September Moon Read online

  He looked at her, standing there in her prim white gloves und stiff crinoline, with her formal manners and rigid outlook, and it occurred to him that everything that made her an English gentlewoman, everything that enabled her to move comfortably and surely through the world she'd known up until now, was useless to her here. Worse than useless: a liability. And she wasn't even aware of it.

  He watched her chin come up, her thin nose quivering, and he knew, without being told, that this woman didn't want to be here in the Flinders any more than he wanted a woman like her out at Penyaka. But he needed someone to teach his children, und he needed someone now, not in another six months— presuming he could even coax Hetty into sending a replacement, which would be doubtful if he turned this one down flat. As for Miss Davenport, he figured she must be pretty destrate herself, to have come all the way up here for a job. The way he looked at it, they were stuck with each other.

  Reside him, one of the bullocks shifted its weight, rattling the harness. O'Reilly scrunched his hat down lower on his head and glanced around, looking for the governess's trunks. "It you'll tell me where you left the rest of your things, we can get goin'."

  As if she, too, had come to some kind of a decision,

  Amanda Davenport put one gloved fist up to her mouth and discreetly cleared her throat. "The mail cart was forced to stop at the blacksmith's shop to repair a broken wheel. 1 left my trunk and satchel there." Her gaze flicked to his wagon, and that brief appearance of color faded from her cheeks. "This—this farm vehicle is yours?"

  O'Reilly's eyes narrowed. So a supply wagon was a touch beneath her ladyship, was it? "Yeah," he drawled. "But I'll be drivin' in the seat, not walkin'."

  She looked at him strangely, as if she didn't even understand what he meant. But she did step down into the sun- washed, dusty road and let him take her precious lap desk. He went to stow it in the wagon bed. When he came back around she was still standing in the middle of the track, eyeing the wagon as if it were a toad or something.

  "What's the matter?" He rested his hands on his hips. "Never ridden in a farm wagon before?"

  She shook her head. "No. The seat is rather high, isn't it?" Her gaze shifted to him, and he realized that what he read in her face was not affronted arrogance but uncertainty, mixed with a touch of what he thought might be fear, although she was doing her best to hide it.

  Swearing under his breath, he started toward her. "Here, let me help you up."

  She sidled nervously away from him. "No." Her voice almost squeaked with panic, surprising him so much, he stopped in his tracks. "No, thank you," she said more calmly. "I can manage."

  He doubted she could, but he leaned back against one of the veranda posts, folded his arms across his chest, and watched.

  Reaching as high as she could, she stretched one hand up to grasp the edge of the wooden seat. She was so tiny, she could only just wrap the tips of her fingers around it, and had to strain to get a grip on the front board with her other hand. She stood like that for a moment, her arms flung wide, so that she reminded him of a martyr, nailed to a cross. A well-endowed martyr, he thought irreverently, his eyes narrowing as he studied her profile. For such a tiny, sour-tempered thing, she sure had a nice pair of breasts. What a waste.

  He had to hide a grin as he watched her lift her foot, then glance down uncertainly. Her full skirts hid her feet from her view, so she fumbled blindly to stick the toe of one shoe between the spokes of the wheel, using it as a step. She brought the other foot up, then took a hopping little jump that made her feet lose the wheel but wasn't enough to do more than propel her halfway up to the seat. Her hands clenched frantically at their grips, but she was stuck there, her stomach on the edge of the wagon, her feet kicking in the air, her little derriere poking out most invitingly.

  She was lucky her crinoline was flexible and unfashionably narrow, he thought, or she'd be giving everyone in Brinkman a good eyeful of whatever she wore under her skirts. He watched her wiggle a moment, then lie still, panting like a hanked fish. O'Reilly eyed that upthrust bottom thoughtfully. He knew she wasn't going to like what he was about to do, but he couldn't see any other way around the problem.

  Pushing away from the veranda, he came up behind her. "Want some help?"

