The Australian's Society Bride

Instantly heat raged around her body. Her skin was melting as the hot blood fizzed through her arteries, ensuring she shook even further. “Yes, I will come riding with you. I was just trying to remember the last time we went riding alone,” she managed, hoping she hadn’t turned scarlet. Both of them had been riding since they could walk. Both of them were very accomplished. Heavens, Boyd was a top class polo player. But she couldn’t remember the last time they had been on their own.

He laughed, sounding particularly at ease, even happy.

It came to her how much she loved his voice and his laugh! It was a sound she adored, yet somehow it disturbed her. It made her bones turn liquid. Even the way he said her name was enough to turn her knees to jelly.

“I’m surprised you don’t remember,” he said, suddenly pinning her with his blue eyes. “You told me you hated me and I couldn’t placate you.”

Didn’t he realise it had just been another outburst against the pull she felt towards him? She willed herself to speak calmly. “I don’t hate you, Boyd. It’s just sometimes I’m not at ease with you. Or you with me. I’m not a fool.”

How could she possibly say: You’re the moon and stars to me. When you touch me I dissolve?

Why did she become so erotically charged with Boyd and no one else?

He was looking at her intently. “I realise I make you sparkle with temper, revolt, whatever. I have a mental image of you at the age it all started. You were around sixteen. You’d been really sweet up until then.”

You mean I was your little slave.

“It’s called growing up,” she said coolly. “Finding one’s own identity. Sometimes you do make me very angry,” she admitted. “You’re so terribly…”

“What?” He pressed for an answer.

“Dominant,” she flashed back with spirit. “The family idol, born to be worshipped. You mock me like I’m a—”

“Nonsense!” he cut in. “Why are you so unwilling to really answer my question? It’s all evasion with you these days. That makes me sad. It’s not any authority I might have that angers you. It’s something else. So far as the mockery goes, it’s the other way around. I see it in your face and in your voice. I can see it now.” His eyes swept over her, marking the tension in her body, which looked so entrancingly fragile but he knew was in fact quite athletic.

“Boyd, everyone is watching us,” she whispered a warning, her nerves exquisitely frayed.

“That’s okay,” he answered without concern. “They’re well used to the friction between us by now.”

“How can you call me evasive, Boyd? Did I not just agree to go riding with you?” she asked, pleased to have tripped him up. Then it struck her.

“We are going on our own, aren’t we, or are you getting up a party?”

“A party of two, Leona,” he told her dryly. “I’m after your company alone. No need to bring in the rest of the family.”

“Right!” She tilted her chin as she prepared to move off.

“You used to love me,” he said, very, very gently to her averted profile.

It stopped her in her tracks. It was still so deliriously true.

She moved back to him in that moment, wanting to throw herself at him, clamp her arms around him. Never let go. Have his arms move to embrace her. If he kissed her she feared she might lose consciousness. Or maybe her soul would float out of her body into his. Instead, she raised herself on tiptoe to be nearer to that so dear yet so dangerous face. “I don’t any more,” she said.

There was safety in deception. Much better to be safe than horribly sorry.

For well over an hour they rode through a countryside that had never seemed so luminous to her. Along the eastern seaboard and even deep into the Outback the land had received wonderful life-giving rain and overnight the land had renewed itself. The light beneath the caverns of trees was jewelled, the display of blossom sumptuous, the air sweet with a hundred different haunting perfumes. Riding together so companionably was too precious to be described. Leona wanted to retain the memory for ever. The sight of him, the familiarity and the exciting strangeness, the profile she loved, that clean cut chiselled jaw. With his head half turned away one would have assumed his eyes would be very dark to match the black of his hair and his strongly marked brows. They were anything but—sometimes his eyes were so blue they looked violet. He really was a dream come true.

* * *

Out of the golden glare of the sunlight and down into the dappled green sanctuary of one of the many creeks that wound their way across the estate, he turned his head to smile lazily at her. His eyes, even in the shade, blazed. His wide-brimmed hat, a soft grey, was tilted at a rakish angle. Riding gear suited him wonderfully well. “Enjoying yourself?” he asked.

