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Frustrated by his attitude, Sandra dredged up an old Outback expression. “What would you know, you big galah!”
He choked back a laugh. “Hey, mind who you’re calling names!”
“Sorry. Galah is not the word for you. You’re more an eagle. But surely you realise they must have been shocked out of their minds by the will. Uncle Lloyd would have fully expected to inherit. He wouldn’t want to work the place. He’d sell it. Bernie would go along with that. Bernie disliked anything to do with station work. You must know that, too. Where do you live?” she asked abruptly.
“I have the overseer’s bungalow.”
“Roy Sommerville, what happened to him? He was the overseer when we left.”
“Died a couple of years back of lung cancer. He was of the generation that chain smoked from dawn to dark.”
“Poor old Roy! He was nice to me.”
“Anyone would be nice to you.” His response was involuntary.
She grimaced. “I don’t recall Uncle Lloyd ever bouncing me on his knee. His ex-wife, Aunty Jilly, used to dodge me and my mother all the time. No wonder that marriage didn’t work out. Bernie was always so darn nasty. Now they must all think I’m the worst thing that ever happened.”
He couldn’t deny that. “What was your grandfather like with you?” he asked, really wanting to know. “Any fond memories?”
“Hello, we’re talking Rigby Kingston here!” she chortled.
“The most rambunctious old son of a bitch to ride out of the Red Centre.”
He shook his head. “When you’d melt any man’s heart.” A major paradox here when Kingston had left her his fortune.
“I don’t want to melt men’s hearts,” she exploded, the blood flowing into her cheeks. “It’s all smiles and kisses one day. Rude shocks the next. I don’t like men at all. They don’t bring out the best in me.”
He held back a sigh. “I think you must have had some bad experiences.”
“You can say that again! But to get back to my dear old grandpop who remembered me at the end, I do recall a few pats on the head. A tweak of the curls before he was out the front door. I didn’t bother him anyway. He was happy enough when my dad was alive. After that, he turned into the Grandad from Hell. He seemed to put the blame for what happened to my dad on my mother.”
“How could she have been responsible?” he asked, puzzled.
“Uncle Lloyd blew the whistle on a little affair she had in Sydney,” she told him bleakly. “Mum used to go away a lot and leave Dad and me at Moondai. Uncle Lloyd said she was really wild, but then he was a great one for airing everyone else’s dirty linen.” She broke off, staring at him accusingly.
“You must have heard all this?”
Why pretend he hadn’t when an unbelievable number of people had made it their business to fill him in on Pamela Kingston’s alleged exploits? Lloyd Kingston wasn’t the only one who liked airing the world’s dirty linen. Apparently Sandra’s mother had been famous for being not only radiantly beautiful but something of a two-timing Jezebel. There had even been gossip about who Alexandra’s father really was. Alexandra didn’t look a bit like a Kingston which now that he had seen her Dan had to concede. The Kingstons were dark haired, dark eyed, tall people with no sense of humour. Pamela had routinely been labelled as an absentee wife and mother who spent half her time in Sydney and Melbourne living it up and getting her photo in all the glossy magazines. Dan knew she had remarried eighteen months after her first husband’s death. Wedding number two was no fairy tale, either. It too had gone on the rocks. Pamela was currently married to her third husband, a merchant banker with whom she had a young son. It seemed Sandra had moved out fairly early. He wondered exactly when? Not yet twenty-one the combative little Ms Sandra Kingston gave the strong impression she had looked after herself for some time. And possibly after her mother, the basket case. Hell, he knew as much about female depression and the various forms it took as the illustrious Dr. Freud.
“All right, what are you thinking about?” Sandra cut into Dan’s pondering.
“I was wondering when you left home?”
At the question put so probingly she began to move the salt and pepper shakers around like chess pieces. “To be perfectly honest, from which you might deduce I’m given to telling lies—I’m not—I’ve never really had a home.”
“You and me both,” he confessed, laconically.
Instantly she was diverted from her own sombre thoughts.