  He didn't quite catch her muffled response.

  "What's that you said?" he asked.

  She twisted her head around and stared at him, her face livid, her fine gray eyes snapping with an unexpected display of temper. "I said, yes, please."

  "All right, then." Reaching up, he cupped the round cheeks

  of her buttocks in his spread hands. She went rigid and let out un incoherent gasp of shock, but he ignored it. Tightening his grip, he lifted her up and into the wagon.

  Amanda stared out over endless stark slopes of withered grass, sparse, scrubby trees, and brittle red rock.

  This country was so wild, she thought; wild and harsh and brutal. A sense of dread had been building steadily within her, with every mile she traveled north of Adelaide. Now she felt a hollowness in her stomach that she recognized as fear. The township of Brinkman had been bad enough, but she was afraid Penyaka itself was going to be worse—worse by far than shed imagined possible.

  She bit back a startled yelp as the man beside her cracked his whip and shouted something unintelligible at the bullocks pulling the wagon. They had spoken little since he had collected her things from the cart at the blacksmith's shop. Yet she remained acutely conscious of his rough, male presence beside her on the wagon seat. He was close enough that every time she breathed, she was aware of his scent—a mingling of leather and tobacco and a distinctly masculine essence that was not unpleasant. He had one of his scruffy brown leather boots planted beside her patent leather shoes, his knees spread wide so that his long, lean thigh pressed too close to her skirt. He made her feel hot and uncomfortable, and she didn't like it.

  She stared down at his big, tanned hands, holding the reins with a laziness that did nothing to disguise the hard strength of that grip. She remembered the heat of those hands, intimately cupping her bottom, and she barely stopped herself from squirming with embarrassment.

  She knew it had been unforgivably foolish of her not to let him help her into the wagon when he'd first offered. She could not understand, even now, why she had so absurdly shied away from the prospect of his touching her. She could only suppose it was because he had turned out to be so very different from the man she had expected.

  She had pictured Mrs. Radwith's brother as a proper, middle-aged gentleman, living in reasonably comfortable circumstances. She was still struggling to reconcile that image with this handsome, aggressively virile young man, who leapt half-naked from widows' porches and lived in the midst of such heart-stopping desolation.

  It seemed to Amanda, suddenly, as if they had been driving forever. "How long will it take us to reach your run?" she asked, breaking the long silence. "That is what you call these properties, isn't it? Runs?"

  The question came out sounding condescending and a bit supercilious, although she hadn't meant it that way. He swiveled to look at her. "We're on Penyaka now. But if you mean how far is it to the homestead itself, it's about an hour from town by horseback. The wagon's slower, but it shouldn't be long now."

  "What do you mean by the homestead?"

  There was a pause filled with the rattling of the harness and the howl of the cold wind. "That's what we call the big house on the main station. A homestead."

  She turned to survey the horizon. Squinting against the dazzling sun, she noticed a few head of rangy cattle, and a distant herd of sheep under the watchful eye of a lone shepherd. Nearer at hand she spotted two emus, their necks stretching out as they minced away with unhurried, single-file grace. Yet the landscape still seemed empty, almost devoid of life. She wondered how anyone could survive in such a harsh place.

  "It feels as if we're in the middle of nowhere," she said, surprised to hear herself speaking the thought aloud.

 
He let out a small huff of laughter. "Oh, it's not so bad anymore. When I first drove a herd up here from Victoria twelve years ago, the nearest town was a couple of days away."

  "That must have been very difficult for your wife," Amanda said without thinking.

  All trace of amusement vanished instantly from his face. She saw the thrust of his cheekbone beneath his taut skin as his expression hardened, and knew she had inadvertently touched a raw nerve. "My wife stayed in Victoria with her parents for the first few years," he said tersely. "She didn't come up here until Hannah was almost a year and half."

