Australia: In Bed with a King

CHAPTER FIVE

MIRANDA was already at the resort helipad when Nathan pulled up in his Jeep. She had arrived five minutes before the arranged time of meeting, driving one of the luggage buggies, which she’d commandeered for her use. Being early made her feel more prepared, more on top of the situation.

Even so, Nathan swung himself out of the Jeep and Miranda’s breath caught in her throat. Regardless of her mental shields, his physical impact got to her, a big blast of strong maleness that instantly set everything female in her aquiver. Like herself, he was dressed in shorts, shirt, walking boots, a hat in one hand, a backpack dangling from his shoulder, but he emanated purposeful vitality while she felt hopelessly paralysed.

“Good morning,” he said, shooting a smile at her that jump-started her heart again. “We’ve struck it lucky with a cloudless sky. A clear sunrise makes the colours more vivid.”

“Yes, it is a good morning,” she agreed, though it promised a hot, hot day to come. In more ways than one, given her instinctive response to him.

He waved her towards the helicopter on the pad and she fell into step beside him, concentrating on injecting more steel into her spine.

“Have you read anything about the Bungle Bungle Range?” he asked.

“Only what was in the tour pamphlet.”

“Well, seeing says it all.”

Clearly he was not interested in lecturing or showing off his local knowledge, but his interest in her was twinkling from his eyes and playing havoc with Miranda’s nerves.

“Having trouble sleeping?” he asked.

“No,” she instantly denied, wondering if she looked tired from last night’s tossing and turning over this meeting. “Why should I?” she challenged, wanting to pin-point the reason for his speculation.

“Oh, the quiet sometimes gets to city people. They miss the background noise, and other things they’re used to.”

Like sex?

Miranda found her jaw clenching and mentally berated herself for being ultra-sensitive. On the surface his comment was perfectly reasonable. On the surface he wasn’t saying or doing anything she could take objection to. But under the surface she felt the buzz of possibilities that were far from innocent.

“The last two days have been so busy, I guess the quiet hasn’t impressed itself on me yet,” she answered.

“It will,” he said matter-of-factly. “You’ll come to like it or hate it. One thing can be said definitively about the outback. It very quickly sorts out the visitors and the stayers.”

“So I understand. I’ve been told there can be a stir-crazy problem with some of the staff if they don’t get regular leave.” That moved the conversation to a more impersonal level!

“Not just with staff,” he returned drily. “Most women I’ve known.”

He slanted her a look that seemed to be weighing if she had the grit to be a stayer. It set Miranda wondering about the woman who’d chosen to marry someone else…a woman who didn’t want to spend her life on a cattle station? But why would Nathan King keep the relationship going for years if it hadn’t suited him?

“There must be women who were born and bred to the outback like you,” she said pertinently. “Like Sam Connelly.”

“Ah, Sam,” he said in a tone of fond indulgence. He slid her an ironic look. “There aren’t many like Sam, believe me, and she only has eyes for Tommy. One of these days he might stop chasing glitter and see the gold right under his nose.”

Was that true about Sam? Miranda tucked the information away for future reference and targeted the man who was criticising his brother. “Perhaps he’s not inclined to look. Some men don’t want real commitment to a woman.”

“Is that personal experience speaking?”

Bitterly personal. Miranda barely stemmed a burning rush of blood as she fought those memories, determined not to reveal her humiliation to a man who’d spent two years pleasuring himself with a woman he must have considered unsuitable for marriage. Why else would he have let her go to another man? With cool deliberation Miranda turned the question back on him.

“I was just wondering why you haven’t found gold somewhere in this vast Kimberly region.”

His mouth quirked, drawing her attention to its sensual promise. “Funny thing about gold. It has certain chemical properties. If they’re missing it’s just fool’s gold.”

“Maybe they’re missing for Tommy,” she argued, all too aware of the chemistry Nathan tapped in her.

“No. He covers it with teasing. Sam covers it with aggression. And Tommy’s damned fool ego gets in the way. He’d add you to his pride list if he could.”

They’d crossed the ground to the helicopter. Nathan opened the door for her. Miranda didn’t immediately step up to the passenger seat. She stood stockstill, her mind whirling back over her evening with the Kings…Nathan, stand-offish, watching, only inserting himself when Tommy was considering taking her on tour trips. Had she got Nathan’s purpose with her entirely wrong? Nothing to do with sexual attraction?

