‘Lord, Chloe, will you stop making it up as you go along. I’m not anorexic,’ Allegra sighed. ‘Though I confess I haven’t had much appetite of late. Or much sleep. Thank you, Rory. I’m fine now.’ It was said with the faintest trace of acid as though she was aware of the erotic thoughts that were running through his head. She shook back her hair, squared her shoulders and slowly straightened up. ‘It was just a fuzzy moment. Nothing to get alarmed about.’
‘How many times have I heard you say that after a dinner party?’ Chloe directed a tight conspiratorial smile in Rory’s direction.
‘The fact is you’ve never heard it, Chloe,’ Allegra answered with a kind of weary resignation.
‘I have, too,’ Chloe suddenly barked. ‘Mark was really worried about your drinking.’
Allegra laughed shakily. ‘What, Diet Coke?’
‘Why don’t I just carry you to your room?’ Rory suggested, not at all happy with the way she was near dragging herself up the stairs, one hand on the banister. He didn’t want to hear about her ex-husband, either. Not tonight anyway. ‘You’d be as light as a feather.’
‘You’re kidding!’ She paused to give him a vaguely taunting glance. ‘A feather?’
‘If I pick you up I can prove it. You look to me like you need carrying to your room.’ Before she could say another word or get out a word of protest, he scooped her up in his arms.
‘There, what did I tell you?’ His voice mocked her, but in reality he was seized by a feeling of intoxication that was enormously distracting. It came at him in mounting waves. For one forbidden moment he went hot with desire, quite without the power to cool it. Never before had a woman stirred such a response. His every other experience paled into insignificance beside this. A man of good sense should fear such things as not all that long ago men feared witches.
She caught her breath, astounded by his action. Then she gave way to laughter. ‘A woman has to be careful around you I can see, Rory Compton. I’ve never been swept off my feet before. Though it does fit your image.’
‘What image?’ He looked down at her with his brooding, light filled eyes.
‘Man of action. It’s written all over you.’
‘Look I’m really sorry, Rory,’ Chloe said, trotting in their wake. ‘Allegra is always doing things like this. It’s so embarrassing.’
‘Give me a break, Chloe!’ Allegra broke into a moan before she was overcome again by laughter. Peals of it. It simply took her over. ‘I’ve never met a man like Rhett Butler before,’ she gasped.
Though her mood seemed lighthearted, Rory had the odd feeling she was on the verge of tears. A woman’s tears could render a man very vulnerable. He knew when she was alone in her room they might flow.
With his arms around her body, her beautiful face so close, excitement was pouring into him way beyond the level of comfort. Wariness had turned to wonder. Wonder to a dark, albeit involuntary desire. She might have been naked in his arms so acutely did his senses respond.
Oh ye of little resolve! A taunting voice started up in his head. But then he hadn’t seen a woman like Allegra Hamilton coming.
What he needed now was a long, cold bracing shower. She was an incredibly desirable woman yet he was half appalled by his own reactions, the depth and dimension, the sheer physical pleasure he took in holding her. The breasts he couldn’t help but look down on, were small but beautifully shaped; her shoulders delicately feminine. Her arched neck had the elegance of a swan’s. What would a man feel like carrying a woman such as this to their bridal bed? It came to him with a fierce jolt he deeply resented the fact another man had already done so. How could that same man bring himself to let her go? He didn’t really know but he was prepared to bet it was she who had tossed her husband aside. And how many other men had she ensnared before him?
It was more than time to set her down before she totally messed him up.
Chloe ran ahead helpfully and opened the bedroom door. ‘Anyone would think she was a baby. She can walk.’ She looked up at Rory sympathetically. ‘Just put her on the bed.’
My God, didn’t he want to!
He was no damned different from all the other poor fools. Whatever his mind said, whatever his will demanded, underneath he was just a man whose fate was to succumb to woman.
‘Please, Chloe,’ Allegra laughed. ‘I’m the wronged party. It’s this cowboy who swept me off my feet.’
‘Cattleman, ma’am,’ he corrected, now so perversely hostile he barely stopped himself from pitching her onto the huge four-poster bed, its timber glowing honey-gold.
‘Rory, I didn’t mean to offend you,’ she apologised, still caught between laughter and tears.
‘Forgive me, I think you did.’ He couldn’t say he badly resented being put under a spell. He wasn’t accustomed to such things.
‘I confess I find your attitude a little worrying, too.’ From a lying position—God how erotic—she sat up on the bed, staring at him with her great topaz-blue eyes.
‘Hey, what on earth are you two talking about?’ Chloe was struggling hard to keep up. It all seemed incomprehensible to her.
‘Nothing. Absolutely nothing,’ Rory said, further perplexing her. Allegra Hamilton in the space of one evening had got right under his skin. He was aware his muscles had gone rigid with the effort not to yield to the urge to lean forward, close the space between them, grasp those delicate shoulders and kiss her hard. Only desiring a woman like that was an option he simply couldn’t afford.
Maybe it was her utter unattainability that made her so desirable to him? He had to find a reason to give him comfort. On his way to the door Rory turned to give her one last glance.
A big mistake!
She couldn’t have looked more ravishing or the setting more marvellously appropriate. The quilted bedspread gleamed an opulent gold, embroidered with richly coloured flowers. Her dress had ridden up over her lovely legs, pooling around her in deep yellow. Her hair shone a rich red beneath an antique gilt and crystal chandelier that hung from a central rose in the plastered ceiling. Hanging over the head of the bed was a very beautiful flower painting of yellow roses in a brass bowl, lit from above.
It was enough to steal any man’s breath away.
‘Good night, Rory,’ she said sweetly, which he translated into, ‘Goodbye!’
He nodded his dark head curtly, but made no response.
Witch!
She was accustomed to putting men under a spell. But for all he knew she could have a heart of ice.
Coming as he did from the desert where there was a much higher pitch of light and the vast landscape was so brilliantly coloured, Rory found his trip out to Naroom, enjoyable, but relatively uninspiring compared to his own region, the Channel Country. The bones of many dead men lay beneath the fiery iron-oxide red soil of his nearly eight hundred thousand square kilometre desert domain. The explorers Burke and Wills had perished there; the great Charles Sturt, the first explorer to ever enter the Simpson Desert almost came to final grief—the German Ludwig Leichhardt became a victim of the forbidding landscape. Not only had the early explorers been challenged by that wild land, but so too were the pioneering cattlemen like his forebears who had followed. After good rains, the best cattle fattening country in the world, in times of drought they had to exploit the water in the Great Artesian Basin, which lay beneath the Simpson Desert to keep their vast herds alive. And exploitation was the word. It really worried him that one day the flow of water to the several natural springs and