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‘Seems not,’ Chloe sighed and headed into a clump of brambles. ‘Mum and I really took to him. He’s so handsome and clever and rich and he worshipped her. It’s a bit weird isn’t it the way men worship beautiful women? I mean beauty’s only a tiny fraction of what a real woman is all about. I tell you when she left him Mum and I were gobsmacked. We even thought he might top himself.’
‘Surely not!’ Rory groaned before he could help himself. ‘Your father liked him, too?’ He wanted some perspective on the worshipping husband. Not that he exactly blamed him, tiny fraction or not.
Pretty Chloe scowled darkly. ‘Oh, as far as Dad was concerned no one was good enough for Allegra!’ she said, her voice betraying her intense jealousy. ‘You’ve no idea what it was like for me when we were growing up. Allegra always wanting the attention and getting it from Dad. Allegra could be an absolute pig!’ She paused a moment to cool down. She didn’t want Rory getting the wrong idea about her. ‘We’re half sisters, you know.’
‘Allegra did tell me,.’ Rory admitted, surprised they were any relation at all.
‘She would. No matter how much Mum and I tried she would never let us love her and Mum’s the sweetest woman who ever drew breath.’
Rory fought a wry smile.
‘I hesitate to say this,’ Chloe continued with some relish, ‘in fact it hurts me, but it might help you understand. My beautiful sister is pretty shallow. I don’t think there’s a man alive who could make her happy.’ To reinforce her opinion Chloe hit the steering wheel with her open palm.
Sibling rivalry could be absolutely deadly Rory thought. Potentially so could Chloe’s driving. ‘That’s your opinion, Chloe, is it? And what about you?’ Rory kept his eyes glued ahead for more likely obstacles. If he’d only known what going for a drive with Chloe held in store! ‘What are your plans if and when the station is sold?’
Chloe swung her head to beam at him. A woman just waiting to be hit by Cupid’s arrow. ‘I’m going to find myself a man,’ she confessed with a dimpled grin. ‘I’m going to have a Big White Wedding I’ll always remember. And I won’t have Allegra for my damned bridesmaid,’ she tacked on wrathfully, heading towards a solitary gum tree like it was a designated pit stop. ‘You can be sure of that!’.
Rory gently nudged the wheel. ‘Obviously a sore point?’ The reason wasn’t lost on him.
‘Well, I won’t want her upstaging me on the best day of my life.’ Inexplicably she braked hard as if they were coming to a set of traffic lights mysteriously erected in the bush. ‘Can you blame me?’ Satisfied about whatever it was—he didn’t have a clue—she picked up speed again. ‘I won’t even let her meet my husband until after we’re married just to be on the safe side. I won’t be like her, either. Sadly she could only stay married five minutes. Marriage is forever, Rory, don’t you think?’
He must have lost a layer of skin. Either that or it was the way Chloe was affecting him. ‘Absolutely,’ he said, ‘or I’d want my money back.’
They insisted he stay for a late lunch again prepared and served by Allegra who, as far as Rory could see, could get a job at a top restaurant.
‘Great meal, Allegra,’ he complimented her. In fact it was the best meal he’d had for quite a while, outside dinner with the Cunninghams.
Chloe blushed fiercely. ‘It’s only a chicken dish,’ she pointed out with a flick of the head, though she had not only overloaded her plate she had scoffed the lot.
‘The secret’s in the spices,’ Allegra told him, ignoring her sister, instead of giving her the thump on the back of the head she deserved. ‘I’d be glad to give you the recipe to hand on.’
‘Perfect,’ he said.
‘Hand on? Who to?’ Chloe looked baffled, staring from one to the other in an effort to get them to divulge the secret.
‘Rory is compiling a cookbook to hand over to his future wife,’ Allegra said.
‘Good heavens! Are you really?’ Chloe looked fascinated by such a thing. After all she had a glory box.
‘I hadn’t been thinking of it,’ Rory confessed. ‘Now I’m convinced I should do it.’
‘Anyone special in your life, Rory?’ Valerie asked, irritated beyond measure by the constant exchanges between their visitor and Allegra and trying none too successfully not to show it.