She eyed him directly. “Is this what today is about, Nathan? Putting yourself between me and Tommy to save Sam’s feelings?”

He returned a look that simmered with appreciative warmth, liking her bluntness. “From what I observed, you’re not particularly drawn to him, Miranda. But Tommy doesn’t give up easily…”

Sam’s words!

“…and as time goes on, you might find yourself getting bored enough to play with his interest. Proximity and availability tend to overcome other shortcomings.”

“I see. You’re warning me off.”

“No. It’s your choice. I don’t believe in interfering with people’s choices. I’d be sorry to see Sam hurt, though. It’s one thing knowing Tommy drifts in and out of affairs, quite another watching one at close quarters.”

“I take your point,” she conceded, knowing she wasn’t interested in getting involved with Tommy King anyway.

Nathan nodded, then suddenly grinned at her, his blue eyes dancing with more than appreciation. “Besides, I’d much prefer you to relieve your boredom with me.”

“What?” Her mouth fell open and stayed open in surprise at the abrupt switch from do-gooding friend of Sam to man making a move on her.

Miranda barely had time to register his words, let alone his intent as he stepped closer, cupped her cheek, tilted her chin, and with his eyes blazing into hers, wickedly inviting, teasing, wanting, he murmured, “Let’s try it, shall we?”

Then he was kissing her, soft, seductive pressures that kept her shocked in stillness. She hadn’t been expecting it, wasn’t prepared for it, and his very gentleness was both confusing and tantalising. It was a take, but there was nothing really offensive about…about the way his mouth was loving hers. Yet he really had no right to just do it like this. She should stop it. Where would it lead? Where could it lead?

She lifted her hands. They clamped onto his chest, but instead of pushing, they found a magnetic attraction to the heat and muscle behind his shirt, and somehow they couldn’t stop sliding up to the big, broad shoulders that were on a higher level than hers, which was a new experience…reaching up to a man…and it sparked a swarm of previously thwarted female feelings…a man whose physique more than complemented her own too generous body length.

The temptation to feel what it was like with such a man as Nathan King—just this once—dissolved all the reasons why she shouldn’t. It was only a kiss, which he was delicately deepening, inviting her active participation, promising a pleasurable exploration that would satisfy her curiosity. No force involved. No danger attached to it. She could back out any time she liked, dismissing the impulse to taste as inconsequential.

He knew how to kiss. He was very good at it. So distractingly good she was barely aware of his hands sliding around her waist, though her whole body was instantly and acutely conscious of his when he hauled her against him. But by then that was what she wanted, to feel more of him, revelling in the dominant maleness he emitted and incredibly excited by it.

Hungry, urgent kisses, a gathering passion for them, and her hands climbing, clutching his head, pulling him down to her, her body arching into his, pinned there by his hands, engulfed by a sweet storm of sensation, riding with it until the growing hardness of his wanting sparked some shred of sanity in her mind, and the shock of her susceptibility to Nathan King’s attraction took hold.

She grabbed his ears and forced his head up. He stared at her, his eyes hot and glazed, steaming with rampant desire. She stared back, panic clutching her stomach where he was pressed so explicitly against her, panic screeching through her mind at having let this…this foolish experiment…go so far.

“You’re right,” he muttered gruffly. “Not the time or place.”

Before she had wits to make any reply, he collected himself and moved, scooping her off her feet and lifting her onto the passenger seat of the helicopter as effortlessly as though she were some lightweight doll.

“Throw your hat and bag on the back seat,” he instructed, and closed the door, sealing her into position.

Miranda was a trembling mess, her mind stuck in a maze of incredulity…unanswerable questions about herself and her totally inappropriate and shamingly intimate response to a man she barely knew and didn’t want to know. Even now, her body was in revolt at having been deprived of what it had wanted from him.

Chemistry!

How did one switch it off?

One solution zipped through her squirming confusion. Get out of the helicopter! She didn’t have to go with him or even be with him. She found the handle to open the door. Then a surge of pride insisted running away was not the most effective move to deal with this.

She had a choice to make here and she had to make Nathan King respect her choice. Her contract at King’s Eden ran two years and there was no way of avoiding him for two years. A stand had to be taken. Words said. He had to be convinced there was never going to be a right time or place for what he wanted from her. No way was she going to fall into the Bobby Hewson trap again.

