Australian Outback Kings / The Cattle King's Mistress / The Playboy King's Wife / The Pleasure King's Bride (15 page)

“One of the things we learn in the outback is always seize the day,” he answered good-humouredly. “And when a woman like Miranda comes along, a man would be a fool not to.”

Heat bloomed in her cheeks. She rolled her eyes at Nathan, not knowing where else to look. It amused the guests who were obviously enjoying his very open confidences.

“My brother, Tommy, will be here in the morning to manage you through the rest of the weekend,” he went on. “Staff will be standing by to see you off on your activities tomorrow. Is there anything you need to check with Miranda before I sweep her away with me?”

The inquiry brought only jovial remarks.

“We're all set. Best of luck to you, Nathan!”

“Yo! We've made a note of everything. Got to say you two look well-matched.”

“No problem for us. Don't let him steam-roller you, Miranda.”

“Huh! Firsthand knowledge sounds good to me!”

“I would seize the night if I were you, Miranda,” Celine said archly.

Everyone laughed.

Except Bobby, who remained silent. Miranda didn't look at him, but she was extremely conscious of his presence and his lack of response. This performance by Nathan was for
his
benefit. She hoped it was having the right effect, whatever that was supposed to be.

Marry!

Nathan couldn't mean it. Why go so far?
What had Bobby said to him?

“Then we'll say goodnight to you. Enjoy yourselves.” Nathan rolled on, saluting them with one hand and digging the fingers of the other into her hip to prompt her into appropriate speech.

“Have a great time, all of you!” she rushed out. “And thank you for your good advice. It's a bit hard to catch one's breath around Nathan.”

It left them laughing.

They didn't know how true it was.

All the way out to his Land Cruiser, Miranda was in a ferment over his words and actions. His arm remained lodged around her waist, and she could feel his determination to prevent any backward sliding from his stated plan. It wasn't desire for her company driving him. He had taken control and was relentlessly pushing through what he considered had to be done.

He opened the front passenger door and half-lifted her into the high seat. Her bag was stowed on the bench seat behind her. There was no time wasted in putting himself behind the steering wheel and getting the Land Cruiser into motion. His face was grim as they sped away from the resort homestead, and Miranda had to take a very deep breath to combat the throat-strangling tension he emitted.

“What did Bobby Hewson say to you?”

Jaw-clenching silence.

Her heart cramped at this evidence of damage done, but she could not let the issue rest any longer. “This is
later
, Nathan. I'm entitled to know.”

“He was surprised you had been hired for such a position of trust without a thorough investigation into your background,” he answered, his voice grating out the words.

Miranda clenched her hands at the implication she could not be trusted. “In all my working life, I have never once been considered unreliable. Your mother saw my references,” she shot at him.

“He proceeded to tell me
your
mother was little better than a whore, a kept mistress who'd serviced several married men, one of whom had fathered you. She'd also been an alcoholic who eventually drank herself to death.”

The stark facts of her mother's life sounded ghastly, stripped as they were of any mitigating circumstances or sympathetic understanding. Miranda felt sick, remembering how Bobby had wanted to know more about her life and had been sweetly comforting when she had confided the truth. But she had never, never used such brutal terms in speaking of her mother, and she had wept over the sadness of it all…the initial deceit of a married lover who had left her alone and pregnant, the inability to cope and the desperate drowning of that inability in alcohol.

She closed her eyes, savagely berating herself for having revealed such deeply personal matters to a man who had no compunction in using them against her. Pillow-talk. Intimacy she had believed was precious to both of them. Now this malicious betrayal of it.

“Did he tell you I was bent the same way?” she asked dully.

“He said you knew how to work the sexual angles to your advantage, that he himself had been pleasured by you in years gone by, and he wouldn't put it past you to fleece any male guest who fancied you.”

Humiliation burned her soul. “It's not true,” she whispered. “I've never…
sold
myself. He's saying these things because he thought he could buy me and I wouldn't go along with it.”

