These rugged Australian heroes won’t be denied!

PRINCES OF THE OUTBACK

Fan-favourite Bronwyn Jameson brings you three compelling, classic romances!

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May 2010

The Ashtons: Walker, Ford & Mercedes

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Betrayed Birthright by Sheri WhiteFeather Mistaken for a Mistress by Kristi Gold Condition of Marriage by Emilie Rose

Princes of the Outback

by Bronwyn Jameson

Featuring

The Rugged Loner The Rich Stranger The Ruthless Groom

Princes of the Outback
Bronwyn Jameson

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Bronwyn Jameson spent much of her childhood with her head buried in a book. As a teenager, she discovered romance novels and it was only a matter of time before she turned her love of reading them into a love of writing them. Bronwyn shares an idyllic piece of the Australian farming heartland with her husband and three sons, a thousand sheep, a dozen horses, assorted wildlife and one kelpie dog. She still chooses to spend her limited downtime with a good book. Bronwyn loves to hear from readers. Write to her at bronwyn@bronwynjameson.com.

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Excerpt

Other Books by

Title Page

About the Author

The Rugged Loner

Prologue

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 Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

The Rich Stranger

Dedication

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 Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

The Ruthless Groom

Dedication

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 Thirteen

Epilogue

Copyright

The Rugged Loner

Prologue

Charles Carlisle knew he was dying. His family denied it. The herd of medical specialists they’d employed kept skirting around the flanks of the truth like a team of well-trained cattle dogs, but Chas knew his number had come up.

If the tumor mushrooming inside his brain didn’t finish him off, the intense radiation therapy he was about to commence would. The only other soul willing to accept the truth was his good mate Jack Konrads. Not surprising since as an estate lawyer Jack dealt with human mortality every day of his working life.

Chas supposed his lawyer friend got to deal with plenty of unusual will clauses, too, because his face remained impressively deadpan as he digested the changes just requested by Chas. Carefully he set the single sheet of paper aside. “I assume you’ve discussed this with your sons?”

“So they can make my last months a living hell?” Chas snorted. “They’ll find out once I’m six feet under!”

“You don’t think they deserve some forewarning? Twelve months is precious little time to produce a baby from scratch—even if any one of them was already married and planning to start a family.”

“You suggest I should give them time to wiggle out of this?” They were clever enough, his sons. Too clever at times for their own good. “Alex and Rafe are past thirty. They need a decent shove or they’ll never settle down.”

Brow furrowed with a deep frown, Jack perused his written instructions again. “This wording doesn’t seem to exclude Tomas…”

“No exclusions. It’s the same for all of them.”

“You don’t have to prove anything to those boys,” Jack said slowly, still frowning. “They know you don’t play favorites. You’ve always treated them as if they’re all your sons by birth. They’ve grown into fine men, Chas.”

Yes, they were sons to make any father proud, but in recent years they’d grown apart, each wrapped up in his own world, too busy, too self-involved. This clause would fix that. It would rekindle the spirit of kinship he’d watched grow with the boys as they raced their ponies over the flat grasslands of their outback station. Later they’d roped cleanskin bulls and corporate competitors with the same ruthless determination. He was counting on that get-it-done attribute when it came time to execute this will clause.

“It has to be the same for all three,” he repeated resolutely. He couldn’t exclude Tomas—didn’t want to exclude Tomas.

“It’s been barely two years since Brooke was killed.”

“And the longer he stays buried in grief, the harder the task of digging his way out.” Jaw set, Chas leaned forward and met his friend’s eyes. “That, I know.”

If his father hadn’t forced his hand—tough love, he’d called it—Chas would have buried himself in the outback after his first wife’s death. He wouldn’t have been forced overseas to manage his father’s British interests and he wouldn’t have met a wild Irish-born beauty named Maura Keane and her two young sons.

He wouldn’t have fallen completely and utterly in love.

He wouldn’t have married her and completed his family with their own son, Tomas. Their son whose grief over his young wife’s death was turning him as hard and remote as his outback home. Tomas needed some mighty tough love before it was too late.

“Does Maura know about this?” Jack asked carefully.

“No, and that’s the way I want it to stay. You know she won’t approve.”

For a long moment Jack regarded him over the top of his glasses. “Hell of a way to take all their minds off grieving for you.”

Chas scowled. “That’s not what this is about. It’ll get them working together to find the best solution. My family needs a shake-up, Tomas most of all.”

“And what if your plan backfires? What if the boys reject this clause and walk away from their inheritance? Do you want the Carlisle assets split up and sold off?”

“That won’t happen.”

“They won’t like this—”

“They don’t have to like it. I suspect I’ll hear their objections from beyond the pearly gates, but they’ll do it. Not for the inheritance—” Chas fixed his friend with his trademark gaze, steel-hard and unwavering. “They’ll do it for their mother.”

And that was the biggest, strongest motivation for this added clause to the last will and testament of Charles Tomas McLachlan Carlisle. He wanted more than his sons working together. He didn’t only want to see them take a chance at settled, family happiness. This was for Maura. A grandchild, born within twelve months of his death, to bring a smile to her sad eyes, to break her growing isolation.

He wanted, in death, to achieve what he’d never been able to do in life: to make his adored wife happy.

“This is my legacy to Maura, Jack.”

And the only thing out of a multibillion-dollar empire that would be worth an Irish damn to her.

One

Six months later

Angelina Mori didn’t mean to eavesdrop. If, at the last minute, she hadn’t remembered the solemnity of the occasion she would have charged into the room in her usual forthright fashion and she wouldn’t have heard a thing.

But she did remember the occasion—this morning’s burial, this afternoon’s reading of the will, the ensuing meeting between Charles Carlisle’s heirs—and she paused and steadied herself to make a decorous entrance into the Kameruka Downs library.

Which is how she came to overhear the three deep, male voices. Three voices as familiar to Angie’s ear as those of her own two brothers.

“You heard what Konrads said. We don’t all have to do this.” Alex, the eldest, sounded as calm and composed as ever. “It’s my responsibility.”

“News flash.” Rafe’s mocking drawl hadn’t changed a bit in the time she’d been gone. “Your advanced age doesn’t make you the expert or the one in charge of this. How about we toss a coin. Heads, you—”

“The hell you say. We’re in this together. One in, all in.” Tomas’s face, she knew, would be as hard and expressionless as his voice. Heartbreakingly different to the man she remembered from…Was it only five years ago? It seemed so much longer, almost another lifetime.

“A nice sentiment, little bro’, but aren’t you forgetting something?” Rafe asked. “It takes two to make a baby.”

Angie didn’t drop the tray of sandwiches she held, but it was a near thing. Heart hammering, she pulled the tray tight against her waist and steadied it with a white-knuckled grip. The rattling plates quieted; the pounding of her heart didn’t.

And despite what she’d overheard—or maybe because of it—she didn’t slink away.

With both hands occupied, she couldn’t knock on the half-closed door. Instead she nudged it open with one knee and cleared her throat. Loudly. Twice. Because now the voices were raised in strident debate on who was going to do this—get married? have a baby? in order to inherit?— and how.

Holy Henry Moses.

Angie cleared her throat a third time, and three pairs of intensely irritated, blue eyes turned her way. The Carlisle brothers. “Princes of the Outback” according to this week’s headlines, but only because some hack had once dubbed their father’s extensive holdings in the Australian outback “Carlisle’s Kingdom.”

Angie had grown up by their rough-and-tumble side. They might look like the tabloid press’s idea of Australian royalty, but they didn’t fool her for a second.

Princes? Ha!

“What?” at least two princes barked now.

“Sorry to intrude, but you’ve been holed up in here for yonks. I thought you might need some sustenance.” She deposited her tray in the center of the big oak desk and her hip on its edge. Then she reached for the bottle of forty-year-old Glenfiddich—pilfered from their father’s secret stash—and swirled the rich, amber contents in the light. More than half-full. Amazing. “I thought you’d have made a bigger dent in this.”

Alex squinted at the glass in his hand as if he’d forgotten its existence. Rafe winked and held his out for a refill. Broad back to the room, hands shoved deep into the pockets of his black dress trousers, Tomas acknowledged neither the whisky nor her arrival.

And no one so much as glanced at the sandwiches. They didn’t want sustenance. They wanted her to leave so they could continue their discussion.

Tough.

She slid her backside further onto the desk, took her time selecting a corn beef and pickle triangle, then arched a brow at the room in general. “So, what’s this about a baby?”

Tomas’s shoulders tensed. Alex and Rafe exchanged a look.

“It’s no use pretending nothing’s going on,” she said around her first bite. “I overheard you talking.”

For a long moment she thought they’d pull the old boys’ club number, buttoning up in front of the girl. Except this girl had spent her whole childhood tearing around Kameruka Downs in the dust of these three males and her two brothers. Sadly outnumbered, she’d learned to chase hard and to never give up. She glanced sideways at Tomas’s back. At least not until she was completely beaten.

“Well?” she prompted.

Rafe, bless his heart, relented. “What do you think, Ange? Would you—”

“This is supposed to be private,” Alex said pointedly.

“You don’t think Ange’s opinion is valuable? She’s a woman.”

“Thank you for noticing,” Angie murmured. From the corner of her eye she watched Tomas who had never noticed, while she fought two equally strong, conflicting urges. One part of her ached to slide off the desk and wrap him and his tightly held pain in a big old-fashioned hug. The other wanted to slug him one for ignoring her.

“Would you have somebody’s baby…for money?”

What? Her attention swung from the still and silent figure by the window and back to Rafe. She swallowed. “Somebody’s?”

“Yeah.” Rafe cocked a brow. “Take our little brother, the hermit, for example. He says he’d pay and since that’s—”

“Enough,” Alex cut in.

Unnecessarily, as it happened, because a second later—so quick, Angie didn’t see it coming—Tomas held Rafe by the shirtfront. The two harsh flat syllables he uttered would never have emanated from any prince’s mouth.

Alex separated them, but Tomas only stayed long enough for a final curt directive to his brothers. “You do this your way, I’ll do it mine. I don’t need your approval.”

He didn’t slam the door on his way out, and it occurred to Angie that that would have shown too much passion, too much heat, for the cold, remote stranger the youngest Carlisle had become.

“I guess my opinion is beside the point now,” she said carefully.

Rafe coughed out a laugh. “Only if you think Mr. Congeniality can find himself a woman.”

Angie’s heart thumped against her ribs. Oh, he could. She had no doubts about that. Tomas Carlisle might have forgotten how to smile, but he could take his big, hard body and I’ve-been-hurt-bad attitude into any bar and choose from the top shelf. Without any mention of the Carlisle billions.

A chill shivered through her skin as she put down the remains of her sandwich. “He won’t do anything stupid, will he?”

“Not if we stop him.”

Alex shook his head. “Leave him be, Rafe.”

“Do you really think he’s in any mood to make a discriminating choice?” Rafe made an impatient sound, not quite a laugh, not quite a snort. “What the hell was Dad thinking anyway? He should have left Tomas right out of this!”

“Maybe he wanted to give him a shake-up,” Alex said slowly.

“The kind that sends him out looking to cut a deal with the first bar-bunny he happens upon?”

Angie stood so swiftly, her head spun. Whoa. Breathing deeply, she leaned against the desk. It was okay. Kameruka Downs was two hours of black dust and corrugated roads from the nearest bar. Even if Tomas did decide to hightail it into Koomah Crossing, he wouldn’t make closing time.

She exhaled slowly and settled back on the desk. “Confession time, guys. I really only overheard one slice of your earlier discussion, so who’d like to fill me in on the whole story?”

Once, on a bet, Angie had raced Tomas and her brother Carlo from the homestead to the waterhole, blindfolded. Remembering that experience fifteen years ago made tonight’s steep descent a veritable walk in the park. A threequarter moon rode high in the sky, casting enough light for Angie to pick a surefooted path through the scrub. Behind a bandanna blindfold there’d been nothing but intense black, yet she’d closed her eyes and run.

Anything to prove herself less of a girl.

You’re part feral goat, the boys had spat in disgust as they handed over her winnings, and it had taken Angie years to realize that comparison wasn’t exactly flattering.

Her smile, wry and reminiscent, faded as she neared her destination. Moment of truth, sister. She rubbed warming hands up and down her goose-bumped arms. She would bet the vintage silk-georgette dress she’d vainly not changed out of—despite the chill night and a setting more suited to jeans—that Tomas had retreated to his usual lair.

And when you find him, you say your piece and you make sure he listens. You don’t let him turn his back.

She’d seen Tomas several times since her return from Italy a week earlier. At the hospital before his father passed away, at the memorial service held largely for his city business associates, at Alex’s Sydney home afterward. Yet he’d managed to evade anything beyond a quick consoling hug and a few token words of sympathy.

So she’d stayed on at Kameruka Downs after the private funeral, begging a lift back to Sydney on the corporate jet with Alex and Rafe, instead of returning on the afternoon charter arranged for other mourners. She had to talk to Tomas, one on one. She had to set things straight between them.

This had nothing to do with the disturbing clause in Charles’s will that she’d just learned about in the library. This was about guilt and regret and failing to be the kind of friend she wanted to be. It was about closure, too, and moving on with her life.

And it promised to be damn-near the toughest thing she’d ever done. Tougher even than the night she’d confronted Tomas with her opinion on his upcoming marriage…and that had been Tough with a capital T!

It wasn’t that she hadn’t liked Brooke. They’d been close friends at school. Tomas had met his future wife at Angie’s eighteenth birthday party, on a night when she’d dressed and preened and set herself on being noticed as a woman instead of his wild-child pseudosister.

Instead—the supreme irony—he’d fallen into complete blinker-eyed besottedness with her petite and delicate friend. And eighteen months later he hadn’t wanted to hear Angie’s opinion on Brooke’s suitability to life in the outback. He loved Brooke. He married Brooke.

And that had been one tough challenge Angie couldn’t face.

Instead of accepting the bridesmaid’s gig, she’d taken off on a backpacking jaunt to Europe. Her grand adventure had started as an impulsive escape from pain and envy, from her fear that she wouldn’t make it through “does anyone have just cause” without jumping to her feet and yelling, “You bet I do! He’s supposed to be mine!”

She’d missed the wedding and, worse, she’d missed Brooke’s funeral. But now she was back, needing to make peace with her conscience. She doubted she could make peace with the flint-hard stranger Tomas had become, but she had to try.

“Moment of truth,” she muttered, out loud this time, as she ducked under a branch into the clearing beside the waterhole.

Slowly she scanned the darkness and the empty shadows, before hauling herself up onto a rock overhang. On sure feet she climbed higher to the secret cave. Peered inside.

Backed-up breath huffed from her lungs.

Nothing. Damn.

Disappointment expanded, tightening her chest as she slowly descended to the ground. She’d made a deal with herself, a deal about finding him and getting this over with tonight. How could she do that when he wasn’t here?

Swearing softly, she turned to leave.

Or perhaps he simply didn’t want to be found…

Her eyes narrowed. Perhaps Tomas hadn’t changed completely. Perhaps now, as in the past, he wasn’t completely alone down here.

Angie allowed herself a small smile before she lifted both pinkies to her pursed lips and whistled.

Tomas figured someone—most likely Angie—would come looking for him. He’d counted on the night hiding his secluded location. He hadn’t counted on her whistling his dog.

Ajay responded with a high-pitched whine of suspicion. Rough translation: You can whistle—point in your favor—but I’m no pushover. I’m a red heeler; I protect my boss. You better proceed with caution.

Angie didn’t.

The quick tread of her approach was as incisive and uninhibited as her personality. Loose gravel dislodged by her climbing feet splished into the water below, and Tomas saw the hair rise along Ajay’s spine. Under his restraining hand he felt a warning growl vibrate through the dog’s tense body. It was a measure of his own snarled mood that he actually considered letting the heeler loose.

He didn’t.

His muttered “Stay” was probably for the dog—God knows Angie wouldn’t take a lick of notice!

As if to prove his point, she appeared out of the darkness and used his shoulder to steady herself as she dropped down at his side. The floaty skirt of her dress settled around her legs where they dangled over the rock ledge, a flutter of feminine contrast to the rugged setting and the worn denim stretched over his thighs alongside.

“Did you consider I might want to be alone?” he asked, surprising himself with the even tone of his voice. Ever since Jack Konrads read out that newly added will clause, tension had snarled through his blood and his flesh. An anger that had whipped the hollow numbness of grief and loss into something hot and taut and hazardous.

“Yes,” she said simply, with a quick flash of smile.

Although that could have been for Ajay, because on the heels of the smile came a softly crooned note of surprise. Her hand slid from his shoulder down his arm—from rolled-up shirtsleeve to skin—as she leaned around him to take a better look. “While I was clambering up here, I kinda thought you mightn’t have Sergeant anymore.”

“He died.”

For the tiniest hint of time, she stilled. Then the pressure of her hand on his forearm changed, a tactile expression of her next words. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

“He got old.”

“As we all do.” She leaned forward. “Well, aren’t you handsome.” And started to reach—“Best you don’t do that.”

“I’m only saying hello.”

And wouldn’t you know it? His wary-natured heeler didn’t take a piece out of her hand. Tomas breathed a tad easier…but only a tad. He was still struggling to reconcile the Angie he knew—the annoying, exasperating, teenage tomboy—with this exotic, alien creature who’d returned from Europe.

She wore dresses, for pity’s sake. She’d straightened her unruly curls into one of those city-girl do’s, all sleek and dark and glossy. And every time she moved he heard the delicate tinkle of the jewelry she wore on her wrists and ankle.

Hell, she even had some kind of rings on her toes. And as for the perfume…

“What’s with the perfume?”

“Excuse me?”

Yeah, excuse him. He hadn’t meant to say it, the question that blared in his brain every time he breathed around her. Ever since that first day he saw her again—hell, was that only last week?—when she’d rushed down the hallway of the hospital to throw her arms around him, to hug him and hold him and leak tears and words and more tears into his shirt.

Except instead of feeling comforted, he’d dragged in air rich with this perfume and he’d felt her curves against his body and he’d tensed. His hands had set her aside, this woman who no longer felt anything like Angie should.

She’d changed when all he wanted was someone—something—to stay the same. To anchor him to the past that fate kept wrenching away.

“You smell…different,” he accused now. She smelled different, she looked different, and right now in the dark he swore she was looking at him different, too. “You’ve changed, Dash.”

His use of her childhood nickname surprised a laugh from her full lips. With a clink of bracelets, her hand slid away from his arm, thank God, and into her lap. “Wow. There’s a blast from the past. No one’s called me Dash in…forever.”

Yeah, forever about summed it up.

Forever since the last time she’d followed him down here, bent on telling him how the outback and Brooke would never see eye to eye. Like he hadn’t known. And like he’d not been young enough and cocky enough to think it wouldn’t make a difference.

“It’s only been five years, but you’re right. I’ve changed, you’ve changed, everything’s changed,” she said softly, and suddenly the darkness seemed more intense. Suffocatingly so. “I’m sorry about your father, that he got so sick and had to suffer and that the last weeks were so hard on you all. I’m sorry I wasn’t here, and I hope—”

“You didn’t have to come down here to tell me that. I’ve heard it more than enough times this last week.”

“Yeah, well, you haven’t heard it from me. At least not without cutting me off midsentence and walking away.” She angled her chin in that determined way she had. “I have more to say, actually, and this time I want you to stay put until I finish.”

Something about her tone and the sympathetic darkness of her eyes alerted him to what might be on her mind, and he started to move, to get the hell out of the conversation. But she put her hand on his knee, stopping him. It was the Angie-of-old, exasperating and annoying and not letting him get away without first saying her piece.

“Did you get my letter?” she asked.

Yeah, he’d gotten the letter she’d written after Brooke was killed. What did she expect him to say? Thank you for your kind thoughts? They really helped me cope when my heart had been ripped bleeding from my chest.

“I hated that a lousy letter was all I could send,” she continued. “I wish I could have been here. I wish I could have found better words.”

“It wouldn’t have made any difference.”

“It would have to me.” She moved her hand—had she always been such a toucher, or had that changed, too?—this time covering his fist where it sat clenched on this thigh. She squeezed his tense knuckles. “I wasn’t here for you when it mattered, when I should have been. What kind of friend does that make me?”

Was he supposed to answer that? Or just sit here like some priest in an outdoors confessional and let her talk so she’d feel better about herself?

He hoped she wasn’t after absolution, because that sure wasn’t anything he was qualified to give!