  Amanda found herself staring at his sharp-boned profile. She decided he couldn't be much more than thirty now, she thought—thirty-two at the most. Twelve years ago he would have been young. Young to be driving a herd through wild, unexplored country to set up his own run. And very young to have already married and fathered a child.

  Surprised by the wayward and decidedly improper direction of her thoughts, Amanda cleared her throat and said, "Tell me about your children. What they're like."

  She sensed an easing of the tightness within him, a letting go of the hostility her words had so unexpectedly provoked. He pushed his hat brim up with his thumb. "Well, there's Hannah. She's the oldest. Then comes Liam, who's nine, and Melissa. She's the baby. But as to what they're like ..." His lips curled up, his cheek creasing with his smile. "I think I'll let you make up your own mind about that."

  She was so preoccupied with looking at him that when one of the wagon's wheels lurched into a deep rut, it almost sent her toppling from her perch on the high seat. She clutched at the board's rough edge and braced her feet wide against the bouncing and rattling of the wagon as it clattered down a steep, rocky incline. They were moving into more open country now, she noticed, the higher reaches of the Flinders Ranges looming to the north and west behind them. The land here ran mostly to undulating, tawny-colored hills and bold red tablelands, cut deeply by creeks lined with box trees and white-stemmed red gums and dense thickets of lignum. But the creeks were all dry, the trees and bushes dust-covered and dying.

  "Your first time in the bush?"

  O'Reilly's voice intruded upon her silence. "Yes," she said.

  "How long you been in Australia, anyway?"

  "Four months."

  "If you don't like it, why'd you come out here?"

  She glanced at him, disconcerted to discover her reaction to this wild, forbidding place so obvious. "I did not actually come here intending to stay. I came with Mr. Jasper Blake, the botanist, and his wife, Frances."

  He peered at her from beneath his hat brim, his eyes flaring a bit in surprise. "You a botanist, then?"

  "1 am not formally trained. But my classical education enabled me to serve as secretary and assistant to Mr. Blake." She couldn't help it if she sounded proud; she was proud of her education, her accomplishments. "It's unusual for a woman to hold such a post, but Mrs. Blake preferred to travel with a female companion, so I was fortunate enough to secure the position."

  "And these Blakes left you here?"

  Amanda shook her head, a surge of grief squeezing her chest. "Originally, we were to be in Australia for a year. Mrs. Blake and I remained in Adelaide and cataloged the material, while Mr. Blake collected samples."

  "So what went wrong?"

  Amanda stared out over the strange, hostile landscape. Those secure, comparatively pleasant days with the Blakes seemed so long ago now, it was as if she spoke of another lifetime. "Shortly after our arrival, Mrs. Blake became ill— something to do with her heart. She wanted to stay, but Mr. Blake decided to return to England on the Prince Edward, in July. Only the very day we were to board ship a thief broke into our rooms at the hotel."

  She hadn't meant to tell him all this, but the words just came spilling out of her. "We were on our way to breakfast, when Mr. Blake forgot something and turned back. He surprised the thief, and the man . . . killed him." She swallowed hard. "He also got away with everything of value—all the Blakes' money, my own savings, even our tickets."

  "The tickets must have been in your names. I wouldn't have thought anyone else could use them."

  "Oh, the shipping line said they would still let us have our cabins. They simply refused to refund the cost of the passage unless we could surrender the actual tickets."

  "So why didn't you sail?"

  She smoothed the ugly brown cloth of her skirt over her knees. "Mrs. Blake was too ill. She died several hours after the ship sailed."

  There was a pause during which Amanda felt his eyes on her. "And you stayed with this woman until she died?" he said.

  "Yes." Anxious to change the subject, she gazed out over the swaying black and brown backs of the plodding bullocks, and said quickly, "I'm glad that if I had to be stranded in the colonies, at least I ended up in South Australia."

  "Why's that?"

  "Because it was set up as a free colony, of course. There are no convicts here to worry about, like in the rest of Australia."

