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“Mummy’s here, Mikey. Don’t move!” Rachel called. Perilously close to him, the whirling blades glinted ominously in the midday sun, sending a black, twisting fear through her. “I’m coming up to get you.” She spoke reassuringly, though she had no idea how she would be able to hold on to her son and keep a firm grasp on the narrow steel ladder at the same time. “Don’t look down!”
She felt Zac’s hand on her shoulder, easing her to one side. “I’ll climb up and get him, Rachel. I’m stronger. I’ll keep him safe, I promise.”
Would he? She gripped his arm in agonized indecision. Would he be as careful as she would be, the boy’s own mother? Mikey meant everything to her, but what did he mean to Zac? He’d never met the boy until today, and he only knew Mikey as the son of a brother he’d never had any time for, a nephew he’d known nothing about until today.
But Zac was strong, far stronger than she was. With those powerful hands and shoulders he’d be more likely to bring Mikey down safely. She must trust him. She must trust the man who’d shown he wasn’t worthy of trust by betraying his own brother, as she’d unknowingly betrayed her own husband. But this was a matter of life and death, not morals.
“Please…take care,” she whispered, and let her hand drop away.
“I will, don’t worry.” He started scaling the ladder, his strong, tanned hands gripping the rungs in a way that gave her a measure of comfort. She’d felt those same hands on her body and knew they could be gentle, too….
She held her breath, clenching her teeth in a frenzy of suspense. Zac was nearly at the top now and she could hear him speaking gently to Mikey. Her heart leaped into her mouth as he managed to loosen Mikey’s frightened grip on the ladder and gather him in one arm, keeping his other hand firmly on the ladder. And then they were coming down, Mikey’s arms curled around his rescuer’s neck and his small plump legs wound around Zac’s upper body.
Rachel didn’t start breathing again until they were nearly at ground level, close enough for her to catch her son if he fell. She let her gaze dwell for a second on Zac’s strong, competent arms and broad shoulders, feeling a rush of gratitude.
The wayward thought popped into her head that Adrian, if he’d been here, instead of Zac, would probably still have been hesitating down below, or calling for backup, or putting a detailed plan into action, weighing up the pros and cons before acting—always the safe, precautionary approach, so different from his more risk-taking, man-of-action brother.
And who was to say which approach was the best? On the one hand, Zac could have lost his grip on Mikey or the ladder as he’d come down, while on the other, her son could just as easily have panicked and fallen while Adrian was preparing a rescue plan, with safety harnesses and bales of hay to provide a soft landing if the worst happened.
But all that mattered was that Zac had brought her son down safe and sound, without any delay or fuss at all. When the two reached solid ground, she gathered Mikey in her arms and held him tightly for a long moment, her eyes moist as they sought and found Zac’s.
“Thank you,” she said, and felt a tiny frisson of shock as his eyes caught and held hers for a heart-stopping second before she broke eye contact.
She could feel Mikey’s weight dragging on her arms and shoulders and was thankful she hadn’t been forced to bring him down from that great height herself. Already he was wriggling to be put down, which only added to his weight. She set him on the dusty ground but didn’t release him, instead placing her hands on his shoulders and leaning over to bring her face close to his.
“Mikey, you know you’re not to climb up the windmill. I’ve told you a hundred times. We’ve all told you. It’s far too dangerous. Why did you do it?”
His answer floored her. “I was spotting tigers from the treetops, like Uncle Zac.”
Like Uncle Zac… She tossed her brother-in-law a sharp glare, her gratitude disintegrating. Damn Zac and his exciting tales of wild animals. Already he was causing trouble and exerting a dangerous influence on her son.
“Mikey, there are no tigers in Australia. And a windmill is not a treetop.”
“Just a boy’s lively imagination.” Zac’s tone was benign, not the least concerned or penitent. “I was just the same. Always dreaming of adventure and excitement and travel to exotic places. Always getting up to mischief. Mikey must have inherited his high spirits from his uncle.” He said it with a certain amount of satisfaction.