“Your friendship matters to me. Are we still friends, T.J.?”

His childhood nickname, but it sounded all wrong on her lips because she’d leaned closer, her arm pressed warm and soft against his, her perfume a sensuous drift of woman in his nostrils. And then she did that squeezing thing again, probably meaning to reassure him but only screwing his tension up another notch.

He wrested his hand away, put hers back in her lap. “If it makes you feel better, why the hell not?”

“Yeesh, Tomas!” She let her breath go sharply, exasperated. “Can’t you at least pretend to accept sympathy from a friend? Would that hurt so very much?”

When he didn’t answer, she shook her head slowly. The slippery ends of her hair skimmed against his bare forearm as if coolly mocking one of the reasons he didn’t feel like she was his friend. This strange awareness that he didn’t want or like or need.

The disturbing notion that little Angie had grown up into a woman…and his man’s body wouldn’t stop noticing.

“That’s all I came down here to say,” she said abruptly. “Accept it or don’t. I’ll leave you to enjoy your pity party alone.”

She’d already started to rise, not using his shoulder for leverage this time, and Tomas should have let her go. Shouldn’t have felt the irrational need to ask, “That’s it? That’s all you came down here to say?”

“Oh, boy.” Beside him she stilled, then her laughter rumbled, as soft and husky-dark as the night. “I really want to say, yes, that’s it. I really, really know I should.”

“But?”

“But you wouldn’t have baited me to stay unless you needed to talk.” She sank back down and he felt her gaze on his face, felt it turn serious. “It’s that will clause, isn’t it?”

“You don’t think that’s worth throwing a pity party over?”

She didn’t answer that question, not directly. Instead she sighed and shook her head. “It’s worth worrying about, sure. But wouldn’t you be better off back at the homestead talking it through with your brothers?”

Tomas snorted. “What’s there to talk through?”

“For a start, there’s some worry about how you’ll choose a mother for this baby you think you have to produce.”

“There’s no ‘think’ about it.”

“My understanding is that only one of you needs do this. One baby between the three of you.”

“You think I’d leave it up to my brothers? When I stand to lose all this?” He gestured around him, indicating the land that was more than a family legacy. Kameruka Downs was the only place he’d ever wanted to live and all he had left since the plane crash that took his wife’s life, his happiness, his future.

“Your brothers know this place is everything to you,” Angie said softly.

Wrong. It wasn’t everything; it was the only thing.

“Alex says he’s going to marry Susannah.”

“Yeah, right. When they both can schedule a free hour between meetings. And as for Rafe…” He made a scoffing noise that said it all.

“Yeah,” Angie agreed, and in the ensuing silence—as they both contemplated the unlikely image of Rafe, the consummate playboy, choosing one woman for the job—it almost felt like the old Angie sitting at his side, driving him bonkers one minute, completely in accord the next. “Why do you think he made this stipulation? Your father, I mean.”

“For Mau.”

She contemplated that for a moment. “He knows you guys would do anything for Maura—that’s a given—but he had to know she wouldn’t want some token grandchild. That she wouldn’t be happy unless you all were happy, not forced into it by a clause in his will.”

“Yeah, but she’s not to know anything about it. That’s why Konrads wanted to see us alone.”

“Good luck with that!” She cut him a look, part thoughtful, part rueful. “Although I do think he was pretty smart. I mean, what surer way to distract you all from mourning him?”

Tomas turned sharply, stared at her for a minute. Trust Angie to come up with that angle.

“Smart?” he wondered out loud, thinking words like contrived and cunning where closer to the truth.

Wasn’t it their right to mourn a father who’d done so much for them, been so much to them?

“It worked, didn’t it?” she asked.

Hell, yes. They’d barely had time to bury him before Jack Konrads called that meeting in the library and turned their sorrow into anger.

Tomas shook his head, dismissing the whole topic with a gesture of impatience. “His reasoning doesn’t change what we have to do.”

Angie’s silent regard, serious and thoughtful, tugged the bands of frustration in his chest tighter.

“What?” he barked.

“Rafe says you’re not…seeing…anyone.”

Her midsentence pause was just long enough for Tomas to know his brother had used another doing word. “What the hell would Rafe know about who I’m…seeing?”

For possibly the first time in her life, Angie’s gaze dropped away from his. Probably because of his brutal emphasis on that verb. Fine. He didn’t want to discuss his sex life, with her, with Rafe, with anyone.

Worse, he hated the notion that they’d been discussing it in his absence.

“Okay,” she said on an exhalation. “So, do you have any sort of a plan? Other than that crazy idea of paying someone?”

“What’s so crazy about it?”

“Yeesh, Tomas, do you really want that kind of woman to mother your child?”

“What kind would that be?”

She rolled her eyes. “The kind who’d do it for money.”

“I’m not talking prostitution.”

“Really?”

Something about her tone—and the arch of her brows—chafed his simmering frustration. “You got any better ideas? Women aren’t about to line up to have my baby.”

“You are so without a clue. I mean, look at you!” And she did. She leaned back and looked at him with a narrow-eyed thoroughness that reminded him all over again how much she’d changed. “Women find that whole rugged loner thing a complete turn-on.”

“What a load of bull!”

She made an impatient tsking sound with her tongue. “You get to the city occasionally…or at least you used to. You have to feel women looking you over. You can’t not know you’re like their living, breathing, outback fantasy.”

Fantasy? Big deal. What he needed was reality, female and available.

“Name me one of these women,” he said roughly. “One who’d have my baby.”

She blinked slowly and edged back another inch. Which is when he noticed that he’d gotten right in her face. Close enough that he heard the faint hiss of her indrawn breath. The only sound in the intense silence, until she spoke.

“I would.”

Two

Angie listened to those two short, stunning syllables echoing inside her head. I would. Where had that come from? Was she insane?

Definitely.

Otherwise she would be laughing, right? Not loopy, they’re-coming-to-take-me-away-ha-ha laughter, but a smooth chuckle as she nudged Tomas and said, “Ha, ha. Got you a good one, didn’t I?” Or something similarly offhand and flippant.

Anything to fill the awkward silence and the fact that her heart was thudding so hard it physically hurt, and that she really, really wanted to confess the truth.

Well, here’s the thing, Tomas…

I’ve loved you in some way pretty much all of my life. I’ve wanted to marry you ever since I was thirteen. Somewhere around fourteen I’d already named our babies—three of them, all boys, all with your baby blues.

Except she couldn’t admit that. She wanted to shove the intensity of her teenage crush back in the past where it belonged. She’d come down here to try and save their friendship, not to send it on a headlong plummet into disaster.

Angie swallowed, and wished that his gaze hadn’t dropped to her throat at that exact second. Her throat felt tight, her smile even tighter. “I’ve really weirded you out, haven’t I?”

“Yup.” He shook his head, looked away, then back at her. “Was that your intention?”

“No.”

“Then…why?”

She wished she could laugh it off, but she looked into his stunned blue eyes and she couldn’t laugh and she couldn’t lie. All she could find was some small version of the truth. “Damned if I know, but I have to tell you that your response is not very flattering. I mean, would it be so bad? You and me?”

She felt him staring, felt the puzzlement in his sharp regard take on another flavor. Was he actually contemplating the reality? Him with her, skin to skin, doing what was necessary to make babies? Her heart skipped. The tightness in her throat and her skin took on a new dimension, a new heat.

“You can’t have thought about it,” he said slowly, “at all!”

Oh, how wrong could one person be. Angie had thought about it—specifically, about her and Tomas doing it—ever since her first sex education lesson. “Actually I have thought about it quite a bit,” she said slowly. “The sex part, I mean, not the having-a-baby part.”

In the midnight quiet his expulsion of breath sounded almost explosive. Apparently the concept of Sex-with-Angie was so appalling that he couldn’t even look her in the eye when he told her so. He jumped to his feet and stalked to the sandstone wall at the back of the rock ledge.

Turning on his boot heels, he stared at her, all hard, shocked, affronted male. “Hell, Angie, you can’t be serious. You’re like…you’re…”

“So unappealing you couldn’t bring yourself to sleep with me? Even to keep Kameruka Downs?”

“Don’t put words in my mouth. You don’t know what I’m thinking,” he said tightly.

No, she didn’t, and between the tricky dark and the distance he’d put between them, she couldn’t tell a thing from his expression. And, dammit, she wasn’t about to lose her oldest friend, her pride, and get a cricked neck out of this.

She stood and brushed the gritty sand from the back of her dress as she closed the distance between them. Moment of truth, sister. “Why don’t you tell me then? Why has the idea of me offering to have your baby got you so wound up?”

“Christ, Angie, we’re not doing some hypothetical here. We’re talking about a real situation. I need a baby.” Chin jutted, he started down at her, his whole expression carved as hard as the rock at this back. Possibly harder. “A baby the mother would have to raise on her own.”

Hands on hips she narrowed her gaze and stared back at him. Surely she’d heard him wrong. “Are you saying you wouldn’t want any part in this child’s upbringing?”

“You got it.”

“But why?” She shook her head. Huffed out a breath and waved her hand at their surroundings. “You have this fabulous place for a child to grow up, and—”

“Not everyone thinks it’s so fabulous.”

“Well, I do! And your father obviously thought so, too, since he chose to bring you all up here. Do you think, when he drafted that clause, that he wanted you to just sire some anonymous—”

“I don’t care what he thought.”

“Really? Then you have changed.”

“You’ve got that right, too!”

For a moment they stood toe to toe glaring at each other, until Angie realized that his expression wasn’t so much tight and flat as schooled. To hide his frustration, his anger, his pain? Perhaps even his fear that if he and his brothers failed to satisfy the will stipulation, he would lose this home and career and life that he loved, right on top of losing his wife and his father.

That knowledge caught in her chest, a thick ache of sympathy and shared pain and her own dawning realization: she wasn’t anywhere near to closing down this part of her past. Because for all that had changed in him, in her, in both their worlds during the last five years, one thing remained the same.

She still loved this man enough to do just about anything to ease his hurt.

Tears misted her eyes as she lifted a hand to touch the side of his face, blurring his features but not his rejection.

Both hands raised in a stop-right-there gesture, he reared back. “Forget it, Angie. Forget the pity and forget this whole crazy conversation!”

Angie’s hand dropped away. Okay. She could do this. She could shrug and pretend indifference while her face and her throat and her heart ached with the effort. Restraint—in words, in actions, in emotions—did not come easily or naturally, but she sensed that now was the time to exercise some self-control.

“I care too much to forget about it,” she said, slowly backing away, giving him the space he demanded, “so let’s talk this through. What are your alternatives? Say you do find a woman willing to have your baby for money. Unprotected sex with a stranger is a big risk, don’t you think?

“Unless you’re thinking of artificial insemination, which is worth consideration,” she continued, thinking on her feet, literally. “On the plus side, you get all the health checks and no awkward intimacy…I gather that is a plus, right?”

A muscle in his cheek jumped. Which probably meant he neither wanted intimacy nor wanted to talk about it. Tough. He’d stopped her leaving earlier, when she’d been ready to walk away, and now she was going to talk this through.

“But that all takes time, the checks and tests and the getting an appointment and such, when you don’t have much leeway. Three months to conceive, right?” Angie winced. “That is not a lot of time. Especially since the conception rate would be lower.”

“Why lower? A.I. works fine in cattle.”

Trust Tomas, the consummate cattleman, to equate this to livestock!

Angie lifted her shoulders and let them drop in an exaggerated shrug. “How would I know? It’s not as if I’ve actually investigated the process. I just read about it somewhere. I was trying to help you work through the possibilities is all.”

“You sure you don’t want to make the decision for me?”

“You’ve never once taken my advice on anything, why would you start now?”

“That’s never stopped you offering it.”

Did he mean her previous advice? About not rushing into marriage with Brooke? She stared back at him, found the answer in the grim blue hostility of his gaze. Yep, that’s what he meant all right.

“I thought you wanted to talk this through,” she said, finally accepting the futility of the conversation. Same old story, really. “You’d do better talking to the cliff face there. At least it won’t tell you anything you don’t want to hear!”

He started to say something. Judging by the look in his eyes and the hands-on-hips aggressiveness of his stance it was neither pretty nor appeasing, so Angie cut him off.

“I offered to help you, Tomas. Your answer: ‘forget this whole crazy conversation.’ Well, perhaps that is the best advice that’s been tossed out here tonight!” She lifted a hand, part frustration, part farewell. “I’ll say goodbye in the morning. When I’m not feeling so inclined to slug you.”

Jaw clenched and silent, Tomas watched her disappear into the darkness from whence she’d come. He hadn’t meant to hark back to the last time they’d stood toe to toe at this same waterhole. The last time she’d offered advice that he didn’t want to hear.

I know you think you love her, T.J., but don’t rush into marriage. Not unless you’re very, very certain Brooke can handle living out here.

Yup, he’d ignored that advice and they’d both suffered the consequences, he and Brooke. Through three roller-coaster years of passion and conflict, of separations and loneliness, of stand-up fights and emotional making-up. Three years that ended in the mother of all fights and no chance to make it up, not once Brooke was gone.

He had no interest in finding another woman, but he did need to satisfy the terms of his father’s will. For his mother, for Kameruka Downs, for his brothers, for himself. All he had to do was find the woman who’d do it his way.

That woman was not Angie. No way. She was too used to dancing to her own wild, unscored tune. Unpredictabil-

ity was the only predictable thing about her. Even her off-the-cuff “I would” offer to have his baby shouldn’t have floored him as it had done.

Angie had been pulling I-didn’t-think-this-through stunts all her life.

No, it wasn’t so much the offer that had rendered him speechless as the disturbing stuff that went hand-in-hand. She’d thought about having sex with him. Quite a bit, she’d said.

Sensations burned through his blood, images burned into his brain, and with a low growl of frustration he flung his body at the path and attacked the climb back to the homestead.

That wasn’t going to happen. Not with Angie. He wouldn’t allow himself to think of her in those terms. Not naked, not in his bed, not beneath his body.

No, no, absolutely no.

She hadn’t meant she would, really, have his baby. Only hypothetically. And even if she had meant it, she would soon change her mind. A woman who couldn’t settle in one place—in one job—for longer than a month or three wasn’t going to cut it as a mother. Sure, she’d changed. She’d grown up some, but she hadn’t yet settled down. He didn’t know if her gypsy heart ever would.

Back at the homestead he found Rafe lurking in the shadows by the door. An ambush, he suspected. If he hadn’t been so preoccupied by the worrying exchange with Angie, he might have suspected as much and avoided it.

“Alex gone to bed?” he asked, stepping onto the veranda.

“He’s on the phone. Business continues.”

Even past midnight on the night of his father’s funeral. That was Alex.

Rafe lifted his liqueur glass. “Care to join me in a nightcap?”

“Another time.”

But when he reached for the door, Rafe sidestepped to block his way. So neatly and pseudo-casually that Tomas knew it was no accident. “Don’t suppose you happened across Ange out there in the dark?”

Trick question. Tomas’s whole body tensed although he schooled his face into passive indifference. Either Rafe had already seen her coming in—had maybe even talked to her—or she’d snuck under his radar by using the side entrance. “Isn’t she inside?”

“She wasn’t in her room when I checked a while back.”

Tomas crossed his arms. Said nothing, gave away nothing. He suspected Rafe would fill him in on why he was looking for Angie without any prompting on his behalf.

“I had this notion, y’see, about the will.” Lips pursed, Rafe swirled the liquid in his glass. Tokay. The same dark amber as Angie’s eyes. The same eddying whirlpool as in Tomas’s gut as he waited for Rafe to continue. “I think Angie’s the answer.”

“This isn’t her problem,” Tomas said tightly. “Leave her out of it.”

“She knows the whole story so no tricky explanations are necessary. And Mau loves her like a daughter already.”

And there was the problem. Angie and her brothers had grown up like part of the family. Their father had cooked for the Carlisles—he’d moved out to Kameruka Downs after his wife died, head-hunted by Chas because he’d cooked at Maura’s favorite Sydney restaurant. The Moris had occupied one of the workers’ cottages but the kids had spent as much time in the homestead as their father. The six of them, Carlisles and Moris, had grown up together, played together, been schooled together.

“From where I’m standing,” Rafe continued, “Angie’s the perfect solution.”

“From where I’m standing, she’s too much like one of the family.”

“You mean like our sister?” Surprise whistled out on Rafe’s exhalation. “Can’t say I feel the same way, not since she’s come back from Italy with the new haircut and that body and the walk.” Rafe eyed him a moment. “You did notice the walk?”

The sexy sway of her hips? The gauzy skirt that clung to her legs? The glint of a gold ankle chain against smooth olive skin? “No.”

“The sad thing is I believe you.” Rafe shook his head, his expression a studied mix of disgust and pity. He sipped from his drink, then narrowed his eyes. “Although this does make things less complicated.”

“How’s that?”

“No need to toss you for her.”

Tomas frowned. “I don’t follow…”

“Ange is the perfect solution for one of us. If you’re not interested, then I’ll ask her.”

To sleep with him, to have his baby? Tomas was shaking his head before the thought finished forming. “You and Angie? No way.”

“Why not?”

Tomas forced himself to relax. His fingers, he realized, had curled into fists. His gut felt about the same. “What makes you think she’d be interested in helping either one of us out?”

“She has this thing about owing the family. For Mau looking out for her with all the girl stuff and Dad getting her into the fancy boarding school. For keeping her father on the payroll even after he was too sick to work.”

“That’s bullshit.” Not what the Carlisles had done for Joe Mori and his family—that was all true—but the debt thing. “She doesn’t owe us a thing.”

“She thinks she does.”

“You’re not serious. About asking her to…” Tomas couldn’t say the words. They stuck in his throat, all wrong.

“There isn’t anyone I’d rather ask.”

“I thought you didn’t give a damn about your inheritance.”

“I don’t.” Rafe swallowed the rest of his drink, then clamped a hand on Tomas’s shoulder. Their eyes met and held, his brother’s intensely serious for once. “But I know how much you care about yours.”

“You’re not martyring yourself for me.”

“One in, all in. Your words, little brother, and the only way to do this thing. We increase our chance of success and lessen the onus on any one of us. No martyrs here, Tomas, just realists out to get the job done.”

“Not with Angie,” he said tightly.

“Think about it, bro’. She is just about perfect.” And with a last squeeze of his shoulder, Rafe turned and disappeared into the house.

The motionless silhouette of horse and rider etched against the clear blue sky must have been a mirage, because when Angie lifted a hand to shield her eyes from the morning sun, only a single Leichardt pine broke the horizon. She sat forward in the passenger seat and stared harder through the Land Rover’s dusty windscreen.

Right the first time—nothing broke the mile-long line of ridge save that tree. The crazy woman not only let fly with impulsive offers in the midnight dark, but now she’d started seeing things! With a rueful half laugh, she sank back into her seat. And heard the driver clear his throat.

“You all right, mate?”

“Fine,” she assured Jeremy, the stockman who’d been coopted into driving her to the airstrip. “I thought I saw someone up on the ridge is all.”

“Coulda been the boss.”

“Oh?” Angie forced herself to sound casual. “He’s out riding then?”

“Went out at sunup. Coulda been him up there.”

Good to know she wasn’t delusional. Not so good to know that Tomas had ridden out at dawn, was likely somewhere beyond the Barakoolie ridge right now, and therefore stood no chance of arriving at the airstrip before they left for Sydney.

Disappointment spiked, quick and sharp, in her chest. She shook her head. What had she expected? A chance to say goodbye or a last second I’ve-been-thinking-about-what-you-said-last-night turnaround?

Is that what she even wanted?

After a night spent tossing and turning, she’d thought not. Sometime in the hour before dawn she’d managed to talk herself into a rational, sensible acceptance that she had no business offering Tomas anything.

So, okay, she had felt rudderless in the last months, unsure what she wanted to do with her life, where she wanted to live, how she wanted to live. She’d returned to Australia because Charles Carlisle was dying, but now she knew she was home to stay.

But having a baby, even Tomas’s baby…

In perfect synchronicity with her heart and stomach, the Land Rover lurched and bounced through a series of potholes.

“That snuck up on me, mate. Sorry.”

Jeremy, barely seventeen and a hoon at heart, grinned unapologetically without slowing down. In fact, he applied a tad more gas as he swung the vehicle in a wide circle before skidding to a dusty stop alongside the plane. Angie tsked her disapproval although she’d driven in much the same way growing up here.

