The Prince's Outback Bride

‘I’m thinking I should talk to Marc about this,’ he said, focusing on food. ‘This is, after all, men’s business. Hunting and gathering. You were heading to the shops when your truck got stuck. Looking for fish and chips.’

‘Yes,’ said Marc, pleased at his acuity, and Sophie and Claire beamed agreement, anticipating assistance. ‘We’ve run out of food,’ Marc told him. ‘All we have left is toast. We don’t even have any jam.’

Right. He could do this. Jam and fish and chips. But not drowned like this.

‘I have a car that’s not stuck in a cattle-grid,’ he told them. ‘But I’m soaking wet. You have a house where I can dry off, and I’ve come a long way to visit you. Let’s combine. You let me use your house to change and I’ll go into town and buy fish and chips.’

‘We can’t impose on you,’ Pippa said. But she looked desperate, and he wondered why.

First things first. He had to persuade her to let him help. ‘I’m not an axe murderer,’ he told her. ‘I promise. I really am a relation.’

‘But…’

‘I’m Maxsim de Gautier. Max.’ He watched to see if there was recognition of the name, but she was too preoccupied to think of anything but immediate need—and maybe she’d never heard the name anyway. ‘I’d really like to help.’

Desperation faded—just a little. ‘I shouldn’t let you.’

‘Yes, you should. You don’t have to like me, but I’m definitely family, so you need to sigh and open the door, the way most families ask rum-soaked Uncle Bertie or similar to Christmas lunch.’

She smiled in return at that, a wobbly sort of smile but it was a welcome change from the desperate. ‘Uncle Bertie or similar?’

‘I’m not even a soak,’ he said encouragingly and her smile wobbled a bit more.

‘You have a great accent,’ she said inconsequentially. ‘It sounds…familiar. Is it Italian or French?’

‘Mostly French.’

‘You’re very wet.’

‘The puddle around my ankles is starting to creep to my knees. If you leave this decision much longer I’ll need a snorkel.’

She stared out at him and chewed her lip. Then she seemed to make a decision. ‘Fine.’

‘Fine what?’

‘Fine I’ll trust you,’ she managed. ‘The kids and I will trust you, but I’m not sure about Dolores.’ She hugged the dog tighter. ‘She bites relations who turn out to be axe murderers.’

‘She’s welcome to try. How will we organise this?’

‘My truck’s blocking your way to the house.’

‘So it is,’ he said cordially. ‘Why didn’t I notice that?’

Her decision meant that she’d relaxed a little. The lines of strain around her eyes had eased. Now she even choked back a bubble of laughter. ‘We need to run to the house. We’ll all be soaked the minute we get out of the truck.’

‘I assume you have dry clothes back at the house?’

‘Yes but…’

‘I’m bored of sitting in the truck,’ Marc said.

‘Me too,’ said Sophie.

‘Me too,’ said Claire.

‘Right,’ Pippa said, coming to a decision. ‘On the count of three I want everybody out of the truck and we’ll run back to the house as fast as we can. Mr de Gautier, you’re welcome to follow.’

‘I’ll do backstroke,’ he told her. ‘What’s your stroke?’

‘Dog-paddle.’ She pushed open the driver’s side door and dived into the torrent. ‘Okay, kids,’ she said, hauling open the back door and starting to lift them out.

‘Let me,’ he told her.

‘I’ll take the kids. You take Dolores.’

‘Dolores?’

‘She hates getting her feet wet,’ Pippa explained. ‘She’s had pneumonia twice so she has an excuse. I’ll carry her if I must but I have a sore back and as you’re here I don’t see why you shouldn’t be useful. After all, you are family.’

‘Um…okay,’ he managed, but that was all he could say before a great brown dog of indiscriminate parentage was pushed out of the cab and into his arms.

‘Don’t drop her,’ Pippa ordered. ‘And run.’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

The house was two hundred yards from the gate, and, even though they ran fast, by the time they reached it they were all sodden. Max’s first impression was that it was a rambling weather board house, a bit down at heel, but it was unfair to judge when he saw everything through sleeting rain. And over one dog who smelled like…wet dog.

There was a veranda. Marc led the way. Pippa ran up the steps behind him, holding a twin by each hand. Max and Dolores brought up the rear. He’d paused to grab his holdall from his car, so he was balancing dog and holdall. Where were those servile minions? he thought again. Maybe accepting the crown could have its uses.

He wasn’t going there, minions or not. He reached the top step, set Dolores down, tossed his holdall into the comparative dry at the back of the veranda, mourned his minions for another fleeting moment, and then turned his attention to the little family before him.