“You don't have to defend yourself to me, Miranda. I don't enjoy repeating this muck-raking. It was all I could do, not to smash his face in.”

Relief poured some soothing balm on her wounds. At least Nathan believed she was being slandered. In fact, the sheer savagery in his voice spurred the courage to open her eyes and really look at him. His face was taut with barely suppressed anger. His knuckles gleamed almost white where he was gripping the steering wheel.

“You had to be taken out of there,” he said with biting conviction. “He would have used you to create a nasty situation. He was setting up for it. Without you as a flesh-and-blood focus, he loses his teeth. In moving you onto my ground, there's no way he can get at you.”

Miranda sighed, understanding his tactics and grateful for being spared Bobby's treacherous company, but suspecting frustration would only drive the slandering further. “It won't stop him telling lies about me, Nathan. In fact, your suggestion of marriage will probably fuel his claim of my playing the sexual angles for profit.”

“No. It reinforces how serious my threat was to him.”

“Threat?” The idea startled her. Then she remembered the hard, ruthless cast of his face when he had answered Bobby at the dinner table. “What did you threaten him with?” she asked, unable to think of anything that would hurt a Hewson.

“I told him if I heard so much as another word breathed against you, I would set about wrecking his marriage and the Hewson-Parmentier merger with every bit of armament at my disposal.”

Shock pummelled her. “But how could you do it?”

“Through his wife.”

“You would hurt her?”

“Against him I would use anything.” He slanted her a hard, cynical look. “Don't be wasting your sympathy on the sultry Celine…a new bride, fancying a lustful dalliance with me. Hardly an expression of true love for her husband.”

It was all very well to criticise the morality of others, but if Nathan had been encouraging Celine, was he any better? Feeling very much at odds with this tactic, Miranda recalled his reaction to her own supposed position of mistress to a married man. “You told me adultery wasn't your scene,” she tersely reminded him.

“It's not,” he replied without hesitation, shooting her a sardonic look as he added, “but neither of them know that. I'm bluffing, Miranda, and a bluff only succeeds if it is credible.”

“Do you think it's credible…talking about marrying me?”

“There wasn't a person around that table who didn't believe me,” he said with arrogant confidence.

A bluff…Miranda closed her eyes again, a dull weariness settling through her. Right now it was all too much…Bobby's mean and malevolent assault on her reputation, Nathan's moves to counter it. Though, of course, he did have to counter it—Tommy, as well—or the slurs on her character could very well taint the good name of the resort, most especially with the wealthy guests who invariably passed on good or bad word of mouth to their friends.

“You'd better warn Tommy that you talked about marrying me,” she said tiredly. “The guests might bring it up with him.”

“I've told him. He'll play along.”

“They might chat with others on the resort, too. The guides…Sam…”

“A pleasant piece of gossip doesn't matter. And I made it clear it was me pursuing you, Miranda, not the other way around,” he added drily.

“And eventually I'm to decide not to marry you.”

He expelled a long breath. “As I've said before, most women wouldn't choose my kind of life.”

“Is that what happened with Susan?”

The words slipped out, probably because she was too stressed to monitor what she said, though she didn't regret the intrusion into his private background, justifying it on the grounds that he knew all of hers now. Why not get the truth out in the open? Then maybe she could get a fix on where she actually stood with Nathan, instead of feeling as though she was caught in another web of deceit.

“No,” he answered slowly. “Marriage was never on the cards with Susan.”

“You just had a mutual sex thing going,” Miranda muttered bitterly, having been all too freshly reminded of how Bobby Hewson had used her.

“I suppose you could put it that way, though we were also friends and I always enjoyed her company,” he said quietly. “Because of injuries from a car accident in her teens, Susan couldn't have children. She told me straight up not to ever get seriously attached to her. It was her unshakable belief that one day I would want children of my own and she'd hate not being able to give them to me.”

Had he tried to shake that belief? Out of a whirl of confusion came one definite fact. “Sam told me she did marry.”

