Princes of the Outback: The Rugged Loner / The Rich Stranger / The Ruthless Groom

“You wouldn’t have heard me above the music.”

Holy Henry, he must have been in the house earlier. How could she not have known? Angie blanched, remembering how she’d belted out whatever lyrics she knew and improvised the rest. “Why didn’t you say something?” she asked on a note of dismay.

“I only came in to change.”

And since he wasn’t laughing or looking horrified, perhaps he hadn’t heard her singing. Relaxing a smidge, she now realized the significance of her first impression. He wasn’t dressed for a business trip but for get-down-and-dirty cattle work, because he’d returned early and come to the house to change. Her gaze slid over his dusty blue Western shirt and lingered on the Wranglers he wore so well.

“What’s going on, Angie?” he asked with a hint of suspicion. And when her gaze flew back to his face she caught him giving her a similar once-over. “Where is everyone?”

“I gave Manny—” who’d been rostered for kitchen duty “—the night off.”

“Why?”

“I thought it would be easier, given you want to keep this just between us.”

He’d started to lift his beer again, but hesitated as the knowledge of what that meant arced between them, hot and sultry and heavy as a summer’s night. At least that’s how Angie’s body felt. Without breaking eye contact he took another long drink, another long swallow. “Is that why you’re all dressed up?”

She almost laughed out loud, remembering how many times she’d changed her clothes in an attempt to dress down. But, still, she liked that he knew she’d made an effort. She wasn’t afraid of letting him know she wanted him.

Slowly she crossed the kitchen floor, closing down the space between them, never losing that hot eye-to-eye connection. She ached to kiss him, to hold him, to have him right here and now. But beyond the surface of his blue-heat eyes she detected a flicker of wariness that held her back. Instead of reaching for the man, she reached for his beer and lifted it to her lips.

As she drank she watched him swallow, and desire beat so hard in her veins she swore she could feel its echo in every cell of her body.

“You’re why I gave Manny the night off and you’re why I’m wearing satin underwear,” she said huskily. “But first you’re having a shower, and then we’re having dinner. I don’t know about you, but I’m starving.”

While he showered Tomas tried to work up a decent sense of outrage. Without asking she’d used his bathroom again. She’d given his staff the night off. He’d let her know, in plain language, how this would happen and she’d gone ahead and set up a seduction scene.

But it was hard to maintain rage in a body tight and hot with anticipation. She’s waiting out there alone, it throbbed, for you. She’s wearing satin underwear, it pulsed, for you. She’s starving, it thundered, for you.

Despite the insistent ache of arousal he forced himself to dress unhurriedly, to arrive slowly, to sit and eat and talk. The wine helped. After one glass he realized he wasn’t going to ignite every time their eyes met in an awkward conversational lapse, or each time his gaze was drawn to the erotic caress of her thumb over the rim of her wineglass.

It only felt that way.

He shifted in his chair, surreptitiously rearranging that insistent ache of arousal. He was a sad case. There she was, chatting away about the innocuous and everyday, oblivious to the effect of her unconscious glassware fondling. Lucky he’d worn roomy chinos because sitting down in jeans, in his condition, would have been murder.

“Hello?”

He looked up to find her waving her hands to attract his attention.

“You didn’t hear a word of that, did you?”

“I was—” Tomas frowned “—thinking.”

“Looks serious.”

Yeah, deadly.

She eyed him a second. “About the trip you made to Queensland? Is there a problem?”

His pulse kicked up a notch as he met her eyes across the table and imagined telling her his real problem. I’ve been at least half-hard ever since I hauled your naked backside into your bedroom five nights ago. The waiting’s killing me, Angie. Let’s skip the pretense and—

“Because I’m all ears. If you need to talk it through.”

Abruptly she put down her cutlery and pushed her plate away, and the decisiveness of her action startled the hor-

mone haze from his mind. She thought he was distracted by cattle problems. He was dying for action, and she wanted to talk.

Shaking his head in disbelief, he pushed his plate away, too. “There’s no problem with the business.”

