Buch lesen: «A Parisian Proposition»

CHAPTER ONE

‘HEY, Jonno, there’s a woman asking for you.’

Jonathan Rivers dragged his attention from a first-class pen of Angus steers and shot a quick sideways glance down the muddy alley of the cattle sale yards.

A woman, dressed in a pale city suit and high heels, hovered at the far end of the pens where the concrete path ended and the sloppy mud began.

He stifled an urge to curse. ‘Not another husband-hunter?’

‘I guess so,’ Andy Bowen, his stock and station agent, admitted with a shrug. ‘But this one’s a cut above the rest. You should check her out, mate.’

Jonno groaned and shook his head in disbelief. ‘I was hoping I wouldn’t have to go through this again.’

‘At least this one’s got class,’ chuckled Andy. ‘And I reckon she’s as stubborn as you are. Classy, sexy and stubborn as the devil. Could be your lucky day.’

‘If you’re so impressed, you go see what she wants.’

Andy winked. ‘I’ve spoken to her and I know exactly what she wants.’ He raised his voice to reach Jonno above the crescendo of the auctioneer’s calls in the adjacent stall. ‘She wants you!’

Against his better judgement, Jonno let his gaze slide sideways again. He caught a fleeting impression of contrasts—of a sophisticated female in smart city clothes amidst rough-clad country folk and cattle. A mass of exotic dark hair, dark eyes and dark mouth, set dramatically against pale skin. Physical slenderness offset by a proud carriage that hinted at inner strength.

She wants you.

‘I’m not bloody available,’ he growled.

‘Course you’re available. You’ve sold most of your cattle. I’ll look after this last pen. I know the price you want for them. Get going, Jonno. You can’t leave a lady like her in all that mud and cattle muck.’

The woman was still watching him intently and Jonno knew she would be aware that Andy had delivered her message. He let out a noisy sigh. ‘I suppose I should be good at this rejection caper by now.’

Over the past months he’d literally lost count of the number of women who’d come chasing him since that crazy story turned up in the women’s magazine. Blondes, brunettes, redheads and all shades in between…older women and young girls…plain, beautiful…cautious, reckless, polite…rude…

He’d sent them all packing…

As he strode grimly towards this latest contender his gumboots squelched in the mud. Recent rains and the pounding of thousands of cattle hooves had turned the dirt floor of the sale yards into a quagmire.

The woman, dressed in a soft beige wool suit with pale stockings and neat beige, high-heeled shoes, was eyeing the smelly mud warily as she waited for him at the edge of the walkway.

He surprised himself by slowing his steps as he drew near so he didn’t splash her, but that was as far as his concessions went. He refused to smile. ‘You’re looking for me?’

‘Yes.’ She smiled cautiously and held out her hand. There was a small dark mole just above her upper lip. It was maddeningly distracting. ‘How do you do, Mr Rivers? I’m Camille Devereaux.’

Her curly hair was dark chocolate and glossy, her eyes and lashes closer to black than brown, and her nose and chin were saved from sharpness by an indefinable elegance. Camille Devereaux. It occurred to Jonno that she matched her French name perfectly.

As he extended a brief, reluctant handshake, she studied him with disturbing directness, her gaze intensely curious and not at all shy.

And damn it, her perfume drifted towards him, teasing his senses for a tantalising instant before it was overpowered by the prevailing stench of mud and cattle.

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 of the nearest pen, but even so one black beast eyeballed her fiercely as it drew close. She held her breath and squeezed in her stomach muscles, trying to flatten herself even more.

Glued to the fence like a fridge magnet, she felt her heart thrash. What would the girls in the office think if they could see her now? Surely this deserved some kind of bravery award. It was above and beyond the call of duty.

CITY GIRL SQUASHED FLAT BY FAT CATTLE…

Sydney journalist Camille Devereaux, faced a stampeding herd of wild beasts in the Mullinjim sale yards earlier today…Vale, Camille…Trampled to death while chasing a vital story for Girl Talk magazine…

She was so busy fighting her panic by composing more tributes to her bravery and courage that it was some time before it finally sank in that the animals were trotting past without paying her any particular attention. The man on horseback acknowledged her with a brief nod as he went by, then turned his mob into another lane.

Camille sagged against the pen as her breath escaped. She was still alive. She hadn’t spooked the cattle. The guy on the horse had given her a casual nod as if she had every right to be here.