“I love it!” Leona responded with uncomplicated joy. “I especially love water. All the time we’ve been riding we’ve been in sight and sound of it.”

“That’s what’s so powerfully attractive about the estate.” He studied her smiling open face with pleasure. “You don’t feel threatened by me when you’re on horseback?”

“I’m secure in the knowledge I could gallop away from you.” She laughed, one hand lightly holding the reins of her pure Arabian mare, as nimble and sure-footed as ever a mare could be. “Anyway, you’ve never really done anything to threaten me,” she added.

“I think I have,” he answered slowly.

The way he said it shook her to the marrow. She had to look away. Curly tendrils of her hair had escaped from her ponytail, glowing brightly against the cream of her skin. “You sound as though you care.” She couldn’t help the revealing tinge of sadness in her voice.

“Of course I do,” he answered, almost roughly.

“Good!” she retorted, suddenly very tense. In fact she was starting to feel light-headed. “At least you know with me you can’t have it all your own way.”

“You think I do?” He leaned forward to caress the bay’s neck.

“You’re quite daunting in a way, you know.”

“Leo, that’s absolute nonsense,” he said crisply.

Her breath fluttered. “No.” She could feel the heat in her cheeks. She even felt like bursting into tears, he moved her so unbearably. That alone gave him a power she could never match.

“Then tell me,” he demanded. “In what way?”

“In every way!” she said a little wildly. “Don’t let it bother you. You can’t help being like that.” Despite the lovely cool of the creek, she could feel trickles of sweat run between her breasts. She had to stop this conversation before her emotions got right out of hand. That would be a very serious mistake.

“Maybe it’s proved a pretty effective defence,” he suggested, as though he had discovered the answer. His handsome, dynamic face was caught in a shaft of sunlight. She realised he looked unexpectedly serious, faintly troubled.

“Against what?” Horribly, her voice wobbled.

He turned a concentrated gaze to her. “Do you remember when you were a little kid you used to pester me with questions?”

“The miracle is you used to answer me.” Despite herself, she gave him her lovely smile, her green eyes changing from stormy to dancing.

“You had such an insatiable curiosity about everything. You read so widely, even as a child.”

“That may have been because I was so lonely after my mother died. You know, sometimes when I’m walking about the lake, I hear her calling to me,” she confided with a poignant little air.

That didn’t surprise him. Many times he had fancied he had seen his own mother near the little stone temple that stood beside a secluded part of the lake. “We never lose the images of those we love,” he murmured gently, wanting only to comfort her.

“She was a beautiful woman, Aunt Alexa. She was so kind to me.” She sighed deeply, in many ways still the child denied her beloved mother. “After my mother died—the way she was killed—I thought I’d never get on my pony again. You were the one who helped me through that. Not my father. He was too dazed. He went off to some distant planet. It was you who convinced me it was what my mother would have wanted. She loved horses. She adored riding. You made me understand that although peril can be anywhere, we have to go on with our lives; we have to hold our simple pleasures close.”

“Then I was good for something,” he said, a faint twist to his sculpted mouth.

“You were. You are,” she said, unbearably conscious of his closeness and the fact that they were alone together. But did it really have to put her in such a frenzy? Why, for the love of God, couldn’t she relax? Was it because she knew Boyd, heir to the Blanchard fortune, would always be denied her? Maybe she had to accept, once and for all, that he was much too much for her.

The silence between them had taken on a deeply intimate turn whether she wanted it or not. She had the strongest notion that the nerve fibres in their bodies were reaching out to draw them together. When all was said and done, he knew her better than anyone. Her eyes smarted with tears. To be together like this always. To have their relationship develop and flourish as she wanted.

She knew in her heart that it wasn’t possible. It wouldn’t be allowed. That was the reason she kept that side of her hidden. Now alarm bells were going off in her head. How easy it was to slip into a dream. But it wouldn’t do at all. Boyd was so far above her she couldn’t begin to calculate the distance. Resolutely she squared her shoulders. “D’you want a race? Let’s say to the old ruin?” she challenged him. The old ruin was what they called an extraordinary rocky outcrop on a wilder part of the estate.

“Flower Face, you couldn’t beat me,” he answered, slowly coming out of his elegant slouch.

