Deadly Intent

“You know better,” Ryan growled, unable to stay silent.

Lifting her head, Judy gave him a troubled look. “I know. But neither am I prepared to marry you. I’m not prepared to marry anyone. It isn’t personal.”

“The hell it isn’t. Whatever you need or want, tell me and I’ll make sure you have it.”

“What I want is to stay single.”

“What you want?”

She heard the disbelief in his tone. “All right, what I need. If you truly feel about me the way you claim, you’ll try to understand.”

“I’ll never understand,” he stated. “And I will do everything in my power to change your mind.”

Deadly Intent

Valerie Parv

www.millsandboon.co.uk

VALERIE PARV

With twenty million copies of her books sold, including three Waldenbooks bestsellers, it’s no wonder Valerie Parv is known as Australia’s queen of romance and is the recognized media spokesperson for all things romantic. Valerie is married to her own romantic hero, Paul, a former crocodile hunter in Australia’s tropical north.

These days he’s a cartoonist and the two live in the country’s capital city of Canberra, where both are volunteer zoo guides, sharing their love of animals with visitors from all over the world. Valerie continues to write her page-turning novels because they affirm her belief in love and happy endings. As she says, “Love gives you wings, romance helps you fly.” Keep up with Valerie’s latest releases at www.silromanceauthors.com.

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Epilogue

Chapter 1

Ryan liked seeing her in a dress, Judy Logan thought as she held the garment against her and checked the bedroom mirror. He would appreciate the way the sea-foam color complemented the sky blue of her eyes and the highlights she’d had put through her ash-blond hair, newly cut in an urchin style with strands feathered around her face.

He’d approve of the way the garment’s draping neckline made the most of her long neck and modest cleavage, the slinky short skirt skimming her legs. Privately, she thought they were her best feature, shapely and muscular thanks to an active lifestyle.

Seeing herself as more Australian stock horse than thoroughbred, she usually threw on whatever suited her schedule, not much caring about the result.

Realizing what she was doing, she flung the dress onto the bed, where it pooled innocently. Why did she care what Ryan thought of her appearance? He was only one of the boys her father and mother had fostered throughout most of Judy’s life.

After she was born, they’d been unable to have more children although they’d desperately wanted a large family. Her father still treated her like fragile china, although these days he was the frail one with a heart that threatened to stop beating at any moment.

She frowned at her mirror image. Des Logan was the reason she was going out with Ryan tonight. Not on a date, but to decide how best they could help her father. Des wouldn’t accept money, not that Ryan had much to offer. Of all the Logan foster sons, he was the least successful. He supported himself doing casual jobs on cattle stations throughout the Kimberley. Nothing wrong with that, but by Ryan’s age most men had something more substantial going for them.

If Judy hadn’t run across Ryan unexpectedly when she flew supplies to a remote Kimberly cattle station where he’d been working, he would still be estranged from them all. He hadn’t wanted to live with the Logans in the first place, she recalled. He’d claimed he was doing fine looking after himself. According to him, losing his mother and having no idea where his father was didn’t mean he needed help to run his life.

At the memory, Judy felt reluctant admiration sweep through her. As a boy he’d lived on his own for almost a year after his mother’s death, convincing the authorities that a friend of hers was his caregiver when, in fact, he’d had nobody. When the truth came out, he’d been dragged literally kicking and screaming into the Logan household.

Then he and Judy had spotted each other. Like a wild buffalo transfixed by a car’s headlights, he’d stopped fighting Des and stared at his new foster sister.

Just stared.

He’d looked her up and down with the insolence of a grown man. Too thin from eating whatever he could rustle up, he’d been lanky and awkward, but his eyes—how she remembered those midnight blue eyes—had been alight with masculine interest. She’d known he liked what he saw long before he’d told her he was in love with her and would marry her one day.

A shiver shook her. What had such a stripling known of love? She’d known even less. Oh, she’d been aware of the facts of life. You couldn’t grow up on a million-acre cattle station and remain ignorant for long. But the chemistry between male and female had been a compelling mystery.