Rachel’s heart did a double flip. “He’s more likely to have inherited it from me,” she said in her most squashing tone. “I was a tomboy as a kid, always getting up to pranks. But putting yourself in danger is a different thing entirely. I’m trying to raise my son to be responsible.”
“You can be too cautious, too careful, Rachel. It can make you vulnerable, tighten you up, cause you to make mistakes. Look where caution got Adrian.”
She sucked in a vexed breath. “That was a freak accident. It could have happened to anyone. It had nothing to do with being too cautious and tightening up.”
“Maybe. Or maybe he felt guilty about what he was doing to Bushy Hill and lost concentration just long enough to make a lethal mistake.”
She snapped her mouth shut. Hadn’t she had a similar thought herself?
Adrian had always tended to put the needs of the cattle station ahead of conservation and the rights of native animals—“vermin,” he’d called them. He’d been forever complaining about the kangaroos, wallabies and wombats and the damage they caused, kicking down fences and digging holes that tripped the horses.
And her husband had had a point. The wildlife often did cause problems. Only yesterday Vince and her young jackeroo, Danny, her recently arrived apprentice farmhand, had found a dead kangaroo in one of the outlying dams. If they hadn’t discovered it so quickly, by a sheer fluke, it could have polluted the water over time. Especially with the dam so low.
Worse, the dead kangaroo had been shot. Its body must have been deliberately thrown into the dam. She couldn’t imagine anyone at Yarrah Downs doing such a thing and had put the incident down to intruders, trespassing onto the property at night to hunt wild boar and shooting the ’roo in frustration after failing to find what they were looking for.
Her chest swelled in a sigh. Since her husband’s death, nothing had gone right. It had been one problem after another.
“You can take Adrian’s motorbike,” she told Zac. “It’s in that shed over there.” She waved a hand. “You’ll find bottles of water in the cool room in the same shed. Better take some with you.” She paused. “Let me know what damage has been done and I’ll see what we can do about it.”
“Whatever damage has been done,” Zac said grimly, “I’ll fix it—if it’s not too late.”
“Can I go with Uncle Zac?” Mikey begged. “Dad used to let me ride on his motorbike.”
Only once, Rachel recalled, and only around the homestead yards. Her husband had decided it wasn’t safe. Safety had been paramount to Adrian. Until he’d made his one fatal mistake.
“No, you can not go, Mikey.” Best to keep him under her eye and away from Zac. Away from further trouble. “You can stay here and help me. And later I might give you a ride on Silver.”
Adrian had bought the pale-gray gelding for her as a wedding gift, after she’d told him she’d taken riding lessons for years and had competed in show-jumping events. On the rare occasions she could find someone to look after Mikey for a few hours, she loved taking Silver out on musters or for invigorating gallops to blow the cobwebs away and feel the wind in her hair. More and more often lately, at Mikey’s urging, she’d been letting her son ride around the yard on Silver.
“Wifout a lead?” Mikey gave her a beseeching look.
She hesitated. Silver was a big horse and could be hard to hold. But if they stayed in the yard and she stayed close by…
“If you do as I say.”
Zac gave a quick grin, as if he’d helped Mikey win a point. “Well, be seeing you.”
As he ruffled the boy’s dark curls and strode off to the shed, Rachel let out another sigh, remembering Zac’s comment about her husband’s assault on Bushy Hill. If it’s not too late, he’d said, in a harsh tone. There’d plainly been little love lost between the twin brothers.
Zac raised a trail of dust as he roared across the paddocks. His brow was lowered, but he wasn’t thinking of Adrian. He was thinking of Rachel. She clearly didn’t want him here. She hadn’t forgiven him. He’d be lucky if she ever did. And how could he blame her? Hadn’t he been blaming himself for what had happened on that highly charged night ever since?
He let out a savage groan. The only woman he’d ever wanted, ever cared about, ever lost his head over, and she could never be his, even now that she was free. She would never be able to forgive him or trust him again. She despised him. Damn his stupidity, his weakness, his pathetic loss of control. Damn it to hell!