“So there’s more?” She leaned forward, elbows on the table, all attention.
“If you think I’m about to share my life story with you, Ms Kingston, I’m not!”
She shook her head. “Is that a hint I’m communicating too much?” she asked tartly, slumping back in her chair.
“Not at all. It strikes me you’ve spent a lot of time alone?”
She sighed theatrically, then stole one of his sandwiches.
“That’s what happens when your mother has had three husbands.”
“One of them was your dad,” he pointed out.
She nearly choked she was so quick to retort. “That son of a bitch Lloyd challenged that at least a dozen times before I was ten.’”
The muscles along his jaw tightened. He knew all about labels. “He’s not a very nice person,” he said shortly.
“He’s a bully,” she said. “And I’m going to prove that. He really really upset my mother. I know she wasn’t the woman to exercise caution but don’t you think she would have been completely insane to try to put one across my dad let alone my fearsome old grandpop. My dad always knew I was his little girl. He used to call me ‘my little possum.’ He told me every day he loved me. I think he was the only person in the entire world who did. Then he went off and left me. I was so sad and so angry. My mum and I needed him. It’s awful to be on your own.” She dug her pretty white teeth into her nether lip again, dragging them across the cushiony surface, colouring it rosy.
“So a man does come in handy?” he asked.
She looked into his eyes and he saw the sorrow behind the prickly front. “A dad is really important.”
Hadn’t he faced that all his life? Even a bastard of a dad.
“Getting killed was the very last thing your dad wanted, Sandra. Unfortunately death is the one appointment none of us can break. I’m sure your mother loves you. Your grandfather too in his own way.”
“God that’s corny!” Now she fixed him with a contemptuous glare. “In his own way. What a cop-out!”
“He made you his heiress,” he pointed out reasonably. “Do people who hate you actually leave you a fortune? I don’t think so. Your grandfather bypassed his son, your uncle, and his only grandson who is older than you by three years.”
“I can count,” she said shortly, hungrily polishing off another one of his sandwiches. “I actually got to go to university. I was a famous swot.”
“Head never out of a book?”
“Something like that.” She shrugged, picking away a piece of rocket. “In a locked room. My stepfather, Jeremy Linklatter, IV, developed a few little unlawful ideas about me.”
He who thought himself unshockable was shocked to the core.
“You can’t trust anyone these days,” she said in a world-weary fashion. “Certainly not men. There should be a Protection Scheme for female stepchildren.”
“Hell!” he breathed, hoping it wasn’t going to get worse.
“He didn’t touch you?”
Her expression showed her detestation of stepfather Jeremy. “Not the bad stuff.” How was she confiding all this to a stranger when she had never spoken about it at all? There was just something about this Daniel Carson.
“Thank God for that!” He released a pent-up sigh. “The guy must have crawled out from under a rock. So when did you leave home?”
She shrugged, licking a little bit of avocado off her fingertip. “I went to boarding school. Then I went on to uni and had on campus accommodation. It proved a lot safer than being at home.”
“Did your mother know what was going on?” Surely not. That would have been criminal.
She sighed. “My mother only sees what she wants to see. She can’t help it. It’s the way she’s made. Besides, Jem was pretty adept at picking his moments. I was always on high alert. Occasionally he got in an awful messy kiss or a grope. Once I pinched his face so hard he cried out. Then I took to carrying a weapon on my person.”
He could picture it. “Don’t tell me. A stun gun?”
“Close. A needle with a tranquillizer in it.”
“You’re joking!” That was totally unexpected. And dangerous.
“All right, I am. But I was desperate. I took to carrying my dad’s Swiss Army knife. You know what that is?’
“Of course I know what it is,” he said, frowning hard at the very idea of her needing to carry such a thing as a weapon. “I have one, like millions of other guys. It’s a miniature tool box.”
“You don’t have one like mine. It’s a collector’s item,” she boasted. “An original 1891 version.”
“Really? I’d like to see it.”
She laughed. “And I’d enjoy showing it to you only I couldn’t bring it on the plane.”
