranger. Consequently, the house and shed doors were seldom locked.

With a silent tread, she walked around the barn, straining to listen and separate the sounds that were always there: the roar of the surf, the creak as one of the branches of the flame tree in the home paddock sawed against another, the metallic clank when the wind came from the southwest and lifted a loose piece of roofing iron on the barn. This one hadn’t been a product of Mother Nature, it had been a definite click.

Her tension mounted as she examined dusty farm implements and a towering pile of hay, the spurt of fear wiping out almost two decades of a measured, safe existence, abruptly transporting her back to a time when every sound had been suspect. Nothing appeared to be missing or out of place, and there was no sign that anyone, or anything had been in the barn but dust, birds and maybe a few mice. Shaking her head, she skimmed the dark reaches of the barn.

Something flickered in the shadows. A split second later a dark form arrowed past her, narrowly missing her head. Dani ducked, adrenaline rocketing through her veins as tomatoes and herbs scattered on the dusty concrete floor.

Nesting swallows.

Letting out a breath, Dani eased the pressure on the lettuce, which was crushed against her chest, bent and retrieved a tomato. A second swallow dove down from the rafters, slicing close as it flew through the doors.

Automatically, her gaze followed the tiny bird as it arced into the sky then wheeled for another run into the barn. Grabbing the rest of the bruised tomatoes and the basil, she retreated back out into the sunlight.

“Okay, okay…I haven’t disturbed your babies.”

And nobody else had, either. The swallows were aggressive. If anybody had been in the barn the birds would have been in the air, flying, before she had gotten there. The sound she’d heard must have been either the birds or some small animal, perhaps a rat, upsetting something.

Shrugging, she started toward the house. As she reached the veranda the distinct sound of a car hitting potholes stopped her in her tracks. Opening the screen door, she deposited the vegetables on the bench and turned to see who her visitor was.

The car was shiny beige and unfamiliar. Frowning, she studied the sleek expensive lines. She was used to cars pulling up at the clinic, which was further down the drive, but not this late. Clinic hours were normally ten until three, which fitted in with her work routine and suited clients who wanted to make an appointment during their lunch break.

Dust rose in a cloud around the vehicle as she walked to meet the visitor. After the scare just moments ago, she felt tense and a little jittery. It wasn’t likely that someone arriving at her front door in daylight would give her trouble, but since Ellen had died she’d become acutely aware of her vulnerability on the isolated farm.

Lifting a hand to shade her eyes, Dani studied the man who climbed out from behind the wheel. He was tall, dark and physically imposing, with the kind of smooth good looks that would make most women look twice.

He was wearing a suit. Her stomach dropped. He wasn’t a real estate agent, his car was too clean and he didn’t have any advertising slapped on his number plate. That meant he had to be with one of the stock and station agents—or the bank.

As soon as she caught a whiff of the subtle expensive cologne he was wearing, she crossed off the stock and station agencies.

“Ms. Marlow?”

“That’s right.”

She didn’t miss the quick, male once-over he gave her. Even in a small place like Jackson’s Ridge, she had gotten used to that look long before she’d turned sixteen. Deliberately, she turned her head so he caught the scar on the right side of her jaw, the narrow slash courtesy of the accident. She generally found that took some of the icing off the cake. She might look a certain way, but that didn’t mean she was.

He introduced himself as Roger Wells, the new branch manager of Jackson’s Ridge’s only bank and slipped a business card from his wallet. “Nice place you’ve got here.”

Dani tucked the card in her jeans pocket and tried not to notice how grubby her fingers were despite the wipe with the rag. Machine oil took no prisoners. “It’s been a lot nicer in the past.”

Galbraith used to be a showplace, with a six-bedroom homestead and extensive gardens. Now the house was in need of a coat of paint and repairs to the roof and verandas, and the gardens needed a lot more care and energy than she could expend.

He shoved both hands in his pants pockets, going for the casual GQ look and achieving it. “I just took a drive down to the beach. The views are really something.”

Dani’s spine tightened. She hadn’t heard a vehicle until just now, which wasn’t surprising, because the Dinosaur made so much noise, but even so she should have heard him sooner. That meant he must have driven down one of the stock roads at the far end of the farm, turned onto the beach road then back up onto the plateau via another stock road, bypassing most of the driveway to the house. Lately she’d heard more than the usual traffic along the beach road, and some of it at night. Despite the fact that it was trespassing, normally she didn’t worry about the unauthorised access, because occasionally locals liked to surf-cast off the beach, but with the syndicate people sniffing around, she was extra wary. “Jackson’s Bay is beautiful.”

Even that was a mild understatement: it was spectacular—lonely and a little wild—a long, smooth crescent that curved into the distance and took a big bite out of the local coastline. Lately, owing to the syndicate’s interest in Jackson’s Ridge, she’d been inundated with more than the usual amount of real estate agents, all wanting her and David to sell. “So what can I do for you, Mr. Wells?” As open and pleasant as Wells seemed, it was after six, the sun was setting, and she wasn’t inclined to trust him.

White teeth gleamed. “This is just a quick call to introduce myself and let you know it’s business as usual with the bank. I like to take a personal interest in my clients.”

She just bet he did. Maybe she was being oversensitive, there was nothing in the statement to take offence at, but Roger Wells was a stark change from Harold Buckley, the previous manager. Mr. Buckley had been with the bank for as long as Dani could remember, and she’d liked him. In all those years, he had never once bothered to take a drive out to Galbraith, let alone take an uninvited tour of the property. If there was any business to be done, it had always been completed in his office during business hours.

