Wanted: Outback Wife

THE BRIDES OF BELLA LUCIA

A family torn apart by secrets, reunited by marriage

When William Valentine returned from the war, as a testament to his love for his beautiful Italian wife, Lucia, he opened the first Bella Lucia restaurant in London. The future looked bright, and William had, he thought, the perfect family.

Now William is nearly ninety, and not long for this world, but he has three top London restaurants with prime spots throughout Knightsbridge and the West End. He has two sons, John and Robert, and grown-up grandchildren on both sides of the Atlantic who are poised to take this small gastronomic success story into the twenty-first century.

But when William dies, and the family fight to control the destiny of the Bella Lucia business, they discover a multitude of long-buried secrets, scandals, the threat of financial ruin and, ultimately, two great loves they hadn’t even dreamed of: the love of a lifelong partner, and the love of a family reunited….

Wanted: Outback Wife by Ally Blake

MILLS & BOON

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THE BRIDES OF BELLA LUCIA

A family torn apart by secrets, reunited by marriage

First there was double the excitement as we met twins Rebecca and Rachel Valentine

Having the Frenchman’s Baby, Rebecca Winters Coming Home to the Cowboy, Patricia Thayer

Then we joined Emma Valentine as she got a royal welcome this September

The Rebel Prince, Raye Morgan

Now, take a trip to the Outback and meet Louise Valentine’s long-lost sister, Jodie

Wanted: Outback Wife, Ally Blake

On cold November nights catch up with newcomer Daniel Valentine

Married Under the Mistletoe, Linda Goodnight

Snuggle up with sexy Jack Valentine over Christmas

Crazy About the Boss, Teresa Southwick

In the New Year join Melissa as she heads off to a desert kingdom

The Nanny and the Sheikh, Barbara McMahon

And don’t miss the thrilling end to the Valentine saga in February

The Valentine Bride, Liz Fielding

To my Sirens–Hulda, Nic, Ola, and Trish–for being the best listeners, huggers, and champions a girl could ever want. Smoochy kisses.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER ONE

HAPPY hour at The Cave was drawing to a close, but Jodie didn’t mind at all.

She had used up every second of employment her working visa had allowed so now her final weeks in Melbourne were hers to do with as she pleased. And it pleased her to sit on a bar stool twirling a daisy-shaped earring she had made from scratch earlier that day, sharing a bottle of red wine that someone else had paid for, and enjoying every last second that she wasn’t in London.

‘Where’s Mandy?’ her housemate Lisa asked. ‘I have to start work in eight minutes and those customers who haven’t booked a table won’t turn themselves away.’

‘Beach Street is back on in less than three minutes,’ Louise added, her clipped London accent so obvious amongst the neighbouring Aussie strine. ‘No matter how exiting Mandy’s big surprise, after the break Angelo is about to find out that Cait was once married to his brother, so her announcement will be nothing but white noise to me.’

‘She’ll be here,’ Jodie said chirpily. The fact that Louise, the half-sister she had never even known existed until two weeks before, had turned up on her doorstep amidst her own family drama wasn’t lost on Jodie. But she began throwing pretzel chunks at Louise, who was glancing at the overhead television every few seconds, all the same.

‘If you do that one more time, Jodie,’ Louise warned, ‘when the next ad break comes along I will retaliate.’

Jodie grinned, but she stopped throwing pretzels at Louise and threw one into her mouth instead, amazed anew that this tall, cool, sophisticated, blonde product of the infamous restaurant family, the Valentines of London, was related to her—mousy little Jodie Simpson.

It was obvious Louise got the glamour goods from their shared mother, whereas Jodie wasn’t sure what she had acquired from Patricia except a lifelong pain in the neck. But thankfully all that was back in London, far far away from friends and fun on this fine Melbourne evening.

‘I’ve got it!’ Mandy cried out, rushing in as fast as her pencil-thin power skirt and two-inch heels would allow. She waved a piece of paper high above her head.