At eight, Marc was just doing the transformation from cute into kid. Maybe he was tall for his age, Max thought, but what did he know about kids? He had the same jet black curls all the members of the Alp d’Estella royal family had, and big brown eyes and a snub nose with a smattering of freckles.

Sophie and Claire were different but similar. They were still not much more than tots, with glossy black curls tied into pigtails and adorned with bright ribbons that now hung limply down their back. They were cute and well rounded and they had a whole lot more freckles than their brother did.

They had to be Marc’s sisters, Max thought, cursing his PI firm for their lack of information. But then, what had his brief been? Find Marc and report on where he was living and who was taking care of him. Nothing about sisters.

But surely the powers that be back in Alp d’Estella must know of these two? They’d certainly known of Marc.

Marc was drying himself, towelling his face with vigour. The twins were being towelled by Pippa. All three children were regarding him cautiously from under their towels.

They were bright, inquisitive kids, he thought. Pippa said something to them and they giggled.

Nice kids.

He shouldn’t stare.

Pippa was stripping off the girls’ outer clothes. She tossed him a towel from a pile by the door. He started to dry his face but was brought up short.

‘That’s for Dolores.’

‘Sorry?’ He looked blank and she sighed.

‘Dolores. Pneumonia. Prevention of same. Please can you rub?’

‘Um…sure.’ He knelt as she was kneeling but instead of undressing kids he was towelling dog. Dolores approved. She rubbed herself ecstatically against the towel, and when he turned her to do the front half she showed her appreciation by giving him a huge lick, from his chin to his forehead. She was big and all bone—a cross between a Labrador and something even bigger. A bloodhound? In dog years she looked about a hundred.

‘She’s kissing you,’ four-year-old Sophie said, and giggled. ‘That means she likes you.’

‘I’ve had better kisses in my day,’ he said darkly.

‘Let’s not go there, Cousin Max,’ Pippa muttered. ‘Otherwise I’ll think axe again.’

‘No kissing,’ Max agreed with alacrity and towelled Dolores harder. ‘You hear that, Dolores? Keep yourself respectable or the lady with the axe knows what to do.’

Pippa chuckled. It was a great chuckle, he thought. He towelled Dolores for a while longer but he was watching Pippa. She was wearing ancient jeans and a windcheater with a rip up one arm. Her close-cropped, coppery curls were plastered wetly to her head, and droplets of rainwater were running down her forehead. She wore no make-up. She’d been wearing huge black wellingtons and she’d kicked them off at the top of the stairs. Underneath she was wearing what looked like football socks. The toe was missing from one yellow and black sock, and her toe poked pinkly through.

Very sexy, he thought, smiling inwardly, but then he glanced at her again and thought actually he was right. She was sexy but she was a very different sort of sexy from the women he normally associated with.

Where was he going with this? Nowhere, he told himself, startled. He was here to organise the succession; nothing more.

The kids were undressed to their knickers now. ‘The quickest way to warm is to shower and we’ll do it in relays,’ Pippa was saying. She motioned to a door at the end of the veranda. ‘That’s the bathroom. The kids can shower first. Then me. I’m sorry, Mr de Gautier, but in this instance it needs to be visitors last. Stay here until I call. We’ll be as quick as we can.’

‘What about Dolores?’

‘She can go through to the kitchen if she wants,’ Pippa said, holding the door open for the dog. ‘Though if you really want I guess she could shower with you.’ She smiled again, a lovely, laughing smile that made these bleak surroundings seem suddenly brighter. ‘Bathing Dolores usually takes a small army, but thanks for offering. Good luck.’

He didn’t shower with the dog. Dolores disappeared as soon as the kids did, leaving Max to wait alone on the veranda. Maybe Dolores had a warm kennel somewhere, Max thought enviously as the wind blasted its way through his wet clothes. Wasn’t Australia supposed to be warm?

Luckily the kids and Pippa were faster than he expected. Pippa reappeared within five minutes, dressed in a pink bathrobe with her hair tied up in a tattered green towel. She tossed him a towel that wasn’t quite as frayed as the one he’d used for Dolores.

‘I assume you have dry clothes in your bag,’ she said and he nodded.

‘Lucky you,’ she said. ‘Everything here is wet. It’s been raining for days. Shower’s through there. Enjoy.’

Everything here was wet? Didn’t she have a dryer? He thought about that while standing under the vast rose shower hanging over the claw-foot bath in the ancient bathroom. Everything he’d seen so far spoke of poverty. Surely Marc—and the girls?—were well provided for?