As she slid down from the cab her gaze skimmed along the empty horizon one last time. She called the resultant hollow sensation deep inside hunger. After all that tossing and turning and self-debating, she had slept eventually. Right through her alarm.

Meaning Rafe had turfed her out of bed with no time for anything but a hasty shower and a quick farewell to Maura and the household staff. Too late to catch a lift when the boys left to perform their pre-flight checks. Too late for breakfast.

She ferreted a fruit bar from her bag and wrinkled her nose in disgust. “I don’t suppose you’ve got anything less healthy on you?” she asked Jeremy as they walked side by side to the plane.

“Nah. Sorry, mate.”

“Too bad.” While Jeremy stowed her luggage she finished the breakfast substitute, but the hollow feeling in her stomach only intensified. “Do you suppose they’re almost ready for takeoff?”

“Just about.”

For some reason Angie wasn’t. She’d come up north for the funeral, but also to say farewell to her childhood home and her teenage daydreams. Instead she felt…fretful.

As if she were leaving something behind, unfinished.

“See ya later then, Ange.”

With a casual wave, Jeremy started to turn away and ri-

diculous panicky I’m-not-ready-to-leave tears sprang to Angie’s eyes. Before she could stop herself she grabbed hold of the young jackaroo and planted a smacker on his cheek.

So, okay, the kid looked a dozen shades of embarrassed as he sidled away, but she felt better. She even managed a big smile as she called after him, “Look after yourself. And drive carefully.”

Holy cow. She sounded like a mother!

Was that some kind of a sign? Her destiny sneaking up to answer all the unanswered questions of the night?

Smile fading, she let her hand drop away from its cheerful wave as the ute sped off, dust billowing in its wake. She didn’t know if this atypical fragility stemmed from returning home after so long away, the emotional circumstances of her visit, or lack of sleep.

Most likely, all of the above.

With a hitch of one shoulder, she started up the steps of the plane. The engines turned over with a high-pitched whine, and a sudden gust of wind plastered her skirt to her legs and tangled her shoulder-length hair. Pausing to rake the thick tresses back from her face, she felt compelled to take one last look over her shoulder.

Her attention snagged on a distant spurt of movement. Not the rapidly departing Jeremy and not an illusion, either.

A horse and rider loped steadily across the treeless flats, heading straight toward the airstrip.

Three

Angie pressed the palm of one hand flat against her chest. “Steady up there,” she cautioned her heart which had taken off at a wild gallop. Even if it is Tomas, he’s likely just coming to see us off or to deliver a last minute message to his brothers.

Or something.

Rafe called out to her from inside the plane, hurrying her along. Alex, she knew, was already in the pilot’s seat. She waved a stalling hand, her eyes fixed on the approaching rider. No one sat a horse quite like Tomas. The familiarity of that sight and the knowledge that she would get to say goodbye, soothed the ragged rawness of her emotions. Her pulse, however, continued to race as she watched him dismount and start toward her, not in any hurry yet still eating up the ground with his easy, long-legged stride.

No one wore a pair of Wranglers quite like Tomas.

Those work-worn jeans and the dusty roper boots beneath came to a halt at the foot of the stairs. Two steps up, Angie held a height advantage for the first time in her life and she felt a renewed surge of emotion.

This time it was good emotion, as strong and dazzling as the northern sun. Leaning down, she tipped back the tan Akubra that shadowed his face from the bright rays of that morning sun.

“You almost missed us,” she said.

“Damn straight he did.” Rafe, curse his timing, leaned out the aircraft door and broke their second of eye-meet connection. “Nice of you to drop by and see us off, bro’.”

“Wanted to make sure you were leaving, bro’.”

Rafe chuckled and Angie couldn’t suppress a grin at the dry banter. It was so typical, so familiar, so brotherly. Then Tomas’s serious gaze shifted back to hers and froze the amusement on her lips. “And I wanted to see Angie.”

“Don’t keep her too long,” Rafe warned. “Alex is itching to get back to work.”

He left them alone then, she and Tomas and the memory of their last conversation stretching tense and awkward in the ensuing silence. Angie’s nerves twitched impatiently.

“If this is about what I said last night—”

“I’ve been thinking about what you said—”

They both spoke at the same time; both stopped at the same time. Their eyes met and locked and Angie felt a curious breathlessness. “You first,” she managed to murmur. “Go ahead.”

“When you said you would—hypothetically—have this baby, was the offer…exclusive?”

What?

Angie felt her spine snap straight with the implication.

“I hope you’re not insinuating I would go around offering to have babies for every Tom, Dick and Harry.”

His disconcerted gaze flicked toward the plane and understanding dawned, startling a cough of laughter from Angie’s mouth. Not every Tom, Dick and Harry, just every…

“Rafe and Alex?”

He shifted his weight from one boot to the other. “Rafe seems to think you’d do this because you owe the family.”

“You discussed me with Rafe?” she asked on a rising note of disbelief.

“He brought it up. He seems to think you’re the perfect choice.”

“And what about you, Tomas? Have you given any thought to your choice?”

“I’ve been thinking about it all night.” His eyes narrowed, deepening the creases at their corners. Making those clear blue irises glint like cool water under a summer sky. Making her heart stutter and restart low in her belly. “Will you help me, Angie?”

And there it was, a simple request spoken so quietly and sincerely that it turned her inside out and upside down. Knowing how much fulfilling this will clause meant to Tomas, how could she refuse? “If I can,” she said, just as softly. “Yes.”

His nostrils flared a fraction. His eyes sparked with…something. “Why?”

Because you need me. Because I love you. “Because I can.”

He looked away, huffed out a breath, said something low and indecipherable and probably not meant for her ears. Slowly his gaze came back to hers. “Still as impetuous as ever?”

Angie shrugged. “Apparently.”

For a long moment they stood in silence, gazes locked, while Angie’s heart screamed at roughly the same decibels as the plane’s engines.

What are you doing? it wailed. What are you saying?

“What now?” she asked, knowing even as she asked what she wanted. Some sign that this was more real than it felt. That she really had just offered to have his baby. “Do you want me to stay?”

“No,” he said quickly. Adamantly. Then he lifted a hand to the brim of his hat, tipping it lower on his brow so his eyes were in shadow. “I’m coming to Sydney next week. I’ll make an appointment with a doctor.”

“You don’t need to…” Her voice trailed off as she remembered what she’d talked about, so glibly, the night before. Then it had been about some hypothetical partner with an unknown sexual history. Now it was about her and Tomas and…She drew a swift breath and lifted her chin. “Yes, we should have the tests, to make sure we’re both healthy.”

He stared at her a moment. “I meant a fertility center.”

“Surely there’s no need for that.”

“There is. For insemination.”

Angie’s mouth fell open. “You’re kidding, right?”

He wasn’t. She could see that in the rigid set of his jaw, in the muscle that flexed and released in his cheek. “It’s got to be artificial.”

“Got to be?” Angie asked calmly, as if she weren’t flailing around trying to get a grasp of something solid. “Because when you asked for my help, when I said yes, I was thinking about doing this the way nature intended.”

“No,” he said tightly. “That’s not going to happen.”

Angie fought an irrational urge to laugh or cry or scream—or perhaps not so irrational. The situation, this conversation, the stilted way they kept tiptoeing around straight language, was all too unreal. She couldn’t believe how calmly she’d offered to sleep with Tomas, to make love, to try to conceive a baby.

And she couldn’t have imagined how much it would hurt, seeing how fiercely he objected.

“Is the idea of sleeping with me so distasteful that you’d prefer doing it on your own? Because most men—”

“Leave it be, Angie!” He muttered a rough word, one that was fairly pertinent to the topic, Angie thought. “It won’t work.”

“Functionally?” She came down a step so she was right on a level with his face. So she could see the heightened color that traced his cheekbones. See the rigid line of his lips.

Hear the breath he sucked through his teeth. “I meant you and me, any way other than artificial.”

“It’s only sex,” she fired back, her patience so close to snapping she could feel the twitch in her nerves. “Surely you could lie back, close your eyes and think of Kameruka!”

Their gazes clashed, so hot and hostile that neither noticed Rafe’s reemergence from the plane until he cleared his throat. “Sorry to interrupt, folks, but we’ve really got to get moving.”

“Two minutes.” Angie didn’t turn around but she held up a hand. “Just give me two minutes.”

She had no clue what she would do with those precious minutes, whether she would sock Tomas one for his stubbornness or take his face between her hands and kiss him one. Just to prove that she was a woman and he was wrong and that this could work if he’d only give her a chance.

Still simmering she leaned a fraction closer, until she could see into the shadow cast by his broad-brimmed hat and beyond the hostility of his stance to the man beneath. And what she saw there sucker-punched her heart.

He looked so torn, so trapped, so tormented.

Ahh, Tomas…

Like butter under the outback sun, her own animosity melted. “I so wish you hadn’t been forced into this.”

She lifted a hand to touch his face, and for a whisper of time he allowed it. She felt the bristly texture of his unshaven cheek, the warmth of an exhaled breath, the tension that held his whole body straight and erect, and she ached to hold him, to bury her face in that hollow between shoulder and neck, to nuzzle his skin.

And she wanted to kiss him so badly that her lips stung with the wanting, but already she could feel him preparing to pull away. She didn’t give him a chance to get any further. Taking his face firmly between both hands, she ducked beneath that broad-brimmed hat and planted her lips on his.

There, Tomas Carlisle, take that.

With her eyes wide-open she saw the shock in his narrowed blue ones, felt the resistance in his stiff lips and the jolt of reaction—in him, in herself—as her mouth opened softly. Then he wrenched her hands away, turning his face so her lips grazed the corner of his mouth and across his whiskery cheek.

She was left kissing nothing but the morning air, left staring into eyes that blazed with blue fire. “You can’t stand even a kiss?” she asked.

He thumbed the hat back up his forehead, aggravation etched all over his face. “Dammit, Angie, why are you forcing this? If you’re willing to help, then why not my way?”

Because this was her chance—probably her only chance—to have him, and if she could have him and love him and give him the family he needed, then maybe she could also heal his wounded heart. She didn’t know if that was possible, but she had to take a chance. One thing she did know for sure and certain—if she told him how she felt, she wouldn’t see his Wrangler-wrapped backside for swirling black bulldust.

So she rocked back on her heels, folded her arms across her chest, and shrugged. “If I’m going to sacrifice myself to have this baby, I’m not going to be dudded out of all the fun.”

For maybe half a second he went completely still—as if she’d really shocked him—and then he shoved his hat low on his forehead and took a slow step backward. Then another. “This is business, Angie, not fun.”

“And business can’t be fun?”

“Not anymore,” he said tightly. And he turned and strode away.

“Nice work, Ange,” Rafe drawled from behind her.

She didn’t turn around, she was too focused on Tomas’s retreat. His broad shoulders were bunched with tension, his long legs moving as if he couldn’t get far enough away from her quickly enough.

Nice work?

“Only if my job description was ‘lose a good friend,’” she said softly.

Rafe’s hand squeezed her shoulder, but the gesture of support and reassurance didn’t do much to ease the thickness in her chest and throat. “You gave him plenty to think about for the next week, don’t you think?”

She frowned back over her shoulder. “What about next week?”

“We’re meeting in Sydney.”

“We?”

“Alex, myself, Tomas. We’re meeting with Konrads again. About the will.”

Angie’s gaze slid, helplessly, back to the man who now sat still and watchful on his horse. Making sure she did leave? “Are you suggesting he might change his mind?”

“With a little help.”

“What kind of help?” she asked suspiciously.

“Last night I mentioned asking you to help me out. My little brother objected rather strenuously.”

“I object rather strenuously!”

Rafe winked. “Yeah, but he doesn’t need to know that.”

“What are you suggesting?”

“A little competition wouldn’t harm your cause, babe.”

Yes, the Carlisles hated to be outdone, especially by each other. Hadn’t Tomas’s first words this morning been about her offering herself to the wider Carlisle cause? Angie’s gaze shifted back to the motionless rider and her heart skipped a half-beat.

“Between that and what you’ve given him to think about…”

“What’s that?” she asked.

“Close your eyes, lie back, and think of Kameruka.” Rafe grinned and shook his head. “Nice work, Ange.”

“Have either of you considered other methods?” Tomas felt the impact of his brothers’ undivided attention before he looked up from his plate and found them both staring at him, obviously baffled by his out-of-the-blue question.

Around them the late-lunch activity continued in the restaurant of the Sydney Carlisle Grande Hotel. Patrons ate. Waiters waited. Tomas didn’t notice.

He didn’t recall eating his meal. Didn’t recall what they’d discussed while they ate. His attention had been fixed solely on the outcome of their prelunch meeting with Jack Konrads, a week to the day after they’d last met in the Kameruka Downs library.

Long story short: they could fight their father’s will. But then they would have to live with the knowledge that they’d disrespected his last wish.

They had to do this. They had to try.

“Other methods—” Rafe rocked back in his chair “—of eating? Meeting?”

“The baby,” Tomas elucidated. “Artificial conception. I’m thinking of going to a—” Center? Service? Frowning, he searched for the right term. “What do you call those places?”

“A breeding farm?” Rafe suggested.

“A clinic.” Alex put his cutlery down and fixed Tomas with a steely look. The kind he used often in the boardroom to show he meant business. “You don’t have to do this—either of you. That message I got before…”

Vaguely Tomas recalled Alex’s phone blipping just as their meals arrived.

“Susannah has agreed to marry me.”

There was a moment of shocked silence, broken when a waiter arrived to remove their plates. Rafe recovered first and gestured toward the phone. “Are you saying Susannah agreed to marry you by text message?”

“She knows we’re on a short timeline. I told her I wanted to know as soon as she reached a decision.”

Rafe shook his head sadly. “And they say romance is dead.”

For once Tomas was in complete agreement with Rafe. Sure, his eldest brother kept a brutal work schedule. Susannah, too, ran her own business. But, still…

“Aren’t you going to congratulate me?” Alex asked.

“Only if you can manage to look slightly happy about it,” Rafe replied at the same time as Tomas said, “You’re only marrying because of the will.”

And in his opinion, that just sucked cane toads. A marriage wasn’t a business transaction. It was about love and partnership and commitment.

Till death us do part.

“Ah, hell.” He didn’t realize he’d been screwing up his napkin until he threw the tightly wadded missile onto the table and rolled the crystal salt shaker. “You don’t have to marry her, Alex.”

“Yes. I do.” Alex folded his napkin in half and half again. Placed it neatly on the table. “That’s the only way I’ll do this.”

“When’s the wedding?” Rafe asked.

“There’s the mandatory thirty-day wait, but as soon as possible. We haven’t decided where.”

“Not at home?” Rafe asked “Mau will want to be there.” By home he meant Kameruka Downs, where they’d all grown up and where Tomas still lived. Their mother, too, in her own place built after his marriage. She rarely left her remote outback home these days. Since intense media scrutiny had led to a breakdown after she’d lost her fourth child to SIDS, she despised the city, crowds, photographers.

“We’re negotiating,” Alex said. “Susannah has family interstate.”

“Not wanting to get personal,” Rafe said carefully. “But does Susannah know she’s expected to, um, produce an heir right off the bat?”

“She knows.” Alex checked his watch, frowned. “I have a meeting to get to, but I wanted you both to know I’ve got this covered.”

Rafe and Tomas exchanged a look.

“You’ve got your part of the deal covered,” Rafe corrected.

“We’ll look after ours,” Tomas added. “One in, all in.” He got to his feet at the same time as his brothers, and of-

fered his hand. “Congratulations, Alex. I hope it works out for you.”

There was a moment, a connection that extended far beyond the firm handshake, the quick slap on the back, even the strong meeting of sky-blue eyes. It was the bond of brothers, the knowledge that a pact made would never be broken. They were all in this together, and, come hell or high water, they would make it work.

Then Alex was striding off between the tables with his trademark sense of purpose. Standing side by side, his brothers watched him out the door before Rafe shook his head. “Do you suppose he proposed by text or e-mail or intercompany memo?”

“Wondered the same thing myself.” Tomas scrubbed a hand over his face. “It’s not that I don’t like Susannah, it’s just that she’s…Susannah.”

Not Susie, like Angelina was Angie, but always the whole three syllables. Always so formal and cool and dispassionate. So absolutely unlike Angie.

“The whole deal’s too cold-blooded and impersonal,” he said, and he felt Rafe’s gaze switch and focus on his face.

“As cold-blooded and impersonal as artificial conception?”

“That’s different.”

“I won’t dignify that with a response.” Rafe shook his head and indicated the door. “You ready to go?”

Nothing more was said—and that surprised the hell out of Tomas—until they were out in the lobby and about to part ways. “Did you know Ange is working here?” Rafe asked conversationally.

Tomas tensed, then covered quickly by casting a casual glance back at the restaurant. “Waitressing?”

“I meant here as in the Carlisle Grande, in my office. She asked if I had any jobs going last week, flying home from your place, after—”

Rafe made an expansive gesture and Tomas thought, Yeah, after. That about summed it up.

“I gather you’re not even considering her offer?”

No longer casual, Tomas’s gaze cut back to his brother’s face. “She told you about that?”

“We talked some. I’ve seen a fair bit of Ange this last week.”

What the hell did “talked some” mean? And “seen a fair bit of”? Was that in the office or out of hours?

Tomas forced his fingers to unfurl out of fists. Forced himself to ask some other question, any other question. “What are you going to do about the baby?”

“I have some prospects.”

“Angie?” he asked before he could stop himself.

“She’s one.” Lips pursed, Rafe studied him narrowly. “That won’t be a problem, now you’ve decided to go elsewhere?”

“If it’s a problem,” Tomas said shortly, “it’s not mine.”

What else could he say? How could he object? He shook hands and watched Rafe walk away. His own decision was made and it involved a clinic and a nameless faceless woman he had to somehow find. It didn’t involve any kind of passion or emotion or commitment. It sure as hell didn’t involve Angie’s boldly stated way of doing things!

Close your eyes, lie back, and think of Kameruka.

How many times had he closed his eyes this last week, lying back in the restless tangle of his sheets, and thought about Angie? Her soft lips grazing his skin, her exotic perfume adrift in his blood, her dark eyes filled with the wild promise of passion as she came to him in the dark.

It’s only sex.

If only he could believe that. If only he could get past the disturbing notion of the action and cut straight to the result. Because he could imagine Angie with a baby, in a wildly sensuous earth-mother way.

But Rafe’s baby?

The notion burned his gut like battery acid, the wrongness and the certainty that if his brother asked, Angie would say yes. Women didn’t say no to Rafe. Ever.

Ah, hell.

Instead of heading out to the street on a quest for cold and impersonal, he found himself in an elevator going up to the executive floor of the Carlisle Grande Hotel. And his gut burned worse than ever.

Four

He found her office empty, yet Tomas had no doubt that this was Angie’s workspace. Less than two days on the job—not enough time to even change the name-plate on the door—and already she’d stamped her personality all over the place. Some—Alex came to mind—would call her desk a disaster. She would shrug and call it work in progress.

Knowing Angie, that would mean at least a dozen pieces of work in simultaneous progress.

Amid all the open folders and scattered paperwork sat a bright blue coffee mug which he knew wouldn’t be empty. Angie rarely finished anything in one sitting. Relaxing a notch, he strolled over to the desk and checked. Yup, the mug was still half full.

Wry amusement twitched at the corners of his mouth as he straightened. His nose twitched at the scent of her per-

fume…or perhaps that was the bunch flowers shoved higgledy-piggledy into a red glass jar. She had a framed collage of pictures, too. One of her parents smiling into each other’s eyes on their wedding day, a more recent picture of her father gaunt with the illness that took his life, and a candid shot of the three Mori kids goofing off at the Kameruka Downs waterhole.

He’d probably been there that day—for all he knew, he could have taken the picture. There’d been so many days like that back then.

But what about now?

Tomas put the frame back, next to the coffee mug, amid the chaos that was Angie’s workspace. She’d taken a convenient job here with Rafe, but how long did she intend staying? Was she ready to settle down? Enough to raise a baby?

His mood had turned grim long before his thumb brushed over the rim of the mug, smudging the glossy imprint of her lipstick.

This was the Angie of now, the woman he didn’t know.

The one who stained her lips the color of mocha, whose lips had imprinted his with the fleeting taste of temptation. The one whose velvet-brown eyes spoke of another wildness, a different type of passion to the laughing girl in the waterhole picture. This was the woman who’d stood on the steps of the plane and calmly suggested that sex between them could be fun.