She’d barely remembered to toss her hat and bag onto the back seat before Nathan King hauled himself into the space beside her, triggering an awful sense of vulnerability. She fastened her seat-belt and did her utmost to ignore his impact on her senses as he settled himself.

“Have to get moving if we’re to catch the sunrise,” he said, handing her a set of headphones and linking up the electronics.

Thankfully he switched on the ignition and busied himself with getting them off the ground. Miranda donned the headphones, which drowned out the noise and allowed her to speak to him but decided any talking was best done later. After she had calmed down. When she could choose her words carefully, not in heat. And when being in the wretchedly small space of this helicopter didn’t make her feel so crowded by him.

Determined on shutting him out for the duration of the flight, Miranda resolved to keep her gaze trained strictly on the view. Which was what she was here for…firsthand knowledge of tourist territory…and which she proceeded to do, once they were in the air.

All the same, even as she watched a seemingly endless vista of beige grass dotted by the grey-green foliage of the universally small outback trees, her nerves were strung taut, waiting for Nathan to say something. As time dragged by, she began to hate the thought he was simply sitting tight, congratulating himself on having sparked a positive response from her, and anticipating more of the same.

“You’ll miss the approach if you keep looking out of the side window, Miranda.”

The advice boomed into her ears, jolting her out of her dark brooding.

“That’s the start of the Bungle Bungle Range straight ahead of us.”

Relief poured through her at his matter-of-fact tone, and the moment she looked where he directed, his domination of her thoughts faded, her mind filling with the wonder of what lay before her.

She had seen photographs of Ayer’s Rock, a huge monolith rising with stunning effect from a vista of flat land as far as the eye could see. The Bungle Bungle Range gave the same weird sense of not belonging to the general landscape, but it was much more than a monumental rock. It looked like some ancient remnant of a lost civilisation, embodying mysteries that no one knew the answers to any more.

The photographs in the pamphlet hadn’t captured what she was seeing, couldn’t capture the size and fascination of it. It seemed to rise out of nowhere, unconnected to anything else, a huge amalgamation of massive beehive structures, horizontally striped in orange and black. The rising sun vividly illuminated the orange sections and made the black more stark.

Miranda knew there were geological explanations for the colours—layers of silica and lichen—and the shapes. She’d read them in the pamphlet. Yet the stripes seemed so evenly spaced, as though to some deliberate, artistic plan, and the striations in the rock of some of the massive domes on the outskirts of the range gave her the impression of buildings built of bricks, like pyramids with the sharp edges having crumbled away over thousands and thousands of years.

She knew it was fanciful to ignore expert knowledge—this was all solid sandstone, and the formation was actually dated back three hundred and fifty million years—but she couldn’t help envisaging ancient rulers being buried inside those time-worn domes.

“Had enough or do you want to see more?” Nathan asked evenly, not pushing either way.

“More, please,” she answered, not grudging those words to him.

He flew the helicopter over the range in a criss-cross pattern, giving her every aspect of it. The narrow canyons or gorges had been carved by water, so she’d read, yet the rock-face it had carved was so smooth and sheer in places, the impression of narrow streets running deep down beside blocks of petrified, windowless skyscrapers kept flowing through Miranda’s mind. If this was the work of nature, it had been wrought in incredible patterns.

“Time we landed if we’re to keep our schedule,” Nathan informed her.

“Okay,” she conceded, realising he’d seen all this before and had been pandering to her interest, probably indulging her so she would be more ready to indulge him. And on the ground she would be more accessible to whatever he had in mind.

He set the helicopter down close to a group of buildings beyond the massif, presumably the park rangers’ headquarters. Intensely wary of his intentions, Miranda swiftly unfastened her seat-belt, whipped off her headphones, opened the door on her side and was out before Nathan could help her, thereby avoiding any macho familiarity he might take, being bigger and stronger than she was.

“Forgot your hat and bag,” he said, handing her the items as he joined her on the ground.

“Thanks,” she mumbled, deeply vexed she hadn’t thought of them in her hurry to get out. The omission revealed her distracted state of mind. “That was so fantastic from the air, I’m eager to see more of it from ground level,” she rolled out as an excuse, not wanting him to think he was the cause of her haste.

“Worth catching the sunrise?” he remarked, his blue eyes glinting with amused mockery.

“Very much so.”

“Sorry if I offended your dignity by bundling you into the helicopter back at the resort, but we were running short of time. Nature doesn’t wait on anything. If we want it working for us we have to follow its dictates.”

