Taming Charlotte (47 page)

She turned, reluctantly, and went back into the cool shelter of the house.

Jake was still sleeping, apparently, so she returned to her own
room and pulled Grandmother Matty’s handmade quilt off the bed. The coverlet hadn’t been washed in a long time, and it had a musty smell to it.

In the homestead’s primitive kitchen, Jacy heated water on the gas-powered stove, making as little noise as possible. Then she rinsed out the quilt in the kitchen sink, wrung it gently, and carried it out to the clothesline in back of the house. While it was drying in the warm morning sun, she brewed a cup of tea and sat on the back step to drink it, watching with delight as a mob of kangaroos sprang across the paddock separating her father’s property from Ian’s.

She was exhausted, and not just from the hasty trip across the international date line after she’d learned about Jake’s heart attack and the long vigil at the hospital in Adelaide that had followed. There were troubles waiting back in the States, snarls to untangle, things that, true to form, she’d run away from.

The way she’d run away from Ian.

“Ian.” She spoke the name softly, but aloud, and it hurt more than she would ever have expected. Memories overtook her like a bushfire; tears stung her eyes, a sob escaped her and, finally, she knew it was futile to try to hold back her grief any longer. She wept in earnest.

When the personal storm was over, Jacy sniffled, tilted her head back, and closed her puffy eyes. Scenes from that awful time ten years before played on the screen of her mind in Technicolor and stereo.

She made herself walk through the memories, facing them one by one. Having done that, she reasoned, she might be able to look Ian in the eye the next time they met without losing her dignity.

Jacy saw in her thoughts a smaller and wilder version of her twenty-eight-year-old sophisticated self, a sunburned waif in blue jeans. Her dark blond hair had been short then, and she’d ridden all over the property, and some parts of those adjoining it, on her aging white mare, Biscuit. She’d been free as a gypsy in those days, knowing nothing of heartache. Even her parents’ divorce hadn’t truly touched her, for she’d been too young to remember leaving the homestead with her mother, and she’d made the long trip Down Under often throughout her childhood, to stay with Jake.

Ian, like Jacy, had been just eighteen the year the world turned upside down, but more man than boy even then. He’d already begun taking over the responsibilities of running the property he’d inherited from his father.

Jacy had fallen in love with Ian at a spring party, much like the one the night before, after the shearing had been done and the wool baled and sent off to Adelaide in semis to be sold. Miracle of miracles, he had felt the same way about her, or said he did, at least, and in secret places on her father’s property and his own he had taught her to glory in her womanhood. He had introduced her to the most excruciatingly sweet pleasures and, in fact, no man had touched her so intimately since.

They’d planned to marry, over Jacy’s mother’s frantic longdistance protests. Regina Tiernan Walsh was strong and smart, but she’d entered into a rash marriage in a foreign land herself once and, subsequently, her bridegroom, Australia, and her own disillusionment had combined forces to break her heart. Not surprisingly, Regina had been terrified that the same fate awaited her daughter.

In the end, though, it had been Elaine Bennett, daughter of the American manager of Merimbula Station, who had brought Jacy’s dreams down with a soul-shattering crash. She’d come up to Jacy and Ian outside the theater in Yolanda, looked Ian straight in the eye, and told him she was going to have his baby.

Even after a decade, Jacy could still feel the terrible shock of that moment, and the helpless, fiery rage that had followed. Ian had not denied the accusation, neither had he troubled himself to explain or apologize. He’d simply expected Jacy to understand.

A distant bleating sound jolted Jacy from her musings, and she rose slowly from her seat on the step. Way off, she saw a sea of recently shorn sheep approaching, kicking up the dry red dust as they came.

Jacy’s heart rose immediately to her throat and lodged there. The sheep were Ian’s, she had no doubt of that, on their way to the springs to drink.

For a few moments, she nursed the scant hope that someone else would be driving the flock, or mob, as the locals called it—one of Ian’s two or three hired men maybe. Even before Ian himself came into view, however, mounted on that enormous liver-colored stallion Jake had written her about, she knew she couldn’t be so lucky.

She wasn’t ready, she thought frantically.

Not so soon.

The baaing and bleating of the sheep grew until the racket filled Jacy’s skull and stomach, and she watched the mob divide like water coursing around a stone. Two lean dogs kept the odd-looking beasts moving when they would have stopped to nibble the grass in the yard, and great clouds of red dust billowed in the hot, still air, covering the freshly washed quilt with grit.

Jacy just stood there on the back step, like a felon on the scaffold, waiting for the noose to tighten around her neck. Her clothes, jeans and a white T-shirt, felt all wrong, her hair probably looked like hell, and she hadn’t bothered to put on makeup. She’d never felt less prepared for anything.

She figured she’d be really upset about the quilt, once her thoughts calmed down, but at the moment she was too distracted.

In the dazzling light of a summer day, it was plain that Ian’s features had hardened with maturity. His violet gaze seemed to slice through her spirit, cutting cleanly, leaving no jagged edges.

Her knees went weak and she sagged onto the step. Jetlag, she insisted to herself, though it had been more than three weeks since she’d landed in Adelaide.

Ian was wearing perfectly ordinary clothes—a battered stockman’s hat, a blue cambric workshirt, the front of which was stained with sweat, jeans, and boots, and yet the sight of him stole Jacy’s breath away.

“How’s Jake this morning?” he asked, shouting to be heard over the last of the sheep and swinging down from the saddle. There was nothing cordial in the question; she could see by his expression that things hadn’t changed since the night before.

“See for yourself,” she replied, amazed that the words had gotten past her constricted throat. Her heart was pounding like a ceremonial drum, and she feared she might be sick to her stomach.

Ian tethered the horse to a rusted hitching post, resettled his hat, and crossed the yard to stand facing her. “See for myself I will,” he answered in that low, rumbling voice that had once urged her to passion and then consoled her afterward, when she’d feared that all the scattered pieces of her soul would never find their way back to her. “If you’ll just get out of my way.”

Jacy looked straight into those impossibly violet eyes, and
her heart shattered all over again. She rose and turned her back on Ian, praying he wouldn’t guess how shaken she was.

“Dad was sleeping, before your sheep came tramping through here like a herd of buffalo,” she said in a moderately acidic tone. She could feel him behind her, though of course they weren’t touching, feel the heat and hardness of him in the small of her back, the space between her shoulder blades and her nape, the tender flesh of her thighs and the insides of her knees. “I don’t suppose you noticed what those creatures did to my clean quilt.”

They entered the kitchen.

“I don’t suppose I did,” Ian said, utterly without remorse. “I’ll tell Jake you’re here.”

“Thanks for that much, anyway,” Ian grumbled. In an involuntary backward glance, Jacy saw him hang his hat on a peg beside the door and shove splayed fingers through his hair.

Suddenly the old anger crashed through all her carefully constructed defenses, swamping her, and it took every ounce of Jacy’s self-control to keep her voice calm and even. “What did you expect, Ian? That I’d welcome you with open arms? That I’d thank you for teaching me that love has fangs?”

Ian’s jawline hardened but, before he could speak, Jake appeared in the inside doorway, leaning on his cane.

“Hello, mate,” he said. “I wondered when you’d get round to paying an old man a visit.”

Ian’s laugh was a low burst of sound, only too well remembered by Jacy and somehow excluding her. “You think I’ve got nothing better to do than eat biscuits and sip tea with the likes of you, Jake Tiernan?”

Jacy hurried outside before her father could suggest that she put the kettle on. She’d eat a bale of raw wool before she’d make tea and fetch cookies for Ian Yarbro. If he wanted refreshments, he could damn well serve himself.

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The Legacy