Nevertheless, they’d both felt its power. But with him being only fourteen then and her newly into her teens, she hadn’t had a clue what her feelings signified or how to deal with them. Des Logan had solved the problem by calling Ryan into his study and ordering him to get any foolish ideas out of his head. Ryan had retorted that nobody told him how to run his life and he was going to marry Judy one day, with or without Des’s approval.

Neither of them had been aware of Judy hunting for a tennis ball in the bushes under Des’s office window. To her, it had seemed romantic to have a young man defy her father over her. These days, she knew Des had been right. They had been mere children, their feelings the result of overactive teenage hormones, nothing more.

Less than a year later, Ryan had run away, eluding Des’s and the authorities’ efforts to find him. Later Ryan told Judy that he’d lied about his age in order to get work as a jackeroo on remote cattle stations.

He hadn’t stayed anywhere for long, she’d learned when they’d met again. She hadn’t been able to tell if he was pleased to see her or not. His manner had been surly and distant, although he was obviously a world away from the difficult teenager she’d once known.

For one thing, he was all man. Taller, fuller in body and so broad-shouldered she’d had to look twice to assure herself he really was Ryan Smith. His red-gold hair and hair-trigger temper had convinced her. There couldn’t be two men with that blend of startling good looks and fiery temperament in the Kimberley.

Since their reunion three years before, she’d persuaded him to return to Diamond Downs a number of times, although he’d never stayed as long as she’d hoped he would. She looked forward to his visits, but no more than those of her other foster brothers, she assured herself. She blamed the fact that Ryan’s arrival made her heart beat faster on his dynamic personality and raw masculinity, enough to turn any woman on.

Judy wasn’t immune to male appeal. She relished her physicality, whether piloting her plane, mustering cattle on horseback or enjoying a relationship to the full, provided a man accepted that she could want him without needing him. She couldn’t imagine Ryan playing by this rule. He was the type to want more than she was prepared to give, so she kept a safe emotional distance.

Ryan and her father got along tolerably well these days in spite of the undercurrent simmering between them. After all this time, Judy wouldn’t allow that it had anything to do with her. More likely, the mistrust mirrored two bulls in the same paddock. They were similar in temperament, neither giving an inch.

Pleasing Ryan with feminine fripperies should be the last thing on her mind. To prove it, she cast the dress a withering look and flounced out of the homestead. Passing the bunkhouse and cottages occupied by the dwindling number of staff still on the station payroll, she found him in the hard-baked earth area used for car parking.

The only sign of him was a pair of jeans-clad legs protruding from under the ancient car he’d jacked up and supported on blocks. Long, long legs betrayed his height as over six feet. His scuffed R. M. Williams boots were a size eleven at least, and she felt a blush starting as she remembered the supposed connection between men and large feet.

Automatically she frowned at the sight of tools scattered over the ground. As a bush pilot, she hated to see good tools mistreated. Evidently Ryan’s drifter ways extended to the care of his equipment.

She hunkered down in time to see him lower the transmission pan in both hands and tilt it to spill the fluid into a drain tray beside him. “Need a hand?”

Without looking he said, “You can pass me the awl so I can get this grommet out.”

Surveying the tangle of tools around her, she said, “What patch of dirt do you suggest I look in?”

He angled his head to stare at her and she suppressed a shiver. Fourteen years on, his eyes still had the power to mesmerize. They were so dark and deep-set that looking into them was like looking into a bottomless pool. The sun was low and shone under the car, turning his hair to flame. The devil would look like this if she caught him working on a car, she thought.

“By your left foot,” he said shortly.

She blinked to banish the vision. Devil, indeed. He was nothing but a pain in the—awl. He didn’t care for anyone or anything but himself. Why he was bothering to talk about Des’s problems with her, she didn’t know. It wasn’t as if there were an inheritance at stake.