Which was a double-edged excuse if she’d ever heard one! If he thought she was going to take sexual dictation from nature, he could think again.

“I didn’t ask for a delay to our departure, Nathan,” she said pointedly.

“True!” He had the gall to grin. “But I didn’t hear or feel any protest for quite some time. Which leaves us with a promising area to explore, doesn’t it?”

“Only if the wish is there to explore it,” she flashed back at him with a look that should have shrivelled his confidence.

It merely raised a quizzical eyebrow. “No problem on my side. Is there one on yours?”

She fixed some mockery of her own directly on him. “Just where do you see this exploration leading to?”

He made a playful frown. “Well, the start of it sug-gested we’re onto something special together. And now you’re throwing in some mystery. No doubt about a strong dash of excitement. Who can tell what will come out of it?”

He was laughing at her, making light of any possible reservations she might have about an open-ended future. Except it wasn’t open-ended to her. She saw a very inevitable end.

“That sounds quite romantic. Except you know and I know there won’t be any romance involved. I bet right now you’re figuring on a two-year convenient affair. And I tell you right now—” her voice hardened as she delivered the bottom line “—I won’t play.”

CHAPTER SIX

‘PLAY?”

Nathan King’s incredulous repetition of her word gave Miranda a queasy moment of doubt. Had she let her own fears paint a crass picture of what he intended?

She watched, with galloping trepidation, while his expression underwent several changes…disbelief shifting to reassessment, then distaste.

He couldn’t have had anything serious in mind with her, she fiercely told herself. He just didn’t like having his motives baldly laid out. Probably no other woman had ever knocked him back quite so bluntly or abruptly. New experience for him!

Just as his eyes took on a laser-like probe, a greeting rang out. They both turned to see a lean bearded man strolling towards them. The interruption was silently welcomed by Miranda. It broke the imminent threat of further confrontation with Nathan King and gave her the chance to regroup her defences.

The newcomer looked to be only in his early thirties and he viewed Miranda with speculative interest as Nathan introduced them. “Jim Hoskins, head park ranger, Miranda Wade, the new resort manager at King’s Eden.”

They shook hands but there was no opportunity for any conversation between them. Nathan claimed Jim’s attention, withdrawing a parcel of books from his bag. “The diaries. Take good care of them, won’t you?”

Jim took the parcel, handling it with reverential care. “I’m much obliged, Nathan. I’ll treat them with the utmost respect. Hard to get any history on this area.”

“Personal diaries aren’t exact historical fact,” Nathan drily warned. “My great-grandmother might have been fed tall tales by the Aborigines of the time. Generally white people weren’t let into tribal secrets.”

“Well, I’m sure I’ll find them interesting anyway.”

Miranda thought she would, too, but she could hardly ask for a loan of old family diaries from a man she was intent on rejecting.

“Come along,” Jim invited, waving to the building. “I’ll put tea or coffee on for you.” He smiled at Miranda as she and Nathan fell into step with him. “Your first time here?”

“Yes. This is an amazing place.”

“Unfortunately we’re short of time, Jim,” Nathan interjected.

Miranda tensed. Was that true, or was he impatient to get her to himself again?

“I promised to show Miranda Cathedral Gorge and have her back at the resort at noon,” he explained. “I know she’s eager to get on with the sight-seeing, so we’ll pass up the coffee, if you don’t mind. I’ve got some packed.”

Which neatly cut the park ranger out of the agenda, using her own excuse for hurrying out of the helicopter. It was clear Nathan was not going to allow her to use Jim Hoskins as a buffer between them. Not even for a short time. Though to be fair, she didn’t know how long it took to get to Cathedral Gorge.

Jim shrugged, accepting the argument without question. “Pity you’re so rushed.” He pointed to a heavy duty four-wheel-drive vehicle parked beside the road. “The Land Cruiser’s ready to go. Keys in the ignition.”

“Thanks, Jim. We’ll be off then.”

“No problem.”

He parted company with them with a cheery wave and Miranda resigned herself to being alone with Nathan again.

They headed straight for the Land Cruiser, neither of them offering conversation. Miranda didn’t look at Nathan but she was extremely conscious of purposeful energy radiating from him and knew he was going to contest her “no play” decision. But if he kept it to only words, she would cope, and she didn’t have to be more than polite in her replies. Let him think whatever he liked. The only important thing was to maintain a safe distance.