Outback Doctors/Outback Engagement/Outback Marriage/Outback Encounter Read online

  ‘Depending on what?’ he said, wanting to touch her—hold her—kiss her…

  ‘On why you want me,’ she said, and the gleam of laughter was gone from her eyes.

  So many reasons, Tom thought. To be his wife, to bear children so his big house rang with noise and laughter, so he could wake every morning with her in bed beside him…

  ‘Because I love you,’ he said, surprising himself by the ease with which the essence of all he wanted to say slipped out. ‘All other things are nothing beside that, Anna. I want you because I love you—because life without you wouldn’t be a life at all.’

  Anna set the kitten down on the floor and slid from her chair, right into the strong arms that opened to enclose her. She felt his body shift until she fitted perfectly against him.

  The kiss would have lasted longer if the kitten, bored with the display, hadn’t scratched at Anna’s leg. They broke apart, and while Tom brought in the special food he’d purchased for it, Anna fixed the two humans a toasted sandwich.

  They sat on the couch to eat it, while the kitten curled up and slept on Anna’s lap.

  ‘If you do tire of the outback, we’ll shift to the city,’ Tom promised, nibbling at Anna’s ear when the sandwiches were finished. ‘Or go and live in South Africa if you’d rather. Or if your parents like Merriwee, we can turn a couple of the bedrooms into a suite of rooms for them, like a private flat, so they could live with us at least part of the year. I don’t think I can employ your cousin, but if you hadn’t ever got engaged to Philip, he’d have had to fend for himself…’

  Anna could hear the remnants of the worry that had made him turn away from her the night on his veranda, but now, knowing the story of his mother’s death, she understood. Then she smiled to herself as she wondered just how big Tom’s list of problems and possible solutions would grow if she remained silent. Would he start worrying about where to send the children for their secondary schooling—or what university they should attend?

  She turned her head, silencing him with a kiss. Silencing any doubt she might have had herself, as the rightness of it warmed her body and love overflowed her soul. Tender hands explored her back, sliding down to cup her buttocks, pressing her close as need grew stronger, until she knew she had to break away or they’d consummate their love on the floor of the hospital residence living room.

  ‘I want to pop over to the hospital and check on Dani and the baby before I go to bed. Why don’t you have a shower while I’m away?’

  Tom lifted his right arm and sniffed at his armpit.

  ‘Need a shower, do I?’ he said, grinning at her in such a way her heart felt it might burst right out of her chest. ‘You’re getting a bit fussy, woman. Far as I remember, the first time we kissed, we both smelt of horse!’

  OUTBACK MARRIAGE

  Meredith Webber

  CONTENTS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  CHAPTER ONE

  BLYTHE knew, from the sidelong glances and puzzled frown, exactly what he’d been thinking so when the man-mountain with whom she’d been partnered finally asked the question, a hissed ‘Are you really Lileth’s sister?’ she was ready with a sardonic ‘Do I look like Lileth’s sister?’

  She nodded towards where the small, dainty, dark-haired and olive-skinned bride was seated at the table inside the chapel’s tiny office. The space was so limited only the bride and groom, and the bishop flown in to perform the ceremony, would fit, so Blythe, acting-bridesmaid, and the best man, whom no one had bothered to introduce, were standing outside the rear door, awaiting the call to witness the happy couple’s signatures.

  The sun pressed down on them, adding to the heat the man’s scrutiny was causing. Though admittedly she’d drawn his attention to the difference between her and her stepsister—had virtually invited him to look!

  And look he did—his intent grey gaze travelling slowly over her body, hesitating where her breasts were squeezed into the too-small dress, no doubt noticing the unfashionable curves the clinging material accentuated.

  She contemplated slapping his hard-planed, suntanned, arrogantly handsome face and decided her mother was already under enough stress without adding to it by making a scene at this stage of the proceedings.

  ‘Not much!’ he drawled—eventually—and she rolled her eyes and thought unkind things about whether heat affected the working of these western men’s brains, or if it was life among the cattle made them so slow.