He shook his head. ‘No, not really, Mrs. Sanders.’ He gave her an easy smile.
‘What’s wrong with all the girls then?’ Valerie favoured him with a girlish one of her own. ‘I would have thought you’d be fighting them off?’
Chloe, mouth slightly open, looked like she felt exactly the same way.
‘A man doesn’t get to meet too many where I come from,’ Rory explained. ‘The desert is about as remote as one can get.’
‘Well then I’m sure you’ll do better here,’ Valerie said with great satisfaction, aiming a fond glance in her daughter’s direction.
Rory vowed there and then not to give Chloe the slightest encouragement.
He took his leave of them thirty minutes later saying he’d have to think things over before getting back to them.
‘Naturally’ Valerie smiled and touched him gently on the arm. ‘We have to put our heads together, too.’
‘Walk out to the car with me.’ Rory managed to get off a quick aside to Allegra as Valerie wheeled about to have a word—never mind what it was—with her daughter.
‘Very well.’ Allegra led the way down the front steps, fully expecting Chloe to seize the moment and race after them. All right, Chloe didn’t normally race, but there was always the first time. She had obviously taken a shine to Rory. Even Valerie had broken out into sunny smiles. One had to be a good looking young man to get one.
Strangely Chloe didn’t come after them. There was only one explanation. It was too hot. ‘So do you want to tell me your thoughts now?’ she asked as Rory fell in alongside her. She really liked the way she had to look up to him. In her high heels she and Mark had been fairly level.
‘Your stepmother made a huge tactical error sacking your overseer,’ he commented in a crisp voice.
‘Tell me something I don’t know,’ she sighed. ‘Jack got on with everybody.’ Except Valerie.
‘Obviously he found it pretty hard going with your stepmother.’
Not wanting to criticise Valerie, Allegra said nothing.
‘Surely you have a big stake in seeing the place is run properly?’ Rory prompted, looking down at her flaming head. For some reason—again beyond him—he felt he could talk to her like he’d known her for ever. She was tall for a woman, around five-eight but to him she felt small. Indeed he’d had extreme difficulty keeping the feel of her out of his dreams. But there was no way he could volunteer that.
‘That’s why I’m here.’ She showed a little flash of temper. ‘Losing Dad was a great blow for all of us. Dad was the one who held us all together. With him gone I’m very much afraid I’ll be minus what family I have left. Val and I never did get on.’
‘Actually I can understand that,’ he said laconically.
When Val had been on her best behaviour, Allegra thought. He should come on them unexpectedly. ‘The thing is I was fatally blemished in my stepmother’s eyes because I resemble my mother. Val suffered from the second wife syndrome. It’s a very hurtful and wounding situation.’
Rory nodded. ‘Skewed by the dagger of jealousy! Have you all come to some agreement on an asking price?’
‘Not as yet,’ she said.
‘You are going to be able to work it out, right?’ he asked dryly.
‘Don’t worry, we will. I take it you feel you can do something with the place?’
‘Not feel, know,’ he said, sounding utterly confident.
‘Ah, the arrogance of achievement!’ she said. ‘Word is you ran your family station?’
‘Jay and I.’ He put her straight. ‘I love my brother.’
‘But he’s not the cattleman in the family?’
‘Would you believe he wanted to be a doctor?’
She picked up on the sadness, the regret. ‘So, what stopped him? What finer calling could there be?’
‘He’s my father’s heir, Allegra,’ he pointed out. ‘That says it all.’
‘Okay. I understand. And I don’t.’ For total strangers they had moved quickly to a very real communication, no matter how edgy. ‘It seems to me Jay should have fought for his dream, instead of letting it die a slow death.’
‘Only life has a way of falling short of our dreams,’ he said, ever sensitive to any criticism of his brother. ‘So what decided you to scuttle your dream?’ he questioned, combining a real desire to know with that little flash of sexual hostility.
‘Scuttle is entirely the wrong word.’ She gave him her own admonishing glance. ‘I wanted to cure the situation. My dream was to find harmony and fulfilment. I thought I had a fighting chance with Mark but it blew up in my face like Krakatoa.’
‘So you took the only course open to you. You bolted?’ He was determined to know.
