was no damned different from all the other poor fools. Whatever his mind said, whatever his will demanded, underneath he was just a man whose fate was to succumb to woman.
‘Please, Chloe,’ Allegra laughed. ‘I’m the wronged party. It’s this cowboy who swept me off my feet.’
‘Cattleman, ma’am,’ he corrected, now so perversely hostile he barely stopped himself from pitching her onto the huge four-poster bed, its timber glowing honey-gold.
‘Rory, I didn’t mean to offend you,’ she apologised, still caught between laughter and tears.
‘Forgive me, I think you did.’ He couldn’t say he badly resented being put under a spell. He wasn’t accustomed to such things.
‘I confess I find your attitude a little worrying, too.’ From a lying position—God how erotic—she sat up on the bed, staring at him with her great topaz-blue eyes.
‘Hey, what on earth are you two talking about?’ Chloe was struggling hard to keep up. It all seemed incomprehensible to her.
‘Nothing. Absolutely nothing,’ Rory said, further perplexing her. Allegra Hamilton in the space of one evening had got right under his skin. He was aware his muscles had gone rigid with the effort not to yield to the urge to lean forward, close the space between them, grasp those delicate shoulders and kiss her hard. Only desiring a woman like that was an option he simply couldn’t afford.
Maybe it was her utter unattainability that made her so desirable to him? He had to find a reason to give him comfort. On his way to the door Rory turned to give her one last glance.
A big mistake!
She couldn’t have looked more ravishing or the setting more marvellously appropriate. The quilted bedspread gleamed an opulent gold, embroidered with richly coloured flowers. Her dress had ridden up over her lovely legs, pooling around her in deep yellow. Her hair shone a rich red beneath an antique gilt and crystal chandelier that hung from a central rose in the plastered ceiling. Hanging over the head of the bed was a very beautiful flower painting of yellow roses in a brass bowl, lit from above.
It was enough to steal any man’s breath away.
‘Good night, Rory,’ she said sweetly, which he translated into, ‘Goodbye!’
He nodded his dark head curtly, but made no response.
Witch!
She was accustomed to putting men under a spell. But for all he knew she could have a heart of ice.
Coming as he did from the desert where there was a much higher pitch of light and the vast landscape was so brilliantly coloured, Rory found his trip out to Naroom, enjoyable, but relatively uninspiring compared to his own region, the Channel Country. The bones of many dead men lay beneath the fiery iron-oxide red soil of his nearly eight hundred thousand square kilometre desert domain. The explorers Burke and Wills had perished there; the great Charles Sturt, the first explorer to ever enter the Simpson Desert almost came to final grief—the German Ludwig Leichhardt became a victim of the forbidding landscape. Not only had the early explorers been challenged by that wild land, but so too were the pioneering cattlemen like his forebears who had followed. After good rains, the best cattle fattening country in the world, in times of drought they had to exploit the water in the Great Artesian Basin, which lay beneath the Simpson Desert to keep their vast herds alive. And exploitation was the word. It really worried him that one day the flow of water to the several natural springs and the artificial bores might cease. What a calamity!
To Rory, the desert atmosphere of home was so vivid he could smell it and taste it on his tongue. These vast central plains seemed much nearer civilisation. He had lived all his life in a riverine desert, bordered on Turrawin’s west by the one hundred thousand square kilometre Simpson Desert of central Australia. His world was a world of infinite horizons and maybe because of it, the desert possessed an extraordinary mystique.
It was certainly a different world from the silvery plains he was driving through. His landscapes were surreal. They seeped into a man’s soul. The desert was where he belonged, he thought sadly, though he accepted it was fearsome country compared to those gentler, more tranquil landscapes; the silvers, the browns, the dark sapphires and the sage-greens. He was used to a sun scorched land where the shifting red sands were decorated with bright golden clumps of Spinifex that glowed at dusk. Scenically the Channel Country was not duplicated by any other region on the continent. It was unique.
Unique, too, the way the desert, universally a bold fiery-red, was literally smothered in wildflowers of all colours after the rains. No matter what ailed him such sights had always offered him relief, a safety valve after grim exchanges with his father, even a considerable degree of healing. There were just some places one belonged. Fate had made him a second son and given him a father who had shown himself to be without heart. He was the second son who was neither wanted nor needed.
Well let it lie.
Clay as promised had set up this meeting with the Sanders women. Clay would have come along, only he was fathoms deep in work. Rory would have liked his company—they got on extremely well together—but he didn’t mind. It was just the two sisters and their mother. An exploratory chat. Just the two sisters? Who was he kidding? He couldn’t wait to lay eyes on Allegra Hamilton again. In fact it hadn’t been easy putting her out of his mind.
You can handle it, he told himself.
With no conviction whatever.
Clay had assured him Mrs Sanders was seriously considering selling, although the property wasn’t on the market as yet. Clay, during his conversation with the beauteous Mrs Hamilton, had formed the idea the family would want between $3.5 and $4 million, although she hadn’t given much away. Clay got the impression Allegra didn’t really want to sell.
Why not? It wasn’t as though a woman like that, a hothouse orchid, could work the place. Nevertheless Rory had already taken the opportunity of having a long, private phone conversation with one of Turrawin’s bankers. A man he was used to and who knew him and his capabilities. He had been given the go-ahead on a sizeable loan to match his own equity. Naroom wasn’t a big property as properties in his part of the world went—nowhere near the size of Jimboorie for that matter, let alone Turrawin. The property from all accounts had been allowed to run down following the death of Llew Sanders and the unexpected departure of their overseer who it was rumoured had had a falling out with Mrs Sanders. A woman who ‘kept herself to herself’ and consequently wasn’t much liked. Rory wanted to ask where Allegra had got her extraordinary looks from, but thought it unfair to Chloe who seemed a nice little thing if she could just hurdle the sibling rivalry or trade in her present life for a new one.
Rivalry simply hadn’t existed between him and Jay. They had always been the best of friends. The strong bond formed in early childhood had only grown closer with the changing circumstances of their lives. In many ways he had taken on the mantle of older brother even though he was two years Jay’s junior. He had shielded the quieter, more sensitive Jay through their traumatic adolescence and gone on to take the burden away from Jay in the running of the station. That old hypocrite, his father, had been well aware of it but chose—because it suited him—to keep his mouth and his purse shut.
Valerie Sanders walked into the kitchen in time to see Allegra taking a tray of chocolate chip cookies out of the oven, presumably to offer to their visitor with tea or coffee. Cooking wasn’t Valerie’s forte so she had left Allegra to it. Besides she had sacked their housekeeper, Beth, who didn’t know how to keep a still