“Good.” She smiled, and damn her, started to play with her glass again. “Yesterday I read that feature article in The Cattleman, about how you’re now considered the innovator, the market leader. It seems you’ve made a lot of changes since you took over managing the northern stations.”

“Necessary changes.”

“And production has increased fifteen percent.”

“We’ve had some good seasons.”

“And good management.”

Half distracted by the play of her pale-tipped fingers on her wineglass, he didn’t answer. Idly he wondered where she was going with this, but mostly he didn’t feel any need to answer. She was right. Good management had increased Carlisle’s productivity.

“Can I ask you something…about the will clause?”

The idle part of his brain clicked to full alert, driving the lingering heat of arousal from his synapses. Not because of the question, but the hint of non-Angie guardedness in her delivery. Tension straightened his spine as he made a go-ahead gesture.

“Here’s the way I understand it—correct me if I’m wrong. If you fail to produce this baby between the three of you, you won’t inherit ownership of Kameruka Downs or any of the other cattle stations. The company would keep ownership and the board overall control?”

Tomas nodded. Correct so far.

“So, I can’t see the board replacing you as manager or kicking you out of your home, not when you’re making the company money hand over fist.”

“It’s not the same as ownership. That’s what I’ve worked toward, always.” He met her eyes across the table. “More than ever the past couple of years.”

“Because of Brooke?”

Yes, because he no longer had Brooke. What else did he have to work toward, to strive for, if not this place?

“Do you want to talk about it?” she asked, and the husky catch to her voice brought his gaze rocketing back to hers. To the undisguised light of emotion in her eyes. “Do you want to talk about—”

“No, I don’t,” he said curtly.

“Fair enough. That’s your prerogative. But any time you change your mind…”

He didn’t bother responding. He didn’t want to talk about Brooke and he didn’t want to debate why. And he sure as hell didn’t need her watching him with those serious, solemn eyes that made him want to run a mile…and made him want to lash out at everything wrong about what happened with Brooke. Everything he wouldn’t let happen again.

The silence stretched between them another tense minute before he saw her start to stack their plates and set them aside. Her hands with their pale glossy nails spread on the table, providing leverage as she stood. And he looked up to find her watching him, those serious, solemn eyes filled with all kinds of promises of temptation and salvation as she extended her hand toward him.

“Let’s go to bed.”

Five minutes ago he would have taken that hand and invitation and they probably wouldn’t have made it to any bedroom. But now…No, he couldn’t touch her. Not in this mood, not with so much emotion and despair and desperate need roiling in his gut.

He couldn’t need her like that—he wouldn’t allow himself.

“I have to work on the books,” he said.

“Okay. I’ll pack the dishwasher then I’ll come help you.”

“No, Angie. You can’t help me.”

She’d started to gather up the dishes, but paused, her eyes rising slowly to lock on his. “I thought I already was.”

“In one way. That’s all.”

The message hummed between them and for several taut, electric seconds he didn’t know that she would accept it. “I don’t want to fight about this,” he said softly. “I don’t want to fight with you, Angie.”

“Oh, me, either,” she said in a breathy rush. “Those things we said to each other the night I got here—I don’t want it to be like that between us. Let me help you, Tomas.”

He set his jaw, his resolve, the steel in his heart and his eyes. “Don’t ask for what I can’t give.”

Emotion shimmered in the fathomless depths of her eyes, but she nodded and mouthed one word. Okay. With careful hands she gathered up the pile of dishes, and as she walked from the room he heard one tiny clatter of crockery, as if her hands trembled and then regrouped. At the door, she hesitated and turned. “Will I see you later?”

Tomas nodded. Later when this maelstrom of emotions stopped whipping through his body, when he’d controlled the persistent pounding need to stop her leaving and yell, yes, I want to talk. I want to talk if it eases the pain and the guilt and this bitter knowledge that I could have done better. That I failed my wife.

“Later,” he said hoarsely. “Yes.”

Nine

Two hours, Tomas told himself, and to prove he was in control of mind and body and emotions he stretched it to two hours twenty. Then he came to her room and quietly closed the door behind him. Head raised and nostrils flared, he waited for his eyes to adjust to the midnight dark.