‘What does anyone do when they find out they’ve made a big mistake,’ she asked, very soberly. ‘Now I’ve got to get my life back on track. Incidentally I’m stunned I’m talking like this to a near stranger.’
‘It is a bit eerie,’ he agreed. ‘I’m not always like this with strange women, either. Then again we can think of it as pouring out a life story to the person sitting next to us on a plane.’
She laughed. ‘I assure you I’ve never done it. There’s too much to you, Rory Compton. Darkness, Lightness. Now I think back, I realise I was running away. I love Naroom. I love station life. After all it’s what I was bred to. Yet I was impelled to change my life. It wasn’t the best reason to marry.’
‘You obviously weren’t prepared to stick it out for the next forty years.’
It was said in a voice that so infuriated her, she wanted to slap him. ‘It strikes me that’s none of your business.’
‘True. It’s just that I’m dying to know. How long was it again?’
‘I repeat. None of your business, Compton,’ she returned coolly. ‘You don’t approve of what I did, do you?’ She came to a standstill staring up into his dynamic face.
He almost reached out to tuck a stray lock of her hair behind her ear. ‘I don’t approve of divorce in general, Allegra, being a child of divorce. Not unless there’s a very good and pressing reason. Which you may well have. Forgive me for not minding my own business.’
‘You know what they say. Curiosity killed the cat.’
‘Curiosity isn’t the right word. It implies a passing interest. I aspire to seeing more of you, Miss Allegra. For better or worse, we seem to have bonded. I haven’t as yet figured out why. There’s one thing jumps to mind. Your cooking. A woman’s ability to put out a good meal finds high favour with most men. Other things about you, however, could scare me.’
She acknowledged the mocking glitter in his eyes with a tight smile. ‘It’s hard to believe any woman could scare you. By the way, it amazes me—I’m not a short woman—but just looking up at you makes me feel dizzy.’
Hell, he felt dizzy just looking down at her. ‘Would you believe you appear small to me?’
‘Then I’ll definitely stick to high heels,’ she said.
He had a sudden vision of her walking up the Cunningham’s staircase, with him admiring her legs. ‘When you get to know me you’ll realise I am scarable,’ he said with a grin. ‘Is that a word?’
‘They let in new words every day.’ They walked on. ‘I know you worry about your brother. I know you’re desperately unhappy beneath the dark Byronic façade.’
‘Please.’ So self-assured, he looked embarrassed.
She decided being able to embarrass him pleased her. ‘Okay,’ she scoffed. ‘So there’s too much romance about Byron for you. Do you know I actually cooked that special lunch for you today because you’ve lost weight even since we met.’
‘Well fancy!’ He gasped in mock surprise. ‘You mean you’ve been studying me with those amazing blue eyes?’
‘I figure if you can look, so can I,’ she answered crisply. ‘Why did you want me to walk with you? Any particular reason?’
‘I’m certain you walk a lot faster than Chloe,’ was his flippant response. ‘Why? Did you have something better to do? Like spend more time with your stepmother and sister?’
‘Your family’s not everything it should be.’ She struck back.
‘Indeed it’s not,’ he agreed with a rasp in his voice. ‘When you think about it, Allegra, the two of us have lived through a lot of stuff. Though I’ve never had the unfortunate experience of being burned by a bad marriage.’
‘What about singed by a love affair that went wrong?’ she asked with feigned sweetness.
He only smiled. ‘Not yet.’
‘Don’t lay money on it not happening,’ she said. ‘Falling in love is a dangerous business.’
‘And your love for your ex-husband wasn’t unconditional?’
‘You’re making me angry, Rory,’ she said. In fact he was making her heart pound.
‘And I don’t blame you. I apologise. You raise my blood pressure, too.’
They had reached his Toyota, now Rory opened the driver’s door.
‘Don’t count on getting this place cheap, either,’ she warned, conscious her body was throbbing in the oddest way.
‘Then I’ll blame you for pushing up the price.’ He turned to fully face her.
They were so close, on a panicked reflex, Allegra stepped back, her heart almost leaping into her throat. It was her turn for embarrassment to wash over her.