Even now, he couldn’t understand how it had happened. Nothing like that had ever happened to him before. No woman had ever had that kind of power over him, making him forget everything but his scorching need for her and the mind-numbing, earth-shattering way she affected him. He’d always prided himself on his strength of character, his integrity, his loyalty.
But they’d deserted him the moment his brother’s wife had thrown herself at him and pressed her fevered lips to his, at the same time running her hand down his body and over his shorts, boldly gripping him, setting off a reaction he would never have believed possible. Some power or demon stronger than himself had taken possession of him.
If only he’d stayed away five years ago, today could have been their first meeting…and she just might have looked on him differently, despite what she’d heard about him from Adrian. At least she could have made up her own mind, with no preconceived ideas of her own to influence her.
But now it was too late!
He put his foot down even harder, almost flying through the air as he deliberately increased his speed, heedless of the danger, not caring in that black, reckless moment what happened to him. Even if he broke his neck, who would care?
And then he thought of Mikey, his nephew, a true Hammond by blood, as well as looks. The boy had recently lost his father. To lose his newly discovered uncle, as well, a man who looked just like his father…what would that do to him? Zac ground out a curse, at the same time giving an ironic laugh when he had to jam his foot down hard on the brake. There was a gate ahead and he would have to stop to open it.
By the time he’d reached the other side of the gate and shut it behind him, the black moment was past and his mind was focused on Bushy Hill.
It was dinnertime before Zac came back. Rachel had already fed and bathed Mikey, wanting him in bed and out of the way early, before he could blab to his uncle that he was about to turn four. She needed time to think and decide what would be the best thing to do—to keep her embarrassing secret or tell Zac the truth.
Zac Hammond was not the kind of man she wanted as a father for Mikey. Aside from his dubious character, he would seldom be around. Not that he would want the responsibility of a child, anyway. Zac wasn’t the type to take on responsibilities. He had his own life, his own world with his wild animals. That was how he liked it and would want to keep it.
And what would the truth do to Mikey? As an acknowledged father—a largely absent father figure— Zac would be an unsuitable influence on the boy, unsettling him and putting wild, reckless ideas into his head. She wanted Mikey to grow up to be a steady, responsible adult, with a normal, settled home life and a family one day, not to be an aimless loner like Zac, without any ties or responsibilities or anyone to love and care about or to love and care about him.
Yet how could she lie to Zac outright if he asked the question? Would it be right to stay silent, now that Adrian was gone and not here to be hurt? But how could she tell Zac the truth? What emotional turmoil and disruption to their lives would it lead to? She would have to sleep on it first.
Zac looked a real mess when he walked in. Dirt had mingled with sweat, his naturally unruly hair was matted and more disheveled than ever, and his shirt was filthy. Yet something deep in the pit of her stomach stirred at the sight of him. He still looked breathtakingly sexy and strong and disturbingly virile.
That he could affect her in such a raw, basic way brought a sharpness to her voice. “You’d better clean yourself up before you tell me what you’ve been doing.” What you’ve been doing to my land. “You can tell me over dinner. My head stockman, Vince, and his wife, Joanne, will be joining us.” She’d heard Vince’s Land Rover returning a while ago and had rushed out to meet it.
She often invited Vince and his new bride to the homestead to talk over station matters. If not to dinner, to drinks on the veranda, sometimes joined by Danny and whoever else was working at Yarrah Downs at the time.
“Can you wait for a cold beer until they come?” she asked Zac. “Or make do with some water for now?” How lucky that she’d asked Vince and Joanne for dinner tonight. Now she wouldn’t have to be alone with Zac.
He grinned.
“Sure. Where’s Mikey?”
“He’s already in bed. He tired himself out.”
“Reaction to all the excitement earlier in the day, hmm?” Zac’s dirt-smudged lips curved in that roguish way he had—so unlike his more serious twin brother, and so like Mikey. So disturbingly like Mikey.
“Reaction to being scared to death, more like it,” she heard herself snapping back, her nerves suddenly on edge. “Are you going to go and clean up or not?”
“Yes, ma’am.” He loped off, still grinning.
While she was waiting for him to come back, Vince and Joanne arrived, freshened up after their day spent checking the water bores. They lived in the head stockman’s cottage on the far side of the yards, past the communal bungalow Danny shared with any other stockmen working on the property.