Without telling the rest of the family, her father had mortgaged Diamond Downs to a neighbor, Clive Horvath, who’d been Des’s best friend for most of their lives. Clive had intended to forgive the debt but Des had insisted on proper documentation, never suspecting that Clive would be thrown from a horse and killed less than a year after they shook hands on the deal. Now his son Max, owned the neighboring property and had made it clear he intended to collect on the mortgage.

It would be bad enough if Max only wanted the money, but he had his sights set on a diamond mine Judy’s great-grandfather was said to have found on Logan land. Jack Logan had disappeared before revealing the exact location of his find to anyone except the elders of the local indigenous people. Their descendants refused to talk about it, believing Jack’s spirit haunted the site.

At considerable risk to themselves, her foster brothers, Tom and Blake, had recently narrowed down the location to an area of Cotton Tree Gorge. But both men had fiancées now, and lives they couldn’t neglect indefinitely. So it was up to her and Ryan to finish the job before their neighbor did it for them. Some sixth sense told her they were close to finding the mine. All she had to do was persuade Ryan to help her before either Max Horvath’s own financial woes spelled the end of Diamond Downs or the fast-approaching wet season made the search impossible.

Spotting the tool he needed, she handed it to him. “I’ve never seen a car held together by rust before.”

“It goes, that’s all I ask.”

“Dad won’t mind if you use one of the station cars while you’re here.”

“I’d mind.”

“You would.” Not sure he’d heard the sotto voce comment, she watched him work the point of the tool up inside the filter neck, pushing it against the outside of the grommet. “Want a hammer to drive that in?”

“I’ll manage, thanks.”

At least he’d said thanks. But did such a puny gesture merit the surge of pleasure rippling through her? This would have to stop. Ryan had barely been at Diamond Downs for two days and already she could hardly think straight around him.

She was a bush pilot, for pity’s sake. She flew solo around the outback in a single-engine plane she largely maintained herself. Turning to jelly because of the way a man looked at her was for females in frilly clothes who spent hours at the hairdresser primping to impress.

She could write off the blond highlights as an aberration. But what about the slinky dress? Thank goodness she’d decided against wearing it tonight on their nondate.

Ryan walked his feet out from under the car and uncoiled disturbingly close to her. For a giddy moment, she thought he meant to touch her face till she saw the oily washer clutched in his fingers. “If you want to help, how about cleaning this?” he asked.

With an inward sigh, she accepted the magnet from the transmission pan and hunted among the tools for a scraper to clean it with. She welcomed the excuse to avoid his gaze, afraid he’d see into her soul.

What an idiot, she thought as her fingers closed around a putty knife. By the time she straightened, Ryan was sluicing the drain pan clean, careful not to spill any of the residue onto the ground. Could his preference for an old car be on environmental grounds? she wondered.

She was tempted to ask but he’d already slid back under the car and she heard the sound of a gasket being scraped off the bottom of the transmission.

Glad of something to occupy her hands, she set to work scraping the magnet clean. “I’ll say this for you, you’re thorough.”

“Might as well do the job right,” he agreed, his rich, deep voice muffled by his position. “One thing your dad taught me.”

She replaced the magnet in the pan and pushed it under the car to him. “So you admit he did some things right?”

“Never said he didn’t. Your folks meant well.”

She couldn’t resist. “Am I hearing an admission that you liked being a Logan?”

“I’m not a Logan and don’t want to be.”

“But you just said…”

He ducked out from under the car and swung himself upright. “You know perfectly well why I never wanted to be a Logan. That hasn’t changed.”

Because of her, she heard it in his voice. “Everything else has,” she said, pushing away the confusing feelings the thought aroused.

“Everything but you.”

She shook her head. “I’ve grown up.”

“You think I haven’t noticed?”

She knew he had. The awareness was in every look he gave her.

“I know you don’t think much of me,” he said. Before she could issue an empty denial, he went on, “Blake has his crocodile farm, Tom got his wish to become a shire ranger and Cade’s photos are published all over the world. While I dropped out of school, drive a beat-up old car and work where and when I can.”