“Then I’m going to have a darn good try.” Abruptly she turned the mare, spurring her into action. They were tearing up the fairly sharp incline, vanishing down the other side while startled magpies croaked their high displeasure and wild doves shot up into the blue, blue air.

He was giving her a start. She knew that, not sure if in plunging away she wasn’t revealing what an emotional coward she was. What made her so emotionally insecure? Was it because she had lost her mother at such a tender age? In many ways she had lost her father to his grief. Lord knew Delia hadn’t turned out to be a mother substitute. She couldn’t even mother her own son. Galloping wasn’t half as dangerous as getting into an intimate conversation with Boyd.

She travelled so fast towards the ruins that an old time Western movie posse might have been giving chase. She wondered excitedly when he was going to close in on her.

To her left was a thick copse of cottonwoods, the golden poplars whose foliage put on such a wonderful brilliant yellow display in the autumn; to her right Chinese elms covered in spring’s delicate whiteish-green samaras. Beyond that an indigenous forest of eucalypts in a country where the gum tree was king.

Did anyone who didn’t ride realise the wonderful exhilaration of being in the saddle? Her breasts beneath her cream silk shirt rose and fell with her exertions. The balls of her feet, encased in expensive riding boots felt weightless in the stirrups. Compared to the order of the rest of the estate, she was heading into near virgin country as she veered off to take the short cut to the ruins.

She sucked in her breath as the remaining section of an ancient weathered wall threw up a challenge. The wall was covered in an apple-green vine with a beautiful mauve trumpet flower. It would be a very small risk taking the wall. The mare was a good jumper; she rarely stumbled, never baulked. Leona felt completely safe. She had taken far higher obstacles than this. Taking obstacles had claimed her mother’s life, but everyone had agreed it was a freak accident, not a miscalculation on her mother’s part. Leona trusted to her own judgement.

They literally sailed over the wall. She gave a great shout of triumph, even though her breath had shortened and her breasts were heaving. The old ruins were dead ahead. They looked for all the world like tumbled stone masonry and pillars. She knew she could beat him. What a thrill! She absolutely revelled in the thought.

When Boyd realised she was about to jump the old weathered wall his heart gave a great leap like a salmon making upstream. He wasn’t sure, but he thought he shouted, “No!” In an instant he was back in time, caught up in a terrible moment of déjà vu. Reining the bay in sharply, he sat stock still in the saddle, back erect, but driven into shutting his eyes. Nothing ever really healed. For a moment he was a boy of fourteen again, waiting for Serena to return so they could all go swimming. He didn’t think he could bear to suffer a worse loss. He had a vision of Serena’s body, brought back to the house on a stretcher. The sorrow he had seen. His mother, Alexa, her beautiful face distorted by grief; the pulverising shock and grief of the others. Leona’s father had been unable to speak, totally gutted. Rupert had taken charge of everything, as was his way, his strong autocratic features set in stone.

He opened his eyes again as he heard Leona’s shout of victory. She was galloping hell for leather towards the ruins. Like her mother, she brimmed over with life. He was over his fear now, but for several moments he sat on his quivering horse, trying to quell the sudden upsurge of anger that swept in to take the place of his enormous relief.

“Sorry, Boyd, dear, I beat you!” She waved an arm high above her head and, not content with that, pulled off her wide brimmed hat and threw it rapturously in the air, bringing home her victory.

“Goodness, you’re not mad, are you?” she asked in the very next second, catching sight of the bright sharp anger in his face. He had dismounted, too, and was stalking towards her.

“Why do you take risks?” he gritted with what she took to be hostility.

“I don’t. I never do.” Hurriedly she tried to defend herself. “Risks? Don’t be absurd.” This was Boyd. How could she be afraid of him? Boyd would never hurt her. “You’re upset,” she said as she quickly comprehended. “There’s no need to be. I wouldn’t do anything stupid.”

His eyes burned with the blue intensity of sapphires. “Your mother didn’t do anything stupid.”