‘If that’s a doctor’s certificate telling you rotten Jake has finally given you something only penicillin will cure, I don’t want to know about it,’ Lisa called back.

‘Funny,’ Mandy said. ‘Now leave my love life out of this; this magical piece of paper is all about Jodie’s.’

‘My love life?’ Jodie wheezed while coughing up a pretzel crumb that had lodged in her throat.

‘Yep,’ Mandy said. ‘I have found a way for you to stay in Australia.’

That got everyone’s attention. Lisa stopped staring at her watch. Jodie’s mouth went so dry she wouldn’t have had a clue if she had been drinking red wine or juiced sawdust. Louise spun on her seat leaving Beach Street’s Angelo and Cait to sort out their worries on their own.

Jodie felt a pang of guilt lodge between her shoulder blades. Until that moment Louise had had no idea that she was considering not returning to London. In Jodie Louise would have a close friend outside the Valentine family she was feeling so angry toward right now, and a sister to be at her side when she met her real mother for the first time.

And though Jodie so wanted to be that person for Louise, she wanted to be in Melbourne more. She waved a quick hand at Louise, intimating she would explain everything later.

‘How? I’ve tried everything,’ Jodie managed, ‘including writing letters to the Australian Department of Immigration telling them how much I want to be one of you.’

Jodie looked from Mandy to Lisa. She would have given her right ear to be like them—bright, breezy, and free as the wind. And being that way in Melbourne.

‘But I still have to be on a plane back to London on the thirtieth of December,’ Jodie said, letting her hand flop back to the table.

Mandy grinned. ‘I have found a way.’

‘And it has something to do with Jodie’s love life?’ Louise asked, sounding anxious.

Mandy nodded. ‘Dust off your best bridesmaid’s frock; we are going to marry your sister off to an Australian.’

Jodie felt herself blanch and blush all at once. ‘You want to marry me…off?’

Mandy looked down at the computer printout she held through a pair of tiny reading glasses. ‘The marriage would only have to last two years. At first you’ll get a Temporary Spouse Visa and at the end of those two years, once you achieve your Permanent Visa, you can divorce the guy and be free.’

Free. Of all the words Mandy could have chosen to sell the idea that was the one that worked. For a child from a split home it certainly rang in her ears a lot more comfortably than marriage, or divorce…

But surely it couldn’t be that simple.

‘You and Lisa are both natives, yet Lisa has been single since I’ve known her and the closest thing to a long-term boyfriend you have managed to locate is rotten Jake. What makes you think I can do it in two and a half months?’

Lisa looked back down at her watch again, neatly avoiding Jodie’s comment.

‘One and a half,’ Mandy said, also ignoring the point.

‘Excuse me?’

‘You have to fill out an Intention To Marry form one month and one day before marrying. So at the outside, you have six weeks in which to find your man. Considering it has been a month since you starting putting big red crosses on your calendar in a passive-aggressive reminder of the looming Day You Have To Leave, I had my team make it top priority. As of today you have your own website!’

‘Website?’ Jodie repeated.

‘It’s called www.ahusbandinahurry.com,’ Mandy said, puffing up proudly.

Louise, who had been elegantly sipping on a Cosmopolitan, coughed inelegantly into her drink.

Jodie sunk her head onto her hands so as not to see the amplified mortification that would surely be in Louise’s eyes. ‘But what if anyone I know has seen it? What if my mother has seen it?’

‘Unless she is trawling the Internet looking for a cute British bride, then I think you’ll be fine. Besides, we did you proud. We used that photo of you from the Christmas in July barbecue on the home page.’

‘Not the action shot where I was laughing so hard you could see my tonsils as I fell off my chair by way of too much champagne?’ Jodie asked.

‘That’s the one,’ Mandy said, grinning. ‘The men at work voted that one their favourite. They all said you seemed, and I quote: “cute, adorable, and fun”.’

