The Cattle King's Mistress (11 page)

Celine returned to her chair.

The call signal of a mobile telephone came from Nathan’s shirt pocket. Conversation halted as attention swung to him, the injured stockman coming to mind again.

“Please excuse me,” he said, standing up to move away from the table.

He went out on the verandah to take the call.

The sweets course was served, providing a timely distraction. Miranda had lost her appetite for any more food, her stomach too knotted with tension to accept even a spoonful. Whatever antagonism had just been raised and aired between Nathan and Bobby was bound to make the situation worse for her, and she had to get through two more days—and nights—with the Hewsons.

Compliments about the lemon souffle flowed around the table. Questions were asked about the chef and what other delights could be anticipated from him. Miranda assured them they would be pleased with whatever Roberto prepared but the menu often depended on the guests themselves. She smiled at the couple going fishing tomorrow and suggested they might provide their next dinner.

“Miranda...”

Her heart jumped at Nathan’s call. She turned to see him standing at the opened doors to the verandah, emanating an air of authority that was not about to brook opposition.

“May I have a word with you?’’

The polite but very public request could not be turned down. “Yes, of course. Please excuse me,” she said to the guests as she stood up.

Chaos tore through her again. If Nathan had received bad news he might have to go. Despite her earlier raging, she didn’t want him to leave. A trembling started in her legs, and it was difficult to maintain any sense of independent pride as she crossed the room, her mind feverishly fretting over the outcome of this evening’s conflicts.

He smoothly engineered her passage out onto the verandah and drew her far enough away from the doors to allow their automatic closing. His grasp on her elbow was firm, warm, and Miranda felt chilled when he dropped it. Had Bobby turned him off her, or had she done that herself? A devastating emptiness yawned inside her.

“The stockman?” she asked, unable to look Nathan in the face.

“The news was good. The spinal cord wasn’t damaged.”

“I’m glad to hear it.”

“That’s not why I called you out. Look at me, Miranda.”

A steely command.

For a moment, she looked out at the dark shape of his Land Cruiser, remembering her feelings when she’d seen him arrive, silhouetted against the sunset. There had been hope in her heart then. Now despair pressed its dark fingers on her mind. She dredged up some remnants of fighting spirit and turned her gaze to his, expecting nothing good.

His eyes blazed with relentless determination. “You cannot stay here,” he stated unequivocally. “I have called Tommy and apprised him of the situation. He’ll fly in first thing in the morning.”

Alarm streaked through Miranda. What had Bobby said about her? Why was Nathan involving Tommy? Was she being fired from her position? Summarily removed because of another person’s word? Though of course it wasn’t just another person. It was her previous employer!

“What did you tell Tommy?” she demanded frantically, needing to know what she had to defend herself against.

“Enough to know Hewson is a threat to his business,” Nathan answered tersely. “I want you to go in now and pack a bag, ready to leave. I shall keep the Hewsons occupied while you do this.”

“But where am I to go?”
What had Bobby said? How was he a threat? And why did she have to leave?
“You can’t do this to me,” she protested. “Not without telling me why. I’m entitled to an explanation.”

“I’m not
doing
anything but safeguarding you and the good name of this resort,” he retorted, frowning at her response. “As to where you’re going, with me, of course. You can spend the weekend at the station homestead. Once the Hewsons are gone, you’ll resume your position here.”

She wasn’t being fired! “I’m to go...
with you?”
she repeated dazedly.

“Yes. I promise you will be safe with me, Miranda. Is my word good enough for you?”

“Safe...from Bobby, you mean,” she said, trying to sort through her confusion.

“From me, as well...if that’s concerning you,” he said harshly.

She shook her head, knowing Nathan would not force himself upon her. But to go to such extreme measures...”I want to know what Bobby said. Why you’re doing this,” she cried.

“Later.” He gestured an impatient dismissal of these concerns. “Is there anything you need to organise for the guests tonight, before you leave?” he pressed, assuming her consent to his plans.

The realisation struck she had no choice in the matter. Nathan and Tommy had already made the decisions. “No,” she answered slowly, trying to adjust her mind to this entirely new set of circumstances. “Though I usually check that they’re happy with everything before they retire for the night.”

“You can do that before we leave. What about the morning? Breakfast? Activities?”

Her mind raced over possible problems and saw none. “It’s all been scheduled. It should run without a hitch. There’ll be a staff member on duty here.”

“Good! Then go and pack what you need. I’ll hold the party together. And don’t be long about it, Miranda.” His eyes flashed contempt. “I’ve had enough of the Hewsons to do me a lifetime.”

