A Wedding At Windaroo

‘She’s dead right,’ he responded brightly. ‘I wouldn’t need to sell this place if she had the right man to help her run it.’

‘So you’d be quite happy to see her throw herself on the marriage market?’

Michael eyed him shrewdly. ‘Don’t you think it’s a good idea?’

Gabe shifted uneasily beneath the faded blue gaze. ‘I wouldn’t know what’s best for her. I’m not her grandfather.’

Leaning closer, Michael touched him on the arm so that he had to turn back, and when he did the old fellow winked. ‘I reckon there’s no harm in letting her look around. It’ll help her to see the lie of the land. Right now she can’t see the wood for the trees.’ He winked at Gabe. ‘You’ll keep an eye on her, won’t you, son?’

‘Surely you don’t want me snooping around like some kind of private eye?’

Michael lifted his shoulders in a helpless little shrug. ‘She’s a babe in the woods. There are wolves out there.’

‘I’ll cramp her style.’

But Michael had a trump card up his sleeve. ‘I’m a dying old man. Can’t you do this for me?’

Gabe’s eyes narrowed. He’d never realised Michael Delaney was such a crafty old beggar.

‘You’ll promise me this one thing, won’t you, boy?’

Gabe sighed. ‘I don’t know how long I’m going to be in the district—but OK, it’s a deal.’ Then he shot to his feet.

‘Something smells good,’ Michael said. ‘I’m sure our breakfast’s ready.’

But the conversation had curbed Gabe’s appetite. ‘I need to get back home,’ he said. ‘Jonno’s expecting me to give him a hand with some stockyard work today.’

In the kitchen, Piper was carrying toast and butter to the table when she caught sight of her reflection in a battered old mirror that hung near the hat pegs. She gasped at the sight of herself with her hair all wild and loose around her face like a silky halo.

With hardly a thought to where she dumped the toast, she drifted closer to the mirror. How different she looked. For a moment she forgot the embarrassment of her foolish behaviour last night. She was thinking instead of the gentle, caressing way Gabe had threaded his fingers through her hair and the way he’d stroked her skin.

A tide of pink rose from her neck to her cheeks and she looked happy and rosy. Almost glowing—like a computer-enhanced picture in a glossy magazine.

Idiot!

She had nothing to make her smile. Nothing to go all vain and gooey about. How could she have been so stupid as to ask Gabe to kiss her? Gabe, who’d been kissed and seduced by squillions of sexy women.

She swung away from the mirror. Last night had merely reinforced what she already knew. She had a long way to go before she worked out the finer points of catching a man.

Hurrying into the bathroom, she grabbed her hairbrush and set about flattening her hair, then pulled it back tightly with another elasticised band.

One thing was certain. Next time she practised flirting she’d make sure Gabe Rivers was nowhere near.

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