With a silent oath he jerked away from the desk, his action so abrupt he almost upset the mug. He righted it quickly, pushing aside papers to make some space. And that’s when he found the book.

Babies Made Easy.

He was still staring at the cover, bemused by her choice of reading material and the irony of that title, when Angie returned.

He heard the quick approach of footsteps in the corridor and sensed her hesitation in the doorway, her presence licking through him like the memory of her kiss—a sweet suggestion of heat and anticipation, chased away by instant hostility. Not toward Angie herself, but toward the unwanted response of his body. He didn’t know how to handle this new awareness, the strange tug in his gut, the tight dryness in his throat.

Because she was standing there watching him, eating him up with those big brown eyes.

“I didn’t expect to find you here.” She came into the room then, smiling with a warmth that made him think she didn’t mind the surprise. “How did the meeting go?”

Of course she knew they’d been meeting with the lawyer. Rafe would have told her. They talked a lot, after all. “A waste of everyone’s time,” he said curtly, irritated that the thought of her and Rafe doing anything together completely wiped away the effect of her smile.

“There’s no way out of the clause?”

“None we’re prepared to take.”

“So, you have to make a baby.” Not a question but a matter-of-fact statement as she leaned her hips against the desk at his side. She looked like a candidate for Ms. Hotel Management, in her crisp white shirt and knee-length black skirt, her hair sleek and neat, her only jewelry a fine gold neck-chain bearing the letter A.

At least she was smiling her usual Angie smile, warm and relaxed and spiced with a dash of wryness.

Then she noticed the book in his hand and her smile faltered. His appreciation of that smile nosedived right alongside. He tapped a finger against the book’s cover, right under the title. “Interesting choice of reading, Angie.”

“I thought I’d research the topic, in case I needed to help any friends out.”

“Friends like Rafe?”

“Like Rafe or Alex or Tomas,” she corrected without hesitation. “It’s fascinating reading…although I have to say the title is very misleading.”

No kidding.

“Did you know there’s only a seventeen percent chance of conceiving each month? With odds like that, you need to get started. You all do!”

“That’s why I’m here.”

Their eyes met and held for a second, and he sensed a stillness in her, a new intensity beneath her aura of casual confidence, as if he’d surprised the breath right out of her. Hell, he’d surprised himself even though the words had come out of his mouth!

“Have you changed your mind?” she asked.

“Have you?” he countered.

“About making a baby in some sterile clinic?” With a glancing brush of fingers, she took the book from him and tossed it onto the desk. “Absolutely not.”

“I meant about helping me.”

“Does it matter? Since we don’t see eye to eye on the method, my offer of help is moot.”

“Maybe we can compromise. About the method.”

“Really?” Eyebrows arched, she regarded him steadily for a drawn-out second. “How would that work, do you suppose?”

Tomas shifted uncomfortably. He didn’t have an answer. Until this last minute he hadn’t fixed on what he’d hoped to achieve by coming up here. Making sure she didn’t get tangled with his hound of a brother, yeah, but as for how—

“Yeesh, Tomas.” She interrupted his thoughts with obvious irritation. “You don’t know why you’re here, do you? Nothing’s changed from last week.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I know that you couldn’t even stand me kissing you, so why chance anything more intimate?” She blew out a short, impatient breath, and when she started to turn away Tomas reacted instinctively, stopping her retreat with a hand on her arm. For a long moment she just stood there gazing up at him, her eyes widened with surprise.

Good.

He’d caught her on the back foot for a change, and with subtle emphasis he shifted his grip on her arm, not exactly tightening but…adjusting. Just so she knew he meant to keep her there until he was done. Whatever he had to say, whyever he’d changed his mind and come upstairs, he had to put into words. Now. “You caught me by surprise last week.”

“So—” she lifted her chin “—if I’d given you more notice you wouldn’t have minded me kissing you?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know,” she repeated softly, her gaze narrowing and darkening. “Do you want to find out? Or do you want to let go of my arm so I can get back to work?”

The challenge gleamed hot in her eyes, daring him to make that choice. It’s only a kiss, he told himself, but that phrasing didn’t help. Not when her words from last week twined sinuously through his consciousness.

It’s only sex.

And this was a test. If he could kiss her, if he could just bend his head to hers and go through the motions, then maybe he could do the sex part, too. Maybe.

He heard the huff of her exasperated breath, felt her start to pull away and blocked her escape with his body. Their eyes met and held. An awareness of what they were about to do charged the air between them, but a breath away from her lips, he paused, too charged with tension to breach that final inch of space.

“Go ahead,” she said softly. “I won’t bite…unless you want me to.”

His head reared back, dumbfounded when he should have expected no less. This was Angie, after all. Angie who was shaking her head with renewed exasperation.

“I was kidding. A joke, you know. Humor.”

Yeah, he knew, he just wasn’t in a kidding mood, not by a long shot.

And that she must had read on his face because she sighed, a soft relenting whisper, as she leaned forward and touched her thumb to his chin. Then she shocked the hell out of him by reaching up and kissing him there. He felt the softness of her lips, the moist warmth of her tongue and then her retreat.

A small smile hovered on her lips as she whispered, “Sorry.”

Sorry for the joke? Or for striking him dumb with that one swift touch of her tongue. Tomas tried to wrap his astonishment into words, to ask what she meant, but she took his face between her hands—the same as she’d done at the plane—and looked right into his eyes, her gaze dark and steady and serious.

“That was your notice.” She stretched to kiss one corner of his mouth and then the other. “I’m going to kiss you now, okay?”

Before he could begin to recover his equilibrium, she moved her lips against his with soft restraint, as if she was expecting his withdrawal…or waiting for him to take a more active role. A raw, male part of him itched to take over, but a stronger, harsher voice hammered away in resistance. It wouldn’t let him forget that this was Angie, and he had no business wanting to close his eyes and immerse himself in the lush temptation of her lips.

“Relax,” she whispered, her breath a shiver of sensation on his skin and in his blood. Her thumbs stroked his cheeks, down to the corners of his mouth. “It’s only a kiss.”

And then she kissed him the same way she tackled everything—with the same energy and heat and wholehearted passion. She kissed and she willed him to open up, to unwind, to let go. She made a sound low in her throat, a kind of smoky humming that rolled through him in one long, hot wave of desire that caught him totally unprepared, completely at a loss. All he could do was close his eyes and thread his hands into the thick softness of her hair and kiss her back.

Lord, how he kissed her back. With a hunger he couldn’t control, with a thoroughness he no longer wanted to control, with a yearning for all the intimacies he’d missed in the last years.

Since Brooke died.

That thought stalled his senses, slammed at his conscience, dragged him out of the drugging depths of that hot, wet contact. Intimacy was not what he wanted. No way. This was only a trial, proof that he could close his eyes and forget himself for long enough to do what had to be done. A means to an end and that was all.

He hauled himself back into his own space and switched his expression to deadpan. Not difficult—he’d had a lot of practice in recent years. Angie had slumped back against the desk. She shook her head as if to clear it and her eyes looked a little dazed. Her hair was a wild tumble, her lips kissed naked and pliant, and when she crossed her arms under her breasts, he couldn’t help but notice the outline of her nipples right through her respectable white shirt.

Heat tightened his skin, itched in his hands, swelled in his flesh. He looked away, forced himself to focus on the next step, now he’d conquered the first.

“So,” she said on a breathy exhalation. “That didn’t seem to go too badly.”

His eyes met hers, held, didn’t let go. “Do you still want to help me?”

For a long second she didn’t react, and he wondered if she hadn’t cottoned on to his meaning, if he needed to spell out what he was asking. Again. Then her hand drifted to her throat, and she twisted the fine chain around her index finger. Her throat moved, as if she’d swallowed. “My way?”

“Yes.”

“Wow.” She eyed him a moment, her expression circumspect. “That’s a big step up from a kiss.”

“I know that.”

“And you think you can take your clothes off and climb into bed with me? That you can do—”

“I don’t know, okay?” And he sure as hell didn’t need her talking him through every step. He could feel the heat in his face, the tightness in his jaw, in other places he didn’t want to acknowledge, and he shifted his weight from one foot to the other, rearranging his weight and the tightness and the jumble of words in his brain. “I don’t know, but I want to try.”

“Because you want a baby?”

“Because I need a baby.”

“Right.”

There was a sting in her tone, a darkness in her eyes, and Tomas knew he’d blown it. He knew but he didn’t have the words or the sentiment to save the situation. What could he say? He had nothing to offer, no incentive, no promises, no smooth lines. None of the weapons a man like Rafe might use. And he could no more spin her lies than he could beg for her help.

“I don’t expect you to commit to this right off,” he said. “Not without a trial.”

“Trial sex? Is that what you’re suggesting?”

“One night without any commitment. If it works, then we can talk about—” He gestured toward the discarded book on top of her desk.

“Making a baby?” She stared back at him a moment, her expression inscrutable. “All right.”

All right? Tomas swallowed and stared into her eyes. She meant it. For a panicky second his world tilted and spun, as if someone had hauled the rug out from under his feet. But then she was talking, planning, asking questions, and he forced himself to focus.

“Do you want me to come home with you?” he heard through the roaring in his ears. “I could—”

“No!” Not in his home, not in his bed. “No,” he repeated less stridently. “That’s not necessary.”

“Well, I can’t invite you home to my place because I don’t have a place. I’m staying with Carlo.”

Her brother, his friend. God, no! “I think we should keep this quiet, just between us.”

“In case it’s a humiliating disaster and we can’t look each other in the eye again?”

“In case it doesn’t work out,” he said, meeting her eyes and refusing to think about such dire consequences. “Neutral territory would be best.”

“I suppose a hotel room shouldn’t be too hard to organize, given your family owns a whole chain.” Despite that wry observation, her eyes remained dark and serious. Slowly she moistened her lips. “When do you want to conduct this…trial?”

“I’m not sure when I can get away.”

“You’re away now,” she pointed out, crossing her arms under her breasts again. Tomas forced himself to concentrate on her words. Not her body. Not the disquieting notion that he’d never seen her naked, but soon would. And he felt the rug start to shift beneath his feet again.

“The kiss worked here and now, with only a little notice,” she said with the same matter-of-fact logic. “Why not this, too?”

With a long slow stroke of her hands down her thighs, she straightened her skirt and walked around her desk. “I guess you’d planned to stay overnight?”

Tomas nodded and she picked up the phone and started dialing.

“With Alex or do you have a room booked?”

“A room. Here,” he managed. His throat was tight, his mouth dry, and that damn rug was moving way too fast.

“Hello, reception?” She greeted the voice on the end of the phone with a smile. “Hi, Lisa, it’s Angelina Mori in Mr. Carlisle’s office. You have a booking for his brother, Mr. Tomas Carlisle, for tonight? Yes? I’m looking for an upgrade if you have a suite available.”

Tomas stiffened. “That’s not necessary.”

“The Boronia Suite is perfect,” she said into the phone, ignoring both his spoken objection and the adamant shake of his head. “Yes, Lisa, only the one night. That’s all Mr. Carlisle requires.” Her eyes lifted to meet his, steady and direct and daring him to make something of it. “For now, at least.”

Two hours later Angie was still shaking her head over how she’d hijacked the arrangements so coolly and proficiently. She hadn’t let Tomas interrupt and she’d handled his objections with the same aplomb as the room upgrade.

“I’ve never been in a position to reserve a suite before,” she told him. “If I’m going to do this, why not with style?”

And then she’d settled behind her desk, telephone receiver anchored between shoulder and ear, and mentioned how much work she needed to get done before she could meet him upstairs. A very nice ploy, beautifully stage-managed, with no room for objection. Especially when Rafe arrived at her door, his curiosity diverted by his brother’s presence.

Tomas left. She shrugged off Rafe’s nosiness by pretending huge interest in a bogus phone call. Really, based on the whole scene in her office from start to finish, she should have been an actress. Her talents were much wasted. Who’d have known that her heart was racing, her insides churning, her bones quivering with nervous tension?

Now, two and a bit hours later, she smiled and made small talk with a Japanese couple as the Carlisle Grande’s high-speed elevator propelled her toward the upper-floor suites and her future. All in all, she felt remarkably calm. Considering she was about to have Tomas Carlisle.

Holy Henry Moses.

After she said goodbye to the couple on floor fifteen, Angie pressed an unsteady hand against her stomach, drew a deep breath, and willed everything to stop spinning. Although she hadn’t decided how, she knew she could go through with this. She knew because of the kiss that still burned strong and fierce in every cell of her blood, a kiss edged with darkness and barely leashed desperation.

He didn’t want her, but he needed her.

And if all went well, she might not only have Tomas Carlisle this once but she might get to keep him. To live with him as she grew big with his baby, to ease the haunted shadows in his eyes, to make him laugh and smile and live again. To be more than a helpmate to secure his inheritance—to be his wife and his partner.

And if it didn’t work out? If this turned into the disaster she’d alluded to in her office? Then perhaps that wouldn’t be all bad if it meant closure and a signal to move on.

Perhaps she might even silence the incessant heart-whisper that had stopped her committing to any other relationship, to a career or even to a place to live. The insistent whisper that she hold back a chunk of herself, to save it for this one man, this one home, this one life. Deep down she’d always hoped…and now those hopes were about to be realized.

If he hadn’t changed his mind all over again.

Outside the door to his suite—their suite—Angie hesitated only long enough to draw a deep breath before knocking. But then she couldn’t stand the waiting, the not knowing if he was inside or not. Fumbling, swearing softly at the tremor in her hand, she managed to swipe her security card through the lock. Red light. Swearing softly she tried again, her hand more steady this time.

Green light, hallelujah.

She pushed the door open and three slow paces into the entry vestibule her heart and stomach did the same free-fall as in the swiftly ascending elevator. Still, she went through the motions of checking the huge marble bathroom, the bedroom and huge closet, but nope. The whole suite stretched before her, quiet and pristine and empty.

He wasn’t here.

Angie didn’t assume she’d been stood up, at least not after she’d circled the whole suite several times and given his absence considerable thought. He may have changed a lot in recent years, but she couldn’t picture any version of Tomas hanging around a hotel room cooling his boot heels. He’d never done inactivity well.

She checked with reception, in case he’d left a message. Then she checked every horizontal surface—a five-star suite, she discovered, had many—and came up with no sign of a note. In fact there was no indication he’d even been here, but that was no reason to get her knickers knotted.

No, really, it wasn’t.

Most likely he had business to do, seeing as he came to the city so rarely these days. Or he could be downstairs in one of the hotel bars getting well and truly drunk. The Tomas she remembered didn’t need Dutch courage to tackle a wild bull or a woman, but this present one—well, she just didn’t know.

Cooling heels wasn’t big with Angie, either, but what else could she do but wait? Tracking Tomas down wasn’t an option, not when he wanted to keep this meeting (encounter? rendezvous? one-night stand?) secret. Yeesh, but she hated not knowing what to expect or even what to call whatever-this-was she’d agreed upon. Not knowing how long she might be waiting made her even more skittish, and determined to find some way of relaxing.

If she could expend some of this pent-up emotional energy then maybe she stood a chance of loosening up Tomas. That, she knew, was essential if this night was going to work out.

She ordered up a bottle of merlot. Then, on a whim, changed her order to the kind of French champagne she’d only tasted once before, at her heartbreaker of an eighteenth birthday party. Courtesy of the Carlisles, as it happened. If Tomas Carlisle was going to make her wait, then he could pay for the luxury of unwinding her nerves!

While she waited for room service to deliver her Dom Pérignon, she filled the spa and added a liberal dash of bath-oil from the complimentary basket labeled “Body Bliss.” Then she stacked the stereo with music designed for relaxation. The spa occupied roughly the same space as Carlo’s whole bathroom, so she figured if the music didn’t work she could use up some stray nervous energy swimming laps of the monster-tub.

Midway through the champagne and chin-deep in richly scented water, Angie felt a sudden sense of…no longer being alone. Her skin tingled, lifting hairs on the back of her neck and over her forearms. Startled, she jackknifed upright and waited, perfectly still but for the wild pounding of her heart. The music masked any sound, but when the bathroom door didn’t move from its half ajar position her heart rate slowly subsided.

So much for the relaxing, luxuriating experience.

She’d started to rise from the water, to reach for a bath sheet, when the music volume dipped noticeably. Instantly her pulse skipped, her exposed nipples tightened, anticipation fizzed in her blood—as happened pretty much any time Tomas Carlisle came into the picture. Not that he was exactly in the picture, but he was close enough that her body knew; her heart knew.

And as she slid back into the water’s warm embrace, she wondered if her patience could hold out until he came looking for her.

Five

How long, he wondered, could a woman stay in a bath?

Teeth gritted, Tomas attempted to block out another slush of water, another image of slick olive skin, another rush of heat to his loins. For the past two or ten or twenty minutes—God knows, it felt like an eternity!—he’d wished back that second when he’d turned down the music. Her selected volume (raucous) would have shut out the constant reminders that Angie was two open doors away, wet and naked.

Yet he couldn’t bring himself to cross to the bedroom, and then to the bathroom, to do what he’d come up here to do. He didn’t know what he would say. He didn’t know how to begin.

Hell.

He focused hard on the view beyond the window, the lights of a city not yet ready for sleep, the traffic inching toward the bridge, late workers heading home from their jobs the same as every other evening. Everything normal, routine, unchanged in their worlds while his was spinning into some unknown dimension.

And then he caught a flutter of movement, a reflection in the glass before him, and his shoulders bunched in instant reaction. She’d exited the bedroom wearing one of the hotel’s white robes, and he tracked her path across the room, saw her stop, heard the rattle of ice as she lifted the bottle.

“Can I get you a glass of champagne?” she asked. “Or would you prefer something else? I imagine there’s anything you want here…”

Plus a whole lot he didn’t want to want, either, he thought grimly as he turned to face her. All wrapped up in a fluffy bathrobe, dark hair gathered in a tousled ponytail on top of her head, brows arched in silent query, she stood waiting for his response.

Tomas shook his head. He’d had enough to drink downstairs. Just enough to numb the edges of his fear, but not enough to lose sight of what tonight was about.

Apparently Angie had no such reservations. He watched her pour a glass from the near-empty bottle, felt himself tense even more as she padded toward him, her bare feet noiseless on the plush claret carpet. Fine gold glinted at one ankle, and as she bent to adjust the stereo volume the chain at her neck swung forward in a slow-motion arc, then back again to settle between her breasts. A for abundant.

“Do you mind?” she asked.

Frowning, he forced his attention away from the deep vee of her robe. Away from the exposed slope of one breast, from the disorienting speed of blood rushing south and to the swirl of classical piano notes that seemed such an unlikely Angie-choice. “I don’t mind, although that doesn’t sound like your kind of music.”

“Relaxation therapy, along with this—” she lifted her glass in a silent salute “—and the spa. Which, I must say, was a treat and a half.”

“You needed to relax?”

“A little.” The corners of her mouth quirked. “Okay, more than a little. Although I figure I now have the advantage over you, in the relaxation stakes.”

“That’s not saying much,” Tomas admitted, and their eyes met and held in a moment of shared honesty. This wasn’t going to be easy—they both knew it, they both acknowledged it.

And being Angie, she also had to try to find a way to fix it. “Are you sure you don’t want a drink? Or the bathroom’s free and I can really, really recommend the spa. No?”

She must have gleaned that answer from his expression, because he hadn’t said a word or moved a muscle. He’d just stood there, growing more tense and rigid while she strolled right up to him. Was it his imagination or did her eyes glint with wicked purpose?

“Okay, then take off your shirt.”

What?

She pushed her glass into his hand and somehow wrapped his stiff fingers around the stem. Apparently because she needed to flex her fingers, then shake them, as if limbering up. To do what? All that southward-rushing blood congregated in very unlimber anticipation of those fingers reaching, touching, closing around him.

“If you don’t want to bother with the spa—” Angie wriggled those damn fingers some more “—then how about I give you a massage?”

“That’s not necessary.”

“Rubbish! You look tense enough to snap and I’ve been told I have magic hands.” Turning to leave, she cut him a trust-me look across her shoulder. “I’ll just go fetch some oil from the bathroom and then—”

“No.”

“No oil?”

No oil, no magic hands stroking his shoulders, no naked thighs straddling his back. “No massage. No spa. No drinks.” With subtle emphasis he placed her glass on the sill at his back, right out of her reach. “That’s not why we’re here.”

“No, but—”

“No buts.”

