you, Leo. That’s the bit I don’t like. He loves you. I’m well aware of that. But you’re too vulnerable where Robbie is concerned. I intend to have a little chat with him this weekend.”
Oh, God! She visibly swallowed. What had Robbie done now? “Please take it easy with him, Boyd.” The minute she said it, she realised she had betrayed her own anxieties.
“Surely I never come down too hard on him?” Boyd asked, hardening his heart against the meltingly lovely pleading image she presented. It was high time to pull Robbie up, before he totally ran off the rails. He had received information that Robbie had been getting in over his head, gambling. He was even doing business with a very unsavoury character, suspected of money laundering. That had to cease.
“I thought we’d ride out towards Mount Garnet,” he said, briskly changing the subject. “You’ve brought some riding gear, haven’t you?” If not, he knew she kept clothes at the house.
She had hardly been listening, wondering exactly what he had learned about Robbie. The gambling, of course. The drugs? What else? Robbie could be wonderfully sweet—at least with her—but he wasn’t as yet a really strong character. Nothing got past Boyd.
“You’re trembling,” he said, suddenly putting a strong hand on her bare arm, his thumb moving almost caressingly over the silky skin.
Instantly heat raged around her body. Her skin was melting as the hot blood fizzed through her arteries, ensuring she shook even further. “Yes, I will come riding with you. I was just trying to remember the last time we went riding alone,” she managed, hoping she hadn’t turned scarlet. Both of them had been riding since they could walk. Both of them were very accomplished. Heavens, Boyd was a top class polo player. But she couldn’t remember the last time they had been on their own.
He laughed, sounding particularly at ease, even happy.
It came to her how much she loved his voice and his laugh! It was a sound she adored, yet somehow it disturbed her. It made her bones turn liquid. Even the way he said her name was enough to turn her knees to jelly.
“I’m surprised you don’t remember,” he said, suddenly pinning her with his blue eyes. “You told me you hated me and I couldn’t placate you.”
Didn’t he realise it had just been another outburst against the pull she felt towards him? She willed herself to speak calmly. “I don’t hate you, Boyd. It’s just sometimes I’m not at ease with you. Or you with me. I’m not a fool.”
How could she possibly say: You’re the moon and stars to me. When you touch me I dissolve?
Why did she become so erotically charged with Boyd and no one else?
He was looking at her intently. “I realise I make you sparkle with temper, revolt, whatever. I have a mental image of you at the age it all started. You were around sixteen. You’d been really sweet up until then.”
You mean I was your little slave.
“It’s called growing up,” she said coolly. “Finding one’s own identity. Sometimes you do make me very angry,” she admitted. “You’re so terribly …”
“What?” He pressed for an answer.
“Dominant,” she flashed back with spirit. “The family idol, born to be worshipped. You mock me like I’m a—”
“Nonsense!” he cut in. “Why are you so unwilling to really answer my question? It’s all evasion with you these days. That makes me sad. It’s not any authority I might have that angers you. It’s something else. So far as the mockery goes, it’s the other way around. I see it in your face and in your voice. I can see it now.” His eyes swept over her, marking the tension in her body, which looked so entrancingly fragile but he knew was in fact quite athletic.
“Boyd, everyone is watching us,” she whispered a warning, her nerves exquisitely frayed.
“That’s okay,” he answered without concern. “They’re well used to the friction between us by now.”
“How can you call me evasive, Boyd? Did I not just agree to go riding with you?” she asked, pleased to have tripped him up. Then it struck her. “We are going on our own, aren’t we, or are you getting up a party?”
“A party of two, Leona,” he told her dryly. “I’m after your company alone. No need to bring in the rest of the family.”
“Right!” She tilted her chin as she prepared to move off.
“You used to love me,” he said, very, very gently to her averted profile.
It stopped her in her tracks. It was still so deliriously true.
She moved back to him in that moment, wanting to throw herself at him, clamp her arms around him. Never let go. Have his arms move to embrace her. If he kissed her she feared she might lose consciousness. Or maybe her soul would float out of her body into his. Instead, she raised herself on tiptoe to be nearer to that so dear yet so dangerous face. “I don’t any more,” she said.
There was safety in deception. Much better to be safe than horribly sorry.
For well over an hour they rode through a countryside that had never seemed so luminous to her. Along the eastern seaboard and even deep into the Outback the land had received wonderful life-giving rain and overnight the land had renewed itself. The light beneath the caverns of trees was jewelled, the display of blossom sumptuous, the air sweet with a hundred different haunting perfumes. Riding together so companionably was too precious to be described. Leona wanted to retain the memory for ever. The sight of him, the familiarity and the exciting strangeness, the profile she loved, that clean cut chiselled jaw. With his head half turned away one would have assumed his eyes would be very dark to match the black of his hair and his strongly marked brows. They were anything but—sometimes his eyes were so blue they looked violet. He really was a dream come true.
Out of the golden glare of the sunlight and down into the dappled green sanctuary of one of the many creeks that wound their way across the estate, he turned his head to smile lazily at her. His eyes, even in the shade, blazed. His wide-brimmed hat, a soft grey, was tilted at a rakish angle. Riding gear suited him wonderfully well. “Enjoying yourself?” he asked.
“I love it!” Leona responded with uncomplicated joy. “I especially love water. All the time we’ve been riding we’ve been in sight and sound of it.”
“That’s what’s so powerfully attractive about the estate.” He studied her smiling open face with pleasure. “You don’t feel threatened by me when you’re on horseback?”
“I’m secure in the knowledge I could gallop away from you.” She laughed, one hand lightly holding the reins of her pure Arabian mare, as nimble and sure-footed as ever a mare could be. “Anyway, you’ve never really done anything to threaten me,” she added.
“I think I have,” he answered slowly.
The way he said it shook her to the marrow. She had to look away. Curly tendrils of her hair had escaped from her ponytail, glowing brightly against the cream of her skin. “You sound as though you care.” She couldn’t help the revealing tinge of sadness in her voice.
“Of course I do,” he answered,
