September Moon Read online

  She laughed into his mouth. "I don't think we'd have heard it if Saint Peter had blown his trumpet and called all the souls to Judgment Day."

  "Aw, come on now. We weren't making that much noise, were we?" He traced her lips with his tongue. "Then again," he said softly, moving on to nibble at her neck. "Maybe we were."

  She rolled onto her back and bracketed his cheeks with her hands, guiding his head lower. Mary wasn't the least bit shy about letting a man know what he could do to please her. "Besides," she said, lifting her chin, "what you plannin' on doin'? Pullin' on your boots and trousers as you run down the hill to meet the cart when you do hear it comin'? That oughta impress the new governess, all right."

  O'Reilly let his nibbles ease down Mary's collarbone to her small, firm breasts and heard her sigh. "That's assuming this Miss Amanda Davenport is even on the cart," he said. "The last governess Hetty was supposed to be sending chickened out before she even left Adelaide."

  "What's this one like? Did your sister say?"

  "Nah." He swirled his tongue around one of Mary's dusky nipples and watched it harden. "Her message just told me the woman's name and when to expect her. Which means she's probably some dried-up, fifty-year-old spinster who's as rigid and unyielding as her whalebone stays. I just hope to God she's not another one of those damned English gentlewomen Hetty loves."

  "I feel sorry for governesses."

  Something in Mary's voice made him glance up at her. "Why?"

  "Their lives are so narrow. So... empty."

  O'Reilly shrugged. "I've always thought people make and miss their own opportunities in life." He brought his hand up to cup her breast.

  "You need to find someone who will stay, Patrick. Your children need a woman who's around long enough that they can learn to trust her—maybe even develop some affection for her. Especially the girls. I know you spend as much time with them as you can, and you're a wonderful father, but..." She paused. "You really ought to think about marrying again."

  He went utterly still. If it'd been any other woman talking, he'd have suspected her of angling for a proposal. But he knew Mary, he knew the names of at least two other men who spent time in Mary's bed, and he knew she had no intention of marrying any of them. He began moving his hand again, slowly caressing her breast. "I still have a wife, remember?"

  "Only legally."

  "When it comes to wives, it's the legalities that count, I'm afraid."

  She rolled onto her side again to look at him. "You could always divorce Katherine for adultery."

  He flopped back on the pillow, one bent arm coming up to shade his eyes. "Oh, that would be lovely. I stand up in court and call my children's mother a whore."

  Mary rested one hand on his chest. "Not a whore, exactly. How about a wandering wife?"

  "Huh." He closed his hand over hers and swiveled his head to meet her gaze squarely. "Why don't you remarry? George has been dead four years now."

  She scooted close enough to rest her head on his shoulder. "No one can ever replace George; you know that. Not in my heart." He heard a smile creep into her voice. "In my bed is a different matter."

  He laughed softly and tightened his arm around her shoulders. "You know, Mary; that's what I like about you. You've got to be the most forthright, honest woman I've ever met. A man always knows exactly where he stands with you. What you want."

  She let out a huff and skimmed her fingertips over his lower belly, smiling at the inevitable reaction she aroused. "You like me because we both want basically the same thing from each other. You want your lovin' fun and easy, and you know I'm not lookin' for complications any more than you are."

  "I like you for a lot more than that, Mary, and you know it."

  She twisted her head to look at him again. "Yes. I know it. And you're a good friend, Patrick O'Reilly."

  He framed her face with his thumb and fingers. "Then you ought to know I have no intention of ever getting legally tangled up with another woman. One mistake like that was enough."

  "We all make mistakes when we're young."

  He sat up. "Bloody hell, woman. Why are you so anxious to marry me off?"

  She sat up beside him. "Because I don't think you're really happy."

  He stared into her wise woman's eyes, horrified to realize she saw that deeply into him. Reaching out, he pulled her onto his lap. "Hell, Mary. Why should I be happy? I've got a thousand square miles of scrub ready to dry up and blow away in this damn drought. I've got a good hundred head of sheep dying every week, and in another month I'll probably be losing that many every day."

