Copyright © 2009 by Bronwyn Jameson. All rights reserved. Website design by Paula Roe
Cover art copyright © by Harlequin Enterprises Limited ® and ™ are trademarks of the publisher
The town of Plenty, Australia
“The hell you say. We’re in this together. One in, all in.” Tomas’s face, she knew, would be as hard and expressionless as his voice. Heartbreakingly different to the man she remembered from... Was it only five years ago? It seemed so much longer, almost another lifetime.
“A nice sentiment, little bro’, but aren’t you forgetting something?” Rafe asked. “It takes two to make a baby.”
Angie didn’t drop the tray of sandwiches she held, but it was a near thing. Heart hammering, she pulled the tray tight against her waist and steadied it with a white-knuckled grip. The rattling plates quieted; the pounding of her heart didn’t.
And despite what she’d overheard—or maybe because of it—she didn’t slink away. With both hands occupied, she couldn’t knock on the half-closed door. Instead she nudged it open with one knee and cleared her throat. Loudly. Twice. Because now the voices were raised in strident debate on who was going to do this—get married? have a baby? in order to inherit?—and how.
Holy Henry Moses.
Angie cleared her throat a third time, and three pairs of intensely irritated, blue eyes turned her way. The Carlisle brothers. “Princes of the Outback” according to this week’s headlines, but only because some hack had once dubbed their father’s extensive holdings in the Australian outback “Carlisle’s Kingdom.”
Angie had grown up by their rough-and-tumble side. They might look like the tabloid press’s idea of Australian royalty, but they didn’t fool her for a second.
Princes? Ha!
“What?” at least two princes barked now.
“Sorry to intrude, but you’ve been holed up in here for yonks. I thought you might need some sustenance.” She deposited her tray in the center of the big oak desk and her hip on its edge. Then she reached for the bottle of forty-year-old Glenfiddich—pilfered from their father’s secret stash—and swirled the rich, amber contents in the light. More than half-full. Amazing. “I thought you’d have made a bigger dent in this.”
Alex squinted at the glass in his hand as if he’d forgotten its existence. Rafe winked and held his out for a refill. Broad back to the room, hands shoved deep into the pockets of his black dress trousers, Tomas acknowledged neither the whisky nor her arrival.
And no one so much as glanced at the sandwiches. They didn’t want sustenance. They wanted her to leave so they could continue their discussion.
Tough.
She slid her backside further onto the desk, took her time selecting a corn beef and pickle triangle, then arched a brow at the room in general. “So, what’s this about a baby?”
Tomas’s shoulders tensed. Alex and Rafe exchanged a look.
“It’s no use pretending nothing’s going on,” she said around her first bite. “I overheard you talking.”
For a long moment she thought they’d pull the old boys’ club number, buttoning up in front of the girl. Except this girl had spent her whole childhood tearing around Kameruka Downs in the dust of these three males and her two brothers. Sadly outnumbered, she’d learned to chase hard and to never give up. She glanced sideways at Tomas’s back. At least not until she was completely beaten.
“Well?” she prompted.
Rafe, bless his heart, relented. “What do you think, Ange? Would you—”
“This is supposed to be private,” Alex said pointedly.
“You don’t think Ange’s opinion is valuable? She’s a woman.”
“Thank you for noticing,” Angie murmured. From the corner of her eye she watched Tomas who had never noticed, while she fought two equally strong, conflicting urges. One part of her ached to slide off the desk and wrap him and his tightly held pain in a big old-fashioned hug. The other wanted to slug him one for ignoring her.
“Would you have somebody’s baby...for money?”
What? Her attention swung from the still and silent figure by the window and back to Rafe. She swallowed. “Somebody’s?”
“Yeah.” Rafe cocked a brow. “Take our little brother, the hermit, for example. He says he’d pay and since that’s—”
“Enough,” Alex cut in.