Alice, Gianetta’s mother, had cut off all ties to her family back in Europe. ‘She married well,’ he’d been told. ‘Into the Australian squattocracy.’ But then, that had been his father speaking, and his father treated the truth with disdain.

Up until now Max hadn’t been interested to find the truth for himself, but if these children’s maternal grandmother had married into money there was nothing to show for it now.

There were questions everywhere. He showered long enough to warm up; he dried; he foraged in his holdall and dressed in chinos and an oversized sweater that he’d almost not packed because Australia was supposed to be warm. Then he set out to find them.

The bathroom led to what looked like a utility room. A door on the far side of the utility room led somewhere else, and he could hear children’s voices close by. He pushed it with caution and found himself in the farmhouse kitchen. Here they were, the children in dressing gowns and slippers and Pippa in jeans and another windcheater. The cuffs of her windcheater looked damp, he thought. What had she said? Everything was wet? Where the hell was a dryer? Or a fire of some sort?

The kitchen was freezing.

Pippa and the kids were seated at the table, with steaming mugs before them. Dolores was under the table, lying on a towel.

‘Get yourself warm on the inside as well as the outside before we send you off as hunter gatherer,’ Pippa said, and she smiled. It was a great smile, he thought, astonishing himself with the intensity of his reaction. In her ancient windcheater and jeans she looked barely older than the kids. The oversized windcheater made her look flat-chested and insignificant. But still it was a killer of a smile. Something inside him reacted when she smiled.

That was a crazy thing to think right now. He needed to figure things out. Too many kids for a start. And this place…Despite the shower and his thick sweater he felt himself starting to shiver. The temperature was as low as outside. Which was pretty low.

‘Hot chocolate?’ Pippa offered. She was using a small electric cooker top. Beside the cooker top was a much larger stove. AnAga.

They had an Aga and didn’t have it lit?

‘We don’t have wood,’ she said, seeing what he was looking at and guessing what he was thinking.

‘I know. Marc mentioned it earlier. Why not?’

‘Pippa hurt her back,’ Marc volunteered. ‘So she can’t chop wood. There’s a dead tree in the far paddock and Pippa cuts it up when we run out but she can’t cut any more until her back gets better.’

‘What happened to your back?’

‘She fell off the roof,’ Marc said, sounding severe for his eight years. ‘Trying to nail roofing iron back on. I told her she’d fall off and she did.’

‘I didn’t have much choice,’ Pippa said with a trace of defiance. She was talking to Marc as she’d talk to an adult. ‘If I hadn’t we’d be in water up to our necks right now.’

‘It was scary,’ Sophie—was Sophie the red ribbons?—informed Max. ‘It was really, really windy. Marc was yelling at her to come down.’

‘And then some roof came off and she fell,’ Claire added, relishing an exciting story. ‘Sophie screamed but I didn’t and Pippa grabbed the edge of the roof and hung on. And she cut her hand and it bled and we had to put a bandage onto it.’

‘I told her not to do it,’ Marc muttered darkly.

What was going on here? Guardian and kids, or four kids?

‘I won’t do it again,’ Pippa told Marc, reaching out to ruffle his dark hair. ‘It’s fixed.’ He looked over to Max. ‘How are you related to the kids?’

‘I believe Marc’s grandmother, Alice, was my aunt.’

‘I remember GrandmaAlice.’ Marc nodded. ‘She died just before Mama and Daddy were killed and we were really sad. She said we had royal cousins, but she said they were a bad lot.’ He thought about it and drank some of his chocolate. ‘I don’t know what a bad lot is.’

‘I hope I’m not a bad lot.’

‘But you’re royal. Like a king or something.’

‘I’m on the same side of the family as you.’

‘Not on the bad lot side?’

‘No.’

The girls—and Pippa—were listening to this interchange with various levels of interest. Now Sophie felt the need to interrupt.

‘I’m really very hungry,’ she said soulfully—martyr about to die a stoic death—and Pippa handed Max his hot chocolate, glanced at Claire who’d gone quiet and made a decision.

‘Um…can the family-tree thing wait? If you really are family…Actually we are in a bit of trouble,’ she confessed. ‘We don’t have anything to eat.’

‘Nothing?’

‘Toast. But no butter. And no jam.’

‘You believe in putting off shopping to the last minute.’

‘We tried to put it off ’ til the rain stopped. But it didn’t.’

‘I see.’ Though he didn’t see.