Their eyes met, held, locked, the air charged with the knowledge of why they were here. Sex. Not for pleasure, but for a purpose. A trial. Angie’s throat moved as she swallowed, and he noticed that one hand had come up to twist at the chain at her throat. “I had this notion that we might…I don’t know…sit around and talk for a bit to ease the awkwardness. Maybe order up dinner and a bottle of wine.”

“Are you hungry?”

“Not really.”

“Then why order dinner? This isn’t a date, Angie.”

Her gaze darkened, maybe hurt, maybe a little shocked at the harshness of his tone. But, in typical Angie fashion, she lifted her chin and fired right back at him. “That’s it then? You just want to do it?”

“Yes.” That’s exactly what he wanted—to do it. No fancy trimmings, no window-dressing, no talk. And, dammit, he shouldn’t feel bad about wanting what they’d both agreed on, just because she was doing him the favor. Just because she was standing there twisting that chain, looking for all the world like—

“Are you nervous?”

Probably he shouldn’t have barked the question, but he couldn’t contain the surly flanks of his mood. And it seemed so unlikely that confident, unflappable, in-your-face Angie could be suffering a case of the jitters.

“Of course I’m nervous,” she answered. “Aren’t you?”

“Why ‘of course’? You said it was ‘only sex.’”

Shaking her head, she released a soft breath of laughter. “Trust you to remember that!”

“You didn’t mean it?”

“Of course I didn’t mean it. Saying ‘it’s only sex’ is like saying this is only a hotel room, and Dom Pérignon is only a sparkling wine, and this—” she tugged at her lapel “—is only a bathrobe.”

He could have asked why in blue blazes women didn’t say what they meant, but that would be like asking why the wet season followed the dry. It simply was. But Angie? He’d always thought her a straight-shooter, and what her heated words implied sent a paradoxical chill through his blood.

“Why are you here? Why did you agree to do this?”

“I told you—because I can.”

“The truth, Angie.” He met her eyes, held her gaze. “No bull.”

Angie stared back at him, taking in the uncompromising set of his jaw, the icy chill in eyes she’d always thought of as hot summer-blue, and her stomach swam with anxiety. Everything rested on her answer…yet if she told him her expectations, her belief that she could heal his wounded heart if he only gave her the chance, she wouldn’t see him for dust.

Yet she couldn’t lie. Not to him and not to herself.

“Well, there is the fact I’ve always wanted to sleep with you,” she said slowly. Truthfully. “Oh, don’t look so shocked. I told you that last week, at the waterhole. When I first suggested having your baby.”

“That was hypothetical.”

“Maybe you thought so. I didn’t. I had a crush on you as a teenager, not that you noticed, but that’s the truth. Do you remember my eighteenth?”

“The party at Shardays?”

Stupid question. Of course he remembered, since he’d met Brooke that night. But he’d asked for the truth and, painful topic or not, she couldn’t stop midstory. “I remember going shopping and picking out the sexiest dress I could find for that party. It was white, this real slippery fabric that clung in all the right places.” She shaped her hands over her body as she talked, remembering how excited she’d been to see herself in that dress, how keen her anticipation when she walked into the nightclub. She’d been humming with it, buzzing, singing. “I picked it out thinking about you, Tomas. I had this fantasy going that you’d see me in it and that would be it.”

“You had a boyfriend.”

“Yes, but he was a boy.” She shrugged. “You were a man.”

He made a rough sound, of disbelief or rejection or both. “That was seven years ago.”

“And I’ve always wondered what it would be like, you and me.”

“You mean you and me scr—”

“Yes.” She spoke over the top of him, blocking out the harsh word he’d chosen. Deliberately, she knew, to shock her.

“Because that’s all it can be,” he said tightly, as if he needed to drive the point home. “Only sex.”

“I hear you, although I think you should know for me it’s never ‘only sex,’ not with any man. I’m a woman, in case I need to point that out.”

“You don’t.”

For a long moment she stared back at him, her annoy-

ance at his stubborn stance yielding to those two little words. He’d noticed her as a woman. And he could talk until he was blue-faced about “only sex” but her heart swelled with the knowledge that it would be so much more. If he would only give her the chance. The chance she may have blown with the honesty of her confession.

Moistening her dry lips, she concentrated on what mattered to Tomas—the reason he’d agreed to “only sex” in the first place.

“You know that book I’ve been reading?” She waited for his nod of acknowledgment, for him to remember the title and make the mental switch from sex-with-Angie to the end result. “Well, I’ve read all about fertility and conception and, frankly, you couldn’t get a better candidate if you advertised. My cycle is regular as a twenty-eight-day clock, which the book says is pretty rare. I’ve never had any gyno problems. I’m strong and I’m healthy and I’m at my prime.”

“You’ve thought about this. You really want to have a baby?”

“Several, eventually. All perfect angels who don’t cry or give their mother a minute’s grief.”

She smiled. He didn’t. And she sensed that she’d taken this one step too far. That perhaps she should never have admitted to nerves and thus diverted his focus back at “just do it.” But, with all that had been said in the interim, how could she get back to that point?

Perhaps she did need to remind him about being a woman…a naked woman who’d agreed to have sex with him.

Slowly she closed the space between them, releasing her hair so it tumbled down past her shoulders. As she came up beside him she raked a hand through the thick tresses, no longer slick and straight but rendered thick and curly by the bathroom steam. She leaned down to recover her glass from the windowsill and her arm brushed against his in a slow heated slide. And again as she straightened.

“Have to enjoy this while I can,” she said, taking a long sip of champagne. Their gazes connected over the rim of her glass. “If I do fall pregnant, I’ll not have the opportunity much longer.”

Something shifted in his eyes, sharpening their focus to a hard glitter for a split second before he turned abruptly to stare out the window. “There’ll be a lot you have to give up.”

“There’ll be a lot to gain.”

“What about your job?”

“It’s only temporary. I’m replacing somebody on maternity leave. There’s a certain irony in that, don’t you think?”

He didn’t answer, and Angie’s confidence gave a nervy little jitter. She didn’t think it possible that he could look any tenser than when she’d first come out of the bathroom, but he did. Because it was time to get down to it, to just do it, and that was easier said than done.

She took another sip of champagne but all she tasted was her own anxiety. “Awkward, huh?” she said into the lengthening silence. “This. Us. Standing here wondering what to do next.”

A muscle jumped in his jaw.

“How about we go into the bedroom? At least that’s a first step.” When he didn’t answer, she turned and started to walk in that direction.

“Angie.”

She whipped back around, caught him watching her in a way that made her heart thunder like a bronco let loose on the northern plains. Heat and fear; fear and heat.

“Don’t expect too much,” he said stiffly.

“I never do.”

That was a straight-out lie. Seven years she’d been waiting, wondering, ever since her coming-of-age party. Tonight she had expectations, and Tomas had no one to blame but himself.

He’d asked about her nerves. He’d insisted on the truth. No bull, he’d said, and wasn’t that a load of it!

Disgusted in himself, he dragged a hand through his hair. She even remembered the damn dress, when all he remembered about that night was meeting Brooke. The only woman he’d ever loved; the only woman he would ever love. The only woman he’d ever taken to bed.

How the hell was he going to do this? How was he going to walk through that door and take off his clothes and lay down with another woman? What in blue blazes had made him think that doing it with Angie would be easier than with a nameless, faceless stranger?

And if he wanted honest, no-bull truth between them, why hadn’t he told her about his lack of sexual experience?

Jaw set, he fought to contain the icy spread of fear through his tense body. Struggled to take the first steps toward the bedroom door, left open like an invitation to sin.

Only sex, he reminded himself. Sex with a lush, sensual woman who kissed like she loved everything about the whole man-woman intimacy thing. He imagined she wouldn’t be too shy to use that mouth in all manner of ways. He imagined she wouldn’t be afraid to take the initiative once he walked through that door. Maybe he should just take her advice: Lie back, close your eyes and think of Kameruka.

How hard could that be?

About as hard as the pounding of his pulse, he thought ruefully. And like a nagging toothache it would only get worse the longer he stood here thinking about it. Better to suck up the fear and dread of the dentist’s chair and march right in there and get it over with.

If he didn’t think about the intimacy, if he just concentrated on the mechanics of undoing buttons and stripping off clothes, if he focused on the part of him that cried out for a woman’s slick warmth in the dead of night, the part of him that was sick of his hand providing its only satisfaction, then he could do this.

As long as she didn’t expect too much.

On the threshold he paused, eyes fixed on the king-size bed that half-filled the room, covers turned back to reveal an expanse of pure white sheets. Twin bedside lamps cast a pale glow that did nothing to warm the starkness of that bed or to prevent the breakout of sweat, cold and sudden on his skin.

And Angie? His gaze swept beyond the bed and found her standing in front of the dresser, stalled in the act of brushing her hair. Their eyes locked in the mirror, as she slowly lowered her arms and put down the brush. The soft clunk sounded preternaturally loud in the stillness and he realized that her music had stopped. That the silence was so intense he could hear the thick thud of his heartbeat. Too loud, too hard.

“Damn moisture,” she said, turning to face him. “Once it gets a sniff of steam, I can’t do a thing to contain it.”

Her hair. She meant her hair. But stupidly it took him a moment to get past the reference to moisture and steam and containing it.

“I like your hair like that.” His voice sounded gruff and rusty, his compliment about as stiff as his body. “The other way, this afternoon, it was too…sleek.”

“Really?” She paused in smoothing the thick mass be-

hind her ears—a pointless task since the curls sprang free as soon as her hand dropped away. “You don’t think sleek is a good look?”

“Hell, no.”

“You prefer the wild look then?”

“On you,” he said simply and her lips tilted at the corners in the tiniest hint of a smile. That probably would have relaxed him a notch, that connection, if her gaze hadn’t drifted off to the bed—that endless stretch of cold, clinical white—before slowly returning to meet his.

“I intended taking off the robe and being all laid out on the bed waiting,” she said softly. “But I couldn’t do it.”

“You could have left the robe on.”

“I could have, if being naked was a problem.” Three slow steps, three thick pulses of blood in his lower body, and she stopped in front of him. “Being naked alone was.”

“You want me to get undressed?”

Dark and luminous eyes lifted from his chest to his eyes. She moistened her lips. “Do you mind if I do it?”

Not if you do it real quick.

That answer lodged in his throat when her silky female knuckles grazed his abdomen. When he sucked in hard, she got a firmer grip on his shirt and pulled it free of his trousers. Before he could think holymotherofmercy she’d unthreaded every button and pushed the sides of his shirt apart.

Maybe it was his vision, his thoughts, his whole body that trembled…or maybe it was her hands as they slowly traversed his bare chest, grazing his nipples, fingering the thick growth of hair, tracing the line of his collarbone. With growing confidence, her palms slid over his shoulders and down his biceps in a long, slow caress that peeled his shirt away until it dropped to the floor at their feet.

“Undo my robe,” she whispered, so close that her breath sloughed over his skin and seeped into his blood. He watched her lean forward and kiss his chest. Watched her eyelids flutter shut and that sight—soft and engrossed and sensual—brought on a surge of lust so intense his knees all but buckled.

He needed something to hold on to, to ground him against the dizzying roar of heat, and he found her robe, her sash, and a simple knot that came apart in his hands. She made a husky sound of approval as the thick toweling fell open. He made a rough sound of unscripted awe as her breasts came into view.

Full, luscious female things of beauty, with wide tawny aureoles and tips that seemed to tighten and darken as he watched—and, hell, he couldn’t stop watching until he feared his mouth was watering, until he had to swallow to stop from drowning. Behind his fly, his body pulsed with an ache to reach for her, to drop to his knees and draw those distended nipples into his mouth, to take her down onto the bed and bury himself without preliminary.

Except he’d be lucky to last a minute and he owed Angie better than that. Only sex, he told himself, didn’t mean it had to be bad sex.

The hands that itched to shape her body lifted instead to cup her face and he leaned down to take her lips, closing his eyes to shut out the lush appeal of her body. Their thighs brushed and her nipples grazed his chest as she came up onto her toes to meet his kiss. Restless, impatient, her hands shimmied over his ribs and sides before settling against his back and drawing their bodies into perfect alignment.

Heat billowed, a furnace of desire in his chest and his thighs and everywhere in between. Especially in between. In a slow, deep sweep his tongue stroked over hers and retreated. Her complaint was a rough sound that vibrated low in her throat and her hands tightened their grip on his back, forcing him to take notice, driving him past the edge of his control.

He kissed her harder, tasting her lips, drawing on her tongue, forcing himself to ease off when he wanted to devour. Only sex, he told himself, only lust, and that was okay. It had been so long, too long, since he’d indulged his male nature. It was understandable that he should feel so primitive, so carnal, so desperate.

Especially when she met him kiss for kiss, biting at his chin when he drew back for breath, sliding her hard-tipped breasts down his chest as she dipped lower and reached for his trousers. He sucked in another quick ragged breath but that oxygen didn’t make a lick of difference when she undid the waist button and started on his fly.

The accidental brush of her fingers against his erection completely zapped his synapses, and before the red-fire haze cleared she was ducking lower, her hair a dark whisper of sensation across his stomach. For one gasp of a moment he thought she was going to take him into her mouth, and in his explosive state that would have been too much, too soon.

Thinking about that hot, moist suction was damn near enough to bring him to embarrassment.

He backed away abruptly, and sat on the edge of the bed.

“Sorry.” In the low light her eyes gleamed dark and hot. “I was just helping with your trousers.”

The way she was looking at him didn’t help a bit. Especially with his trousers. Finally he managed to extricate himself from the rest of his clothing, and she was still watching him with a powerful hungry intensity.

“I bought condoms,” he managed to say, amazed that he remembered the earlier shopping expedition. “I’ll get them.”

Something in her eyes darkened, as if with a sense of purpose, and through the shimmering haze of lust Tomas felt a pang of misgiving.

“You could,” she said, her gaze not leaving his. “Or we could leave them right where they are and try to make a baby.”

Six

“According to the book, this is my prime conception time.” Sure and steady and dark as the night, Angie’s eyes held his. “Do you really want to waste this chance?”

Deep inside Tomas felt a keening cry of resistance. No, he couldn’t do this wholly naked. He needed protection, a barrier in any shape or form, some sense that he could hold himself apart from the intimacy of their bodies joining.

And how will you make a baby then? How will you keep Kameruka Downs?

His heart raced erratically, sweat sheened cold on his skin, and without a word he stood and stalked from the bedroom. Halfway across the sitting room he stopped suddenly, and for one numb second he couldn’t think what he was doing or why he’d come out here.

The condoms.

His gaze closed on the box he’d tossed onto the bureau earlier, when he’d come through the door and heard the music and realized that she was here. When it really struck home that sex with Angie was going to happen.

Do you need birth control? Do you really need this bedroom session as a trial?

Obviously he wasn’t going to have any trouble functionally. Obviously Angie had made up her mind about having a baby. He could get this over with now. If luck was on his side he wouldn’t have to go through this feverish ordeal of wanting and not-wanting-to-want ever again.

All you have to do is go back in that bedroom, shut down your mind and follow the lead of your body. It knows what it wants. It’s not having any problem with intimacy. It wants inside Angie, naked, now.

With a grim grunt of determination, he turned and followed where that leading part of his body pointed.

Several things hit him right in the face when he walked back into the bedroom. The shapeless form of her discarded robe, stark against the wine-red carpet. How the white sheets no longer looked cold and clinical, not with Angie’s darkly sensual beauty spread across them. And the fact that no amount of rubber or latex or reinforced steel could have protected him from the impact of her lying there naked.

Sucker-punched, he watched her roll up onto her knees, all tumbled black hair and perfect smooth skin and wildly generous curves. Her gaze had fixed on the highly functional and grossly underprotected body part that had lead him right back to her. He felt it thicken and pulse. Saw her moisten her lips and then move on to study his empty hands.

“You couldn’t find the condoms?”

“I found them.” Slowly he walked to the bed. Her eyes arrowed back for another up-close look, probably to see what he was wearing. Or not. “I left them where they were.”

Heavy-lidded eyes slid up to his. Something flickered in their dark chocolate depths. “Are you sure?”

“That I left them there? Yes. That I should have? No,” he admitted, honest for once.

“If that’s because we haven’t talked about STDs and such…I want you to know that I’m good. I had tests done when I last gave blood, and I haven’t been with anyone since.”

He swallowed the spontaneous question—how long since someone else?—and looked away. Irrelevant. Too personal. None of your business. And in his mind that justified not telling how long he’d been without. Instead he just nodded and said, “I’m clean.”

There was an uncomfortable moment as their gazes connected and a measure of the unasked personal and intimate shivered between them. She made a rueful sound, half sigh, half laughter. “Okay, and now we’re back at the awkward stage.”

“Us, standing here wondering what to do next.”

She smiled, appreciating his recall of their earlier conversation. “Except this time we’re already in the bedroom.”

“Naked.”

“All over.”

To illustrate her meaning Angie’s gaze dipped, and the mood took on a new sultriness, as if a blanket of heat billowed high before descending to settle heavily over their bodies. One silken finger traced the length of his nakedness. Her breathing hitched. His, more so, as she cupped and stroked him more firmly.

Nope, he wouldn’t be having any trouble functionally. Not if he made it inside her body before embarrassing himself. And if she kept touching him like that, and looking at him with her eyes kinda hazed and her lips softly parted, then that was quite on the cards.

“Enough,” he bit out sharply. Then to take the edge off he tried a laugh, a laugh that came out all raw and strained. “It’s been a while.”

She let him go and for a long silent moment she watched him with unsettling intensity, as if she was delving inside and grabbing hold of his fears and laying them out for open examination. Oh, no. No, no, no. Reflexively he slammed down the shutters on the tiny window of vulnerability he’d unintentionally revealed.

No more private stuff, no expectations, no emotions.

Something of the unspoken must have shown on his face, because her expression slowly transformed from I-have-questions intensity to now-where-were-we? teasing. Settling back on her heels, she pointed at an erection that didn’t need any pointing out. “I thought you told me not to expect too much.”

Okay, so this was better. This he could play along with. Frowning, he pretended to inspect himself. “Too much?”

“Guess there’s only one way to find out.”

Despite the sexy banter, there were no smiles and her eyes flared with dark heat as their gazes connected. “I guess so.”

Slowly she reached out and touched his forearm in a barely there caress, then her hand slid down to link fingers, and slowly, inexorably she tugged him down onto the bed.

They came together in an unchoreographed duel for position. It wasn’t elegant, but it was so hot Tomas swore he heard the slow sizzle as their limbs parried for optimum sensual contact. One of his thighs settled between hers, and he couldn’t stop himself pressing into her heat.

She responded with a deep hum of satisfaction.

For a second their gazes collided and he felt such a jolt—a left-right combination punch of need and fear and dread and desire—that he immediately ducked down to her mouth. They met with lips and tongues, with teeth and passion, and Tomas closed his eyes against the onslaught.

He closed his eyes and thought, yes! I can shut it all out. I can dive into the carnal delight of French kissing, I can shape my hands over these curves and immerse myself in the pleasure of all the scents and textures of a woman’s body. I can absorb the throaty sounds of a woman’s enjoyment and I can stand the roar of need in my ears.

I can handle the rush of lust because that’s all it is. Only sex.

His hand shaped one breast, his thumb rasped across the nipple and she sucked a breath from his mouth, an act so intimate he felt its effect raw and deep in his gut. He jammed his eyes closed tighter and breathed more deeply, until the indelibly delicious scent of her skin filled his lungs and his veins.

“What the hell did you bathe in?” he breathed huskily near her ear.

“Cinnamon and honey-milk.”

And he gave a half-grunt of laughter because that’s what he’d been about to ask. Honey-milk. She tasted so sweet, her skin was so soft and pliant. Unthinking he opened his eyes and saw her roll her head back against the sheets, her dark curls a wild and wanton spread against the white.

“That’s what the bottle said.” She blinked slowly. “Do you want to taste me?”

“Later,” he growled because even the thought of going down on her damn near brought him undone. He could feel a rawness gathering inside, a desperation he didn’t want to contain.

Her mouth tilted into a sultry smile. “I can hardly wait.”

“Right now,” he said, repositioning himself to settle thickly between her thighs, “It’s this way.”

“Okay,” she whispered on a broken murmur of breath.