Now both of them were confronting the past. She remembered the horror everyone had felt on that tragic day. The utter disbelief that life, as they had known it, was for ever changed. Her father had been near catatonic. The tears had poured out of Aunt Alexa’s eyes. Geraldine had had her arms around her, trying to comfort a loved child. A Blanchard uncle was there with a second wife. That marriage hadn’t lasted either. She remembered the way she had afterwards clung to Boyd like some little monkey too scared to let go.

Now she tried desperately to offer conciliation. “We’ve had a lovely ride. Please don’t spoil it.”

“Spoil it?” He knew he was losing control, something that never happened. “What you had to do was not tackle that damned wall. It could have cost you your neck.”

Would anything go as she hoped? Temper flashed. “What I did,” she told him defiantly, “was jump a fairly low obstacle. I’ve jumped a lot higher than that.”

“Not on that little mare you haven’t,” he said with a vigorous jerk of his head towards the pure bred Arabian.

She stared back at him in disbelief, forgetting all caution, missing the fear behind his grimness. “So she isn’t the tallest horse in the stable, but I love her. In any case she’s sure-footed. Who the devil do you think you are, telling me what I can and cannot do?” she demanded. “Who are you to rule my life? No wonder I resent you. No wonder I’ve fought you for years. No wonder—”

She was on such a roll she was completely unprepared for his explosive reaction. Sparks seemed to be flowing from him like tiny glittering stars. While the blood rushed in her ears, he pulled her to him in a kind of fury, locking one steely arm around her, his left hand thrusting up her chin. “Oh, shut up bleating about your resentments and irritations,” he bit off with unfamiliar violence. “You irritate the hell out of me.”

He had confirmed it at long last. She let out a cry of pain. “I was wondering when you’d get around to admitting it,” she said, small white teeth clenched. They were standing so close together all her senses were reeling. Her blood ran blisteringly hot in her veins. To her distress she knew she couldn’t handle this. She was shaking with the effort to hold herself together. Dazzling sunlight spun around them like an impenetrable golden web.

“Let me go, you savage!” Even as the words left her lips she was shocked that she had said it. Boyd, a savage! Why couldn’t she shout, I love you? Why did she for ever have to hold it in? It was agony. There was no hope of getting free unless he released her.

“Count yourself lucky I’m not!” He laughed, but that didn’t lessen the bright anger on his face. “I’m not going to let you go, Leona, until I’ve taught you a necessary lesson. No point in struggling. I’ve been far too indulgent with you, taking all the little taunts you throw at me on a regular basis. Just how long do I have to wait before you call a ceasefire?”

How could she possibly demolish the defensive structure she had so painstakingly built up in a matter of moments? “For ever!” she shouted fiercely, not fully realising how wildly provocative she had become.

And that sealed her fate.

With a face like thunder Boyd lowered his head. He hauled her right up against him, her delicate body near breakable in his grip, intent on finding her beautiful, softly textured mouth. He felt capable of something monstrous, like picking her up and carrying her off into the forest like some primitive caveman. Sometimes she literally drove him crazy.

The impact on Leona was equally tremendous. Yet hadn’t she always known that something like this would happen? This was the man she loved. And, from time to time, hated. Because he made her feel so…so what? Off her brain? She couldn’t move. Her riding clothes seemed to have turned to gossamer. She had to tense her body so it wouldn’t dissolve into his. She had never experienced such tumultuous emotions in her whole life. It was seismic.

His long fingers plunged into her hair, catching up handfuls of red-gold curls. “I get so tired of your fighting me,” he groaned.

Her legs had given way to the extent that she thought if he hadn’t been holding her so powerfully she would have slid down his body to crumple at his feet. “Open your mouth,” he said. “I want to taste you.”

The sensuality of the moment was ferocious. It stole her breath. Desperately she clamped her lips together. The utter senselessness of it. His tongue prised them apart. “This is something else you can resent,” he told her harshly.

To save herself from going totally under, like a swimmer in wild surf, she closed her eyes and let the giant waves of emotion engulf her.

He was kissing her, devouring her, eating her, as if her mouth were a peach. To make it worse, she was so driven by sensation she began to eat him. It certainly felt like it. All she knew was desire. It was terrifying. So sensuous, so natural, so voluptuous, so God-given. To ease the strength of his hold on her, she thrust one of her legs between his, making her acutely aware that he was powerfully aroused. And she was the cause of it.