It wasn’t like night in the city. This was outback dark, an intense blackness that amplified the other senses to an acute pitch. He could smell the warm female scent of her body. Could hear the quick in-out whisper of her breathing.

Was she awake? Lying in the dark waiting? Craving the intense pleasure of that first skin to skin contact?

He shed his clothes quickly, felt the night air stroke him like a lover’s warm sigh. His skin was as hot and tight as a steer hide stretched to dry in the summer sun. As he stripped off his underwear the fleeting brush of his hand caused his erection to jerk with need.

He sucked in a tense breath, half afraid of the edginess to this lust. Half afraid that the edges were keened with loneliness and need and yearning for more than hot bodies meeting in the darkness. The distant call of a night bird echoed in the dark, a high haunting two-note summons to its mate. Closer he heard the soft stirring of sheets, and his sex quickened in instant response. Its call to mate.

He started toward the bed, and despite the darkness he could make out the slow stretch of her arms above her head. As he stopped by the bed she made a throaty sound of welcome. “You’re here.”

“I thought you’d be asleep.”

She shifted again, rolling onto her side and pushing aside the bedclothes. “I was waiting for you.”

He sat on the edge of the mattress and her hand glided over his back, a whisper of sensation that reverberated through his body and pulsed in his blood and his sex. So did her scent—the familiar sweet fragrance of skin steeped in honey and cinnamon milk. The same as the day she’d arrived. The same as in Sydney when he’d yearned to taste her.

Tonight he would.

Then it wouldn’t matter if he lasted or not, if first he gave her pleasure.

“Was there really paperwork?” she asked as he settled beside her.

He didn’t answer, except to groan a deep thankful note as her arms and her legs wrapped around to draw him flush with her body. He didn’t answer because he forgot the question when she rocked against him, breast to chest, groin to groin, soft to hard. Unerringly he found her lips in the dark and kissed her deeply, a long, wet play of tongues and mouths and throaty murmurings that seemed to hang suspended in the heavy curtain of night. He didn’t close his eyes. He didn’t have to hide in the darkness, didn’t have to fear what he might see in her eyes or what she might learn from his.

Slowly he kissed his way down her body, drinking in the soft taste of her skin and the husky rasp of her breathing and the strong arch of her back when he took each nipple into his mouth. When he palmed the curve of her belly and slid lower to part her thighs, she sucked in a ragged breath.

“You don’t have to do that.”

“Yeah, I do.”

And he did. With tongue and lips, with a hunger long repressed, and when she tensed and cried out, when he felt her press down hard and start to come, he knew he had to be there. Now.

“Ready?” he asked, and for answer she arched her back and welcomed him inside with a low guttural sound that echoed through his chest and gut, all the way to the organ that drove down hard inside her.

Staggered by the power of his pleasure, he held himself still and rigid as he fought the urgent desire to keep on driving to an end. He was deep, all the way inside her climaxing body and her legs had wrapped around him, holding him tight against her.

“I’m always ready for you.”

God, but that undid him. The thickness of her turned-on voice, the taste of her on his lips, the intensity he felt in her stillness as she watched him start to move. The way she rose to meet the drive of his body, thrust for thrust, flesh meeting flesh. The gentle caress of her fingers on his face and throat, and the not-so-gentle bite of her teeth when she came again without any warning. Against the heat of his skin, where chest and breast met and brushed and drove into hard contact again, he felt the cool brush of her necklace and his fingers twined around the chain and held on while the beast of desire swallowed him whole.

Head back, he took the last uncontrollable plunge and roared over the edge into completion.

Somehow Tomas managed to rouse himself before the lure of taking Angie again or letting her sleep in his arms took hold. And when he sat on the side of her bed and rubbed a hand over his face to clear the last traces of temptation from his consciousness, he realized that he held her A-letter necklace in his hand. In the last minutes of that wild ride he must have gripped her chain so hard that he broke a link.

He rubbed his thumb over the tiny charm and put it down on the bedside table. A for aftermath, afterward, awkward. The time to leave before he got comfortable in the lush folds of her sated body. A, he thought as he scooped up his clothes and retreated to his own bed, for another night, another time, another chance at conception.