  There was an uncomfortable silence, filled only with the crunch of stones beneath the bullocks' plodding hooves and the sound of the wind howling around them, cold and dusty and lonely. "Convicts," he said. "They're a worry, all right."

  The words were easy enough, but they carried an underlying, almost terse note that made her turn to look at him. He was still wearing that lazy smile, but his eyes had narrowed.

  "You don't agree?" she said.

  The smile tightened into something unmistakably nasty. "Course I do. Why, I was born in Tasmania, and the convicts there were a real worry." He drawled the words out, deliberately emphasizing his colonial twang, as if to mock her. " 'Specially my grandpapa. He was transported for stealin' a horse back in 1803, you see, and my mama, she always kept a nervous eye on him. Course, he claimed he was just bor- rowin' the horse. It was the sheep he was stealin'."

  She stared at his dark, handsome face, with its bad-boy smile and glittering, challenging eyes. "You are making that up."

  "Not a bit of it," he said, his attention flicking back to his team.

  They were running now beside a dry creek bed, and the lead bullock slowed to eye the withered bush at the edge of the track with undisguised longing. O'Reilly cracked his bullwhip so close to Amanda's head that she flung up her hand to make sure her ear was still attached. "Gedup there, Mallee- boy," he called. "You ball-less bastard."

  His raw language sent a shocked rush of color to Amanda's cheeks. If he was telling the truth—if his grandfather really had been transported as a convict—then she supposed she ought to apologize for her unintentional insult. Instead, she said tartly, "I take it you acquired your impressive vocabulary from your illustrious grandfather. Did he teach you any of his other skills?"

  He turned his head and met her gaze. She looked into his disturbing eyes and, for a moment, forgot to breathe. She saw a flare of something hot and dangerous and exciting, something that reminded her that this man was no gentleman, that he was as wild and untamed as this land he made his home. "Skills, Miss Davenport?" he said, his voice rough and low. "Which of my skills were you interested in?"

  For some reason she could not explain, his words brought back to her the image of Patrick O'Reilly as she had first seen him, his open shirt flapping in the breeze, his strong man's hands roaming familiarly over a woman's body. She felt a peculiar flutter in her stomach, a flutter that intensified as she realized she'd allowed the silence between them to drag out far too long.

  "All of my livestock is legally acquired," he said, his lips twisting unexpectedly into a grin. "If that's what you meant."

  She found she could no longer meet that intense blue stare, and swung her head away to look out over a land so lonely and primitive, it made her ache inside. She could not understand the feelings this place provoked in her. It was more than strangeness and fear. It was a restlessness, an edginess that was like a stirring of something she didn't want.

  Something she didn't even want to name.

  Pa
trick O'Reilly's main station consisted of some dozen or so sturdily constructed sandstone buildings that lay scattered seemingly at random along the side of a dry, rocky hill overlooking a broad valley.

  Except this was not the kind of valley Amanda knew. This was no gentle English dale, knee-deep in clover and rich, sweet-smelling grass. This was a desolate swath of rocks and dusty, golden-brown vegetation that cut between the rugged, blue-green folds of the Flinders Ranges.

  As the wagon lurched and swayed down the steep track, she noticed the drooping, gray-green leaves of a line of white-trunked gums that curled around the base of the hill. She knew the trees marked the site of a watercourse. But like all the other creeks they had crossed, this one was nothing but a I unible of dry rocks and widely scattered water holes.

  High above the creek, at one edge of the compound and up- stream from the other buildings, she could see the homestead itself. It was a low, one-story building, shaded on three sides by deep verandas. Massive, carefully shaped blocks of rosy- tinged, golden sandstone braced the house's corners and framed the openings for the doors and long windows. But the walls themselves were formed of rough stones, crudely plastered with some ochre-colored mortar. It gave the house the look of something ancient—primeval, even. The homestead couldn't have been here more than ten years or so, she thought, but already it looked as much a part of this harsh, sun-baked landscape as the cracked hills and raw red earth.