She lifted her shoulders and let them drop. “None of that matters to me.”

“It’s who you are inside that counts,” he quoted her father. “He also said even a saint has to be able to educate his kids and put food on his family’s table.”

At the thought of Ryan’s children, her knees softened and she rested a palm against the sun-heated metal to steady herself. “Are you sure you’ve got things the right way around?”

Although she’d thought about it often enough, she hadn’t meant to come out and say it. His eyes clouded as he asked, “What do you mean?”

Too late to wish she’d never opened her mouth. “Being a no-hoper is a good excuse to avoid settling down.”

“You think I live the way I do to avoid taking on responsibility?”

“Don’t you?”

He made a harshly dismissive sound deep in his throat. “You don’t know the first thing about me.”

She started to turn away. “You’re right, I don’t.” And if she were wise, she would keep it that way.

His fingers clamped around her wrist leaving a smear of oil like a handcuff. “Such slim wrists,” he said unexpectedly. “Beats me how you pack so much muscle into such a slight body.”

If looks could kill, he would have been ash where he stood. “Aren’t you afraid of snapping such fragile bones?”

At her sarcastic tone, his mouth tightened. “I know precisely how much pressure I’m applying.”

So did she. Her whole body quivered with the awareness of his touch. Trying to shake him off would only betray his effect on her, so she schooled herself to stillness. “I prefer wiry to slight.”

He eased his thumb over her pulse point, making her wish she could slow the frantic beat by willpower alone. “Wiry, then. I like a woman with good muscle tone,” he said.

As if she kept herself fit to please him. “You didn’t always have so much muscle of your own to throw around,” she snapped.

Cruel, she told herself when she saw his dark lashes veil those memorable eyes. “Malnutrition does that to you,” he said.

She placed her hand over the one holding her. “I’m sorry, that was uncalled-for. I shouldn’t have reminded you.”

He looked down at their joined hands and an odd light flickered over his rugged features. “You didn’t have to. Some things you never forget.”

Her sigh gusted between them. “Ryan, why do we strike such sparks off each other?”

“I’m not complaining, if the alternative is indifference.”

He could make her mad as hell, dizzy with laughter and aching with other things she refused to name. The one thing she could never be around him was indifferent. “Are you saying you like it when we fight?”

“It’s communication, isn’t it?”

Her nod conceded his point. “Not very constructive communication,” she observed.

He released her hand slowly, as if reluctant to do so. “I don’t know. We’re getting the transmission filter changed.”

Other things were changing between them, too, although they were harder to pinpoint. She fell back on the superficial. “At this rate, it will be dinnertime before the job’s done.”

In tacit agreement, he dropped to the ground and shimmied back under the car and she heard the sound of bolts being tightened. Anticipating what he’d need next, she hunted around for a long-necked funnel and the AFT fluid. By the time he stood up again and was ready to let the car down, she had them handy.

She watched as he fed fluid into the filler tubes. His moves were sure and capable. She’d also seen him handle a horse and rope cattle with the best of them. “Why haven’t you bought your own land?”

“Didn’t suit me.”

“To be tied down?”

Fluid slopped over the funnel, earning a muttered oath. “Have I ever questioned how you run your life?”

“Not for a long time.” She placed a hand on his arm. “I wasn’t criticizing. I care about what happens to you.”

“I wish I could believe that.”

She was glad his attention was on his task so that he didn’t see her recoil in distress. “What makes you think I don’t?”

He turned his head, his gaze sharpening. “If you did, you’d ask what’s going on in my life instead of constantly jumping to conclusions.”

“You could simply tell me.”

“I could.”

But he wouldn’t, she heard. Annoyed at being put on the defensive, she examined her conscience. Had she jumped to conclusions about him? Perhaps he had a million dollars stashed away and chose to knock around the outback for pleasure, like the American billionaire she remembered reading about. Getty? Rockefeller? One of them, anyway.

