скачать книгу бесплатно
A Bride For Barra Creek
Jessica Hart
Self-made millionaire Tye Gibson has come home to the Outback–to find himself a bride!Lizzy Walker is delighted when Tye offers her a job. Working for his company could be just what her career– and her bank account–need. Only the job is not quite what she expects. She has to find Tye a bride within two months–or she might have to marry him herself!
“So you won’t marry me?”
“No.”
“What about your financial problems?”
“I’m looking for a job, not a meal ticket,” Lizzy said coldly. “I’m sorry if you feel you’ve wasted an expensive bottle of champagne on me, but you’re going to have to look elsewhere for a wife. I’m not for sale.”
Wearily, she made to push back her chair, but Tye caught her wrist.
“Lizzy, wait! You want a job? I’ll give you a job. If you won’t marry me yourself, you can find me someone who will.”
In the hot, dusty Australian Outback, the last thing a woman expects to find is a husband….
Clare, the Englishwoman, Ellie, the tomboy and Lizzy, the career girl, don’t come to this harsh, beautiful land looking for love.
Yet they all find themselves saying “I do” to a handsome Australian man of their dreams!
Baby at Bushman’s Creek
Wedding at Waverley Creek
A Bride for Barra Creek
Welcome to an exciting new trilogy by rising star
Jessica Hart
Celebrate three unexpected weddings, Australian-style!
A Bride for Barra Creek
Jessica Hart
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
For Annie, with love on reaching Chapter Ten.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE (#u96709859-5086-58e3-8d21-64de2424ea99)
CHAPTER TWO (#u64945820-8707-5bfe-bf55-428185e1c03e)
CHAPTER THREE (#u6b0e3bda-f76d-57b8-a425-4ce5167c8ca6)
CHAPTER FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SIX (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ONE
‘YOU may kiss the bride.’
Smiling, Lizzy watched as Jack cupped Ellie’s face between his hands and bent his head to kiss her. It was only a brief kiss, but Lizzy was sure that for that moment the two of them had completely forgotten their audience and existed only for each other.
Lucky Ellie, thought Lizzy as she saw Jack’s hand close firmly around her sister’s, and she couldn’t help wondering a little wistfully if it would ever be her turn. When was she going to find someone who belonged with her the way Jack belonged with Ellie?
Not that she didn’t have more important things to worry about, Lizzy reminded herself. Like finding a job. Falling in love would be wonderful, but it wouldn’t pay off her credit card bills, would it?
Lizzy’s mind flickered towards the likely total, and veered away like a startled horse. She shouldn’t have bought those shoes, she thought, glancing down at them a little guiltily. They had been an extravagance, but they were perfect with the dress, and she’d had to look nice for Ellie’s wedding. It wasn’t every day your little sister got married.
Anyway, Lizzy decided firmly, she wasn’t going to think about her overdraft today. This was Ellie’s day.
Blue eyes warm with affection, Lizzy looked around the old woolshed. It looked as if the entire district had turned out to see Ellie marry Jack Henderson. How could their marriage fail to be a success when so many people were there to wish them well? All the faces were familiar to Lizzy, all were smiling.
Except one.
He was standing on his own, not talking, not smiling, just surveying the scene with an air of detached cynicism that made him stand out from the crowd far more than his height or his dark, harsh features.
As a child, Lizzy had been sent a book of fairy tales from England. It had been illustrated with green fields and dense, dark forests that had meant little to a child growing up in the outback. One of the pictures had shown a wolf, barely disguised beneath a fleece, prowling through a field of sheep. It had conveyed the same sense of lurking menace that Lizzy felt now, staring at the stranger, and a tiny shiver tiptoed down her spine.
The photographer was busily arranging family groups and Lizzy was called just then to stand next to her sister. Smiling obediently for the camera, she craned her neck slightly to keep the mysterious stranger in view over the photographer’s shoulder, and her interest deepened when she saw the way the other guests eyed him askance and were careful to give him a wide berth. Clearly she wasn’t the only one who sensed something different about him, something dangerous, yet strangely compelling.
Released by the photographer, Lizzy manoeuvred her way to the edge of the group where she could greet guests waiting to congratulate Jack and Ellie and watch the man at the same time. He had acquired a glass of the champagne that was circulating, and judging by the curl of his lip he didn’t think much of it.