He hadn’t been enjoying himself...

Still in a state of shock over these new developments, Miranda went back inside to follow Nathan’s instructions. It took considerable effort to shake her mind free of the dark, tumultuous brooding that had possessed it since his arrival earlier this evening. However, one comforting fact did emerge. Nathan
had
come to stand by her, to protect her. And now he was taking her right out of the nightmare of having to cope with Bobby any longer.

Relief mixed with a sense of humiliation that it had come to this...taking her out...bringing in Tommy... all because of her history with a man she now despised, a past she had done everything to escape from.

Did anyone ever escape from their past? she wondered.

On the other hand, perhaps she was exaggerating her part in whatever was going on. Maybe there was some threat to the resort, competition planned by the Hewson/Parmentier hotel connection. Bobby’s request for her to show him how the resort worked might have another more devious motive than just getting her alone with him.

Assuring herself she’d find out soon enough from Nathan, and having reached her room, Miranda pushed herself into thinking of what clothes to take for a weekend at the station homestead. Except it wasn’t just a place to go to, a place of refuge from Bobby Hewson. She would be spending the weekend with Nathan...in his home.

Safe,
he’d said, and his word could be trusted. Miranda didn’t doubt that. The problem was...could she trust herself to keep safe from him? She hated the distance she had put between them tonight. Maybe it was a sensible distance. Maybe he no longer wanted to cross it.

What had Bobby said about her?

Her heart quivered in trepidation. Her life didn’t feel her own any more. But she went through the motions of packing a bag. A weekend with Nathan should sort out something, she argued. Safe or not, it had to be better than staying here with Bobby Hewson.

Nathan
had taken her chair at the head of the table, continuing his assumed role of host in her absence. Miranda noted he was still promoting a congenial mood amongst the guests, though keeping a physical distance from the Hewsons. She dropped her bag near the doors and crossed the lounge area to the split-level dining section, nervously wondering how he intended to direct their departure.

He rose from her chair, pushing it right back so he could gather her to his side, smiling at her as he slid his arm around her waist, deliberately coupling them to face the table guests together.

“All ready?” he asked, his eyes commanding her assent.

“Yes,” she murmured, acutely aware of his hand resting possessively on the curve of her hip.

He transferred his smile to the guests who were all watching this linking with speculative interest. “I must beg you to excuse us from the rest of this evening’s dinner party,” he said charmingly. “Duty calls me back to the station and this is Miranda’s weekend off. I’ve persuaded her to find out firsthand what the life of a cattleman is like.”

He turned an intimate grin to her and added, “I can’t, in all conscience, expect her to marry me until she knows what she’s committing herself to.”

Marry!

Miranda was too poleaxed to say a word. Somehow she managed to maintain the smile she’d pasted on her face.

One of the male guests laughingly remarked, “Well, that’s making your intentions clear, Nathan.”

“One of the things we learn in the outback is always seize the day,” he answered good-humouredly. “And when a woman like Miranda comes along, a man would be a fool not to.”

Heat bloomed in her cheeks. She rolled her eyes at Nathan, not knowing where else to look. It amused the guests who were obviously enjoying his very open confidences.

“My brother, Tommy, will be here in the morning to manage you through the rest of the weekend,” he went on. “Staff will be standing by to see you off on your activities tomorrow. Is there anything you need to check with Miranda before I sweep her away with me?”

The inquiry brought only jovial remarks.

“We’re all set. Best of luck to you, Nathan!”

“Yo! We’ve made a note of everything. Got to say you two look well-matched.”

“No problem for us. Don’t let him steam-roller you, Miranda.”

“Huh! Firsthand knowledge sounds good to me!”

“I would seize the night if I were you, Miranda,” Celine said archly.

Everyone laughed.

Except Bobby, who remained silent. Miranda didn’t look at him, but she was extremely conscious of his presence and his lack of response. This performance by Nathan was for
his
benefit. She hoped it was having the right effect, whatever that was supposed to be.

Marry!

Nathan couldn’t mean it. Why go so far?
What had Bobby said to him?

“Then we’ll say goodnight to you. Enjoy yourselves.” Nathan rolled on, saluting them with one hand and digging the fingers of the other into her hip to prompt her into appropriate speech.

“Have a great time, all of you!” she rushed out. “And thank you for your good advice. It’s a bit hard to catch one’s breath around Nathan.”

It left them laughing.

They didn’t know how true it was.

All the way out to his Land Cruiser, Miranda was in a ferment over his words and actions. His arm remained lodged around her waist, and she could feel his determination to prevent any backward sliding from his stated plan. It wasn’t desire for her company driving him. He had taken control and was relentlessly pushing through what he considered had to be done.

