Outback bride - Hart Jessica - Страница 17

Her hair had been longer then, dishevelled from the sea and streaked with sunshine, and like almost everyone else on her tour she had worn shorts and a faded sleeveless top. Only her smile had marked her out from the ordinary-her smile and the clear green eyes that had looked so directly into his.

‘Your hair’s shorter now-smarter, I suppose,’ he went on after a moment. ‘You had sunglasses on, you were wearing a suit, for God’s sake, and I simply wasn’t expecting you. It hardly seemed possible that you could be the same girl. And then you took off your sunglasses and I saw your eyes and I realised that it really was you. By then

‘

Mal paused, lifting his shoulders as if searching for the best way to explain. ‘Well, by then it was clear that even if you had recognised me, you weren’t going to acknowledge it. I don’t know-I thought you might feel awkward, even embarrassed about working for me if I raised the subject, and since I was assuming that you’d come as a new housekeeper it just seemed easier to follow your lead and pretend that you were a stranger.’ He glanced sideways at Copper. ‘It’s been seven years, after all,’ he added. ‘There was no reason why you should have remembered me.’

No reason? Copper thought about his lips against her skin, about the mastery of his hands and the sleek, supple strength of his body. She thought about the way he had made her senses sing and the breathtaking passion they had shared.

She wanted to look at the horses, at the fence, at her hands, at anything other than Mal, but an irresistible force was dragging her gaze round and against her will she found herself looking into his eyes, drowning in the brown depths that sucked her into the past, sending her spinning back seven years to the moment when she had looked up, laughing, from the crowd and seen him watching her.

Mal had been travelling on his own, Copper with a group due to move on in three days, but none of that had mattered at the time. They had been more than just fellow Australians far from home; they had been two halves of a whole, clicking naturally into place. Being together had seemed utterly right, as if it had been somehow inevitable that they should meet that way. It was like a compass swinging to north, like an arrow heading straight for its target, like walking through a door and knowing that you had come home without even realising that you had been away.

It had been time out of time. For three days they had talked and laughed. They had swum in the turquoise sea. Droplets of water had glistened on Mal’s shoulders as he surfaced and he had smiled as he shook the wet hair out of his eyes and reached for her. They had climbed the hill to the ruined fort overlooking the beach and watched the sunset, and when the soft night had closed around them making love had been the most natural thing in the world. Afterwards they had walked down to the sea again, to sink into the cool, dark water, and the phosphorescence had glimmered around their entwined bodies.

‘Stay,’ Mal had said on the last night, but Copper had been part of an overland tour making its way back to London, where friends were expecting her. It hadn’t seemed so bad saying goodbye when he had her contact address there and promised to ring her as soon as he got there himself. She had been so sure that they had been meant for each other. How was she to have known that it would be seven years before she saw him again?

No reason to remember him? With an effort, Copper wrenched her eyes from Mal and back to the present. The beach snapped into a dirt track, the warm Mediterranean night into the fierce glare of an outback afternoon, and she was left feeling jarred and disorientated by the abrupt transition. ‘Of course I remembered,’ she said in a low voice.

‘Why didn’t you say anything?’

‘The same sort of reasons, I suppose,’ she said weakly. ‘I didn’t think you remembered me. All I knew was that you’d been married and that your wife had died, so it didn’t seem very appropriate to remind you that we’d met before. And there didn’t seem much point. It was just a holiday romance,’ she added, trying to convince herself.

‘Was it?’ said Mal, without looking at her.

‘You never got in touch,’ Copper reminded him. She wanted to sound casual, as if she hadn’t really cared one way or the other, but her voice came out flat, accusing.

‘I rang you,’ he said.

Surprise made her swing round. ‘No, you didn’t!’

‘I did,’ he insisted. Linking his hands loosely together, he leant on the top rail once more. Copper could see the dust on his skin, the pulse beating below his ear. ‘I’d spent that year working as an agricultural consultant in East Africa. I’d waited until Brett had finished school and could help Dad while I was away and knew I would never have a better chance to travel than when my contract was finished. I was making the most of that chance in Turkey because I knew that once I got back there wouldn’t be many opportunities like it, but it meant that I was out of contact for a couple of months.’

Mal’s voice lost all expression. ‘When I got to London there was a message saying that my father had died suddenly over a month before. Brett was too young to manage on his own so I had to get the first plane home.’ He hesitated. ‘I rang you from the airport. One of your friends answered the phone. She said you were at a party but that she’d give you the message. Didn’t you get it?’

‘No,’ said Copper slowly, thinking how differently she might have felt if she had known that Mal had tried to contact her. ‘No, I never got a message.’

‘I even tried to ring you from here when I got back,’ Mal went on after a moment. ‘But you were out again and

oh, I don’t know.’ He stopped, narrowing his eyes at the distant horizon. ‘I suppose there didn’t seem much point, just like you said. You were on the other side of the world and obviously having a good time. I remembered what you’d said about your life in Adelaide, about the parties and the clubs and the sailing weekends, and I couldn’t see you giving all that up for the kind of life I could offer you out here. I had other things on my mind as well, trying to get Birraminda back together after my father’s death.’

He paused again and brought his eyes back to Copper’s face. ‘You’d seemed like the kind of girl who would enjoy herself whatever she was doing, so I didn’t think you would waste much time wondering what had happened to me.’

Only seven years. ‘No,’ said Copper.

‘Anyway,’ Mal finished, ‘it doesn’t matter now. It’s all in the past.’

‘Yes,’ said Copper.

There was an uncomfortable silence. At least she found it uncomfortable. Mal didn’t look as if it bothered him in the least. It ought to be so easy now that each knew that the other remembered. It ought to be easy to relax, to laugh, to say ‘Do you remember?’ or ‘We had a good time, didn’t we?’ But somehow it wasn’t easy at all. Memories shimmered in the air between them, so close that Copper felt as if she could reach out and push them apart with her hands.

‘It’s

er

quite a coincidence, isn’t it?’ she managed at last, moving a few surreptitious inches away from Mal. ‘Ending up together again after all this time, I mean.’

‘Does it make any difference?’ he asked coolly, and she knew that he wasn’t thinking of the past but of the present, of Megan and his determination to provide her with stability for as long as he could.

‘No,’ said Copper awkwardly. She ought to be thinking of the present too, of the future and what this marriage would gain for Copley Travel. ‘No, of course not.’

Mal’s eyes rested on her standing rigidly away from him, her arms hugged together in an unconsciously defensive posture. ‘As far as I’m concerned, as long as you behave like a wife in public after we’re married, how you behave in private is your decision. My feeling is that we’re both adults, and we’ve found each other attractive in the past, so we might as well make the most of the time we’re going to spend together in bed as well as out of it. We did before.’