Somehow, she doubted it. “Ryan,” she said on impulse, “If you were really rich, would you use your money to help Dad save Diamond Downs?”

“He wouldn’t permit it,” he said, avoiding the question.

At his signal, she got into the driver’s seat and cranked the engine. “But you would be willing to try?”

“Why do you think I’m here?”

She pulled the gearshift down through each gear in turn, allowing the fresh fluid to circulate through the transmission. “You do know we have less than a month to either pay off Max Horvath or find Great-grandpa’s diamond mine?”

Ryan pulled out the transmission dipstick and inspected it critically. “According to Blake and Cade, Max is in financial trouble up to his neck and his creditors are pouring on the pressure. From what I’ve heard about Max’s character, he could be even more dangerous with his back to the wall. But the wet season is going to make it hard to find anything in the area Blake and Jo mapped out.”

She nodded. “Especially if the mine is where they think it is, underground near Cotton Tree Gorge.” Jo Francis was a journalist who’d been working with Blake on a story when she’d tumbled into a hidden valley trying to elude one of Max Horvath’s henchmen. The ancient rock paintings they’d noted were placed high above the valley floor, indicating the dangerously high levels the creek flowing through it could reach during the monsoon rains. Diamond Downs had already tasted the fury of the rains soon to come, and the wet season still hadn’t started in earnest.

She could only pray the Wet would hold off long enough for her and Ryan to look for the mine. If they didn’t find anything…resolutely she pushed the thought of failure out of her mind. Not only her father’s life, but the only thing besides Des’s family that mattered to him—his land—was at stake. They couldn’t afford to fail.

Ryan swiped the dipstick with a clean rag and replaced it, then pulled it back out. “Close to full?” she asked.

“A quarter inch away from the full mark, close enough,” he agreed.

She got out as he began to check the radiator hoses and clamps. For a beat-up old car, it was in surprisingly good running order, she noted. Under her hand the engine had positively purred. Why drive a car that looked as if it was about to fall apart at any moment, yet keep it practically in racing condition? Another piece of the Ryan puzzle, she decided.

She leaned on her arms on the car body, angling in under the hood to watch him work, finding more enjoyment than she wanted to in his easy movements.

The thought disturbed her enough to say, “Why don’t we decide right now what we should do about finding the mine. Save us having to go out to eat later.”

His wry look raked her. “Jumping to conclusions again, Judy? Don’t you think I can afford to buy you dinner?”

From the look of him, a hamburger would stretch his resources. Then she considered what he’d said about asking first. “Can you?”

“I may have trouble servicing the bank loan, but I’ll manage somehow.”

Masking her irritation at the blatant mockery in his tone, she smiled. “Then we’d better find the diamonds soon.”

He replaced the dipstick and reached to close the hood, forcing her to jump out of the way. “Not on my account.”

“Won’t you feel better knowing Dad’s future is safe?”

“Give me some credit. Des deserves health and happiness more than most men. But not because I’m indebted to him for rescuing me. I was fine as I was.”

And what was he now? “Where do you call home?” she asked on impulse.

He looked surprised at the question. “You sound as if you don’t think I have one.”

Something else she hadn’t thought to ask. What additional surprises lay behind his inscrutable facade? “You’ve never mentioned one.”

“Doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.”

Anger bubbled through her and she fisted her hands on her hips. “Is it too much to expect one straight answer out of you?”

He seemed to collapse in on himself. “You’re right, there’s no reason you shouldn’t know. I have a home, an old pearling master’s cottage in Broome.”

She knew her eyebrows had risen. Such heritage properties weren’t cheap to acquire or maintain. “I’d like to see it sometime.”

“I don’t spend very much time there.”

As soon as the words left his mouth and he saw her expression become shuttered, Ryan regretted being so blunt. It wasn’t her fault that she’d haunted his thoughts since his teens, making a mockery of his vow to rely only on himself and not allow anyone to get to him emotionally ever again.