Unnecessarily, as it happened, because a second later—so quick, Angie didn’t see it coming—Tomas held Rafe by the shirtfront. The two harsh flat syllables he uttered would never have emanated from any prince’s mouth.
Alex separated them, but Tomas only stayed long enough for a final curt directive to his brothers. “You do this your way, I’ll do it mine. I don’t need your approval.”
He didn’t slam the door on his way out, and it occurred to Angie that that would have shown too much passion, too much heat, for the cold, remote stranger the youngest Carlisle had become.
“I guess my opinion is beside the point now,” she said carefully.
Rafe coughed out a laugh. “Only if you think Mr. Congeniality can find himself a woman.”
Angie’s heart thumped against her ribs. Oh, he could. She had no doubts about that. Tomas Carlisle might have forgotten how to smile, but he could take his big, hard body and I’ve-been-hurt-bad attitude into any bar and choose from the top shelf. Without any mention of the Carlisle billions.
A chill shivered through her skin as she put down the remains of her sandwich. “He won’t do anything stupid, will he?”
“Not if we stop him.”
Alex shook his head. “Leave him be, Rafe.”
“Do you really think he’s in any mood to make a discriminating choice?” Rafe made an impatient sound, not quite a laugh, not quite a snort. “What the hell was Dad thinking anyway? He should have left Tomas right out of this!”
“Maybe he wanted to give him a shake-up,” Alex said slowly.
“The kind that sends him out looking to cut a deal with the first bar-bunny he happens upon?”
Angie stood so swiftly, her head spun. Whoa. Breathing deeply, she leaned against the desk. It was okay. Kameruka Downs was two hours of black dust and corrugated roads from the nearest bar. Even if T Tomas did decide to hightail it into Koomah Crossing, he wouldn’t make closing time.
She exhaled slowly and settled back on the desk. “Confession time, guys. I really only overheard one slice of your earlier discussion, so who’d like to fill me in on the whole story?”
From the book THE RUGGED LONER by Bronwyn Jameson Silhouette Desire®
July 2005, ISBN 0-373-76666-1, ©2005 Bronwyn Jameson
THE RUGGED LONER
Angelina Mori didn’t mean to eavesdrop. If, at the last minute, she hadn’t remembered the solemnity of the occasion she would have charged into the room in her usual forthright fashion and she wouldn’t have heard a thing.
But she did remember the occasion—this morning’s burial, this afternoon’s reading of the will, the ensuing meeting between Charles Carlisle’s heirs—and she paused and steadied herself to make a decorous entrance into the Kameruka Downs library.
Which is how she came to overhear the three deep, male voices. Three voices as familiar to Angie’s ear as those of her own two brothers.
“You heard what Konrads said. We don’t all have to do this.” Alex, the eldest, sounded as calm and composed as ever. “It’s my responsibility.”
“News flash.” Rafe’s mocking drawl hadn’t changed a bit in the time she’d been gone. “Your advanced age doesn’t make you the expert or the one in charge of this. How about we toss a coin. Heads, you—”
THE RICH STRANGER
Rafe Carlisle woke with a start, dazed and disoriented for the seconds it took to register his surroundings and the woman shaking him by the shoulders. Slowly the pieces came back to him, a series of snapshots that blurred in and out of focus with the pounding of his head.
He remembered landing the company jet at Bourke Airport, remembered heading out again in the Cessna. The storm he’d thought he could outrace. A hazel-eyed angel of mercy and rain so loud he’d thought it was pounding holes in his skull.
Vaguely he recalled waking at his angel’s homestead and the struggle to get him inside. Less vaguely he recalled the cold compress she applied to the side of his head. Such a promising start, spoiled when she insisted he sit still, stay awake and answer the same questions over and over with a persistency that hammered worse than his killer headache.
Realizing she’d succeeded in waking him, Nurse Naggard stopped the shaking and leaned back out of his face. This brought her into clearer focus, and Rafe blinked with surprise. “You showered.”
