of the champagne that was circulating, and judging by the curl of his lip he didn’t think much of it.
Lizzy was intrigued. Who was he? His hair was dark and cut close to his head, his face angular, with strong features and a forbidding expression. He might be dressed like all the other men in the room, but there was an unmistakably maverick quality about him. It was something to do with the hardness of his mouth, with the coiled power that was evident in the way he held himself, with the cool, watchful eyes.
Her mother must know who he was, Lizzy reasoned. He didn’t look like the kind of man who would drive thirty miles from the nearest sealed road to gatecrash an ordinary outback wedding, so presumably he had been invited.
She turned to ask, but her mother was talking to the celebrant, and when she glanced back to the stranger she found herself looking straight into his eyes. They were piercingly pale in his dark face, and so cold that Lizzy’s heart jerked and the breath dried in her throat.
She had the oddest feeling that the floor of the woolshed had dropped away beneath her feet and only that unnervingly light gaze was holding her above an abyss. It could only have been for a moment, but to Lizzy it felt as if she hung there for ever, her gaze locked with his.
And then he smiled, a swift, mocking smile that for some reason sent the colour surging into her cheeks. Lizzy wrenched her eyes away and pointedly turned her back, furious to find that her heart was hammering in her chest.
It hadn’t been a nice smile. Not really. She wasn’t even going to ask who he was. From now on, she decided, she would ignore him.
Only somehow she couldn’t. Lizzy threw herself into her role as bridesmaid, flitting between groups, hugging old friends, laughing, kissing, agreeing that Ellie looked beautiful and that she and Jack were perfect for each other, but no matter how many times she tried to turn her back, the stranger always seemed to be there, lurking irritatingly at the edge of her vision.
Perversely, the moment she couldn’t see him any more, she missed him. On her way back from the bar that had been set up at one end of the woolshed, Lizzy paused and sipped her champagne, surveying the crowd with a slight frown between her brows. Where had he gone?
‘Looking for me?’ a voice said in her ear, and Lizzy started, the champagne sloshing out of her glass as she swung round.
Sure enough, it was the stranger, looking even more sardonic at close quarters. Close to, Lizzy could see that his eyes were grey, but so light they seemed glacial against the darkness of his hair and lashes, and she had the uncomfortable feeling that they could see right through her.
‘Why should I be looking for you?’ she asked, with what she thought was creditable coolness considering that her heart seemed to have taken up residence in her throat, where it was jumping and fluttering and generally making it ridiculously hard for her to breathe.
‘I’m the only person here you haven’t kissed,’ he said. He had an unusual accent, not wholly Australian nor completely American, but somewhere in between. ‘You wouldn’t want to miss anyone out, would you?’
Lizzy swallowed her heart firmly. ‘I only kiss people I know,’ she said, ‘and I don’t know you.’
‘We could introduce ourselves,’ he pointed out. ‘Although I already know exactly who you are.’
Lizzy, opening her mouth to reply to his suggestion, was thrown. ‘You do?’ she asked uncertainly.
‘I’ve been asking around about you. You’re Elizabeth Walker, always known as Lizzy, elder sister of the bride and all round nice girl.’
For some reason this description annoyed Lizzy. ‘That’s not quite how I’d describe myself,’ she said with something of a snap.
‘Oh? How would you describe yourself?’
‘As a professional woman,’ said Lizzy loftily and not very accurately. ‘I’m in PR.’
‘Ah.’ He nodded down at her feet. ‘That explains the shoes.’
In spite of herself, Lizzy warmed to him. He was the only person who had noticed her shoes. Following his gaze downwards, she couldn’t help smiling. There was just something about shoes, Lizzy felt. You couldn’t put on a pair like this and not feel good.
‘Aren’t they wonderful?’ she said, forgetting for a moment that she didn’t like him.
His eyes travelled slowly up from the shoes to her face. Lizzy was tall and built on generous lines. Whenever she grumbled about losing weight, her friends would roll their eyes and assure her that her figure was perfectly proportioned to her height and her personality. Deep down, Lizzy knew that this was true, but it didn’t stop her grumbling. She was normal, after all.
For Ellie’s wedding she had found a fabulous dress that emphasised her warm curves and glowing, opulent skin. Kingfisher-blue, its colour intensified the blueness of her eyes and made a wonderful foil for her wavy blonde hair, bluntly cut to her chin, and her stylishly bold lipstick.
There was no way that Lizzy could be described as a classical beauty, but her face was so vivid that no one ever noticed that her nose was too big and her mouth too wide or that there were already lines starring the edges of her eyes.
‘Wonderful,’ Tye agreed. His face was quite straight, but something in his voice set a blush stealing into Lizzy’s cheeks, and she looked quickly away. It was a relief when his gaze dropped back to her shoes. ‘But not very practical,’ he added.
They certainly weren’t. She had nearly twisted her ankle several times on the uneven woolshed floor. To her chagrin, Lizzy realised that she had been holding her breath and let it out. ‘There are more important things in life than practicality,’ she said firmly, and a disconcerting gleam of amusement lit the cool grey eyes.
‘You must be the only person in this woolshed to think so!’
That was probably true too, Lizzy reflected, glancing around at the people she had grown up with. They were all wonderful, and she loved them deeply, but they didn’t understand about shoes.
‘You have to be practical if you live in the outback,’ she said, her gaze coming back to meet his almost defiantly. ‘I don’t. I’m a city girl now.’
‘So I gathered.’
Lizzy didn’t quite know what to make of that. There had been an odd undercurrent to his voice that she couldn’t interpret. ‘You seem to know all about me,’ she pointed out with a challenging look, ‘but I still don’t know who you are.’
‘I’m Tye Gibson,’ he told her, and he smiled sardonically at the expression on her face. ‘Yes, that Tye Gibson,’ he answered her unspoken question. ‘Didn’t anyone tell you that the black sheep of the district was back?’
‘No,’ admitted Lizzy, too surprised to think what she was saying.
She couldn’t help staring. Tye Gibson! No one had seen him since he had walked off his family property nearly twenty years ago, but of course they all knew about him. Breaking off all contact with his father, Tye had turned his back on the bush and gone on make his fortune. Not just an ordinary little fortune, not just millions, but serious money.
Lizzy had never been absolutely sure what Tye Gibson did—something to do
