Outback Bachelor / The Cattleman's Adopted Family. Margaret Way

all common sense.

      “Do you dream of me?” he asked abruptly.

      It took her breath.

      “I dream of you,” he said, lying back on the rough grey blanket and staring up at the sky.

      She looked down at his dark, brooding face. “If we weren’t who we are, would you marry me?” How absurd could she get? She waited. He didn’t speak so she answered her own question. “I think not.” All these years wasted. Only they were unforgettable years. She would remember them to her last breath.

      “Who are we exactly?” Abruptly he pulled her down to him in one swift, fluid motion.

      She allowed him to do it even when she knew she could ill afford the least sign of surrender. To prove it, high emotion kicked in in a heartbeat. Keefe’s sexual magnetism was unquestioned, and so proprietorial. He knew he owned her. That alone aroused a certain female hostility. Being owned was wrong. “Are you saying there are secrets, Keefe?” She turned on her side to challenge him. They were so close, the pain was scarcely to be borne. Whatever had happened between them, they could never truly lose the old unifying bond. In his own way he needed her. But never as much as she needed him. There was nothing really normal about their relationship, she thought.

      Again he didn’t speak. Groaning with frustration, she flung her arm across his hard, muscled chest, feeling the rhythmic thud of his heart beneath her hand. Sometimes she thought she would simply expire with the pain of loving Keefe, when there seemed to be no resolution to the matter. It was here, almost this very spot, where he had first made love to her. Taken her virginity. Captured her heart. Held it so fast he had denied her the freedom to enjoy another lover for a long time. Even then, those few relationships had never taken real shape. There was no one like Keefe. The way he made love to her. The things he did. The things he said. It was magic and music. Unforgettable.

      “Secrets, yes,” he muttered. With a strong arm he fitted her body to him, as though her proximity gave him all the comfort this world could offer. “But does every secret need to be told?”

      Her vulnerable flesh was pulsing with desire, causing deep knife-like sensations in her groin. He hadn’t asked a rhetorical question. He needed an answer. “You’re saying not every secret needs to be exposed to the light? Are you worried I’m family, Keefe?” Finally she threw her hidden anxieties into the ring.

      “Isn’t that the fear locked away in your own Pandora’s box?” he countered, a correspondingly sharp note in his voice. “Let it out and who knows what will happen? Family!” he groaned. “There’s nothing family about the way I feel about you.”

      Such an admission, yet she had a fierce desire to lash out at him. “Feel, certainly. Never act on those feelings. They could be taboo.” Why not hurt him as he always managed to hurt her? “Just give me a simple answer. What do you feel?” She stared at him with her black-fringed radiant blue eyes.

      He brushed the question aside as if she had wasted her breath asking it. “Is that some kind of a joke? Neither of us can let go of the other. More to the point, I need to ask, is it a safe time for you?” There was a great urgency in him she couldn’t fail to miss.

      “Safe?” She considered that with a brittle laugh. “No time is safe with you.” She didn’t think she could withstand the heat of his scrutiny. “Oh, Keefe!” Her breast rose and fell with her deep troubled sigh. Impossible to sustain the illusion she was her own woman. She was a woman who couldn’t let go. Worse, he wouldn’t let her go.

      He shifted position, half pinning her beneath his powerful body but withholding most of his weight. “I want to make love to you. Tell me you’ll let me?” The very first sight of her at the airport had triggered a desperate need in him for the mind-bending pleasure of knowing her body again. He needed her to lessen the pain of this dreadful chaotic day. Make it bearable.

      “It’s always what you want,” she said. “Shades of the old droit de seigneur!” Tears sparkled in her eyes.

      “Never heard of it,” he darkly mocked, lifting skeins of her golden hair then letting them slide through his fingers. “I said, only if you want it.”

      “What a concession, Keefe!” Hostility was coming off her like steam. She knew it had its genesis in status. His. Hers. Though successive generations were easing up on the status war. Once it would have been considered a disgrace for the scion of a great pastoral family to become involved with the daughter of a lowly employee. But she was an educated woman living in the twenty-first century. She could take her place anywhere. Except, it seemed, at Djinjara.

      “Do I want it?” She considered his question bleakly. With a tremendous effort of will she exerted enough strength to break free of him. High time she made it perfectly plain she was her own woman. “Do you really believe I’m happy to think of myself as a woman possessed?” A high flush of colour had come to her cheeks.

      “Possessed and possessing,” he answered bluntly. His hand, with a life of its own, moved up to caress her breast, shaping its contours within his palm, his thumb teasing the berry-ripe nipple. “I can feel your heart racing. It beats for me.”

      The truth of it cut her to the bone. One had an intellectual life. And one had an emotional life. Sometimes the two were at war. “So arrogant!” she lamented. “I exist only to worship at your feet?” Deliberately she removed his hand from her breast. She knew about love. She knew about total seduction. He had long since mastered the art.

      “Maybe I am arrogant,” he agreed flatly. “Maybe that’s what you do to me, Skye.”

      He resumed his position, in all probability waiting for her to come round. Instead, she sat rigid with self-control, watching an eagle hawk swoop on its prey. “Are you ever going to free me, Keefe?” she asked eventually. “Or are you just holding onto me until you find someone else?”

      He didn’t appear to be listening to her. As though what she was saying made no sense to him. “This is almost the precise spot where I first made love to you,” he said in a quiet, serious voice, an element of—was it regret?—in his tone.

      “The heir to Djinjara having sex with the young daughter of a station employee.”

      Again he didn’t choose to hear her. “The world was perfect that day. You made me feel like a titan. Capable of taking on the world. Sweet, funny little Skye with her ceaseless questions grown into a beautiful woman.”

      “You always took the time to answer those questions.”

      “They were always so intelligent. You had a great thirst for knowledge.”

      Her released breath had a soft, shaken sound. “You were so kind to me in those days. Then overnight you drew back. You kept your distance.”

      His handsome features tightened. “What would you have had me do? Keeping a distance between us was the only course open to me.”

      “Of course.” There was brittle acceptance in her tone. “Keefe McGovern and Skye McCory. What a no-no! That was never going to work.” Her gaze went beyond him. “It’s going to storm.”

      He didn’t move. “Right this minute I don’t care if we’re heading for Armageddon. I want to crush you. You won’t let me. I want to take every little particle of you into me.”

      “That would seem to be our misfortune,” she said with the greatest irony.

      “I call it destiny.” Abruptly he sat up. “I’ve missed you so much, Skye. You were supposed to come in August.”

      To be here with him, remote from everyone and everything, and hold herself aloof was an excruciating test of her resolve. “And sow more discord?” she challenged. ‘No, Keefe, I couldn’t. What was the point? Besides, you might have found yourself a fiancée by then.”

      His expression hardened. “Be damned to that! Haven’t you forgotten something?”