  "And if it rains tomorrow and the creeks run again and the grass grows tall and sweet, would you be happy then, Patrick?"

  They faced each other. "Are you happy, Mary? Really happy?"

  She rolled away to pluck his pants off the floor and throw them at him. "Go meet your governess."

  Amanda trudged up the dry, rutted track, her high-topped shoes kicking up little eddies of red dust as she walked. Her arms ached from the strain of carrying her writing desk, but it had been her mother's and she hadn't wanted to leave it with her other things in the broken-down cart that had been forced to stop at the blacksmith's shop on the edge of town.

  Breathing heavily, she topped a small rise, then paused, conscious of an inner spasm of dismay as she gazed out over the township of Brinkman. According to the driver of the cart that had brought her here, Brinkman had been founded in the late 1850s; yet the settlement was still unbelievably raw. Constructed mainly of crudely cut sandstone blocks or upright saplings, it was not so much a town as a haphazard scattering of hovels flung amid the red rocks and dry scrub of the Flinders Ranges. Apart from the blacksmith's shop and the buildings of the copper mining company that had given the town birth, she could see only a squat store, a handful of cottages with bark or thatched roofs, and a one-story stone hotel with a weathered sign proclaiming "Brinkman Inn, Ich- abod Hornbottom, Proprietor."

  Amanda walked on, puzzled. Beneath the harsh glare of the winter sun, the town seemed deserted. A team of bullocks hitched to a loaded wagon stood in front of the store, but it was a crude equipage, hardly the sort one would expect the brother of Mrs. Radwith to drive. Flies buzzed in the still air. As Amanda approached, one of the bullocks flicked its tail and shook its head, rattling the yoke, before subsiding back into somnolence.

  There was no one here to meet her.

  She blinked back a ridiculous urge to burst into tears. As the motherless only child of a scholar, Amanda had been alone most of her life. But she didn't think she had ever felt as alone as she did at this moment, standing in the deserted street of this strange town on the edge of nowhere.

  Her entire body felt sore and unutterably weary after countless days of being thrown around on the hard seat of the cart as it rattled over a series of impossibly primitive tracks. Fine dust filmed her skin and clothing, and it had been so long since she'd been able to bathe properly that she was embarrassingly convinced that she smelled.

  An icy breeze kicked up, swirling the dust around her. The bright sunlight stung her eyes, and she started thankfully toward the slice of deep shade offered by the veranda of the hotel across the street. As she climbed the high step to the stone flagging, a chorus of ribald cheers and hearty male laughter erupted through the only one of the hotel's two doors that stood partially ajar. She hesitated, then pushed open the door and stepped inside.

  The sharp scent of cheap alcohol pinched her nostrils. Through a haze of cigar and pipe smoke she could see a rough bar supporting some half a dozen men in red or plaid flannel shirts and rugged trousers. As Amanda's narrow-heeled shoes clicked over the bare floor, voices stopped in midsentence. Heads pivoted. Glass-filled hands arrested their progress toward open mouths. The atmosphere in the small, airless room fairly crackled with mingling shock and masculine outrage.

  Conscious of having unwittingly committed a severe social solecism, Amanda took a step back over the threshold. But she didn't retreat any farthe
r. "Pardon me for disturbing you, gentlemen," she said, her precise, Oxford-bred vowels sounding terribly out of place in this rough bush bar. "I am looking for a Mr. Patrick O'Reilly."

  Half a dozen pairs of squinting eyes stared at her. Just when Amanda had decided that no one was going to answer her, a thin, stooped man with a graying fringe of hair stepped out from behind the bar. "O'Reilly ain't here," the man said, shifting a wad of tobacco from one sun-darkened, whiskered jaw to the other as he looked her up and down. "You that new governess he's been expectin'?"

  "Yes." Amanda watched the old man purse his lips to let loose a stream of golden-brown tobacco juice that landed with a sickening, malodorous plop inside the brass cuspidor on the floor. She wrinkled her nose. It was impossible to imagine any brother of Mrs. Radwith frequenting this crude establishment, but she asked anyway. "About Mr. O'Reilly..."