Two more times and that was it. Done.

Then she was going home.

Angie heard the drone of a plane coming in from the west and her heart banked and rolled. In fact her whole body revved to instant Tomas-is-home, here-look-at-me! attention a good thirty seconds before logic kicked in. He hadn’t said anything about flying anywhere…but then that didn’t mean anything…more often than not he didn’t say…and with so much acreage to get around, flying was an everyday feature of station life.

But she couldn’t deny the punchy anticipation low in her stomach, the heaviness in her breasts, the tightness of her nipples. A little early, but Tomas was definitely home…almost. She shoved the last of the flowers she was arranging—until now, artfully—into the table centerpiece and dashed for the bathroom. No time for soaking in milky baths tonight. If he drove straight from the airstrip, no stops in-between, she had a maximum of ten minutes.

Hurry, hurry, hurry.

Shedding clothes along the way, she hit the shower running…then ducked straight back out for a shower-cap. No time for drying hair—she needed every precious minute for essentials. The red wine should be opened to breathe. Vegetables peeled. Cream whipped. For a wet, soapy second she rued letting the staff off early, again, so she could savor every detail of preparing and serving this special dinner.

An intense wave of nervous tension gripped her body. Ovulation day, she’d joked at breakfast this morning. I’ll make a celebratory dinner. Don’t be late.

It was a measure of the progress they’d made in twenty-four hours that she could joke about such a thing, even if neither of them had laughed. Even if his eyes had darkened and flared with unnamed emotion as they fastened on hers across the breakfast table.

Yes, they’d eaten breakfast together. The previous night they’d eaten dinner together, too, and he’d relaxed a tiny bit more, talking, smiling, even laughing at one of her anecdotes about Stink, the mechanic. For the second consecutive night he refused her offer to help with whatever office-work compelled his devotion, and she went to bed alone.

Around midnight he came to her room and made love with the same fierce power as the night before. Just once, damn him, and again he’d left her in the cooling sheets of her bed, hoping and wishing and praying that the next night might be different.

Well, Angie, the next night is about to begin.

Angie held her face tilted up for a last cool rinse and switched off the taps. Last night, last chance. She’d joked about this dinner but underneath, deep inside where her stomach was knotted with trepidation, she’d fastened her determination to make it special. A lot had changed in twenty-four hours, but not her conviction.

What had transpired between them in her bed the last two nights was too real, too huge, too intense, to cast aside as a purely physical joining. So many times she’d had to bite her tongue—or his shoulder—to stop herself blurting out what filled her heart. She’d curbed her natural inclination to tell it all, to lay it on the line, to charge ahead too fast.

She’d reined herself in and she would continue to do so.

Even when he asked her to go back to Sydney until she knew the result of this round of baby-sex—which she knew he would, probably tonight—she would keep it together. While preparing dinner, she’d also prepared her argument for staying and coached herself on delivering it with cool, direct logic.

If she failed, if he wouldn’t listen to her reasoning, then at least she would get to experience something approximating a date. Tonight she wouldn’t allow him to retreat to his work. Tonight they would walk hand in hand to bed. Tonight the light stayed on.

He owed her that much.

The dress she’d decided on earlier lay waiting on her bed. She traced one of the bright pink flowers and fingered the silky georgette material in momentary indecision. Too much? Probably, but in that second she heard the solitary bark of Tomas’s heeler a second before the whole kennel joined in. A vehicle was coming.

Swallowing her hesitancy whole, she pulled the dress over her head and wriggled until the satin lining shimmied its way over her hips and down to her knees.

“Hurry, hurry, hurry,” she muttered. And of course the zipper stuck. She left it half-undone to shove her feet into white mules, to grab her brush and drag it through her moisture-messed hair…a task made easier when she remembered to take out her ponytail scrunchie. She slapped on some tinted moisturizer, glossed her lips, traced her eyes with kohl and smudged the lines.

Done!