Okay. That’s all this would be, he told himself as he deliberately drew out that initial slide of entry. This would be okay. Not wonderful. Not wild and untamed. Not earth-shattering or mind-altering. Just okay. All he had to do was take it easy, maintain control, keep his focus on the wall or the pillows or on visualizing the twisted thread of his restraint. He wouldn’t look into her eyes, he wouldn’t indulge in sweet words or tender kisses, and he wouldn’t think about the incredible moist pleasure of her body molding to accommodate his penetration.

Slowly. Take it slowly.

Sweat broke out along his back and on his forehead as he stopped himself giving in to what his body craved. To just plunge into her, hard, fast, wild. He sucked in air through his teeth, stared harder at the beige wall, and then he felt the tremulous touch of her hand on his face.

“If you’re worrying about the ‘too much’ comment, then don’t.”

For a moment he forgot himself and looked down, right into her eyes. Not teasing like her husky-voiced comment, but serious, intent, burning. He drew back slightly and then let himself go in one long hard drive that took him all the way inside and he couldn’t contain the long, deep sound of satisfaction that rose from his throat.

Sweet, oh God she was sweet.

Tomas couldn’t stand it—not the enraptured look on her face or the softening of her lips or the do-that-again challenge in her eyes. He had to look away, refocus. To remind himself that she wasn’t sweet. Sex was sweet. Being enclosed in that velvet female sheathing, the silky slide as he withdrew and drove back again, the hot friction of flesh against flesh, of male against female. This sex was so sweet because it had been so long and he’d almost forgotten the intensity of the pleasure. It was okay to enjoy it, to let himself go a little, to ease back so he could touch her breasts and flatten his hand against her belly and imagine that this was about making a child.

Only sex. And if it succeeded, never again.

Conversely his mind railed and bucked against that possibility. This was so good he wanted to do it again and again and again. Abruptly he pulled back, almost all the way out, then thrust himself in to the hilt. Too good to contemplate never doing again and that was all right, too, he justified, because tonight he could do it again and again. He could because it was necessary to make the child he needed.

It wasn’t about this rapidly escalating rapture, not about the gut-wrenching explosion of pleasure when his hand slid lower and thumbed her slick plump heart until she came apart in a shuddering cry that kept on going and going as he changed angles and drove into her until his own climax roared through him like a cyclone, rough and whirling and eddying through his rigid frame with uncontrollable force.

He could justify that he couldn’t disconnect immediately, not while his heart thundered and his blood roared and his mind clamored with the image of his seed spilling deeply into her fertile core.

For a minute his whole being succumbed to the intensity of that image and he slumped forward, his nose buried in that sweet hot spot where her neck joined with her shoulder. Their heartbeats raced one against the other and he knew he should move but he couldn’t, not until she took a slow, shuddering breath that echoed right through him. They were that close.

Too close, and when her mouth touched the side of his face with the kind of tender intimacy he’d vowed to avoid, he suddenly found his strength. He was on his feet and into the bathroom before her kiss had cooled on his cheek. Shower controls turned to maximum, he stepped under the torrent and let the cold water savage him for a count of ten. Then he spread his legs and planted his arms against the cold tiles and let the water pound out the torpor of sexual satiation.

Somewhere at the back of his mind he imagined it might also pound away a nagging sense of dissatisfaction. Not with the sex—jeez, but that had been unbelievably satisfying. No, it was something deeper, probably tied up with those earlier chills of fear, but even after ten minutes or so of water-torture he couldn’t put a finger on the cause.

And he couldn’t stand here any longer, not without turning blue. Adjusting the temperature mix, he rolled back his head and let the warmth hit him full in the face. Then he raked his wet hair back from his face, turned off the taps and reached for a towel.

Bare-assed, he padded back to the bedroom, his muscles tightening reflexively with every step. She’d turned the lights out, he realized, but enough light filtered in from the city outside for him to make out the figure curled up on the bed. Motionless. Asleep.

He exhaled a long, audible breath. No need for post-coital conversation or cuddling. She’d left plenty of the bed for him, enough of a buffer zone that he could crawl in under the covers and spread out in his usual fashion without any contact. That didn’t help him relax. As the minutes passed he grew tenser, more wide-awake and so attuned to the silence that he swore he could hear each ticking minute on the noiseless bedside clock.

Possibly because he was concentrating so hard on anything besides the soft sound of Angie’s breathing.

Damn her, how could she be so relaxed? Had what they’d done been so exhausting…or so meaningless that she could roll over and go to sleep within minutes? He turned restlessly and shucked off the eiderdown quilt. So, okay, he’d been gone more than a few minutes, but still…

Did she think that was it? One time lucky? And what about her earlier invitation. Do you want to taste me?

His body reacted instantly, extravagantly, as if she’d whispered the incendiary words into his ear right then. Turning impatiently on his side didn’t help. Not when he could see the rise and fall of her breasts under the pure white sheet. I can hardly wait, she’d said.

Well, hell, he’d waited long enough. They only had this one night. What a waste to spend it watching her sleep when he was obviously up for making certain.

It was okay to smooth her hair away from her throat and taste her there, he figured. It was okay to kiss his way over her shoulder and whisper “wake up, Angie” when she stirred restlessly and rolled onto her side. Fine to kiss his way down the length of her naked spine and to learn the multitude of curves and valleys that made up her generous body. And when she stretched sleepily and pressed back into him with a lazy sigh, how could he not reach around to cup her breasts and rub her nipples and wake her by stroking her slick, wet heat?

When she rocked hard against him and murmured “already?” he took her like that, in a long, lazy joining, and again in the predawn quiet when the pace was slow and sensuous with enough time to recognize his earlier bout of fear for what it was.

Not performance anxiety or any sense of disloyalty to the wife he still loved, but fear that he would enjoy this—enjoy her—so much that he would never want it to end. That he’d want to twist his fingers into her chain and drag her mouth down to his, to swallow her cries of release whole and absorb them into his body.

That he would want this to go on and on and never end.

Angie woke to the glare of morning sun streaming through the window and the low sound of conversation. Frowning slightly, she pushed up on her elbows and strained her ears. Not the TV she realized, shoving her hair back from her face, but real voices in the adjoining room. Before she had a chance to identify words out of the indistinguishable drone, her attention diverted to the scent of food and her nose twitched and her stomach growled. Between no dinner and the…um…strenuous night, she was famished.

As she swung her legs out of bed she stretched her arms and back. And winced. Oh, yes, it had, indeed, been a most strenuous night. Satisfying in many ways, promising in many ways, even if she hated the many times he’d refused to meet her gaze, the times he’d chosen the darkness of closed eyes over the emotional connection of their joining.

Even if the notion that he’d needed to wash the scent of their lovemaking from his body still rubbed raw against her heart.

Slowly she started for the same bathroom. Vaguely she realized that the voices had stopped, and when she heard the thump of a door closing, she stopped dead. Surely he wouldn’t just leave? Surely. But her heart shifted with uncomfortable doubt as she resumed her trip toward the bathroom. Just shy of the door, a sixth sense made her swing her gaze back…and there he was, standing in the doorway between bedroom and sitting-room, watching her.

He, she noticed immediately, was dressed. Unlike her. Ridiculous, after all they’d done in the night, to feel so exposed. He’d seen pretty much everything, from much closer than the width of a hotel bedroom.

“I ordered breakfast,” he said evenly.

A good start, she thought. Excellent really, since she would have bet on much awkwardness this morning.

“I’m famished, but I just need a quick shower before I eat.” She smiled broadly, in appreciation of him ordering breakfast, and still being here to share it. “Will you save me something?”

“I’ve already eaten. With Rafe.”

Angie stiffened. That explained the other voice. Yet…“You invited your brother to breakfast?”

“He invited himself.”

Aah, now that made more sense. And explained the closing door.

“Does he know…?” She gestured between them, indicating the meaning she couldn’t put into words. That I’m here, in your bedroom, naked?

“No, and that’s the way I’d prefer we kept it.” He shifted his weight from one booted foot to the other. “Look, I just rang the airport. My pilot’s ready to go. I have to get moving.”

“Well, I’ll have my shower and breakfast and go straight down to work, I expect.” She managed a carefree shrug, but since she was standing naked in the full morning light, she couldn’t quite bring herself to stroll over and casually kiss him goodbye. Which is the comeback she would have liked, to prove that though her heart had just taken a plummeting nosedive, she could handle this. He’d told her not to expect too much. She knew this would be a long haul, this getting past his hurt and distance to the man inside.

Last night she’d taken the first step, and that was only the start.

Despite his gotta-go message, he still hadn’t moved from the doorway, however, and Angie discerned he had more to say. Ever helpful, she raised her eyebrows, inviting him to spit it out.

“Call me,” he said, “as soon as you know something.”

“You’ll be the first to know.”

He nodded stiffly.

And Angie couldn’t help herself, the words just kind of bubbled out. “Do you think I will have to call? Do you think last night was a success?”

Which, in retrospect, was a ridiculous thing to ask. She’d read the literature. Even at the right time of month, with all the planets in alignment and karma beaming down from the stars, a certain percentage of women didn’t conceive. It wasn’t as if she’d ever tried before. She didn’t know, for sure, that she was the perfect candidate she’d promoted herself as the night before.

And her ridiculous questions had obviously made Tomas as uncomfortable as a ringer with a burr in his swag, because now he couldn’t meet her eyes. He stared toward the window and beyond, his expression so tricky and unreadable that she longed to climb inside his head.

“If you are—” his gaze shifted back to her face “—will you want to keep working?”

“I told you. My job here is temporary.”

“You know Rafe will give you another job at the drop of a hat. Alex, too.”

“And what about you? Do you have a job for me on Kameruka Downs?”

His eyes narrowed. “You’re joking.”

“Why would you think that?”

“Because I wouldn’t—” He stopped abruptly, lips a tight line.

“Because you don’t want me around?”

“Because there’s no job for you there.”

The pain she felt was, no doubt, her heart bottoming out of that slow-fall plummet with a sickening crash. “I’ll let you know the result, once I know,” she said, painfully aware that she was still standing here, having this momentous conversation, stark naked.

Tomas started to turn, paused. “Angie…thank you.”

For being such a sport? For not pushing the job issue? For not making this morning-after a train wreck?

It was her turn to nod tightly. “You’re welcome.”

And then he was gone, probably bolting as fast as his boots would take him, to the airport and the company plane that would transport him back to his territory.

Kameruka Downs, where she was no longer welcome.

Seven

For two weeks Angie hummed through life in a cheerful glow of hopefulness. When she closed the door on that hotel suite—after an indulgently long shower and an extravagantly big breakfast—she closed the door on all doubts and despondency. She left them there in the dark, shut away from the shining light of her optimism.

Only sex? Bull! She’d felt the connection, the specialness, the rightness of their lovemaking.

As for Tomas…well, she could make allowances. He’d been even more nervous than Angie, and he didn’t have the crutch of a lifetime of fantasies for support. She’d seriously unsettled him with that revelation, and she’d unnerved him more with the emotion she couldn’t completely contain when they’d finally come together.

Plus, in his own words, it had been a while.

Her mind had drifted back to that comment with vex-

ing regularity. A while, as in, not since Brooke? Could he have been celibate that long?

Knowing Tomas…yes. Because that’s how he would honor his vows, yet that thought caused a churning storm of conflict in Angie. The very qualities that drew her to this man—his steadfastness, his loyalty, his constancy and conviction—could also be the downfall of any hope of a future with him.

He loved Brooke. He probably believed he would never love again. Yet Angie knew deep in her heart that she was his woman, and she used that confidence to staunch the rebellious doubts as she worked through two weeks without any calls from or contact with Kameruka Downs. He was busy, she reminded herself. This was his busiest time of year with the cattle business. Besides, she was to call him, she reassured herself, whenever her hungry gaze drifted to the phone late at night.

Then her hand would cradle her belly and her heart would skitter with a mix of nerves and excitement as she contemplated the prospect of Tomas’s baby growing there. And she would fall asleep with a smile on her lips and optimism warm in her heart.

This morning, when she visited the bathroom, fate and the female cycle rudely snuffed out that light.

Naturally it was Monday and she couldn’t slink back to bed. Predictably it was a stinking grey Monday, the kind that decides to dump its wet load of misery on a woman’s shoulders when she’s running to catch the bus. And because she was in no mood for company, Rafe came to wander aimlessly around her workspace as soon as he arrived at the office.

That happened to be about five minutes after she’d tossed her rose-colored glasses in the bin beside her desk, along with the pregnancy-test kit she’d bought ahead of time and stored in the back of her filing cabinet. She knew the second Rafe’s miss-nothing eyes settled on the discarded box.

Why had she given in to that silly fit of hormonal pique? Why hadn’t she just left the kit where it was? She hadn’t needed to trash the damn thing!

A small frown lined her boss’s forehead. “Is that what I think it is?”

“That’s none of your business.”

His gaze lifted at her sharp tone. “It appears to be unopened.”

“How observant.” It was hard not to sound snarky when Rafe—dammit—was pushing aside papers to perch on the edge of her desk.

“Do I take it this is bad news?”

She clicked her mouse and stared hard at the computer screen.

“Because I always thought it was bad news when the lines turned pink.”

Eyes narrowed in irritation, she swung back to face him. “In your situation, that would be good news…or have you forgotten the baby you’re supposed—”

“So, you did do it.”

“What?”

“You and Tomas. That night in the suite. I wondered.”

Yet he hadn’t said a word. She wondered—

“I didn’t say anything in case nothing came of it,” he said, finishing her thought. He glanced back at her bin. “Is that what the unopened test means?”

“I’m not pregnant, if that’s what you’re asking.”

And because she couldn’t stand the sharp perceptiveness of his gaze—or the flicker of sympathy in his eyes—

she turned back to her computer. Tapped at a couple of keys before she realized she hadn’t opened a document. The computer beeped back at her, something that sounded like you dolt. And she was the stupid, idiotic queen of dolts for imagining she could do this, for thinking that one night would instantly provide a baby, and for wanting it so much. Dammit, and now she had to put up with her boss sitting there looking at her with pity and—

“What are you going to do about it?” he asked, and she whirled on him in a flash of fury.

“What are you doing about it? You, also being part of this pact. Why should it be up to me? And how about Alex—has he set a date yet?”

“Last I heard, he and Susannah are still in negotiation.”

Which meant no date, no marriage, no baby, since Alex had decided that marriage had to come first. “And you?”

“I’m still considering my options.”

“Too much choice?”

Instead of grinning or winking or chipping in with the usual Rafe-line, he looked at her steadily. “Or maybe I can’t find the right woman to make a baby with.”

The right woman, the right mother, the perfect candidate. Angie’s heartbeat sounded thick and loud in the sudden quiet. “Do you think Tomas found the right woman?”

“Do you?”

Yeesh, but she hated questions tossed back in her face. Twelve hours ago she knew the answer, unequivocally, but now? Had so much changed? Or was this only a wet-day hormone funk? She stared at the blankness of her computer screen a moment, and the only answer she found was the truth. “I want to make more than a baby with him. I want to make him live and laugh and love again.”

Rafe grinned. And winked. “Attagirl.”

Angie scowled back at him, but somewhere inside she felt the tiny flicker of hope. “Fat lot of good it will do me.”

“My brother needs someone like you. Someone with the balls—”

“Thank you very much!”

“—to keep pushing and prodding so he doesn’t hole up in his shell like a hermit crab. He needs someone who loves him enough to not give up.”

“You think?”

“He needs you more than he needs this baby, Ange.”

Holy Henry, she hoped so. Yet, if Rafe believed it—if he could sit there and recite with such conviction the belief engraved deep in her heart…“Do you suppose your father thought the same thing?” she asked slowly. “That he was using the will clause to push Tomas to find someone else?”

“Maybe.” In silence, they both considered this a minute. Then Rafe shook his head. “Nah, there’s too many things that could have gone wrong, the way he worded the clause.”

“I guess.”

“What matters is making sure everything goes right from here on in. You need to be in his face, Ange, showing him what he’s missing.”

“What do you suggest? That I turn up on his doorstep and chirp, ‘Honey, I’m home’?”

Rafe grinned. “You’re reading my mind.”

It took Angie a moment to realize he wasn’t joking. She wet her lips nervously. “What, exactly, are you thinking?”

“Two weeks, right? Until you can next make babies?”

Angie nodded.

“What if I fly you out there a bit earlier…?” Not really a question, since he didn’t wait for an answer. He picked up her desk calendar and studied it. When he looked up his eyes held a wicked glitter. “You know what this Saturday is?”

“Um…the twentieth?”

“The Ruby Creek Races.”

Angie frowned. The Ruby Creek weekend was an outback institution, more about socializing than horse-racing, but what did it have to do with her situation? “You want to go? You think I should go? Do you think Tomas will be going?”

“Unlikely. He doesn’t get out much these days. No, what I’m thinking is all the staff will be going and he’ll be home alone.”

Until she arrived. Angie’s pulse fluttered. “He won’t like it.”

“Does that matter?”

She smiled slowly and the glow of hope spread strong and rosy through her whole body. “No. I don’t suppose that it does.”

Tomas recognized the sound of the Carlisle Company plane coming in low over the Barakoolie ridge without lifting his gaze from the weaners he was tailing. He figured it was Alex or Rafe dropping in to visit with their mother. A wasted trip, since Maura had flown down to another of their stations to supervise the muster after the manager broke his leg. Tomas would have gone himself except…

His chest tightened as he recalled the plea in his mother’s pained eyes—a look that had cow-kicked him right where he lived. He knew what she couldn’t say. I’m lost and I’m hurting. I need to be busy, occupied, working as hard as my body can take. It’s the only way to live through this grief.

Oh, yeah, he knew better than anyone the benefits of physical exhaustion. Not a cure, but a salve to deaden the acute pain and a bandage dressing for the soul-deep loneliness. A means to fill the days and a way to find the salvation of sleep in a marriage bed suddenly left half-empty. So, yeah, he’d let Mau go with his blessing, and if either of his brothers gave him grief over it…After several weeks of fourteen- and fifteen-hour days he felt brutal enough to knock them both on their Armani-clad asses.

Thinking about that outcome gave him a grim satisfaction as he watched the King Air bank and turn before coming in low on its final approach to the airstrip. The young colt he was training jigged and danced beneath him. And if his pulse skipped in time with his fractious mount, that wasn’t because some rogue part of him remembered the last time one of company planes had sat on the Kameruka airstrip.

The way she’d tried to kiss him. The day she’d sowed the idea of only-sex in his brain.

“Easy boy,” he soothed. “It’s just a big old noisy bird.” With a big old noisy pilot.

He identified Rafe as the pilot by the way he approached his landing. Not sure and steady like Alex, but in a flamboyant rush.

The colt tossed his head, and with knees and thighs Tomas directed his attention back to the cattle. “We have a job to do, Ace,” he murmured. “Keep your eye on the prize.”

He didn’t turn back toward the strip. He would see his brother soon enough, whether he wanted to or not. And even though this was officially a holiday weekend on Kameruka, with all his staff away at the races or visiting friends or simply sitting it out at the local bar, his time off was this: training a young colt to tail cattle. Later he’d fly a bore check in the station Cessna. And there was a gate hinge to weld on the Boolah round-yard. All the stock horses and dogs to be fed.

Only when he was good and ready, would he return home to his visitor.

The sun had started its descent behind the rugged western cliffs of Killarney Gorge before Tomas returned to the homestead. His narrowed gaze scanned the deepening shadows of the veranda and, sure enough, found Rafe. He didn’t care. He was resigned to enduring his brother’s smart-ass company this evening. In fact, he was looking forward to crossing words if not swords—either would suit his mood. But first, he was looking forward to a long cold beer and a longer hot shower.

“Rafe,” he said in greeting, as he hit the veranda and kept moving.

“Pleased to see you, too. I was getting bored with my own company.”

“No kidding.” He paused with the door half-open. “I’d have saved you the tedium if you’d rung first.”

“You’d have laid on hot and cold running housemaids?”

“I’d have told you Ruby Creek was on.”

Rafe chuckled softly. “I knew that. I’m heading out there in the morning, but I thought I’d spend the night with Mau first. I’m surprised she’s not home yet.”

“She’s over at Killarney, mustering.”

“Better that she’s keeping busy.” No surprise, no censure, barely a pause to digest the news. “I’ll fly down tomorrow and see her.”

“Only if you’ve got a couple of days free. She’ll be out in the back country by now.” And they both knew that no one—not even Rafe—could land a twin-engine there.

“How’s she doing?”

Tomas let the door swing shut and tipped his hat back. “She’s coping.”