‘So why not just set her up with one of the guys from your work?’ Louise asked. Several faint frown lines marred her forehead. She wasn’t as aloof to the situation as she was making out. But Jodie couldn’t deal with what those frown lines meant. Not yet.

Jodie was beginning to see the possibilities. There was any number of reasons why two people could happily marry for convenience’s sake. And considering this was her last chance at staying in Australia, the place where she had found fabulous friends, a growing number of people who stopped her on the street to ask her where they could buy the unique floral-inspired earrings she herself created, and where she had begun to delight in her youth, maybe, just maybe, she could pull this off.

That was the clincher. After years of being the adult in the family, the one who remembered to pick up milk, the one who kept the house free of dust bunnies, the one who remembered to pay the gas bill, the one who made sure her mum got to work in time—when she managed to hold down a job—Jodie felt hopeful that at last she had a chance to find the youth inside herself.

‘Oh, no,’ Mandy said, ‘once they knew she was looking for a husband, even a two-year one, they backed away like I had pulled a shotgun.’

And there was the rub.

Jodie looked to Lisa, who had been quiet through all of this. ‘What do you think?’

Lisa held up both hands before slipping off the seat and backing away. ‘You don’t want to know what I think. Besides, can’t talk, I’m now on the clock.’

‘She has some old-fashioned view that you should only date, marry, sleep with a guy if you’re in love.’ Mandy shivered as though that would have saved her from a whole lot of fun. ‘But I’m not expecting you to worry about any of that. Leave it all to me.’

Jodie had every intention of leaving it all to Mandy. Though it wasn’t in her make-up to come out and say it, she needed help. For there was no way on God’s green earth she was ever going back to London. To that oppressive apartment. To that half life…

But the real question was: what sort of man would give up two years of his life to marry her, to be her husband, after knowing her for less than a month?

Heath swung back and forth on the love seat on the veranda of his big old home, staring out across the flat red dirt of Jamesons Run.

A blood-red sunset glowed across the plain. A nimble dry wind whipped along the dusty ground so that the golden kangaroo grass seemed to be waving toward the grand old willow dipping its sad leaves into the dam at the centre of his main paddock.

He could do with rain—and not just to damp down the dust storms that were springing up from nowhere more often than not these days. Rain would be a break in routine of stifling hot temperatures that spoke of an oppressive summer to come. Rain would be a change.

‘Knock, knock.’

Heath looked over his shoulder to find his older sister Elena standing in the doorway with a paper plate drooping under the weight of mixed desserts. An outfit of a floral dress and stockings on such a warm day could only mean one thing—a wedding or a funeral. And there had not been a wedding at Jamesons Run in years.

He let his riding-boot-clad feet drag against the wooden floor until the seat stopped swinging so she could sit beside him.

‘I brought this for you before the Crabbe sisters had the chance,’ Elena said. ‘No doubt they are still squabbling over whether you might prefer Carol’s custard tart or Rachel’s mud cake.’

Heath smiled, and he only hoped he had managed to make it reach his eyes. His appetite seemed to have departed him since the moment he had picked up the phone four days earlier to learn that Marissa was gone, but he swallowed a bite of Elena’s home-made pavlova to keep her happy. His mouth was so dry that the sticky passion-fruit topping caught on his palate. Now he would be prying pavlova loose with his heavy tongue all night.

‘How you doing, little brother?’ Elena asked, patting him on the knee. ‘You holding up okay?’

He nodded, though he turned away for a brief moment so she wouldn’t see his frown. Why was she worried about him? Cameron was the one she should have been comforting. Cameron was the one who had lost his wife. He had only lost…what? A friend? His last remaining link to the life he had once thought he might have?

‘Do we have enough ice?’ he asked, tidily avoiding the question. ‘I can run into town to get more.’

‘We have plenty of ice,’ Elena said. Her patting stopped. ‘Though I’m sure it won’t occur to Cameron to thank you, he appreciates you holding Marissa’s wake here. And when you took over for him during the eulogy, oh, that fair broke my heart then and there. You’re a good kid, Heath.’