Lizzy was intrigued. Who was he? His hair was dark and cut close to his head, his face angular, with strong features and a forbidding expression. He might be dressed like all the other men in the room, but there was an unmistakably maverick quality about him. It was something to do with the hardness of his mouth, with the coiled power that was evident in the way he held himself, with the cool, watchful eyes.
Her mother must know who he was, Lizzy reasoned. He didn’t look like the kind of man who would drive thirty miles from the nearest sealed road to gatecrash an ordinary outback wedding, so presumably he had been invited.
She turned to ask, but her mother was talking to the celebrant, and when she glanced back to the stranger she found herself looking straight into his eyes. They were piercingly pale in his dark face, and so cold that Lizzy’s heart jerked and the breath dried in her throat.
She had the oddest feeling that the floor of the woolshed had dropped away beneath her feet and only that unnervingly light gaze was holding her above an abyss. It could only have been for a moment, but to Lizzy it felt as if she hung there for ever, her gaze locked with his.
And then he smiled, a swift, mocking smile that for some reason sent the colour surging into her cheeks. Lizzy wrenched her eyes away and pointedly turned her back, furious to find that her heart was hammering in her chest.
It hadn’t been a nice smile. Not really. She wasn’t even going to ask who he was. From now on, she decided, she would ignore him.
Only somehow she couldn’t. Lizzy threw herself into her role as bridesmaid, flitting between groups, hugging old friends, laughing, kissing, agreeing that Ellie looked beautiful and that she and Jack were perfect for each other, but no matter how many times she tried to turn her back, the stranger always seemed to be there, lurking irritatingly at the edge of her vision.
Perversely, the moment she couldn’t see him any more, she missed him. On her way back from the bar that had been set up at one end of the woolshed, Lizzy paused and sipped her champagne, surveying the crowd with a slight frown between her brows. Where had he gone?
‘Looking for me?’ a voice said in her ear, and Lizzy started, the champagne sloshing out of her glass as she swung round.
Sure enough, it was the stranger, looking even more sardonic at close quarters. Close to, Lizzy could see that his eyes were grey, but so light they seemed glacial against the darkness of his hair and lashes, and she had the uncomfortable feeling that they could see right through her.
‘Why should I be looking for you?’ she asked, with what she thought was creditable coolness considering that her heart seemed to have taken up residence in her throat, where it was jumping and fluttering and generally making it ridiculously hard for her to breathe.
‘I’m the only person here you haven’t kissed,’ he said. He had an unusual accent, not wholly Australian nor completely American, but somewhere in between. ‘You wouldn’t want to miss anyone out, would you?’
Lizzy swallowed her heart firmly. ‘I only kiss people I know,’ she said, ‘and I don’t know you.’
‘We could introduce ourselves,’ he pointed out. ‘Although I already know exactly who you are.’
Lizzy, opening her mouth to reply to his suggestion, was thrown. ‘You do?’ she asked uncertainly.
‘I’ve been asking around about you. You’re Elizabeth Walker, always known as Lizzy, elder sister of the bride and all round nice girl.’
For some reason this description annoyed Lizzy. ‘That’s not quite how I’d describe myself,’ she said with something of a snap.
‘Oh? How would you describe yourself?’
‘As a professional woman,’ said Lizzy loftily and not very accurately. ‘I’m in PR.’
‘Ah.’ He nodded down at her feet. ‘That explains the shoes.’
In spite of herself, Lizzy warmed to him. He was the only person who had noticed her shoes. Following his gaze downwards, she couldn’t help smiling. There was just something about shoes, Lizzy felt. You couldn’t put on a pair like this and not feel good.
‘Aren’t they wonderful?’ she said, forgetting for a moment that she didn’t like him.
His eyes travelled slowly up from the shoes to her face. Lizzy was tall and built on generous lines. Whenever she grumbled about losing weight, her friends would roll their eyes and assure her that her figure was perfectly proportioned to her height and her personality. Deep down, Lizzy knew that this was true, but it didn’t stop her grumbling. She was normal, after all.
For Ellie’s wedding she had found a fabulous dress that emphasised her warm curves and glowing, opulent skin. Kingfisher-blue, its colour intensified the blueness of her eyes and made a wonderful foil for her wavy blonde hair, bluntly cut to her chin, and her stylishly bold lipstick.