Wells made a few bland observations about the severity of the drought and the state of the economy—nothing that Dani hadn’t tortured herself with a thousand times over already—then finally got to what really interested him, Galbraith’s stock numbers.

Setting her jaw, Dani reeled off the figures. A year ago that many head of cattle would have represented a slim, but comfortable return, but with the price of beef falling to a ten-year low, her profit margin was gone and Wells knew it. “Is there a problem with the bank financing farm mortgages? I hear Tom Stoddard’s looking at selling up.”

The blunt tactic didn’t net a return. “The bank’s commitment to farmers hasn’t changed.”

Dani kept her face expressionless. She’d seen the ad on T.V.—something about the “friendly bank.” From what she’d heard, lately, the Jackson’s Ridge bank was as friendly as a rottweiler. They had squeezed Tom so tight his options were gone.

After a few more uncomfortable pleasantries, Wells climbed back into his car and drove away. Dani watched the plume of dust until it dissipated, any appetite she’d had gone. As bland and pleasant as Wells had been, he represented trouble. He might have been on her land uninvited, but technically he owned more of Galbraith Station than either she or her brother did.

Chapter 4

The following afternoon, after taking a trip into town to buy groceries, Dani strolled down to the waterfront and met Becca McKay at Jackson’s Ridge’s only café.

Becca was the same age as Dani—a tanned, willowy blonde who’d spent most of her life travelling. Five years ago she had landed in Jackson’s Ridge for a summer and waited tables for Nola, until she’d been swept off her feet by one of the coast’s pastoral barons.

The marriage had caught everyone in Jackson’s Ridge cold. John McKay was twelve years older than Becca and a widower. To compound matters, Becca’s boss, Nola, just happened to be one of John’s sisters. Nola had had an amiable relationship with Becca until John had started turning up as a regular customer. Since then, she hadn’t been able to hide her disapproval of the age difference, or her opinion that the marriage was doomed to failure—despite the fact that John and Becca now had two children, with a third on the way.

Becca chose a table outside under a shade sail and shot her a meaningful look. “I heard Carter’s back.”

Dani pulled out a chair, sat down and braced herself. She and Becca had been friends for years, but they had differing opinions about Carter. Despite Carter’s reputation for being cool and elusive, Becca was certain he was prime husband material—for the right woman. “How did you find out?”

Becca draped a colourful fringed bag that matched the orange and pink stripes of her tank top over the back of her chair. “John had a face-to-face in the supermarket. Carter reached for a bottle of hot sauce—he was getting ketchup for the kids. How typical is that?”

Dani couldn’t help thinking that when it came to John McKay it was very typical. He was a devoted husband and father and made no bones about the fact that his wife and children came first. “Be warned. Carter Rawlings is not my favourite topic.”

“Then you’re on your own, because the whole town’s humming. Word is out that he’s got to pop the question this time.”

Dani studied the laminated menu. “He did make a proposition last time he was back, but it was more along the lines of a suggestion that it would be more convenient all around if I moved in with him. I don’t recall that a ring was part of the deal.”

Dani poured two glasses of water from the carafe on the table. There had been no moonlight, no bended knee, just pure practicality. She took a sip of water and tried to forget the moment. Carter had been on his way out the door, his bags packed, his orders and passport on his bedside table, with that cool, distant look in his gaze. As always, the exit was practiced and slick. Dani didn’t like to dwell on how many women had been put through the exact same routine. Even in Jackson’s Ridge Carter had a certain reputation, and he hadn’t earned it by being caught up in emotion. She shrugged. “I wasn’t interested. The way I saw it, it was all about convenience. His.”

Becca frowned. “Are you sure it’s finished? Don’t forget, he’s a guy. They think differently—food, sex, football, business—and not necessarily in that order.”

The screen door flipped open as Nola walked toward them with a pad.

“Twelve months sure. Carter and I broke up when he left. We’re finished.”

Nola’s expression went utterly blank. She was a dedicated lifetime member of the Carter Rawlings fan club. In her eyes he could do no wrong, whereas Dani did wrong on a regular basis—like now, for example.

Becca took one look at Nola’s face and set the menu down. “We’ll have two lattes while we figure out what else we want. Is that okay?”

Nola’s notebook snapped closed.

Becca waited until she was out of earshot. “She’s in shock.”

“I can’t think why. It’s the third time it’s happened.”

Becca’s expression was rueful. “Only the third? The moon would have to turn blue before Nola admitted she might have it wrong. Once she gets her teeth into an idea she hangs on like grim death. According to John she had a thing going with Walter Douglas from the butcher shop when they were at school. He ended up marrying someone else and Nola’s refused to date since. That’s thirty-five years on the shelf because she figures that someone else got her guy.”

The screen door to the café flipped open as a couple left.

“Talking about male cheesecake…” Becca jerked her head to indicate Roger Wells, who was seated inside near the window then averted her gaze as he pushed his chair back and strolled toward the door. She rolled her eyes. “He’s coming this way. Do I look married?”

“Becca, you’re six months pregnant. He’s got to figure that you’ve at least got a guy.”

“I guess. Plus he’s just been over the farm books. What he doesn’t know about me isn’t worth printing.” With a grin, she patted her belly. “Did I tell you it’s a girl? I had a scan on Monday. John’s over the moon.”