When he let go of her—all but pushed her away—she felt so disorientated, so weak-limbed, she actually fell down into the thick, honey-coloured grasses that grew in a wide circle around the ruins. “I don’t believe you just did that,” she said eventually, her hands pressed to her temples as if they were pounding.

“It happened all right.” Forcefully, Boyd drew air into his lungs.

“I hated it,” she said. An outrageous piece of lying. And it wouldn’t help her.

“Don’t lie to me, Leo,” he chided her curtly. “It won’t work.” He gave them both a necessary minute of respite, then he reached down to pull her to her feet, keeping a hold on her swaying figure.

Her green eyes met his, huge with shock. “But I need to lie to you.” The truth would involve love and love was a fatal word. “Don’t you understand? We’re cousins. Family.”

He gave a jagged laugh. “Second cousins, more or less. Less, actually, when you consider your grandfather and my great-uncle were half-brothers.”

“Does that make a difference?” How could she possibly steal Boyd away from the family? She knew Rupert fervently wished for an alliance between him and Chloe Compton, who was an heiress in her own right. How could she challenge powerful, menacing Rupert? She would never be allowed to walk away from that one.

“A difference to what?” Boyd rasped, uncaring of his father’s plans, his own man.

“You mean you were doing me a great honour kissing me?” She felt unendurably pressured, not even sure what she was saying. Whether indeed she was making any sense.

“I didn’t think for one moment you’d admit to a passionate response,” he said bitterly.

How was she managing to hide all her yearning? She was a woman, flesh and blood, not a pillar of ice. But she was managing. She saw it in his eyes.

He was waiting for something from her—something important—only she was in such a state of high arousal she didn’t know how best to answer. She didn’t know how best to handle a situation she herself had created. Instead, she concentrated fiercely on a distant copse of trees. “Let’s set the record straight. That was an angry response, more or less.” Anger was safe. It was what he was used to from her, after all.

His expression became hard and mocking. “That’s it! Do another runner.” His brilliant blue eyes darkened to cobalt.

“And just who am I supposed to be running away from?” Unable to help herself, she took the bait.

“Hell, Leo, we both know that.”

How she felt the power of those blazing eyes. She was shaking all over, engulfed by raging passions.

“Oh, for God’s sake!” Boyd, contemplating her extreme agitation, suddenly relented. He reached out and drew her against his chest as if she were still a child, allowing her to stand until she was quiet within the half circle of his arms.

“Here, let’s get you home,” he murmured, somehow preventing his hands from sliding all over her perfect body. A body he wanted to cover like a man sought to cover the body of the woman he desired.

To Leona’s ears, he sounded near defeated. That was so unlike Boyd—but he kept a supportive arm around her. It was a measure of his very real affection for her, she thought gratefully. Affection was allowed. The family would allow affection.

Boyd must have been on the same wavelength because he asked in a very dry voice, “Anyone for a cup of tea?”

She fell into line. “I don’t drink tea.”

“Neither do I.”

“I know.” She dared to look up at him, seeking some measure of reassurance. “Was kissing me a game?” If he said yes, she thought she might die.

“If it was a game, it’s one I’m not sure I know the rules to,” he said grimly.

“Sometimes I’m afraid, Boyd.” She tried to explain herself. Without her mother, with a largely “absent” father, she had become used to keeping things in. It was all right to worship Boyd. He was the supernova in the family. She was part of the clan certainly, but still fairly low in the pecking order. For her and Boyd to become romantically involved would cause huge problems. She could even lose her job. Would Bea allow it? She badly needed time to consider the magnitude of what had just happened. Both of them had responded so passionately they might have been trying to make up for lost time. Would the force grow, the desperation?

“Poor baby!” Boyd murmured, as though all too aware of her fears. He was suppressing urges so intense he didn’t know how he was able to withstand them. “Come on.” He used his normal persuasive voice. “Home.” He bent to give her a leg up onto the Arabian mare, who was standing so quietly she might have been listening in on their conversation. Then, when Leona was in the saddle, he turned away to whistle up his bay, who was lightly grazing several feet away.