“I wish I could meet up with this Jem,” he said grimly.
“No need to feel sorry for me.” She tilted her chin.
“Nothing catastrophic happened. He’s such a maggot. He just had all these urges. Men are like that.”
“Indeed they’re not,” he rapped back. “Evil men give the rest of us ordinary decent guys a bad name. It’s utterly unfair. There’s something utterly disgusting about a predator.”
“That’s why I like my gay friends,” she announced, wiping her hands daintily on a paper napkin before brushing back the damp curls at her temple.
“How long was your hair?” he asked, his eyes following the movement of her small, pretty hands.
“That’s a funny question, Daniel Carson.”
He gave his dimpled, lopsided smile. “Oh, I dunno. I’m trying to visualise you as the girl you were.”
“If you must know, I had a great mop of hair. A lot of people thought it was lovely. Say, those sandwiches were good. I think I must have been starving. I might even have another one of those little pastries. Oh, it’s yours!” she observed belatedly.
“Take it,” he urged. “You’re the one paying.”
“What?”
“Just a little joke,” he said. “My shout this time.”
“Which reminds me,” she said in quite a different voice.
“I want you up at the house.”
His eyebrows shot up. “You can’t mean living there?”
“I can mean and I do mean.” She sat back, fiddling with her thumbs.
“Just forget about it,” he answered flatly.
“Might I remind you, Daniel, I’m the boss. I want you about two steps up the hallway from me. I don’t know you very well, but I’d find having a great big guy like you around—especially one with a Swiss Army knife—reassuring.”
He frowned direly. “Sandra, your fears are groundless.”
“Sez you!” she responded hotly, sitting up straight. “Do you know how many people get killed over money?”
“There could only be one in a million who don’t finish up in jail,” he told her in a stern voice.
“A few more than that filter through,” she struck back.
He studied the flare-up of colour in her cheeks. “Listen, Ms Kingston, if you’re under the impression your family would agree to that, you’re very much mistaken. Both your uncle and your cousin would see me gone only neither of them can do my job. It was your grandfather who hired me. It was your grandfather who gave me so much authority. As you can imagine your uncle and your cousin bitterly resented that fact, even if they didn’t want to take over the reins. After twelve months I’ll have no alternative but to quit.”
“You won’t quit while I need you,” she told him imperiously. “And you will shift your gear up into the house, if you’d be so kind. I may have been only ten when we were kicked out but I do remember it was so big you needed a bus to get around it.”
“Just leave it for the time being, won’t you?” he asked in his most reasonable voice. “See how the family reacts.”
“In that case, Daniel, you better be present,” she said. “So where did you come from anyway? Are you a Territorian?”
“I am now, but I come from all over.”
“You’re worse than I am,” she sighed. “Could you be a bit more specific?”
“Maybe not today.”
She looked at him searchingly. “So what about a compromise? Where precisely did you learn to manage a cattle station. You’re what?” Her blue eyes ranged over him.
“You want me to produce a birth certificate? I’m twenty-eight, okay?”
“Most overseers aren’t off the ground by then,” she observed, impressed.
“Then I must be the eighth wonder of the world. As it happened, I learned from the best. My mother and I lived like gypsies moving around Outback Queensland until we came to rest in the Channel Country when I was about eleven. A station owner there, a Harry Cunningham, offered her the job of housekeeper after his wife died and there we stayed until he died some years back. His daughter sold the station almost immediately after. Something that must have the old man still swivelling in his grave. But such is life!”
There were a hundred questions she wanted to ask, but the first was easy. “So where is your mother now?”
His handsome face instantly turned to granite. “I’m like you, Alexandra. I’m an orphan.”
“I’m sorry.” She saw clearly he had no more dealt with the loss of his mother than she had the loss of her father. Orphans. Hadn’t her mother been lost to her the day she married that rich, worthless scumbag, Jem?
“Not as sorry as I am,” he said.
“What happened to her?” She spoke as gently as she could, fearing she was about to be rebuffed.
“I think we’ll just leave it,” he said.