For a quiet minute they were in accord, everything else forgotten in shared concern for their mother. Worry that she may sink back into the same depression as after she lost her baby daughter—their sister—so many years ago. Rafe made a scoffing noise and shook his head. “Why didn’t he just leave her one of the stations to run? That would have made more sense than this grandchild thing.”

“Is that why you think he did it? For Mau?”

“Don’t you?”

Tomas let his breath go in a long sigh. “Yup, I do.”

“Do you reckon it’ll make any difference? That she’ll buy we’re doing this because we want to?”

“Does it matter in the end? If she gets the grandchild to dote on?”

“Point.” Rafe expelled a long, audible breath. “I’ll fly out next weekend to see her.”

Tomas nodded, but he could see there was more going on in Rafe’s head than the fact he’d wasted a trip. He looked almost…pained.

“What are you doing about the baby?” Tomas asked, taking a stab at what bothered his brother’s usual carefree attitude. “Have you decided on a mother yet?”

“There’s someone I’m hoping to bump into at Ruby Creek tomorrow.”

Hence the look of a man headed for the gallows. If he didn’t feel a barrowload of empathy, Tomas would have found his brother’s situation funny—the last of the great playboys forced to choose one woman. He didn’t ask for the lucky lady’s name because the look on his brother’s face reminded him of his own circumstances. Of Angie, who Rafe would have seen as recently as yesterday. It had been over two weeks. She’d said she’d call as soon as she knew. She should have called.

He scowled down at his boots, tried to find the words he needed down there. How’s Angie? Two simple words, one question. How hard was that? Instead he found himself asking, “How’s the hotel business?”

“Booming.” Rafe stared at him a moment. “Can’t say you’ve ever expressed an interest before. Is there a reason? Anything specific you wanted to know?”

Tomas gritted his teeth. Okay, all he had to do was ask. He took off his hat, slapped it against his thigh. “How’sAngie?”

“Why don’t you ask her yourself?”

Call her? His gut clenched and fisted. “Yeah, I guess I could phone her.”

“I meant you should ask her. In person.”

Tomas frowned. “In Sydney?”

“Inside.” Rafe hitched a shoulder in that direction. “I think she mentioned something about taking a bath. She liked the look of that new spa you put in.”

In his bathroom? Like hell!

Tomas barreled down the long hallway and shouldered through the half-open door. Yes, she’d taken a bath. In his bathroom. Wisps of steam wafted toward the open louver windows, and the moist sweet fragrance of honeyed bath oil still hung in the air.

The house had a half-dozen bathrooms and she’d had to use his? Dammit to hell and back…

He slapped his hand against the doorjamb, whipped around and his eyes narrowed in cold fury. His bedroom door lay open. Oh, no. No, no, no. No. A dozen long strides and he came to a grinding halt, everything locked up by the sight that greeted him through that open doorway.

Angie was bent over his bed, ratting through an open suitcase. Not that he took much notice of the suitcase, since she wore nothing but a towel. For a long minute his anger dissipated, swamped by the heated rush of a body remembering. The soft pliancy of her thighs. The full curves of her buttocks. The sheer carnal pleasure of sliding inside.

She stilled suddenly and turned, as if she’d heard the groan of his lust or the snarl of his restraint, and her eyes widened in surprise. Vaguely he was aware of something—hell, it could have been the crown jewels for all he noticed—drop from her fingers as she straightened.

“Hi.”

The husky note of her greeting stroked his aroused glands like a velvet fist, and in that spun-out moment she had only to smile and unwrap her towel and he’d have forgotten every grievance. But she didn’t smile. And she clutched the front of the towel with an edginess that reminded him of everything wrong with this picture.

Her body, in his towel, in his bedroom. Uninvited.

“What are you doing here?” he growled, low and mean.

“Looking for clothes. I was about to get dressed.” Gathering her usual assurance, she let go the towel and leaned back into her luggage. “If I can just find my—”

“Dammit, Angie, you know that’s not what I asked!”

She knew it and she had to know how much was revealed when she leaned over like that, but it didn’t stop her dragging out the moment. Deliberately? Was she trying to provoke him? Entice him? Seduce him?

Tomas ground his teeth and forced his attention to her busy hands. They rummaged some more then paused, holding up a piece of ivory satin underwear that dangled from her fingertips like some blatant stroke-me invitation. Oh, yeah, this was deliberate, unsubtle and doomed for failure.

“Forget getting dressed,” he barked. “We need to talk.” Her gaze skittered with the same edginess she’d dis-

played earlier. Good. This was his home, his territory, and he was calling the shots. She had cause to look nervous.

“Why didn’t you call?”

“That’s why I’m here,” she said quietly. And as if her legs lost strength, she kind of flopped down onto the edge of his bed. “Instead of calling.”

“You’re pregnant?”

The thick ponytail on top of her head wobbled as she shook her head. “No. I’m not.”

“Are you sure?”

“Pretty much.”

“What does that mean? Did you do a test or not?”

Her backbone stiffened at his harsh tone, and her gaze snapped to his. “I mean,” she said clearly, evenly, “that unless I’m one of those women who bleed even when they’re pregnant, then I’m not.”

Tomas let go an audible breath. Restless, unable to meet the steady darkness of her gaze and unsure how to respond, he paced to the window. Hesitated a second before turning around. “You okay with that?”

“I’m disappointed. What about you?”

How did he feel? Thrown. Rattled. Disgruntled. And, yeah, disappointed that she hadn’t let him know. That she’d probably confided in Rafe first—why else would he have brought her out here?

“How long have you known?” he asked tightly.

“Only a day or two.”

“You said your cycle was regular as clockwork. I can do the sums, Angie. Either you—”

“Okay.” She jumped to her feet in a rush of fluttering towel and creamy skin. “I knew on Monday. Yes, I should have called, but I wanted to surprise you.”

What? He scarcely believed his ears. This was supposed to be a pleasant surprise? Here I am, in your bedroom, aren’t you glad?

She sucked in a breath, as if preparing to say more, but the action caused the towel-tuck over her breasts to come right undone. Before she could regather the gaping sides, Tomas caught an eyeful of dark nipples and curved belly and feminine curls. His body blistered with instant heat, his groin tightened with instant desire, but he rejected the quickening of lust and fixed her with a hard, cold stare.

“I don’t like surprises.”

He walked to the dresser and stared for a full twenty seconds before he realized what was wrong. Her hairbrush, a tub of face cream, her neck-chain, were scattered carelessly amidst his neatly arrayed belongings.

Tomas’s jaw set so hard he heard his teeth grind.

He didn’t want this. He didn’t want her here, not in his home, not in his bedroom, not in his days and his nights.

With one fisted hand he scooped up her things and tossed them into her suitcase. In another second he’d gathered up all the gauzy bras and filmy panties that had spilled onto his bed, and jammed the lid shut on it all.

He was fuming that she’d pulled this surprise-him stunt, that she’d thought she could take over his bedroom, that she’d brought all that skimpy underwear with her…for what? They were having sex, not a seduction. He clicked the snaps shut on her case and his icy rage turned to steam.

“I hope you didn’t buy all that specially,” he said, straightening with the luggage in his hand.

In silence she’d watched him, not objecting, not commenting, although her eyes now flashed with indignation. “You don’t like nice lingerie?”

“It’s a waste of money if you bought it for me.”

“Actually, I bought it for myself. I never thought for a minute that you’d wear a G-string.” She smiled silkily. “Although I do like how satin feels against my skin. Maybe you should feel it sometime.”

Tomas refused to let her taunt affect him, refused to picture her wearing a satin G-string and nothing else, refused to imagine his hands skimming over her curves, touching, feeling, caressing. Narrow-eyed he glared back at her. “It looks like I’ll have to.”

“Are you saying you want to try again?”

“I take it that’s why you’re here.”

“Yes,” she answered calmly. “Bad news, I’m not pregnant. Good news, we get to do it all over again. If that’s what you want.”

Eight

Oh, yeah, he wanted, but this time he was setting the rules—starting with not in his bed. Suitcase in hand, he turned toward the door. “You’ll have your own bedroom. That’s not negotiable, Angie.”

“If you want me out of your bedroom—” her eyes flashed a challenge “—you’ll have to carry me.”

He only hesitated long enough to think: dentist, throbbing tooth, get it over with quick. Eyes fixed on hers, he marched across the room, picked her up like a sack of chaff and tossed her over his shoulder.

She wiggled, she kicked, she punched. Against his shoulder he could feel the soft schmoosh of her breasts but he kept on walking. The towel rode up and his hand ended up cupping her bare backside, but he gritted his teeth and didn’t stop until he’d dumped her inside the best of the guest bedrooms. Too bad if Rafe was using it, he was too damn mad to care. “This is your room and when we do it, we do it here. When are you fertile?”

“You did the sums before.”

So he did them again, counting off the days on his fingers. “Next weekend.”

“How many times?”

He’d turned to leave, had actually taken his first step out into the corridor, but her question stilled him. He could feel her eyes boring into the back of his neck, could feel their dark heat and fierce indignation.

“How many times are we doing it?” she asked again. “The book I read says a woman can conceive if she has intercourse any time up to five days before ovulation and twenty-four hours afterward. Conception isn’t an exact science.”

“I’m well aware of that.” He turned and pinned her in place with an uncompromising look. “The article I read stated the optimum time as two days before and the day of ovulation. And you told me you’re a twenty-eight-day clock.”

“You’re choosing three days of unregulated, unprotected, whenever-you-feel-like-it, however-you-want-it sex over six? Yeesh, Tomas, you’re the only man I know who’d prefer that option!”

“Not whenever, however. Once a night, missionary position, in your bed.” The exasperated sound she choked out turned his voice even colder while heat of every hue pumped through his blood. “This isn’t personal preference. This is to preserve sperm count and let gravity do its bit.”

“That’s such an old wives’ tale!”

“I have a housekeeper,” he continued coldly, ignoring her interjection, “and a mother who visits regularly. I don’t want either to know about this unless there’s a positive result to tell. Either way, they’ll both be here long after you’ve gone.”

The expression in her eyes turned from willful to stunned in one blink of her long, dark lashes. Yeah, what he’d said was harsh but he wouldn’t back down. If you gave Angie an inch, she always took a hundred miles. If he gave her access to his bed, she would keep on chipping away, wanting more and more of a life he had no intention of sharing, with her or anyone.

He watched her nostrils flare as she sucked in a breath, saw a grim determination replace the hurt in her eyes. “So, if this is going to be all clandestine, how will I know when to lie on my back and expect you?”

Tomas clenched his jaw. “You’ll know.”

“How is that?” she cocked her head on the side, all fake sweet-voiced curiosity. “Will there be some secret code?”

“You’ll know when I turn up in your bed.”

Angie hated everything about that hurtful snarky exchange, but she did accept his edict on separate bedrooms. It was his home, after all, and she had arrived uninvited. In retrospect, that hadn’t been such a great idea. And if she thought he’d been hostile with her…

Five days later her body still did a kind of internal shudder and wince remembering the unpleasantness of their dinner with Rafe that night.

All her fault.

She should have called and let Tomas know she wasn’t pregnant. She should have allowed him—not his brother—a say in what transpired next. Backing a stubborn man into the proverbial corner was not the way to win his cooperation. Lord knows, she came from a household steeped in testosterone. She should have known better.

She should have left his bedroom with better grace and some dignity, too. She shouldn’t have let him light a match to her temper. And she definitely should not have kept pushing and provoking until he ground out that line about after-she’d-gone. Mostly she wasn’t one to dwell on should-haves and most of that list she’d put well behind her by Thursday—all except the leaving thing and that bothered her deeply.

If he wouldn’t let her stay, then how could she prove herself and her love? If he was never home and their paths crossed as rarely as they’d done in the past five days, then how could he see that she’d fitted happily back into station life?

She didn’t assume he was avoiding her. It was a hectic time with mustering and branding and weaning and trucking out stock for sale and fattening. Tomas was responsible for managing a hundred thousand head of cattle and fifty employees. He was a busy man. So busy that he’d neglected to tell her he was flying out on a three-day visit to the company’s eastern feed-lots.

She simmered and seethed inside for a good twenty-four hours, but what could she do? She could prepare for his return, that’s what. She could make sure he did notice her seamless integration into his home and station life, and she could do so without another sharp-worded confrontation.

A few casual questions to a head stockman and she had an estimated time for the boss’s return. She prepared dinner herself and chose the perfect wine accompaniment from Chas’s extensive cellar. She soaked for a good hour in the honey and cinnamon bath-milk she’d bought especially for the trip—the same one she’d used in the hotel that night. “For you, Tomas,” she stated with some defiance as she poured a liberal dose into the tub. “Same as all the pretty underwear.”

Oh, and she gave the housekeeping staff the night off.

Tonight was the first of her three nights with Tomas, and she intended on making the most of it.

Despite the good food, the wine and the satin she’d chosen to wear next to her bath-softened skin, Angie didn’t go for a full-out seduction scene. In the interests of subtlety—and not scaring him off—she scuttled the candles and flowers, and left the stereo turned off. That would help, too, with hearing his incoming plane.

Ready early, she couldn’t stand still. She fussed over the lasagna and greens and bread rolls she’d baked earlier. She applied a third coat of Nude Shimmy polish and wandered restlessly around the gardens while her nails dried and the sun clocked off for the day. She even considered straightening her hair, just to fill some time.

But when she looked into the mirror at the mass of curls, she remembered Tomas saying he didn’t like sleek. She set down the straightening tool and smiled slowly. “Oh, yeah. I rather like it wild, too.”

Except she wasn’t thinking about her hair.

She huffed out a breath, hot with memories and keen with anticipation, and eyed her reflection in the mirror. She looked like a woman thinking about sex. Heat traced the line of her cheekbones and glowed dark in her eyes. And when she stood up and braced her shoulders, she felt the sweet tug of arousal in her breasts and satin panties.

Perhaps she should really surprise him and take them off. Perhaps she would after she’d fortified her bravery with a glass of merlot.

Yes, she needed a glass of wine. And to check the meal one more time. She straightened the neckline of her white gypsy top, smoothed the sitting-down wrinkles from her jeans, and set off for the kitchen at the opposite end of the house. With every step she could feel the friction of her clothes against each sensitive peak and fold of her body. Perhaps she should take everything off and really surprise him…although that would take a lot more than one glass of bravado!

Smiling at herself, she pushed through the kitchen door and came to a stunned standstill.

Tomas was home.

Right there in the middle of the kitchen, actually, although he hadn’t yet noticed her arrival. He stood in profile, a tall, dark, dusty hunk with a long-neck bottle in his hand. She watched his head tilt back as he raised the beer to his lips. Watched the movement of his throat as he drank…and she drank in his almost sybaritic enjoyment of that first long, slow pull from the cold bottle.

In that moment he wasn’t Tomas Carlisle, heir apparent to Australia’s richest cattle empire. He wasn’t any “Prince of the Outback.” He was just an ordinary cowboy at the end of a hellishly long working day.

A quiver of pure desire slid through her body, from the tingling in her scalp all the way to the freshly painted tips of her toes. She wanted to walk right up and kiss him on his drink-cooled lips and breathe the commingled scents of horse and leather and Kameruka dust on his skin. But more even than the physical, she longed to share dinner without sniping and harsh words. She wanted to let the evening flow naturally all the way to the moment when they stood in unison and walked hand in hand to bed.

Was that too much to ask?

Suddenly the hand holding the bottle stilled halfway back down from his mouth, and Angie had enough time to answer her own question—yes, definitely too much— before his head turned slowly her way. She could feel the tension in her bones and knew it seeped into the innocent kitchen air. And all she could think to say was, “You’re home.”

He grunted—possibly an acknowledgment, possibly a commentary on the intelligence of her opening remark.

“I didn’t hear your plane,” she continued, with a sweeping gesture toward the roof.

“I’m not surprised.”

Angie frowned. She’d turned off the music so she wouldn’t miss his arrival. “What do you mean?”

“You were in the bath.”

What? That was hours ago. And how did he know she—

“You wouldn’t have heard me above the music.”

Holy Henry, he must have been in the house earlier. How could she not have known? Angie blanched, remembering how she’d belted out whatever lyrics she knew and improvised the rest. “Why didn’t you say something?” she asked on a note of dismay.

“I only came in to change.”

And since he wasn’t laughing or looking horrified, perhaps he hadn’t heard her singing. Relaxing a smidge, she now realized the significance of her first impression. He wasn’t dressed for a business trip but for get-down-and-dirty cattle work, because he’d returned early and come to the house to change. Her gaze slid over his dusty blue Western shirt and lingered on the Wranglers he wore so well.

“What’s going on, Angie?” he asked with a hint of suspicion. And when her gaze flew back to his face she caught him giving her a similar once-over. “Where is everyone?”

“I gave Manny—” who’d been rostered for kitchen duty “—the night off.”

“Why?”

“I thought it would be easier, given you want to keep this just between us.”

He’d started to lift his beer again, but hesitated as the knowledge of what that meant arced between them, hot and sultry and heavy as a summer’s night. At least that’s how Angie’s body felt. Without breaking eye contact he took another long drink, another long swallow. “Is that why you’re all dressed up?”

She almost laughed out loud, remembering how many times she’d changed her clothes in an attempt to dress down. But, still, she liked that he knew she’d made an effort. She wasn’t afraid of letting him know she wanted him.

Slowly she crossed the kitchen floor, closing down the space between them, never losing that hot eye-to-eye connection. She ached to kiss him, to hold him, to have him right here and now. But beyond the surface of his blue-heat eyes she detected a flicker of wariness that held her back. Instead of reaching for the man, she reached for his beer and lifted it to her lips.

As she drank she watched him swallow, and desire beat so hard in her veins she swore she could feel its echo in every cell of her body.

“You’re why I gave Manny the night off and you’re why I’m wearing satin underwear,” she said huskily. “But first you’re having a shower, and then we’re having dinner. I don’t know about you, but I’m starving.”

While he showered Tomas tried to work up a decent sense of outrage. Without asking she’d used his bathroom again. She’d given his staff the night off. He’d let her know, in plain language, how this would happen and she’d gone ahead and set up a seduction scene.

But it was hard to maintain rage in a body tight and hot with anticipation. She’s waiting out there alone, it throbbed, for you. She’s wearing satin underwear, it pulsed, for you. She’s starving, it thundered, for you.

Despite the insistent ache of arousal he forced himself to dress unhurriedly, to arrive slowly, to sit and eat and talk. The wine helped. After one glass he realized he wasn’t going to ignite every time their eyes met in an awkward conversational lapse, or each time his gaze was drawn to the erotic caress of her thumb over the rim of her wineglass.

It only felt that way.

He shifted in his chair, surreptitiously rearranging that insistent ache of arousal. He was a sad case. There she was, chatting away about the innocuous and everyday, oblivious to the effect of her unconscious glassware fondling. Lucky he’d worn roomy chinos because sitting down in jeans, in his condition, would have been murder.

“Hello?”

He looked up to find her waving her hands to attract his attention.

“You didn’t hear a word of that, did you?”

“I was—” Tomas frowned “—thinking.”

“Looks serious.”

Yeah, deadly.

She eyed him a second. “About the trip you made to Queensland? Is there a problem?”

His pulse kicked up a notch as he met her eyes across the table and imagined telling her his real problem. I’ve been at least half-hard ever since I hauled your naked backside into your bedroom five nights ago. The waiting’s killing me, Angie. Let’s skip the pretense and—

“Because I’m all ears. If you need to talk it through.”

Abruptly she put down her cutlery and pushed her plate away, and the decisiveness of her action startled the hor-

mone haze from his mind. She thought he was distracted by cattle problems. He was dying for action, and she wanted to talk.

Shaking his head in disbelief, he pushed his plate away, too. “There’s no problem with the business.”

“Good.” She smiled, and damn her, started to play with her glass again. “Yesterday I read that feature article in The Cattleman, about how you’re now considered the innovator, the market leader. It seems you’ve made a lot of changes since you took over managing the northern stations.”

“Necessary changes.”

“And production has increased fifteen percent.”

“We’ve had some good seasons.”

“And good management.”

Half distracted by the play of her pale-tipped fingers on her wineglass, he didn’t answer. Idly he wondered where she was going with this, but mostly he didn’t feel any need to answer. She was right. Good management had increased Carlisle’s productivity.

“Can I ask you something…about the will clause?”

The idle part of his brain clicked to full alert, driving the lingering heat of arousal from his synapses. Not because of the question, but the hint of non-Angie guardedness in her delivery. Tension straightened his spine as he made a go-ahead gesture.