‘A thirty-six-year-old kid,’ he reminded her. ‘Which makes you—’

‘A lady of indiscriminate age,’ Elena said, cutting him off quick smart. ‘So when are we going to get to use this big old place for more than Christmas parties, local community meetings and funerals? When do we all get to come here to celebrate your wedding?’

‘Ha! I’m surprised you and the Crabbe sisters haven’t lined Cam and me up for a double wedding by now.’

As soon as the words left his mouth he regretted them. They were cruel and hurtful and born of the fact that he barely believed the words even as he said them. He stood and moved to the edge of the veranda, wrapping his hands around the wooden railing until a bunch of splinters poked deep enough to hurt.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘That was out of order.’

‘And completely understandable, considering. Does the thought of settling down frighten you that much?’

Settling down? That was what she thought had kept him from the altar all this time? He had settled down a decade ago. What scared him was that if one day he settled down at Jamesons Run with someone else it meant that he would never leave. But now, on this tragic day, it no longer seemed the biggest problem in his life.

‘What if I told you that right this moment I am feeling the very opposite?’ he said. He turned and leant his backside against the railing and folded his arms and stared his big sister down.

‘Well, kid, I would say thank the gods.’ She stood and grabbed him by the arms, giving him a big kiss on the cheek. ‘Is there a particular woman who has brought about this change of heart?’

One woman? Absolutely. But she was gone now. Not just gone from his life, but gone from all life. And it had taken a shock of that magnitude to knock him from the path of his life.

‘None in particular,’ he said. His reasons were his to wrangle alone. ‘So what do you think? Should I go and give the Crabbe sisters the fright of their life by proposing to one of them right now?’

The Crabbe girls were as sensible a choice as any. He knew from past experience of country-dance bottom-pinching, all instigated by one or the other of them, that they would not have been immune to such an idea. But no matter how hard he tried to picture himself in the role of doting husband with a good little country wife by his side, he found he in all good conscience could not. It felt like too much of the same.

And what he craved so deeply was change.

‘No need,’ Elena said, reaching into her purse for a pile of yellowed, creased A4 paper. ‘I’ve already signed you up to some dating websites, just in case.’

‘Websites?’ Heath parroted back. ‘Aren’t they all just fronts for three-hundred-pound, sixty-year-old Russians looking to relocate?’

Elena’s responding sigh was melodramatic. ‘I’ll have you know over half all new relationships forged by people in their thirties come from meeting over the Internet.’

After a pause, Heath said, ‘You just made that up.’

‘I did. But it sounds good, don’t you think? Now I’ve found some girls I like, and some I know you’ll like. All are Melbourne women. Twenty-seven to thirty-five. Single. Looking for love, not just fun.’ She glanced at him through narrowed eyes.

He took the pages, skimming through pictures and vital statistics of a dozen perfectly attractive young women.

One page about halfway through had stuck to another with a glob of baby food. It caught his eye for the fact that it had a big red cross through it. Why, he had no idea, for the woman in the picture looked absolutely worth investigating.

She was laughing so hard he could almost feel the energy radiating from the page. Something about the angle of the photo made him feel kind of dizzy, as if he were about to tip over if he didn’t plant his feet.

Behind the smile was English-rose skin. Huge jade-green cat’s eyes. Long curling eyelashes. A fine chin and a nice straight nose. And she had a seriously sexy stash of strawberry-blonde waves. She barely looked twenty but there was something steely behind her pretty green eyes that had Heath thinking that she was older.

A bulleted list below the photo told him she hated chocolate, her favourite colour was yellow, she cooked a mean plate of fettuccini carbonara, and she lived for mascarpone.

Considering he couldn’t go a day without chocolate, he wasn’t entirely sure he had a favourite colour, he couldn’t eat starch and didn’t even know what a mascarpone was, it seemed that they were likely the least-suited pair on the planet. Maybe that was why Elena had crossed her out.