“Only because you kept nagging,” she said archly.
He kept nagging? That was rich!
He thought about telling her so, but she shifted again, totally distracting him with the sharp, sweet scent of whatever she’d showered with. And her hair...he hadn’t noticed she had so much of it. The mass of damp, brown curls hung almost to her waist. Pity about the twin furrows of worry and annoyance between her brows--they completely ruined the pretty effect.
Rafe started to shake his head with regret, then stopped himself. Any movement caused a rolling wave of nausea, as if his brain hadn’t regained its balance after whatever walloping it had taken. She’d told him he’d been out cold for a minute or two, that he must have hit his head during what had been a rough landing.
He didn’t remember.
He did remember she’d been wet, right through. Now she wore a green sweater that looked soft and pretty and dry. “You changed,” he said. “Good.”
“You slept,” she countered. “Bad.”
Ah, yes, his nagging angel of mercy had a quick mouth. He remembered that now. “I was just resting my eyes.”
A lie, but a fair one, given the way she kept trying to blind him. Right on cue she picked up a flashlight and tapped it against the palm of her hand. Her very own instrument of torture.
“No.” He held up a hand, keeping her at bay. “Enough is enough. I remember where I am and who I am. I remember my mother’s name, my brothers’ names, and even my third cousin Jasper’s middle name.”
The last was an exaggeration, but he’d had it with this routine. Every half hour, her same questions, his same answers, while the beam of light burned a hole clear through his pupil and into his brain.
“Don’t be a baby.” She picked up his hand and turned it over. Despite the “baby” barb, Rafe let her take his pulse. He liked the cool press of her fingers against his wrist, liked the serious intensity on her face and the infinitesimal movement of her lips as she counted the beats. “Only one more hour, as per the doctor’s instructions.”
The doctor she’d called when the weather defeated her aim of driving him to the nearest hospital. The instructions involved basic observations and this neuro-responsive B.S. that he’d endured for at least three hours. And that, he decided, was long enough.
“My pupils are equal and reacting?” he asked.
“Last time I checked, yes, but--“
“Has anything changed in the last half hour?”
“No, but--“
“Fine.” Rafe wrested the flashlight from her hand. “No more. I’m going to sleep.”
He started to lift his legs, angling himself to lie down, and her voice rose in alarm. “You’re not sleeping here. The couch is too short. It’s not comfort--”
“It’s horizontal.” And at the moment that’s all Rafe required. To shut his eyes, to stop talking and rest his aching brain--
“There’s a bed made up,” she relented with a heavy sigh. “But first, are you sure you don’t need to call anyone?”
“No calls,” he said.
“What about food?”
“Just bed.”
He got to his feet. And when his brain took a moment to adjust to the new upright perspective, she helped him steady. He didn’t mind the solicitous hand at his elbow, and he liked the sweep of her hair against his shoulder and the scent--peaches, he decided--that drifted from her skin. He enjoyed the brush of her hip against his thigh as she ushered him to a hallway off the living room. And when he started to turn into the first doorway, when she stood her ground and blocked his progress, he really enjoyed the soft pressure of her breast against his ribs.
“That’s my room,” she said, a bit breathless as if she, too, was aware of that unplanned contact. “You’re next on the right.” She steered him that way. “And it would ease my mind if you could stay awake ten minutes so I can do one more check.“
“I’ll be asleep in five.”
She made an impatient sound, tongue against teeth. “Are you always this difficult?”
“Are you?”
Surprise swung her gaze up to meet his. A pretty mix of gray and green and brown, her eyes, in the muted light of the hallway. “I’m not difficult.”
“Huh.” Whirring head notwithstanding, he felt an urge to tease--to look into those pretty eyes and ask if that meant she was easy. But she nudged the door to his room open, flicked the light switch, and the s sudden brightness knifed through his brain.