‘Could you really go into town and pick up a few supplies?’

‘Of course. You could come with me if you like.’

‘All of us?’ Pippa asked.

He did a quick head count. Maybe…

‘Including Dolores.’

He looked down at Dolores—a great brown dog, gently steaming and wafting wet dog smell through the kitchen.

‘Maybe I’m fine by myself,’ Max said.

She chuckled, a nice chuckle that might have had the capacity to warm the kitchen if it wasn’t so appallingly cold. Then she eyed him appraisingly. ‘You’ll get wet again, walking back to your car. That’s not exactly wet-weather gear.’

‘Lend him Daddy’s milking gear,’ Marc piped up. ‘He’s bigger than Daddy but he might fit.’

‘He can wear Daddy’s gumboots,’ Sophie offered.

‘Gumboots?’

‘That’s Australian for wellingtons,’ Pippa said.

‘He needs an umbrella,’ Claire added. Like all of them she’d been staring at Max with caution, but she’d obviously reached a decision. ‘He can use my doggy umbrella.’ She fetched it from near the back door, opened it and twirled it for inspection. Pale pink, it had a picture of an appealing puppy on every panel. ‘You’ll look after it,’ she said, as one conferring a huge level of trust.

Great, Max thought. Prince Regents wearing wellingtons and carrying umbrellas with dogs? Thankfully the paparazzi were half a world from here.

There was so much here that he hadn’t expected. Actually nothing was what he’d expected. Except Marc. Marc looked just like Max’s brother. Which was great. It made things almost perfect.

Except…It made his gut do this lurching kind of thing. A kid who looked like Thiérry…

He glanced at Marc again and Pippa intercepted the look. ‘What?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Why were you looking at Marc?’

‘I was wondering why he was dark when you’re a redhead.’ He knew the relationship but it didn’t hurt to check.

‘Pippa’s not related to us,’ Marc told him. ‘She’s our friend.’

‘Pippa’s our aunty,’ Sophie volunteered, but Marc shook his head.

‘No, she’s not. She and Mummy were friends and Pippa promised she’ll look after us, just like a real aunty. But she’s not our real aunty.’

‘I wish she was,’ Claire whispered.

‘I’m just as good as an aunty,’ Pippa said stoutly. ‘Only bossier. More like a mother hen, really.’ She was staring across the table at him as she spoke, her voice…challenging? Max met her look head-on. Had she guessed why he was here?

He had to tell her, but let it come slowly, he thought. It’d be easy to get a blank no, with no room to manoeuvre. Surely the poverty he saw in this place meant he’d at least get a hearing.

Meanwhile…‘Where’s this wet-weather gear?’

‘I’ll show you.’ Pippa produced a battered purse and handed over two notes and a couple of coins. ‘Our budget for the rest of the week is thirty-two dollars, fifty cents,’ she told him. ‘Can you buy fish and chips and bread, jam, some dried pasta and a slab of cheap cheese? Spend the change on dog food. The cheapest there is.’

He stared down at the notes and coins in disbelief. ‘You’re kidding,’ he said finally, and she flushed.

‘We’re momentarily broke,’ she admitted. ‘Our vats were found to be contaminated. It’s only low level—we’re still drinking our milk—but it’s bad enough to stop sales. We need a week’s clear testing before the dairy corporation will buy our milk again.’

‘But we can’t afford new vats,’ Marc interjected. ‘Pippa says we’re up the creek without a paddle.’ He sounded almost cheerful but Max saw Pippa wince and realised there was real distress behind those words.

‘That’s not Mr de Gautier’s problem,’ Pippa said, gently reproving. ‘But we do have to pull in our belts. Mr de Gautier, I’d appreciate if you could do our buying for us, but that’s all we need. We’ll be fine.’

‘Will you be fine without fruit?’ he asked, staring at the list in disapproval. ‘What about scurvy?’

‘No one gets scurvy if they go without for only a week.’

‘No, but…’ He searched her face for a long moment, seeing quiet dignity masking a background of desperation. What on earth was she doing here? She seemed to be stuck on an almost derelict farm with three kids who weren’t hers and a dog who’d seen better days. The investigators said there was no blood tie. Why hadn’t she walked away?

Until now this had seemed easy. He’d expected to be back on a plane by the end of the week. With Marc. Maybe with Pippa as well. It could still happen, but that jutting chin prompted doubts. The little girls prompted more. Plus the way the dog was draped so she was touching everyone’s feet.

Enough. He squared his shoulders and accepted an umbrella. Doubts had to wait. He had to go shopping.

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