  Here she was, five-ten and blonde and definitely not a size ten, positively squeezed into a bridesmaid’s dress intended for her other—smaller—stepsister and he’d just figured out he had the wrong partner. Afraid she’d pop a seam, she edged gingerly into the inch of shade—all the midday sun was offering—beside the wall.

  Any minute now sweat would start oozing from her body, leaving unattractive damp patches on the aqua stretch satin of the dress.

  How could a couple of signatures take so long?

  Or was the bishop giving the newlyweds a pep talk?

  ‘You’re blonde, for one thing.’

  ‘Staggering powers of observation!’ Blythe muttered at her companion, as the sun sucked out any last vestige of politeness she might have retained under the trying circumstances.

  ‘Slow!’ the man remarked, nodding to show he’d understood her rudeness. ‘Actually, I’m surprised I’m functioning at all. I didn’t arrive until late last night, then was hijacked into a party. Some of the lads who work here decided Mark needed a bachelor party and, though he trotted off to bed at a reasonable hour, the hands seem to feel I should stay. I think I managed a few hours’ sleep although they seem to have made things worse, not better.’

  He was rubbing his forehead as he spoke and, pitiful though he looked, this massive country bumpkin, Blythe steeled herself against offering any sympathy. In fact, she was feeling bitchy enough to do the opposite.

  ‘Self-inflicted pain—serves you right!’

  The glare he shot her way would have shrivelled a lesser mortal, but she’d been glared at by experts in her life, so ignored it.

  Although the eyes that delivered it were arresting, now she looked a bit closer. Grey, definitely, but with a darker line around the outsides of the irises, complementing night-dark lashes and eyebrows.

  ‘I am not hungover.’ He stated the words with a grimness that suggested he might have felt better had he been. ‘Merely tired.’

  Blythe ignored the protest and continued her assessment. His hair was the same heavy black, cut ruthlessly short—no doubt in honour of the big event.

  ‘Witnesses, please.’

  The bishop called to them, then stepped aside to let them in, but the big man took up all the room, so in the end the bride and groom had to be evicted while Blythe and…she peered across to where his name was printed on the official document—Callum Whitworth—heavens! He was one of them, one of the cattle kings!…signed their names.

  Then it was done, and the string quartet, imported to the cattle property at great expense by Lileth’s grandfather, swung into some approximation of a triumphant wedding march. The bishop led the bride and groom back into the church and down the aisle with the attendants moving decorously behind.

  ‘I always feel the triumph is overdone at this stage,’ Blythe’s partner whispered. ‘I mean, who’s won?’

  ‘True love, of course!’ Blythe whispered back, allowing only a little sarcasm to leak into the words. ‘I thought you country lads were romantics, not cynics!’

  ‘Once bitten, twice shy!’ he growled as flash bulbs popped and handfuls of rose petals were flung at the radiant bride.

  Friends and relatives crowded around, pushing Blythe and her partner aside, though the man had the good
manners to take her arm when a particularly insistent matron in flowered dress and matching hat shoved against her in an effort to get a picture.

  ‘So who are you?’ he asked, in a voice that told her he couldn’t give a damn but understood being polite to her was part of his duties for the day.

  ‘I’m Lileth’s stepsister. Not included in the wedding party on account of not fitting the size requirements, but a last-minute replacement when Mary-Lynne developed mumps.’

  Halfway through delivering this succinct explanation, another thought struck Blythe.

  ‘If you’re a Whitworth, you’re a relative. You must have known I wasn’t Mary-Lynne.’

  Her comment surprised a smile into life on his face, and for a moment she wondered if she’d have to rethink her opinion of cowboys. The man was devilishly handsome when he smiled—heart-stoppingly so!

  ‘No one in the family’s seen much of the girls since they were little,’ he said, the smile disappearing and a faint frown returning. ‘I think when their mother died and their father decided he was better qualified to raise them than the string of governesses and maids my grandfather wanted to provide, they were not cut off so much as set beyond the pale.’