  "He was here for a wet one a bit ago," said one of the men near the bar. "He's probably off with Mary now."

  A couple of the men exchanged grins. Someone tittered, and someone else muttered, "Now that's the kind of wet one I need." Everyone laughed except for Amanda.

  "Mary?" repeated Amanda.

  "Mary McCarthy," explained the grizzly old man with the wad of chewing tobacco. "The widow what owns the shop."

  " Thank you." Amanda turned to stare at the squat stone building across the road. Her gaze fell on the bullock-drawn wagon she had noticed earlier, and for the first time, it oc- curred to her that this rough equipage might actually belong to Mr. O'Reilly. Her already depressed spirits sagging even lower, Amanda crossed the dusty track to push open the shop door.

  She found herself in a long, narrow room crowded with big bins sporting hand-printed labels proclaiming their contents. Flour. Oatmeal. Rice. Sago. Barley. Sugar. Shelves of groceries and dry goods climbed the entire height of three walls, while through the door at the back she could see a storeroom filled with bags of bulkier items—potatoes and onions, jumbled together with caskets of nails and drums of kerosene and enormous wheels of wire and stout hemp.

  There were two long wooden counters running along opposite sides of the front room, and against one of these lounged a tall, dark-haired boy, all arms and legs and bony shoulders. He stood hunched over an accounts book and seemed oblivious to Amanda's presence until she cleared her throat and said, "Excuse me? I'm looking for Mr. O'Reilly."

  The boy's head came up, showing her a fierce, closed expression. "He ain't here."

  "I was told he was with a Mrs. Mary McCarthy. Is she—"

  "Who said it?" the boy demanded, sudden, angry color flooding his face. "And what else did they say about my mother?"

  "Nothing," said Amanda quickly, backing up. "Nothing at all. Thank you." She swung about, shifting the weight of her writing desk to her other arm as she went to stand in the lee of the shop's meager veranda and wonder what she was supposed to do next.

  A movement at the edge of the settlement drew her attention. Squinting against the bright sunlight, she realized that a man had appeared on the stoop of a sandstone cottage that stood in the shadow of a dusty red bluff. Digging his fists into the small of his back, he stretched and yawned, his long, beautiful body curving into a graceful arc, his unbuttoned waistcoat and blue serge shirt hanging open to reveal a lean- muscled expanse of naked, sun-bronzed masculine flesh.

  Straightening, he lifted his hat to catch the chin strap, and the stark Australian sun glanced on golden hair bleached every shade from ochre to the color of ripe wheat. He settled the hat back on his head, stretched again, then turned as a woman appeared in the open doorway behind him. A woman with long dark hair that tumbled unbound and rumpled about her shoulders, as if she had only just come from her bed.

  As Amanda watched, the man caught the woman around the back of the neck with the crook of his elbow and pulled her to him. Even at this distance, Amanda could hear the woman's delighted laugh, see her fingers splay, then clench at the man's shoulders as he bent his head and covered the woman's mouth with his own. He kissed her long and hard, his hands roving familiarly over her body. Unable to tear her gaze away, Amanda watched, conscious of an uncomfortable heat that was part shock, part a desperate, unnamed longing that flooded through her.

  Releasing the woman with a familiar pat to her posterior, the man hopped off the stoop to land lightly, easily, in the barren yard, his open shirt flapping freely about his lean hips. Tucking his chin against his chest, he went to work on the buttons as he strolled down the hill.

  Amanda watched the man come at her. She assured herself that this could not be Mr. Patrick O'Reilly. He was too young and attractive, too casually sensual, too Australian. But he kept coming. Just short of the shop where Amanda waited in the shadows, he stopped and tucked his shirttails into white moleskin trousers so well worn that the cloth looked almost like supple leather. A very large, lethal-looking knife hung in a sheath strapped to one hip.

  A sudden gust of wind caught at Amanda's skirts, rustling the stiff fustian and starched petticoats and billowing them out around her. The man paused with his hand still stuffed halfway down the waistband of his trousers. His head fell back and a pair of startlingly blue eyes stared at her from beneath straight, dark brows. She heard him mutter something beneath his breath, something that sounded suspiciously like "shit."