“Here’s the way I understand it—correct me if I’m wrong. If you fail to produce this baby between the three of you, you won’t inherit ownership of Kameruka Downs or any of the other cattle stations. The company would keep ownership and the board overall control?”

Tomas nodded. Correct so far.

“So, I can’t see the board replacing you as manager or kicking you out of your home, not when you’re making the company money hand over fist.”

“It’s not the same as ownership. That’s what I’ve worked toward, always.” He met her eyes across the table. “More than ever the past couple of years.”

“Because of Brooke?”

Yes, because he no longer had Brooke. What else did he have to work toward, to strive for, if not this place?

“Do you want to talk about it?” she asked, and the husky catch to her voice brought his gaze rocketing back to hers. To the undisguised light of emotion in her eyes. “Do you want to talk about—”

“No, I don’t,” he said curtly.

“Fair enough. That’s your prerogative. But any time you change your mind…”

He didn’t bother responding. He didn’t want to talk about Brooke and he didn’t want to debate why. And he sure as hell didn’t need her watching him with those serious, solemn eyes that made him want to run a mile…and made him want to lash out at everything wrong about what happened with Brooke. Everything he wouldn’t let happen again.

The silence stretched between them another tense minute before he saw her start to stack their plates and set them aside. Her hands with their pale glossy nails spread on the table, providing leverage as she stood. And he looked up to find her watching him, those serious, solemn eyes filled with all kinds of promises of temptation and salvation as she extended her hand toward him.

“Let’s go to bed.”

Five minutes ago he would have taken that hand and invitation and they probably wouldn’t have made it to any bedroom. But now…No, he couldn’t touch her. Not in this mood, not with so much emotion and despair and desperate need roiling in his gut.

He couldn’t need her like that—he wouldn’t allow himself.

“I have to work on the books,” he said.

“Okay. I’ll pack the dishwasher then I’ll come help you.”

“No, Angie. You can’t help me.”

She’d started to gather up the dishes, but paused, her eyes rising slowly to lock on his. “I thought I already was.”

“In one way. That’s all.”

The message hummed between them and for several taut, electric seconds he didn’t know that she would accept it. “I don’t want to fight about this,” he said softly. “I don’t want to fight with you, Angie.”

“Oh, me, either,” she said in a breathy rush. “Those things we said to each other the night I got here—I don’t want it to be like that between us. Let me help you, Tomas.”

He set his jaw, his resolve, the steel in his heart and his eyes. “Don’t ask for what I can’t give.”

Emotion shimmered in the fathomless depths of her eyes, but she nodded and mouthed one word. Okay. With careful hands she gathered up the pile of dishes, and as she walked from the room he heard one tiny clatter of crockery, as if her hands trembled and then regrouped. At the door, she hesitated and turned. “Will I see you later?”

Tomas nodded. Later when this maelstrom of emotions stopped whipping through his body, when he’d controlled the persistent pounding need to stop her leaving and yell, yes, I want to talk. I want to talk if it eases the pain and the guilt and this bitter knowledge that I could have done better. That I failed my wife.

“Later,” he said hoarsely. “Yes.”

Nine

Two hours, Tomas told himself, and to prove he was in control of mind and body and emotions he stretched it to two hours twenty. Then he came to her room and quietly closed the door behind him. Head raised and nostrils flared, he waited for his eyes to adjust to the midnight dark.

It wasn’t like night in the city. This was outback dark, an intense blackness that amplified the other senses to an acute pitch. He could smell the warm female scent of her body. Could hear the quick in-out whisper of her breathing.

Was she awake? Lying in the dark waiting? Craving the intense pleasure of that first skin to skin contact?

He shed his clothes quickly, felt the night air stroke him like a lover’s warm sigh. His skin was as hot and tight as a steer hide stretched to dry in the summer sun. As he stripped off his underwear the fleeting brush of his hand caused his erection to jerk with need.

He sucked in a tense breath, half afraid of the edginess to this lust. Half afraid that the edges were keened with loneliness and need and yearning for more than hot bodies meeting in the darkness. The distant call of a night bird echoed in the dark, a high haunting two-note summons to its mate. Closer he heard the soft stirring of sheets, and his sex quickened in instant response. Its call to mate.

He started toward the bed, and despite the darkness he could make out the slow stretch of her arms above her head. As he stopped by the bed she made a throaty sound of welcome. “You’re here.”

“I thought you’d be asleep.”

She shifted again, rolling onto her side and pushing aside the bedclothes. “I was waiting for you.”

He sat on the edge of the mattress and her hand glided over his back, a whisper of sensation that reverberated through his body and pulsed in his blood and his sex. So did her scent—the familiar sweet fragrance of skin steeped in honey and cinnamon milk. The same as the day she’d arrived. The same as in Sydney when he’d yearned to taste her.

Tonight he would.

Then it wouldn’t matter if he lasted or not, if first he gave her pleasure.

“Was there really paperwork?” she asked as he settled beside her.

He didn’t answer, except to groan a deep thankful note as her arms and her legs wrapped around to draw him flush with her body. He didn’t answer because he forgot the question when she rocked against him, breast to chest, groin to groin, soft to hard. Unerringly he found her lips in the dark and kissed her deeply, a long, wet play of tongues and mouths and throaty murmurings that seemed to hang suspended in the heavy curtain of night. He didn’t close his eyes. He didn’t have to hide in the darkness, didn’t have to fear what he might see in her eyes or what she might learn from his.

Slowly he kissed his way down her body, drinking in the soft taste of her skin and the husky rasp of her breathing and the strong arch of her back when he took each nipple into his mouth. When he palmed the curve of her belly and slid lower to part her thighs, she sucked in a ragged breath.

“You don’t have to do that.”

“Yeah, I do.”

And he did. With tongue and lips, with a hunger long repressed, and when she tensed and cried out, when he felt her press down hard and start to come, he knew he had to be there. Now.

“Ready?” he asked, and for answer she arched her back and welcomed him inside with a low guttural sound that echoed through his chest and gut, all the way to the organ that drove down hard inside her.

Staggered by the power of his pleasure, he held himself still and rigid as he fought the urgent desire to keep on driving to an end. He was deep, all the way inside her climaxing body and her legs had wrapped around him, holding him tight against her.

“I’m always ready for you.”

God, but that undid him. The thickness of her turned-on voice, the taste of her on his lips, the intensity he felt in her stillness as she watched him start to move. The way she rose to meet the drive of his body, thrust for thrust, flesh meeting flesh. The gentle caress of her fingers on his face and throat, and the not-so-gentle bite of her teeth when she came again without any warning. Against the heat of his skin, where chest and breast met and brushed and drove into hard contact again, he felt the cool brush of her necklace and his fingers twined around the chain and held on while the beast of desire swallowed him whole.

Head back, he took the last uncontrollable plunge and roared over the edge into completion.

Somehow Tomas managed to rouse himself before the lure of taking Angie again or letting her sleep in his arms took hold. And when he sat on the side of her bed and rubbed a hand over his face to clear the last traces of temptation from his consciousness, he realized that he held her A-letter necklace in his hand. In the last minutes of that wild ride he must have gripped her chain so hard that he broke a link.

He rubbed his thumb over the tiny charm and put it down on the bedside table. A for aftermath, afterward, awkward. The time to leave before he got comfortable in the lush folds of her sated body. A, he thought as he scooped up his clothes and retreated to his own bed, for another night, another time, another chance at conception.

Two more times and that was it. Done.

Then she was going home.

Angie heard the drone of a plane coming in from the west and her heart banked and rolled. In fact her whole body revved to instant Tomas-is-home, here-look-at-me! attention a good thirty seconds before logic kicked in. He hadn’t said anything about flying anywhere…but then that didn’t mean anything…more often than not he didn’t say…and with so much acreage to get around, flying was an everyday feature of station life.

But she couldn’t deny the punchy anticipation low in her stomach, the heaviness in her breasts, the tightness of her nipples. A little early, but Tomas was definitely home…almost. She shoved the last of the flowers she was arranging—until now, artfully—into the table centerpiece and dashed for the bathroom. No time for soaking in milky baths tonight. If he drove straight from the airstrip, no stops in-between, she had a maximum of ten minutes.

Hurry, hurry, hurry.

Shedding clothes along the way, she hit the shower running…then ducked straight back out for a shower-cap. No time for drying hair—she needed every precious minute for essentials. The red wine should be opened to breathe. Vegetables peeled. Cream whipped. For a wet, soapy second she rued letting the staff off early, again, so she could savor every detail of preparing and serving this special dinner.

An intense wave of nervous tension gripped her body. Ovulation day, she’d joked at breakfast this morning. I’ll make a celebratory dinner. Don’t be late.

It was a measure of the progress they’d made in twenty-four hours that she could joke about such a thing, even if neither of them had laughed. Even if his eyes had darkened and flared with unnamed emotion as they fastened on hers across the breakfast table.

Yes, they’d eaten breakfast together. The previous night they’d eaten dinner together, too, and he’d relaxed a tiny bit more, talking, smiling, even laughing at one of her anecdotes about Stink, the mechanic. For the second consecutive night he refused her offer to help with whatever office-work compelled his devotion, and she went to bed alone.

Around midnight he came to her room and made love with the same fierce power as the night before. Just once, damn him, and again he’d left her in the cooling sheets of her bed, hoping and wishing and praying that the next night might be different.

Well, Angie, the next night is about to begin.

Angie held her face tilted up for a last cool rinse and switched off the taps. Last night, last chance. She’d joked about this dinner but underneath, deep inside where her stomach was knotted with trepidation, she’d fastened her determination to make it special. A lot had changed in twenty-four hours, but not her conviction.

What had transpired between them in her bed the last two nights was too real, too huge, too intense, to cast aside as a purely physical joining. So many times she’d had to bite her tongue—or his shoulder—to stop herself blurting out what filled her heart. She’d curbed her natural inclination to tell it all, to lay it on the line, to charge ahead too fast.

She’d reined herself in and she would continue to do so.

Even when he asked her to go back to Sydney until she knew the result of this round of baby-sex—which she knew he would, probably tonight—she would keep it together. While preparing dinner, she’d also prepared her argument for staying and coached herself on delivering it with cool, direct logic.

If she failed, if he wouldn’t listen to her reasoning, then at least she would get to experience something approximating a date. Tonight she wouldn’t allow him to retreat to his work. Tonight they would walk hand in hand to bed. Tonight the light stayed on.

He owed her that much.

The dress she’d decided on earlier lay waiting on her bed. She traced one of the bright pink flowers and fingered the silky georgette material in momentary indecision. Too much? Probably, but in that second she heard the solitary bark of Tomas’s heeler a second before the whole kennel joined in. A vehicle was coming.

Swallowing her hesitancy whole, she pulled the dress over her head and wriggled until the satin lining shimmied its way over her hips and down to her knees.

“Hurry, hurry, hurry,” she muttered. And of course the zipper stuck. She left it half-undone to shove her feet into white mules, to grab her brush and drag it through her moisture-messed hair…a task made easier when she remembered to take out her ponytail scrunchie. She slapped on some tinted moisturizer, glossed her lips, traced her eyes with kohl and smudged the lines.

Done!

She sucked in a quick breath…and realized she should be wearing a bra. If this were a real restaurant date, with other people present, she would take the extra minute to find one, to make some effort to disguise the hard jut of her nipples. But there were no other people…just her and Tomas and the fact that she couldn’t think about him without this obvious result. Why hide that truth?

As she rushed to the living end of the house, she struggled to free the stuck zipper and strained her ears for the sound of his vehicle pulling up outside. She wanted to greet him at the door, to smile and say, “Hi, I missed you.” To hand him his beer and, if she caught him really on the hop, surprise him with a kiss.

The canine chorus rose to a second crescendo as she entered the kitchen, then quieted immediately as if in response to a slash of the conductor’s baton. Or a one-word command from their master. In the same instant—perhaps in response to the excited jump of her hand—the zipper released and glided effortlessly all the way to the top. That had to be a good omen, Angie decided.

She collected his beer and walked calmly to the door. Her heart, naturally, raced at a thousand miles an hour. That, she hoped, didn’t show as clearly as her nipples.

Then she heard a vehicle pull up outside and her skin flushed with heat. The ice-cold bottle in her hand was suddenly very enticing. If she rolled it over her forehead, her throat, her breasts…

Tempting, but she didn’t. Instead she drew a deep breath and walked out onto the veranda, lifting a hand to shield her eyes from the rays of the sinking sun. A car door slammed, then a second. Voices? The brief murmur was too far away to identify but it sounded like a brief exchange of words.

Lord, but she hoped the second was one of the mechanics who’d bummed a lift back from the airstrip and not a visitor. She cast a nervous glance downward. Yep, there they were. Both the girls still at full hello-Tomas, boy-are-we-pleased-to-see-you attention.

Okay, she was definitely going back to change. Except that decision had barely formed before the first figure walked into view—no strode into view—and it was not Tomas or any mechanic.

“Maura,” she cried, nipples forgotten in a stunned blast of astonishment and joy. Back from the Killarney muster early and unexpected. And here at the homestead, not her own place.

Maura stopped, luckily, because that gave her a chance to brace herself before Angie hit at full speed. She wrapped her arms around Maura’s reed-thin body and held on for all she was worth until her bubbles of surprised laughter turned to tears.

How did that happen? And why? Angie didn’t burst into tears for no reason. She just…didn’t.

A bit stunned, a lot embarrassed, she pulled back and attempted to gather herself.

“What’s the matter, child?” Maura was frowning, her expression a mixture of confusion and concern. “Why are you crying?”

“I don’t know.” She scrubbed harder at her face. “I think it’s just the surprise of seeing you.”

“Do I look so bad?”

Angie rolled watery eyes. In her youth Maura Carlisle had been a world-renowned model. In her mid-fifties, even her bad days couldn’t hide that beauty. But before Angie could voice that opinion she glimpsed movement beyond Maura and her body stiffened reflexively.

Oh, no. She did not want to be caught crying. She was the strong, outback woman who would sail through the toughest days at his side.

But it wasn’t Tomas who walked into her blurry wet-eyed field of vision, but Rafe. Her eyes widened…so did his, as they took in her dress, the bottle in her hand, the smudged kohl under her eyes.

“You’re crying,” he pointed out.

“I know that.”

And if both Carlisles would stop looking at her so oddly she might be able to get some control over herself. Emotions and hormones and surprises and tears. Holy Henry Moses, she had to get a grip. She sucked in a breath, waved a hand in front of her face, and finally managed to halt the waterworks.

Rafe and his mother were still looking at her oddly.

“Nice dress,” Rafe said.

“Is there a special occasion?” Maura asked. Then she turned on Rafe. “Did you know Angie was here?” Oh, dear. Angie inhaled and wet her lips. “I just—”

“And when did you start drinking beer?”

“It’s, um, not mine, actually.”

“Speaking of which—” amusement, rich and redo-

lent, colored Rafe’s voice “—where is the man of the house?”

She flashed him a warning glance. “I wasn’t expecting you. Either of you.”

“Obviously.”

Maura looked at him narrowly, then back at Angie. “Rafe flew out to visit me at Killarney. I had him bring me straight home when I heard the news.”

Angie stiffened. “What news?”

“Alex has set a wedding date.”

“In two weeks.” Maura’s lips came together in a disapproving line. “Civil vows in Melbourne! Why are they in such a rush? Alex fobbed me off with some cock-and-bull story about their busy lives. Rafe knows something and won’t tell me. Do you know what’s going on?”

Fixed with those straight blue eyes, Angie started to squirm.

Maura didn’t miss that reaction. Her gaze narrowed. “Is Susannah pregnant? Is that what you’re all trying to keep from me? “

“I don’t know,” Angie answered honestly, her gaze sliding away to Rafe’s in silent appeal.

“Oh, for land’s sake, will you two stop treating me like a fool! I know there’s something going on with you all, not just Alex. I’ve been too wrapped up in myself since…” Her eyes sharpened, as if with remembered pain, but she drew a deep breath and continued. “Does this have anything to do with your father’s will?”

Rafe rubbed at the back of his neck. Angie studied the bottle in her hand. Maura clicked her tongue in disapproval.

“I won’t accept that. One of you is going to tell me the whole story and—”

“What story?”

Tomas? They all turned as one, three sets of eyes fixed on the new arrival. Angie felt her stomach drop as if a high-speed elevator had taken off and left her a nanosecond behind. Where had he arrived from? And why couldn’t he have done so five minutes earlier?

His gaze slid from one to the other before settling on Angie. “What’s going on?”

Ten

The dinner didn’t unfold as it had done in Angie’s imagination. While she attempted to stretch a meal-for-two four ways—she shouldn’t have bothered, since no one had much of an appetite—Tomas and Rafe had drawn Maura a pretty thin sketch of the will clause. Angie knew it was sketchy by the questions Maura continued to ask after they’d all sat down for dinner.

They’d discussed Alex and Susannah and their no frills wedding. Maura, who’d given up all pretence of eating, supposed she wouldn’t be able to do a thing to change her eldest son’s mind. Silently Angie sympathized. Tomas was equally stubborn, when he made up his mind. And as for Rafe…

“What are you doing about this clause, Rafferty?”

Uh-oh. Maura used her sons’ full names rarely. The upshot was always trouble. Angie put down her cutlery and started to collect plates—escaping to the kitchen and washing dishes suddenly looked very attractive.

“I’m still considering my options,” Rafe said carefully.

“Of course you are.” Maura’s tone hovered between disgust and anger. “And what about you?” Her gaze speared Tomas. “Please tell me that’s not why Angie’s here.”

The crockery in Angie’s hands rattled its own answer, even after she gripped hard to stop the telltale clatter. She could feel Maura’s eyes on her face, could feel the heat rising from her chest through her throat and into her cheeks. First tears and now she was blushing. What could she possibly do for a grand finale?

She knew what she wanted to do. She wanted to look this woman she loved like a mother right in the eye and tell her the truth. But she couldn’t; she’d promised Tomas. Seated beside him at the table she could feel his tension even though he answered Maura’s question with enviable composure. “I’ll talk to you later, Mau. After we’ve—”

“Don’t be ridiculous. We all know what’s going on.” Maura looked from one to the other, daring them to disagree. “Don’t we?”

“It’s no one’s business but mine and Angie’s. I’m not discussing it at this table.”

For a long second the silence was chillingly complete, then Maura exhaled through her nose in a sound of pure exasperation. “If I’m reading your lack of denial and outrage correctly, you two are sleeping together to make a baby. Because Charles thinks—thought—he could make up for something that happened twenty-six years ago.”

Angie put the stack of plates down with a loud clatter. Is that why Charles added this clause? To replace the baby his wife lost at childbirth? To make up for the devastation of that loss?

“We don’t know that,” Rafe said.

“No one knows why he attached that clause,” Tomas added.

“I do,” Maura said with more conviction than either of her sons. “I always wanted more children but after Cathy died, I couldn’t, physically or mentally. Charles vowed he would make that up to me, that he’d make me happy again.”

She shook her head slowly, sadly, and for the first time that night tears misted her vivid blue eyes. She hadn’t been happy in a long, long time, Angie knew, but usually she maintained a stoic facade.

“You, child—” Maura pointed across the table at Angie. “You made me happy when you came to live here. You were such a wild, joyous little thing. So full of life and so eager to give these boys a kick in their arrogance.”

“It was an easy target.”

Maura’s smile couldn’t disguise the lingering sadness in her eyes. “And now you’re making a baby with my son. Have you planned a wedding I know nothing about, too?”

“We’re not getting married,” Tomas answered, and his voice was about as tight as the constriction in Angie’s chest.

“Even if a baby comes of this?”

“That’s right.”

Maura stared at her son a second longer, then shifted her attention one place to the left. “And is that all right with you, Angie?”

“Tomas was very straight with me,” she said carefully, “about not wanting to marry again. I offered to have this baby, regardless.”

Maura nodded once, accepting that answer even though she obviously didn’t like it. Her disapproval and disappointment fisted hard around Angie’s heart and squeezed with all its might. She longed to blurt out the truth, to say she wanted the marriage, the together, the forever, and she would probably keep on wanting it until the day she died. If she couldn’t change the stubborn man’s mind in the meantime.

“I’m not going to tell you how to live your life, Angie, that’s not my place. But you know I was a single mother, twice over. I was lucky Charles came along and gave us all his love and this life and a complete family. I know which option I preferred, and that’s all I have to say to you.”

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