A short uncensored curse hissed from his mouth. Muttering a quick apology, she turned the light off, but Rafe had caught a glimpse of the bed. Big, broad, dressed in a mile-thick quilt, it crooned, Come to Mama.
“Oh, yeah,” Rafe murmured, pushing off the doorjamb to answer that sultry siren’s call.
Catriona, apparently, moved too.
Perhaps she thought he needed help negotiating the semi-darkness. Perhaps she was still hand-on-elbow in case her patient fell. Whatever the reason, she was there at his side, fussing about extra blankets and bathroom directions, when he made it bedside.
And when, with a blissful moan, he collapsed into the thick folds of feather-down comforter, she overbalanced and went down with him. He heard the heavy hitch of her surprised breath as the bed came up to greet their fall. Horizontal at last, engulfed in sweet-smelling quilt and sweeter-smelling female, Rafe couldn’t bring himself to move.
He should, he mused, at least move his hand--the one resting atop a very sweet curve of breast. And he would, just as soon as he summoned enough energy. Meanwhile his eyes drifted shut and the night he’d planned before leaving Sydney drifted through his dwindling consciousness.
If not for the storm he’d be at his destination now. His unexpected arrival would have shocked the blazes out of his one-time girlfriend, Nikki Bates, but not nearly as much as the reason for his visit. Right about now he’d have been getting to that point. Despite a mountain of reservations and providing he could wring the words from his resistive mind, he’d have been asking Nikki how she felt about having his baby.
Excerpt from THE RICH STRANGER, Silhouette Desire® Sept 2005, ISBN 0373766807
© Bronwyn Jameson
THE RUTHLESS GROOM
Zara had stayed at the cabin enough times to know what to expect. One room, one bed, one outside bathroom. No electricity, no hot water, no neighbors. One key hidden in the same spot behind the wood box on the porch.
Three-quarters of an hour after Alex took the key from her useless, numb fingers to open the door, Zara thought she might have stopped shivering. Finally. The fire he’d patiently built and nurtured from damp kindling into a blazing inferno helped. So had losing her wet clothes and wrapping herself snugly in one of the pair of thick sleeping bags Alex had found.
Draped over the handlebars of her bike and a chair he’d dragged fireside, her thin gym clothes would soon be dry. So would his shirt, which meant she could stop not watching him prowl around the cabin, all bare-chested and beautiful in the rusty firelight. She’d decided it was much safer and more relaxing to watch the flames flicker and dance over the logs in the fireplace.
Sitting cross-legged inside her downy cocoon, staring into the blaze, she could even put a positive spin to this misadventure. With Alex isolated out here, Susannah had more time to think—or to get wherever she’d gone to do that thinking—without him turning up to influence her decision. Zara might be stormbound with a man who stirred her libido in all kinds of forbidden ways, but she had willpower. She knew what she could have and what was off-limits. Take chocolate, for example...
Bad example.
With a wry grimace, she pressed a hand to her empty stomach. Thinking about food reminded her of how little she’d eaten today and how little Alex had found in his preliminary investigation of the cabin. Two pillows, two sleeping bags, two kerosene lamps, no kerosene. One box of matches.
Right now she could hear him executing a more thorough search of the kitchen cupboards.
“Any luck?” she asked hopefully, when the sounds of doors opening and shutting ceased.
“Unless there’s something edible in the first-aid kit, we’re dead out of luck.”
She turned then to find him leaning back against what passed for a kitchen bench. And for the first time since they’d walked through the door, for the first time since he’d ordered her out of her wet clothes, s since he’d busied himself with building the fire and setting out their clothes to dry, he met her eyes.
Nice that it was across the width of the cabin. Nice that the distance and the shadowy light disguised the hot lick of reaction in her eyes, in her blood, in her bare-naked skin beneath the silky lining of the sleeping bag. She wrapped it more securely around her shoulders and attempted to relax. They were stuck with each other for the duration of the storm; why not make it as easy and comfortable as possible?