But there was something in those flinty green eyes that kept him staring at her picture. ‘What’s wrong with this one?’ he asked.

Elena glanced at the page and screwed up her nose. ‘That one wasn’t meant to be there.’ She reached out to take it back, but Heath moved it just out of her way.

‘Why not?’

‘She is the star turn on a website called www.ahusbandinahurry.com. I don’t think that bodes well.’

‘Don’t you think that’s what many of these women are after? At least she’s honest,’ he said. And if he was honest, it was what he wanted too. Now. As soon as possible. A wife. A partner. Someone else with whom to share his space, his time, his life. It was time for him to stop playing it safe. It was time for him to take a risk.

Elena shrugged, obviously not pleased that it hadn’t gone all her way. Likely she had picked out a bunch of women who enjoyed cross-stitch and watching car racing on TV so that if all went well she could have a new friend as well as a sister-in-law.

But that one, as Elena called her, was different. Behind the pretty green eyes Heath knew there was fire. And though all week he had been wishing for rain, suddenly fire held a heck of a lot more possibilities. Change was in the air. Barely there, but there all the same. Enough that he could taste it—sweet and welcome on his tongue.

‘Heath, are you out here?’ a male voice called from inside. His youngest brother, Caleb.

‘Out here, buddy.’

‘Someone knocked over the punch bowl and there’s pineapple pieces swimming all over the dining-room floor.’

He let out a long slow breath and bit back the suggestion that Caleb could have cleaned the thing up himself. But the kid was spoilt. All of his siblings were. And it was his fault.

But inside there were worse things afoot than pineapple on the floor. His brother Cameron was doing his best to keep himself from shattering into a million pieces while trying to help his two little daughters understand why their mummy was not coming home. And big brother Heath was hiding outside.

Well, not any more. ‘I’m coming, Caleb.’

‘To save the day as always, bro,’ Caleb said, slapping Heath on the back, but Heath was sure the kid had no notion of how true that was.

On a balmy Saturday night, two weeks later, Jodie angled her beloved twenty-year-old car, aptly nicknamed Rusty, into an empty car park in a side street off Flinders. She threw a handful of coins into the parking meter as she spied a gap in Saturday-night traffic cruising the length of the grand old train station. She hitched her black sparkly halter an inch higher and tugged her tight jeans an inch lower and ran as fast as her borrowed high heels would carry her.

She was late, as an hour before she could still have been found sitting on the couch with Louise in her pyjama bottoms, Chelsea Football Club T-shirt and slippers, as she hadn’t entirely been planning on turning up that night.

Over the past two weeks, Jodie had met twelve different guys that she and Mandy had chosen from the responses to her website. An actor, a vet, a guy who sold mobile phone contracts door-to-door, and a funeral director whose massive Adam’s apple slid up and down in his throat with such vigour Jodie had found it hard to look anywhere else. And she would have put every cent she owned on the fact that most had come for a good time, not a long time.

What was she doing interviewing prospective husbands? Really? When Jodie reached the safety of the footpath, she closed her eyes and visualised waving goodbye to Mandy and Lisa, getting on the jumbo plane, landing in Heathrow, catching the tube, knocking on the front door of the tiny flat she had shared with her mother for twenty-five years…No, if she was to have any sort of life, she had to stay the course.

Jodie pushed open the heavy carved door nestled into the underbelly of the train station and rushed down the carpeted steps.

Lisa, the maître d’ at the popular restaurant, grimaced as she came into view. ‘Another minute and I would have given away your table.’

‘I probably would have thanked you if you had,’ Jodie muttered. ‘Is he here yet?’

Lisa shook her head. ‘But Mandy is prowling in your corner. Go settle her before she frightens away my customers.’

Jodie gave her a quick pat on the arm before skimming through the tables to the private table for two in the corner. When she saw Mandy sitting in a chair, her stiletto tapping nervously against the floor, Jodie was torn between staying or making a run for it to the ladies’ room, squeezing out the tiny window and dropping atop the Dumpster a floor below.