She sucked in a quick breath…and realized she should be wearing a bra. If this were a real restaurant date, with other people present, she would take the extra minute to find one, to make some effort to disguise the hard jut of her nipples. But there were no other people…just her and Tomas and the fact that she couldn’t think about him without this obvious result. Why hide that truth?

As she rushed to the living end of the house, she struggled to free the stuck zipper and strained her ears for the sound of his vehicle pulling up outside. She wanted to greet him at the door, to smile and say, “Hi, I missed you.” To hand him his beer and, if she caught him really on the hop, surprise him with a kiss.

The canine chorus rose to a second crescendo as she entered the kitchen, then quieted immediately as if in response to a slash of the conductor’s baton. Or a one-word command from their master. In the same instant—perhaps in response to the excited jump of her hand—the zipper released and glided effortlessly all the way to the top. That had to be a good omen, Angie decided.

She collected his beer and walked calmly to the door. Her heart, naturally, raced at a thousand miles an hour. That, she hoped, didn’t show as clearly as her nipples.

Then she heard a vehicle pull up outside and her skin flushed with heat. The ice-cold bottle in her hand was suddenly very enticing. If she rolled it over her forehead, her throat, her breasts…

Tempting, but she didn’t. Instead she drew a deep breath and walked out onto the veranda, lifting a hand to shield her eyes from the rays of the sinking sun. A car door slammed, then a second. Voices? The brief murmur was too far away to identify but it sounded like a brief exchange of words.

Lord, but she hoped the second was one of the mechanics who’d bummed a lift back from the airstrip and not a visitor. She cast a nervous glance downward. Yep, there they were. Both the girls still at full hello-Tomas, boy-are-we-pleased-to-see-you attention.

Okay, she was definitely going back to change. Except that decision had barely formed before the first figure walked into view—no strode into view—and it was not Tomas or any mechanic.

“Maura,” she cried, nipples forgotten in a stunned blast of astonishment and joy. Back from the Killarney muster early and unexpected. And here at the homestead, not her own place.

Maura stopped, luckily, because that gave her a chance to brace herself before Angie hit at full speed. She wrapped her arms around Maura’s reed-thin body and held on for all she was worth until her bubbles of surprised laughter turned to tears.

How did that happen? And why? Angie didn’t burst into tears for no reason. She just…didn’t.

A bit stunned, a lot embarrassed, she pulled back and attempted to gather herself.

“What’s the matter, child?” Maura was frowning, her expression a mixture of confusion and concern. “Why are you crying?”

“I don’t know.” She scrubbed harder at her face. “I think it’s just the surprise of seeing you.”

“Do I look so bad?”

Angie rolled watery eyes. In her youth Maura Carlisle had been a world-renowned model. In her mid-fifties, even her bad days couldn’t hide that beauty. But before Angie could voice that opinion she glimpsed movement beyond Maura and her body stiffened reflexively.

Oh, no. She did not want to be caught crying. She was the strong, outback woman who would sail through the toughest days at his side.

But it wasn’t Tomas who walked into her blurry wet-eyed field of vision, but Rafe. Her eyes widened…so did his, as they took in her dress, the bottle in her hand, the smudged kohl under her eyes.

“You’re crying,” he pointed out.

“I know that.”

And if both Carlisles would stop looking at her so oddly she might be able to get some control over herself. Emotions and hormones and surprises and tears. Holy Henry Moses, she had to get a grip. She sucked in a breath, waved a hand in front of her face, and finally managed to halt the waterworks.

Rafe and his mother were still looking at her oddly.

“Nice dress,” Rafe said.

“Is there a special occasion?” Maura asked. Then she turned on Rafe. “Did you know Angie was here?” Oh, dear. Angie inhaled and wet her lips. “I just—”

“And when did you start drinking beer?”

“It’s, um, not mine, actually.”

“Speaking of which—” amusement, rich and redo-

lent, colored Rafe’s voice “—where is the man of the house?”

She flashed him a warning glance. “I wasn’t expecting you. Either of you.”

“Obviously.”

Maura looked at him narrowly, then back at Angie. “Rafe flew out to visit me at Killarney. I had him bring me straight home when I heard the news.”

Angie stiffened. “What news?”