How about that? Her coat and boots must have done the trick. She looked as if she belonged. She felt inordinately pleased with herself.

Something nudged her elbow and she whipped around to discover a large, damp and very bovine nose sniffing her sleeve. Oh, God! The pen she’d been leaning against was full of another lot of cattle! She suppressed the urge to panic again. It was OK. These four-footed fellows were securely inside the pen. Nothing to worry about here. A snap.

She allowed a few minutes for her heartbeats to steady and her breathing to settle and realised that the pen she’d chosen to lean against was becoming a matter of some interest. Half a dozen or more cattlemen were joining her to stare over the fence at the beasts.

But the men hardly gave Camille a second glance.

Wow! This confirmation that she looked like a country girl gave her fresh confidence. Now she could track down Jonno Rivers through any amount of mud.

There was a rising babble of voices around her and the excited chanting of an auctioneer calling cattle prices. ‘One-forty, one-forty! Hup! One-forty-five!’

She paid little attention. She was scanning the metal walkways above the pens for signs of Jonno and she thought she glimpsed him. This time she wouldn’t let him go till she got what she’d come for.

Her view was blocked by the press of men around the pen and she stood on the bottom rung of the fence to get a better view. Above her, a promising set of shoulders and a slow, almost insolent stride came into her line of sight. Yes, it was Jonno.

‘One-fifty-five!’ the auctioneer’s voice shouted.

She had no idea how to get up to that suspended walkway. If she could at least get Jonno’s attention…Standing on tiptoes, she waved.

‘Hup! One-sixty!’

Jonno was looking at a point just beyond her. She waved again.

‘One-sixty twice!’

Camille glanced briefly in the direction of the strident voice. The auctioneer was standing on the same walkway as Jonno but directly above her, pointing straight at her. All around her, men were moving away from the pen, heading off down the lane.

A ghastly suspicion sent shivers chasing down her back and arms. No, he couldn’t think that she—

‘One-sixty!’ the auctioneer shouted, staring straight at her. ‘Hup! I’ve got one-sixty! Going for one-sixty. Sold!’

‘Congratulations,’ said a voice at her side.

She whirled around to find the ruddy-faced man who’d fetched Jonno for her.

‘Oh, good grief!’ She gulped. ‘You’re not congratulating me, are you?’

His beaming, slice-of-watermelon smile widened. ‘Sure am. You’ve bought a fine pen of weaner steers.’

‘I have not!’ She gasped. ‘I can’t have. Tell me you’re joking.’

The man slapped his hand on the top rail of the pen. ‘This mob of little beauties here. All yours.’

‘But I was waving to Jonno Rivers. I…’ She flashed a frantic glance back to the auctioneer, but he simply gave a curt salute to the man at her side, then headed towards another pen. ‘It can’t happen like that,’ she spluttered. ‘I’m not a genuine buyer. How—how on earth could he have thought I wanted a pen of cattle?’

‘You were standing next to me.’

‘What’s that got to do with anything?’

‘I’m a stock and station agent. Brian must have assumed you were one of my clients.’

‘Oh, my God!’ She pressed a shaking hand to her forehead. ‘You’ll go and tell him it’s a mistake, won’t you?’

‘You don’t want these steers?’

‘Of course I don’t want them.’ She sent a scathing glance over the pen of cattle and let out a laughing groan. ‘What on earth would I do with them? I live in a one-bedroom flat in Kings Cross. My courtyard is smaller than this pen.’

‘You could put them out on agistment.’

A deep voice sounded at her back. ‘Is this woman hassling you, Andy?’

Camille spun around to find a scowling Jonno Rivers close behind her. His suspicious gaze was cold enough to freeze an ocean. Two oceans.

‘Jonno,’ greeted the ever cheerful Andy. ‘You’re just the man we need.’

Camille wasn’t so sure. She’d had about as much as she could take of this pesky cattleman and his sulky silence and his stinking cattle. Her fists curled against her thighs and she felt an overwhelming urge to thump him on the nose.

‘This young lady seems to have a little problem,’ the agent explained calmly. ‘But I’m sure you can help her, mate.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Sorry, Jonno, I’ve got to see a man about a bull. Catch you later.’ With a brief salute, he hurried away.

Camille’s stomach and head were spinning as she gaped after him. She felt exhausted as she turned back to Jonno. ‘At least you’ve had the guts to show up,’ she muttered. ‘This is all your fault, so you’ll have to do something about it.’