‘So long, Allegra,’ he said, his eyes holding a wealth of mockery. He sketched a brief salute. ‘I’ll get back to you in a day or two.’
‘You’ve made up your mind now,’ She slammed his door shut, beating him to it.
He studied her through the open window. The sun was turning her glowing head to fire. ‘Be sure of it,’ he said.
CHAPTER FOUR
JAY paused for a minute to catch his breath. His arms were aching from thrashing through the lignum swamp. His khaki bush shirt was soaked with sweat, his jeans soaked with a green slime and swamp water up to the knees. He and a couple of the men had been hunting up a massive wild boar as big as a calf that kept threatening the herd. They had chased it into the deepest reaches of the swamp where a man on his own would find it very easy to get lost. The swamp was home to countless water birds and pelicans, but was spell-bound to the aborigines who shivering in fear, refused to go into it. Jay didn’t altogether blame them. An unearthly yellow glow emanated from the place, seeping into the air. Rory, of course, afraid of nothing always said it was a sulphur spring. Whatever the eerie glow was, it was almost impossible to get into the swamp’s deepest recesses without a machete. A good enough reason for the boar to make its home in the dense thickets, out of the path of danger where it could wallow to its heart’s content in the mud.
It had made one last stand, its ugly head lowered for a final charge. It glared at them with its little reddened eyes, a ferocious looking animal, its coarse black bristles caked in mud and slime. Two powerful yellowish tusks protruded from its lower jaw, curving upwards in half circles. Sharp tusks that could easily disembowel a man or gore him to death. Spear carrying aborigines on the plain, would have charged the beast and killed it, a manoeuvre so dangerous it made Jay shudder just to think of it, though he knew boar hunting had been considered an exciting sport for hundreds of years. Jay got off a single clean shot to the boar’s heart. Its bulk quivered for a moment on its short powerful legs, then it rolled over with a loud squelching sound into the foul smelling mud.
That exploit had taken them far afield and it was a long ride back before Jay reached the home compound.
He had truly believed he fully appreciated just how much hard yakka Rory put in, day in and day out—how much responsibility he assumed without saying a word. Rory had a natural affinity with animals; all sorts of animals from the wildest rogue brumby hell-bent on freedom to the most docile calf. Rory wouldn’t have spent the best part of the afternoon tracking down that boar. He could read the signs as clearly as any aboriginal. Rory had only been gone a month and already he was sorely missed by all.
Jay missed him terribly. First as a brother and his best friend: then as a buffer between him and their father and thirdly as the cattleman, the Boss-man, who ran Turrawin. Rory was the Compton every last station employee deferred to and took orders from without complaint. Rory was a natural born leader. Such men didn’t come along every day. Their father, Bernard, Jay had long since recognised, had little going for him these days but bluster and a whiplash tongue. With Rory gone there was animosity where there had never been before. Not only that, it was on the rise among the station staff. Not towards him personally—he got on well enough with everyone—but the whole situation. Not content with ordering Rory off the station, their father had let it be known Rory wasn’t coming back. Further more Rory had been disinherited.
What that had achieved was nigh on catastrophic. It had bonded everyone against his father. While the men had greatly admired and respected Rory, working happily in the saddle for him from dawn to dusk, they were becoming discontented and occasionally rebellious under him. Okay they liked him—they even felt sorry for him having the father he did—but they didn’t look to him as the boss.
He wasn’t a cattleman, though God knows he’d struggled to become one. The trouble was his heart wasn’t in it and he wasn’t half tough enough. He wasn’t much good at giving orders, either, or even knowing what best to do in difficult situations when Rory, the man of action, had always come up with a solution right off the top of his head. Jay’s only gift was fixing things, especially machinery. Rory had constantly reassured him that was a considerable gift. He could take any piece of faulty station machinery apart and put it together again in fine working order. Just like he had once longed to put the damaged human body back together.
He was thirty years of age, two years Rory’s senior, but he still longed for the beautiful woman who had been his mother. She had understood him but she had never been strong enough to withstand their father. She was scared of him the same way Jay had been scared of him. The only one who wasn’t scared was Rory. But even Rory had been known to flinch away from their father’s vicious tongue.