  ‘And, of course, once their father had the bad taste to marry my mother, they went further out of favour.’ Blythe found her cynicism matching his with ease.

  ‘Which is your mother?’ he asked, peering across to where a clutch of women pressed around the bride.

  ‘The one with the sway back from bending over backwards to make sure she treated her stepdaughters just as well as she treated her own daughter.’

  The grey eyes studied her more sharply, something in the regard making Blythe regret her silly flippancy.

  ‘That sounded worse than I meant it to be.’ She rushed to make amends. ‘My mother is actually the sweetest, kindest woman imaginable and would do anything for anyone. She’s also genuinely in love with Brian and unstinting in her love for all three of her daughters, step or not!’

  ‘You don’t sound exactly happy about having this paragon for a mother,’ Callum Whitworth remarked.

  Blythe grinned at him.

  ‘Makes it very hard to say no when she asks a favour of you. Look at me. For a start I was meant to leave for the UK two weeks ago, but Lileth’s whirlwind romance, her decision to get married, meant I had to delay my departure and give up the job I’d arranged to take on there. Then her grandfather steps in and insists she wed on the family’s kingdom, and I have to fly up here to the back of beyond, spending money I can ill afford. And what happens within minutes of my arrival late yesterday, but Mary-Lynne swells up. Mum does her ‘‘please, Blythe’’ thing again, and I’m squeezed into a dress two sizes too small and made look like an absolute gig as part of the wedding party.’

  ‘Why did it cost you money to fly up?’

  Of all her complaints, it was the last bit she’d expected him to pick up on.

  ‘It’s a long way from Brisbane to the Northern Territory. You may not realise it, but this place is actually a long way from anywhere. I had to fly to Darwin, then get another plane to—’

  ‘But my grandfather arranged to fly in all the wedding guests.’ He cut into her catalogue of complaints. ‘One flight from Brisbane and another from Sydney.’

  ‘Yes, well…’ Blythe said, and looked around for distraction. It was hard to explain that she didn’t want to be beholden to a man to whom she wasn’t related. It was something even her mother hadn’t understood.

  ‘Seems we’re wanted.’ Before she had to put this reluctance into words, the man took her arm and steered her towards the newly married couple. ‘Photo call!’

  They posed for group photos with the parents of both bride and groom, then the photographer ushered them into a golf buggy and, with one of the property’s workmen driving, they followed another buggy containing bride, groom and photographer along a carefully smoothed track.

  ‘Photos by the lagoon are a tradition at Mount Spec,’ Blythe’s companion remarked, his voice as dry as the hot air stirred to a feeble breeze by their progress.

  ‘Been there and done that, have you?’ Blythe guessed, and the man smiled again.

  ‘Been there and done that!’ he agreed.

  ‘You don’t sound as if marriage has brought you a lot of joy!’ Blythe remarked, and heard confirmation of her guess in the harshness of his laugh.

  ‘It’s worked better for my brother,’ was all he said, because by now they’d reached the banks of the placid, tree-shaded lagoon, its waters strewn with Lileth’s name flowers—blue, pink and white waterlilies.

  ‘It is lovely,’ Blythe found herself admitting.

  ‘Come on, don’t turn sentimental on me,’ Callum complained. ‘Your caustic tongue’s just about made things bearable because I find myself wondering who you’re going to knife next! If you’re about to become increasingly mawkish and womanly as the day progresses, I may as well drown myself now and be done with it.’

  Blythe opened her mouth to retaliate, then closed it again when she couldn’t decide which bit of his insult to protest at first. In the end she settled on what was probably the weakest point of all, firing a look of loathing at him as she straightened to her full height and expanded her chest.

  ‘I do happen to be a woman!’ she snorted, then heard the sound of fabric tearing as the chest-expansion exercise proved a disastrous mistake.

  ‘Oh, sh—’

  Firm fingers closed over her lips, cutting off the word she’d intended saying.

  ‘Not in front of the bishop,’ Callum said, the grey eyes dancing with delight at her predicament.

