Her hand in his felt soft and cool. Jonno snatched his own rough and callused hand away, shoved it into the back pocket of his jeans and tried to ignore the fact that Andy had been right.
This one was a cut above the others…
She had the intriguing allure of an exotic stranger. Very Mediterranean. Unexpectedly sexy.
His mistake was to allow his gaze to connect with hers for just a shade too long. For a fraction longer than was wise, he’d stared into her eyes and—
And hell. He’d never experienced anything like the sudden certainty that he and this stranger shared an unwilling reaction, that they’d both felt the same helpless stirring. A deep shudder inside.
An involuntary leap of awareness.
‘Look,’ he said quickly. Too quickly. Although Camille Devereaux hadn’t told him why she was here, and although she looked different, he knew she would be the same as all the others. ‘I can’t help you. There’s been a mistake. The magazine got it wrong. I’m not looking for someone to date and I’m certainly not looking for a wife.’ He whirled away. ‘Sorry to disappoint.’
‘No, don’t go,’ she cried.
But he kept walking. He’d done this countless times and it was always embarrassing.
‘I’ve no intention of dating or marrying you,’ she called loudly. Way too loudly.
The bunch of cattlemen who were gathered around the nearby pen of heifers swung their fascinated gazes from Jonno to Camille and back to Jonno and grinned like mad.
‘Another one?’ someone called. ‘What’s the count now, Jonno?’
Teeth gritted, Jonno refused to turn. He kept hurrying through the mud.
‘Jonno!’ she yelled. ‘Mr Rivers, we’ve got to talk!’
There was a hint of desperation in that last cry but he didn’t look back. There was nothing more to say. He’d delivered his message and he wasn’t going to hang around chatting to a beautiful stranger while he fuelled the entire Mullinjim community with a month’s worth of gossip and cheap laughs.
Camille blamed the lack of coffee.
That was why she’d stuffed up. It had never happened before. She had never missed her mark. It was unprofessional.
It had nothing to do with meeting Jonathan Rivers in the flesh after weeks of trying to make contact. It was caffeine withdrawal that had made her hollow and shivery, brain-dead and tongue-tied. Not Jonno.
And it was lack of caffeine plus too much squelchy, smelly mud that had stopped her from running after the obstinate cattleman and forcing him to listen to her.
But what kind of experienced, hard-nosed journalist was she if she let him get away before she’d had a chance to explain anything? To ask anything! OK, maybe thinking of herself as hard-nosed was over-the-top, but she was experienced and competent.
And yet she’d stood there like a ninny and watched him walk off without unearthing one measly reason for his lack of co-operation in ‘The Bachelor Project’.
It had been so unreal…the way he’d looked at her…and…
She shook her head and shrugged. She’d lost it. For some reason, meeting Jonno had shrivelled her synapses. Which was pretty silly considering she’d seen his photo and had been expecting the magnetic intensity of his eyes, the rough, chiselled cheekbones and the dangerous mouth.
The heartthrob, half-mast smile.
It was his smile that had sealed Jonno Rivers’s fate. Well…if she was honest…it was the crooked smile and the huge shoulders and the breathtaking fit of his low-slung jeans.
For the team at Girl Talk magazine, choosing Jonathan Rivers for inclusion in ‘The Pick of Australia’s Eligible Bachelors’ had been a no-brainer. And they’d decided that the pic he’d submitted was so good there was no need to send a professional photographer.
That had been Girl Talk’s first big mistake.
If they’d sent someone out at the beginning, Camille might have been saved this vexing journey now.
The second mistake had been Camille’s. When she’d been put in charge of ‘The Bachelor Project’ she’d made a serious error of judgement. After selecting a range of bachelor volunteers from various walks of life, she’d taken the fellows she’d expected to be difficult as her personal responsibility—the high-powered lawyer from Perth, the owner of the construction company in Sydney and the executive chef in Melbourne.
She’d left the lower-profile contenders for more junior journalists to deal with—fellows like the tourist operator in Tasmania, the crocodile-hunter in the Northern Territory…and the cattleman in Queensland…
And it was only recently she’d discovered that the cattleman hadn’t been playing the game.
Now she’d had to travel all the way from Sydney to North Queensland to get to the bottom of his problem and after several false leads she’d finally, finally tracked him down. And she’d barely managed three words of conversation before she’d let him go.
But if Jonno Rivers thought she’d give up after such a brief, unsatisfactory exchange, he was in for a nasty surprise. Or three.
It was her mission to tell him he couldn’t back out of the bachelor story now. She wasn’t going to let him wreck her magazine’s project and she certainly wasn’t going to let him jeopardise her job.
He might have refused to return phone calls, e-mail, faxes and letters. And he might have put padlocks on the gate to his cattle property, Edenvale, as she’d discovered this morning when she’d driven all the way out there.
She’d crawled along muddy outback roads while her little hire car scraped its underbelly on every bump, only to find his front gate one hundred per cent, in-her-face locked.
But she hadn’t let smug, fat padlocks and rusty chains stop her.
And she hadn’t been deterred when she tracked down Jonno’s brother, Gabe, only to have him refuse to take her by helicopter over the locked gate and into Edenvale.
And now that she had tracked him down to these sale yards and had finally set eyes on the infamous and elusive Jonathan Rivers, she certainly wasn’t going to let sloppy mud stop her! Not when she had knee-high boots and an oilskin coat in the back of her car.
She hurried back through the car park, where the sight of men on horseback and enormous road trains the size of locomotives with triple decks of cattle pens on the back rekindled the unsettling sense of alienation she’d felt ever since she’d arrived in Mullinjim.
It was weird. She’d always thought of herself as a true-blue Aussie, but this was her first trip from Sydney to the real outback and she couldn’t have felt more of an outsider if she’d been on assignment in an exotic foreign country.
She was relieved that at least she was much less conspicuous when she prowled back through the disgusting mud of the sale yards camouflaged by her coat and boots.
Let Jonno hide. She would find him.
She scanned the lanes between the pens of bellowing cattle. Each lane was filled with cattlemen in look-alike wide-brimmed akubra hats, oilskin coats and jeans.
A sudden clomping of hooves forced her to turn and every organ in Camille’s body lurched when she saw a mob of cattle being herded down the lane towards her by a man on horseback. Help! The beasts were massive and their hooves looked heavy and hard enough to crush and maim!
She’d never seen a cow that wasn’t safely on the other side of a fence! And there were dozens of them bearing down on her. Some were snorting, others bellowing. Some had horns! Would there be enough room for them to pass?
Oh, God! Heart pounding, she squashed herself hard against the timber rails