There was no way that Lizzy could be described as a classical beauty, but her face was so vivid that no one ever noticed that her nose was too big and her mouth too wide or that there were already lines starring the edges of her eyes.
‘Wonderful,’ Tye agreed. His face was quite straight, but something in his voice set a blush stealing into Lizzy’s cheeks, and she looked quickly away. It was a relief when his gaze dropped back to her shoes. ‘But not very practical,’ he added.
They certainly weren’t. She had nearly twisted her ankle several times on the uneven woolshed floor. To her chagrin, Lizzy realised that she had been holding her breath and let it out. ‘There are more important things in life than practicality,’ she said firmly, and a disconcerting gleam of amusement lit the cool grey eyes.
‘You must be the only person in this woolshed to think so!’
That was probably true too, Lizzy reflected, glancing around at the people she had grown up with. They were all wonderful, and she loved them deeply, but they didn’t understand about shoes.
‘You have to be practical if you live in the outback,’ she said, her gaze coming back to meet his almost defiantly. ‘I don’t. I’m a city girl now.’
‘So I gathered.’
Lizzy didn’t quite know what to make of that. There had been an odd undercurrent to his voice that she couldn’t interpret. ‘You seem to know all about me,’ she pointed out with a challenging look, ‘but I still don’t know who you are.’
‘I’m Tye Gibson,’ he told her, and he smiled sardonically at the expression on her face. ‘Yes, that Tye Gibson,’ he answered her unspoken question. ‘Didn’t anyone tell you that the black sheep of the district was back?’
‘No,’ admitted Lizzy, too surprised to think what she was saying.
She couldn’t help staring. Tye Gibson! No one had seen him since he had walked off his family property nearly twenty years ago, but of course they all knew about him. Breaking off all contact with his father, Tye had turned his back on the bush and gone on make his fortune. Not just an ordinary little fortune, not just millions, but serious money.
Lizzy had never been absolutely sure what Tye Gibson did—something to do with communications, she thought—but she knew that his company, GCS, was a global giant, and that his name was a byword for ruthlessness around the world. It wasn’t bad going for a boy from Barra Creek, but nobody wanted to claim him as a local hero. However Tye had made his fortune, it hadn’t been by being nice.
It seemed that anyone who ever had to do business with him regretted it, and the press didn’t like him any better. Refusing to be interviewed or photographed, Tye Gibson was apparently content for people to think of him as heartless and amoral, and the richer and more reclusive he became, the more the myths about him proliferated.
Nor did the district he had grown up in have anything good to say for him. Lizzy had been a little girl when he’d left his father to struggle on his own, and anyway had never met him, but gossip travelled fast around the outback and she knew all about his unsavoury reputation. Nobody had been sorry to see him go.
But now it seemed that he was back—and it wasn’t hard to guess why.
‘Aren’t you a little late?’ she said.
Tye’s dark brows lifted. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Your father’s funeral was a week ago,’ said Lizzy pointedly.
‘So?’
‘So couldn’t you have made the effort to get here in time for that?’
His face hardened. ‘I think that would have been a little hypocritical, don’t you? My father and I hadn’t spoken for twenty years. What would have been the point of me weeping crocodile tears over the coffin? Besides,’ he went on, glancing around him, ‘I doubt if I would have been very welcome. That’s been made very obvious today.’
‘Are you surprised?’
‘Not in the slightest.’ There was a cynical twist to Tye’s lips. ‘Nothing’s changed round here. I never expected to be greeted as the prodigal son.’
‘Perhaps if you’d come back to see your father when he was alive, you would have been,’ said Lizzy tartly.
She must have drunk more champagne than she’d thought. She wasn’t usually like this. Normally she had the sunniest of natures and wanted everyone to like her, but there was something about Tye Gibson that got under her skin and left her feeling ruffled and somehow aggravated.
‘He wanted to see you,’ she told Tye, who lifted a disbelieving eyebrow.
‘Did he?’
Lizzy lost some of her assurance. ‘Well…that’s what I heard. I heard that he’d begged you to come home so that he could see you before he died.’
Tye laughed, but there was no humour in it. ‘I’d like to have seen my father begging for anything!’
It didn’t ring that true with what Lizzy remembered of Frank Gibson either, now that he mentioned it. Frank had been a proud man.
‘You mean it’s not true?’