  Blythe pressed her arm against the seam that was giving way and glanced frantically around.

  ‘The bishop’s not here and it’s not funny!’ She scowled at her companion in case her whispered retort didn’t carry enough aggravation. ‘Hell’s bells, what do I do now?’

  She was clutching the top of the strapless dress with one hand and trying to hide the split with the other when Lileth approached.

  ‘What have you done now?’ she demanded, and Blythe, though used to her younger step-sibling’s uncanny ability to sniff out problems, was staggered to find it working so well on her wedding day.

  ‘Split the damn dress!’ she admitted. ‘I told Mum this was likely to happen.’

  If anything, Lileth looked relieved. Of course, relief wasn’t enough to stop her bringing up the list of disasters Blythe had already caused, including Mary-Lynne’s mumps and Blythe’s failure to be the right size for the aesthetic balance of the wedding party, but in the end she mellowed.

  ‘I suppose the dress thing isn’t so bad,’ she finally declared. ‘Mark and I had already decided we wanted more photos of just the two of us. I mean, if Mary-Lynne had been here, it would have been different, but Callum’s only best man because he works with Mark…’

  Blythe glanced at the maligned attendant to see how he was taking his cousin’s blunt assessment of his friendship with the groom.

  He seemed remarkably unfazed, even going so far as to wink at Blythe, as if to assure her he was OK with the put-down.

  ‘You’re a funny lot, you Whitworths,’ she remarked, when Lileth had gone to reclaim her groom and one hundred per cent of the photographer’s attention.

  ‘Be grateful we are,’ Callum told her. ‘Now, where are you staying? At the main house or in one of the bungalows? As we’ve been officially dismissed, we can go back and you can change.’

  To Cal, it seemed an eminently sensible suggestion, but the look of dismay in the brown eyes of the stand in told him she didn’t see it in the same light.

  ‘More problems?’

  ‘Not of my own making,’ she hastened to point out, a reassuringly waspish tone back in her voice. ‘Any more than Mary-Lynne throwing out a swelling or two was my fault.’

  She hesitated, then added almost in an undertone, ‘Not that anyone’s likely to believe that!’

  Cal found himself chuc
kling.

  ‘What are you? Some harbinger of doom?’

  Blythe nodded, the movement shifting the abundance of wavy fair hair so golden light shot through it.

  ‘I’m known in the family for being a walking disaster area—an accident looking for somewhere to happen. It got that way I was paranoid about stepping on cracks in the pavement, thinking I must be doing something wrong to be causing so much trouble. While as for cats, black, brown or brindle, I steer clear of them as well.’

  Cal laughed again—she had to be joking—though she didn’t smile. In fact, for someone in a wedding party, she looked particularly gloomy.

  The gloomy expression failed to diminish the attractiveness of the face framed by the fair hair, and he found himself waiting for her to smile—guessing the effect would be pleasant.

  Though why he was laughing, he didn’t know. Fate had embroiled him in this ‘happy families’ reunion, but nothing was going to make him like it. They’d walked as far as the buggy but the reluctance he was feeling stopped him climbing in.

  His companion, in spite of a dress that was slipping lower by the minute, and incidentally revealing a better and better view of full, rich, creamy breasts, seemed even less eager to return to the homestead.

  ‘I haven’t any clothes to change into.’

  The blunt statement drew his attention back to the woman.

  ‘None?’

  ‘Well, I’ve the jeans and shirt I wore to come up but, having glimpsed, as we scampered down the aisle, the outfits other women are wearing, I think changing into jeans and a T-shirt, which says ‘‘I suffer from occasional feelings of adequacy’’ could well send the bride into hysterics.’

  Cal nodded. From the little he knew of Lileth, the ersatz bridesmaid was probably right. And though his mind was having trouble with the notion of a woman arriving at a wedding—or anywhere for that matter—without several suitcases packed with clothes, the T-shirt intrigued him.

  ‘Do you?’ he asked.

  She looked at him, the luminous brown eyes puzzled.