Vince and his wife were both hardworking, rough-diamond types. Vince was short and muscular, with a shock of sandy hair normally hidden beneath a battered Akubra hat. Joanne, as strong and tough-talking as a man, had inherited her wiry strength from her stockman father and her dusky beauty from her Aboriginal mother. She pulled her weight with the men out on the station and acted as cook on musters.
Rachel often worried that Joanne knew more about station life than she did. She had a feeling that Vince thought so, too, that he still thought of his new boss as a cosseted, wet-behind-the-ears “townie.”
“Is there something wrong?” she asked the moment she saw their faces.
Vince’s mouth was dragged down in a grimace. “We found that one o’ the bores—Boomerang Bore—has been tampered with and put out of action, maybe wrecked beyond repair. We’ll have to bring in a contractor quickly to fix it. If it can be fixed. We might need to sink a new bore.”
Rachel’s heart sank. How on earth would she be able to afford to fix it, let alone pay for a new bore if they needed it? It would cost a fortune! Yet she had to find a way. Without water her cattle would die.
Tampered with, Vince had said. “Who would do such a thing?” she cried. Her eyes clouded. Someone who didn’t want a woman running Yarrah Downs? Someone who wanted to demoralize her and drive her out?
The person most likely to benefit if she did leave was Vince. He’d made no secret of the fact that he wanted to manage a cattle station one day, now he was a married man with responsibilities. He must think this a perfect opportunity—the city-bred widow, left alone with a young child, finding herself unable to cope with the demands of a busy cattle station. Putting a few obstacles in her way might drive her out all the faster.
Rachel felt a wave of despair. How could she keep Yarrah Downs running if she couldn’t even trust her own head stockman?
“Beats me.” Vince shook his sandy head. There was no sign of guilt on his sun-weathered face, no sliding away of his crinkled gaze, but then, Vince seldom showed any emotion. “Young hooligans? One of our neighbors, keen to buy up your land if you decide to sell? Or maybe some contractor who doesn’t like dealing with a female station owner.”
“Is that how you feel, Vince?” she asked bluntly.
“No, of course not.” But his ready denial wasn’t convincing. He didn’t expect her to stay. Not for the long term. Not when he knew her own father was doing his best to persuade her to sell and move back to town. Nobody expected her to stay. And Zac, she suspected, shared the sentiment.
As if her thoughts had conjured him up, Zac appeared, his hair still damp from his shower, his clean shirt splashed with droplets of water. In place of the boots he’d been wearing earlier was an old pair of sneakers. He looked perfectly at home already in his brother’s house.
She sensed Vince stiffen at the sight of him, heard Joanne’s quick intake of breath and said as coolly as she could, “I don’t suppose you’ve met Adrian’s twin brother, Zac Hammond? Zac, this is my head stockman, Vince Morgan. And this is his wife, Joanne.”
“G’day, Zac.” Vince stretched out a freckled hand. By the mystified look on his face, it was clear that Adrian had never mentioned a brother to his head stockman, or if he had, he’d kept quiet about Zac being an identical twin.
As Zac clasped the outstretched hand, Rachel could almost read Vince’s mind: couldn’t have been much brotherly love between ’em if the boss never mentioned having a twin brother. And how right he would be!
To explain her brother-in-law’s long absence from Australia, she gave a sketchy background. “Zac’s a wildlife photographer. He works in remote parts of the world, taking photographs for geographic and wildlife publications and making documentaries. He’s come back to Australia to do an assignment here.”
Was that a flicker of relief in Vince’s eyes? Or merely a flicker of interest? Had he wondered for a second if Zac had come back to take over the family property, dashing any hopes he might have had of running the station himself?
“Good to meet you, Vince. Joanne.” Zac was all smoothness and charm as he turned to Vince’s bride, who gave one of her rare smiles and thrust out her own hand. Rachel had the strangest feeling, as Zac’s hand closed over Joanne’s, that it was her own hand being clasped in that warm, firm grasp, and she had to swallow and look away.