“Yes. To a widower who already had two young children. Susan is a schoolteacher. One of the children was in her kindergarten class last year. She told me it was her chance to be a mother and she was taking it. I was not prepared to argue that, Miranda. It was her choice.”

Never judge anything before hearing all the circumstances, Miranda silently berated herself, shamed by the full story of Nathan's relationship with the woman who had engaged his interest for two years. He hadn't said he'd loved Susan but there'd been caring in his voice, caring for her personally and respect for the needs he couldn't answer.

There had to have been a sense of loss when she'd chosen the widower with the children, closing Nathan out of her life. The ending of any long relationship left an empty place. Even Bobby's defection had left her ravaged. For Nathan it would have been much worse, presented with a set of circumstances he couldn't fight, forced to let go by his own code of decency. And since then, he'd been alone for months, Sam had told her, not interested in picking up with anyone else.

Until she had arrived on the scene and a strong sexual chemistry had hit both of them.

Had it been that way between him and Susan?

Impossible to ask. It was wrong to make comparisons. People were different and their relationships were different. She darted a glance at him but his expression was closed to her, his concentration fixed on the road. It startled her to see they were driving through the station's community, almost at the homestead.

“I'm sorry,” she blurted out. “I shouldn't have brought up Susan like that.”

He shrugged. “It was on your mind.”

He brought the Land Cruiser to a halt in front of the entrance to his homestead and switched off the engine. For a few moments he sat frowning, his fingers tapping the steering wheel. Then he turned to her with a look that was searing in its intensity.

“I'm not another Bobby Hewson, Miranda. I have never acted dishonourably over any woman and never would. I don't want you coming into my home, feeling at risk in any way. If you do feel…compromised in some fashion…I'll take you somewhere else…to one of the families on the station…”

“No. This is fine,” she protested in an agony of embarrassment at her own blind and bitter thoughts about him. “I do trust you, Nathan. God knows you've proved you're a decent person and I thank you, very sincerely, for all the trouble you've gone to on my behalf.”

He nodded, his eyes still burning into hers, intent on scouring any doubts. “I'll put you in a guest suite. I think it best if you accompany me out on the station tomorrow. Can you be up, dressed and ready for breakfast by six-thirty in the morning?”

She was too drained to argue anything any more. “If there's an alarm clock in my room and it works.”

“I'll set it for you.”

Decisions firmly made, he alighted from the Land Cruiser, collected her bag and was opening her door before Miranda could collect wits enough to get out of the vehicle by herself. “Thanks,” she murmured as he steadied her wobbly step onto the ground.

“Want to hang onto my arm?” he offered kindly.

“I'm okay. Just tired.”

Too tired to even try to figure out what Nathan was feeling, how he saw her now. There were so many layers to him…kind, caring, ruthless in carrying through decisive action, shouldering responsibility at a moment's notice, a masterful controller of situations, yet still respectful of others' choices.

Part of her very much wanted to hang onto him. Part of her recoiled from giving him any reason to wonder if she was the kind of woman Bobby Hewson had painted…perhaps giving him sex yesterday so he would take her side today.

Though it hadn't been like that.

She hoped Nathan realised it had been some spontaneous need, triggered by the man he was, nothing else. Nevertheless, she could hardly blame him for wondering about it. If enough dirt was thrown, some of it stuck, and Bobby had certainly done his worst to hang dirt on her tonight.

Too sensitive on this point to touch Nathan even accidentally, Miranda kept a safe space between them as she accompanied him inside, down the long central hallway to another hall that ran at right angles to it. They turned into this and halfway along he opened a door, switched on a light and stood back, waving her ahead of him.

It was a very welcoming room, a pretty patchwork quilt on an old-fashioned brass bed, richly polished cedar wardrobes and chests of drawers giving a warm character to the rest of the furnishings. Following her in, Nathan placed her bag on the end of the bed and moved straight to the lamp table near the bedhead, indicating the clock radio there.