  He yanked his hand from his waistband and doffed his hat. "Miss Davenport?"

  Amanda's voice seemed to have stopped working. All she could do was nod.

  A beguiling set of dimples appeared in his lean, tanned cheeks as he flashed her a devil's grin. "G'day," he said. "Welcome to the Flinders."

  CHAPTER TWO

  Thin and drab and as stiff-backed as a corpse in its coffin, the governess stared at O'Reilly from beneath the shelter of the store's veranda.

  She had on an ugly, old-fashioned bonnet that covered every hair on her head and poked out to shadow her pale, tight-lipped face. Her mantelet was dull and shapeless, her brown dress even drabber and more plainly cut. He didn't think he'd ever seen a woman more obviously determined to make herself unattractive.

  Shit, he thought again, although this time he was careful not to say it out loud. Settling his hat back on his head, he i niched for the wooden case she held clutched in a death grip against her chest. "Here, let me take that."

  "You—" The word ended in a squeak. She swallowed hard and hugged the box tighter. "You are employed by Mr. O'Reilly?"

  English. O'Reilly froze, staring at the woman before him. Bloody hell. Hetty had done it to him again—sent him another one of her damned English gentlewomen.

  He squeezed his eyes shut, momentarily indulging himself with the mental image of his hands closing around his big sister's neck and shaking her. Shaking her until she said yes, she understood that English gentlewomen didn't get along very well in the outback at the best of times, let alone in the middle of a killing drought. Yes, she understood that the last thing he wanted was for Hannah and Missy to start acting like u couple of precious little Englishwomen. For Christ's sake, what did he have to do to Hetty to make her understand that, after Katherine, if he never saw another bloody Englishwoman in his life, it would be too soon? Damn Hetty and her meddling, know-it-all ways.

  He sucked in a deep breath and opened his eyes to find the new governess peering at him strangely. "You're English."

  She squared her already rigidly held shoulders and proudly elevated her thin nose a bit higher into the air in a way that immediately reminded him of Katherine. "Naturally I am English," she said in her painfully precise diction. "Mrs. Radwith's advertisement specifically required the respondents to be English gentlewomen."

  "Oh it did, did it?"

  She gave him a supercilious look calculated to let him know she'd decided he must be a bit thick or something. "Surely, Mr. O'Reilly—"

  "I am Patrick O'Reilly," he said testily. "Now if you'll let me have that case—"

  "You?" An expression somewhere between disbelief and horror flooded into her face.
"But you... you are Australian."

  "Yeah." He gave up trying to get her to let him carry her bloody lap desk and just stood there, looking at her. Jesus, she was a tiny thing. The top of her head didn't come up any higher than his chest. She was fine-boned, too, and underfed looking, which gave her a worrisome air of fragility. As if the least hint of adversity would flatten her.

  Against the harsh reality of the Flinders and the active animosity of his three hell-born brats, he thought, she didn't stand a chance.

  As he watched, her gaze veered uncomfortably away from him, as if she'd decided her outspoken comment on his colonial birth might have sounded rather rude. He knew from experience that Englishwomen always made it a point to be painfully polite. Even when they were metaphorically sinking a knife into your back.

  "I beg your pardon," she said stiffly. "It's just that your sister . . . That is, I assumed Mrs. Radwith was born in England."

  "Oh, she can sound like a bloody pom when she wants. But she was still born out here, same as me."

  At the words bloody pom, a band of indignant color leapt to Miss Amanda Davenport's fine, high cheekbones. Looking at her again, he realized she was younger than he'd taken her to be when he'd first seen her. She was even surprisingly easy on the eyes—or rather, she had been, before she'd pinched her lips together in one of those sour, censorious expressions English gentlewomen invariably assumed whenever someone said shit or bloody hell in their rarefied presence.

  A gust of cold wind swirled around them, anointing them both with a fine layer of dust and the bitter, pungent scents of the dying bush. He watched Miss Davenport stiffen her already rigid back to keep from flinching, and he almost felt sorry for her. She was so—so English.