“How about a cold beer?” she asked, and receiving nods all round—Joanne always joined the men in a beer—she hastened back to the kitchen. She normally had a weak gin-and-tonic herself, but tonight she chose mineral water, knowing they’d be having wine with dinner. With Zac around, she needed to keep her wits about her.
Over drinks she asked Zac about his inspection of Bushy Hill, half dreading his answer. She wasn’t sure how much damage Adrian had done before his fatal accident. For Mikey’s sake she’d kept well away from the hill in the past month.
Zac pursed his lips. “I guess it could have been worse. Most of the hill’s been untouched, luckily, but quite a bit of native scrub and a few trees along the lower slopes are gone, exposing the bare earth to the elements. I’d advise putting in some drains before the rains come, or you could face an erosion problem.”
Drains? How much would they cost? Rachel took a quick gulp of her drink, wishing she had chosen something stronger.
“We can only hope the wildlife hasn’t been disturbed too much.” Zac’s jaw gritted as he said it. “My other worry is that the dam below the hill is almost empty. We’ll need to bring in a water tanker to refill it, or the wildlife and the cattle out there will run out of water. Or be in danger of getting trapped in the mud if the dam dries up any more.”
Rachel’s spirits nose-dived. Drains…trucking in water…repairing or maybe even replacing the damaged bore… All tasks that would cost money she simply didn’t have.
She felt Zac’s eyes on her face and knew he’d sensed her dismay. Now he, too, would assume the property was too much for her, just as everyone else did.
“Don’t worry, Rachel. I said I’d fix my brother’s mess and I will. I need to fly to Brisbane in the morning to see about the plane and to bring some more fuel in, but first I’ll arrange for a water tanker to come and for a truck to deliver the plastic pipes and gravel I’ll need for Bushy Hill. I’ll work on that when I get back tomorrow. Then I’ll scatter some seeds around for eventual regrowth when the rains come.”
As her lips parted in protest—how dared he take charge and leave her to face the bill?—he drawled, “My expense, naturally. Bushy Hill’s always been my special interest. Please don’t deny me this one thing I can do for Yarrah Downs, Rachel.”
She hesitated, frowning, wondering about his motives. If she allowed him to sink money into the property, she would be obligated to him. He might even expect to become a partner, an equal, if mostly absent partner, with the right to make decisions—decisions she might not agree with.
“No strings attached,” Zac said, as if he’d read her mind. “It’s the least I can do for my family.”
Well, that made sense. He hadn’t done too much for his family in the past. And she and Mikey were the only family he had now that Adrian had gone.
“Well, if you insist,” she said, trying not to sound too grateful. No strings, he’d said. No, of course not. Zac Hammond didn’t believe in strings or getting involved in other people’s lives. Let him do something for his family in the short time he was here. He’d be gone soon, anyway. “I have more pressing matters to deal with,” she said with a shrug.
“The damaged bore should be our first priority,” Vince said, drawing a quick frown from her. It was precisely what she’d been thinking herself. Did he have to treat her like an ignorant female who needed to have decisions made for her?
She stifled her indignation. He was only trying to help. It was his job to help her. “I’ll call the contractor in the morning,” she said, wondering how in the world she was going to pay for it. The bank had refused further credit. “It’ll cost a bit to repair. If we need to sink a new bore, we…we might have to leave it for a while. It’ll cost an arm and a leg. Meantime, we’ll just have to move those cattle to another paddock.” Water for the cattle was vital.
“If you need to sink a new bore,” Zac said, “I’ll see to it. You can pay me back when you can, Rachel.”
She recoiled. To accept that kind of help from Zac would really put her in his debt. He’d have a real hold over her. She’d be in his power. He’d love that.
“I don’t—”
“A loan, Rachel. Just like you’d get from a bank. Only, I won’t be charging interest or putting any pressure on you to pay me back until you’re ready.”
But maybe you’d put pressure on me to pay you back in some other way. She felt her legs go weak. Whatever his motive, he wasn’t making the offer out of the goodness of his heart. Zac Hammond had no heart, according to Adrian.