“Not even an out-of-date can of beans?” she asked.
“Sadly, no.”
“You know what’s really sad? I stopped on my way out here for fuel and what was allegedly lunch. At the time I thought I was doing myself a favor not eating it!”
“You didn’t save the leftovers?”
Zara chuckled at his hopeful tone. “No, although that’s not the saddest bit. In a moment of weakness I almost bought a couple of chocolate bars, you know, for later. But I resisted.”
“Damn.”
“You like chocolate?”
“Like is perhaps too mild a word,” he said with a slow smile. “It’s my sin of choice.”
Standing there in the shadows with his bare chest and flat abdomen and low-riding trousers, with that deadly little smile exaggerating the sensual bow of his top lip and deepening the grooves in his lean cheeks, he looked like a different kind of sinner. And a different kind of sin.
Temptation snaked through Zara’s veins, the dark, rich, sumptuous chocolate kind. Temptation to ask how often he sinned, to suggest it had done him no harm, to ask about his second choice. To flirt and indulge herself for once.
She didn’t. She couldn’t. He was Susannah’s.
“I resisted the siren call.” Zara shrugged, a silky slide of her bare shoulders inside the sleeping bag. “It’s not been one of my better days for choices.”
“I don’t suppose it worked out quite the way you planned when you got up this morning.”
“We have that in common,” she said, and regretted her candor instantly. The mood changed, grew thick and weighty with the reminder of how his day had started and what had brought them together. His wedding. Her worry.
“Why do you disapprove of me marrying Susannah?” he asked.
Zara exhaled slowly. So much for the easy banter. So much for comfortable. She felt the tension in his gaze, in her limbs, and concentrated on how to answer.
In truth, Susannah hadn’t told her much about her relationship with Alex Carlisle and that was the problem. If Zara ever fell in love, she couldn’t imagine clamming up on her best friend in their regular e-mail or IM or phone updates. She’d have sung it, laughed it, lived it, breathed it. Susannah hadn’t. Sure, she’d mentioned meeting Alex and going out with him a couple of times, then the next thing Zara knew, she’d agreed to marry him.
“I wouldn’t have disapproved,” she said slowly, “if Susannah had appeared more enthusiastic about her wedding.”
“She wasn’t happy?”
“You’re asking me?”
The line of his lips tightened. “We haven’t spent a lot of time together, not since she moved back to Melbourne.”
“You spent last weekend together,” Zara pointed out. They’d flown to his family’s outback station so Susannah could meet his mother and apparently there’d been a small engagement party. “Didn’t you notice anything the matter?”
Heck, Zara had only seen her friend twice during the last week and she’d noticed her quietness, her distraction. That’s why she’d prodded her at dinner last night. That’s why she’d asked if Susannah was very, very sure.
Obviously her fiancé hadn’t noticed. He stood in stony-faced silence for at least another minute before he asked, “Is there someone else?”
Even across the room and through the deepening twilight she could see the stormy tension in his eyes. The breath caught hard in her chest and she had to look away. Had to force her focus to that bolt-from-the-blue question. Something had definitely been going on with Susannah this last week, but another man? It seemed so unlikely that Zara hadn’t even considered the possibility.
Perhaps she’d needed someone who gave her more time and consideration. Zara could belief that. But she couldn’t believe that Susannah would cheat.
“No.” She shook her head. “Not when she’d agreed to marry you.”
The moment spun out, taut and silent but for the whistling howl of the wind and the intermittent crack and spit of the fire. She didn’t know if he believed her, couldn’t tell what he was thinking.
“What will you do now?” she asked.
“What can I do?” He pushed away from the bench. “For now we’re stuck here with nothing to do but wait out the storm.”
Excerpt from THE RUTHLESS GROOM, Silhouette Desire® November 2005, ISBN 0-373-76691-2
© Bronwyn Jameson