He opened the front passenger door and half-lifted her into the high seat. Her bag was stowed on the bench seat behind her. There was no time wasted in putting himself behind the steering wheel and getting the Land Cruiser into motion. His face was grim as they sped away from the resort homestead, and Miranda had to take a very deep breath to combat the throat-strangling tension he emitted.

“What did Bobby Hewson say to you?”

Jaw-clenching silence.

Her heart cramped at this evidence of damage done, but she could not let the issue rest any longer. “This is
later,
Nathan. I’m entitled to know.”

“He was surprised you had been hired for such a position of trust without a thorough investigation into your background,” he answered, his voice grating out the words.

Miranda clenched her hands at the implication she could not be trusted. “In all my working life, I have never once been considered unreliable. Your mother saw my references,” she shot at him.

“He proceeded to tell me
your
mother was little better than a whore, a kept mistress who’d serviced several married men, one of whom had fathered you. She’d also been an alcoholic who eventually drank herself to death.”

The stark facts of her mother’s life sounded ghastly, stripped as they were of any mitigating circumstances or sympathetic understanding. Miranda felt sick, remembering how Bobby had wanted to know more about her life and had been sweetly comforting when she had confided the truth. But she had never, never used such brutal terms in speaking of her mother, and she had wept over the sadness of it all...the initial deceit of a married lover who had left her alone and pregnant, the inability to cope and the desperate drowning of that inability in alcohol.

She closed her eyes, savagely berating herself for having revealed such deeply personal matters to a man who had no compunction in using them against her. Pillow-talk. Intimacy she had believed was precious to both of them. Now this malicious betrayal of it.

“Did he tell you I was bent the same way?” she asked dully.

“He said you knew how to work the sexual angles to your advantage, that he himself had been pleasured by you in years gone by, and he wouldn’t put it past you to fleece any male guest who fancied you.”

Humiliation burned her soul. “It’s not true,” she whispered. “I’ve never...
sold
myself. He’s saying these things because he thought he could buy me and I wouldn’t go along with it.”

“You don’t have to defend yourself to me, Miranda. I don’t enjoy repeating this muck-raking. It was all I could do, not to smash his face in.”

Relief poured some soothing balm on her wounds. At least Nathan believed she was being slandered. In fact, the sheer savagery in his voice spurred the courage to open her eyes and really look at him. His face was taut with barely suppressed anger. His knuckles gleamed almost white where he was gripping the steering wheel.

“You had to be taken out of there,” he said with biting conviction. “He would have used you to create a nasty situation. He was setting up for it. Without you as a flesh-and-blood focus, he loses his teeth. In moving you onto my ground, there’s no way he can get at you.”

Miranda sighed, understanding his tactics and grateful for being spared Bobby’s treacherous company, but suspecting frustration would only drive the slandering further. “It won’t stop him telling lies about me, Nathan. In fact, your suggestion of marriage will probably fuel his claim of my playing the sexual angles for profit.”

“No. It reinforces how serious my threat was to him.”

“Threat?” The idea startled her. Then she remembered the hard, ruthless cast of his face when he had answered Bobby at the dinner table. “What did you threaten him with?” she asked, unable to think of anything that would hurt a Hewson.

“I told him if I heard so much as another word breathed against you, I would set about wrecking his marriage and the Hewson-Parmentier merger with every bit of armament at my disposal.”

Shock pummelled her. “But how could you do it?’’

“Through his wife.”

“You would hurt her?”

“Against him I would use anything.” He slanted her a hard, cynical look. “Don’t be wasting your sympathy on the sultry Celine...a new bride, fancying a lustful dalliance with me. Hardly an expression of true love for her husband.”

It was all very well to criticise the morality of others, but if Nathan had been encouraging Celine, was he any better? Feeling very much at odds with this tactic, Miranda recalled his reaction to her own supposed position of mistress to a married man. “You told me adultery wasn’t your scene,” she tersely reminded him.

“It’s not,” he replied without hesitation, shooting her a sardonic look as he added, “but neither of them know that. I’m bluffing, Miranda, and a bluff only succeeds if it is credible.”

“Do you think it’s credible...talking about marrying me?”

“There wasn’t a person around that table who didn’t believe me,” he said with arrogant confidence.

A bluff...Miranda closed her eyes again, a dull weariness settling through her. Right now it was all too much...Bobby’s mean and malevolent assault on her reputation, Nathan’s moves to counter it. Though, of course, he did have to counter it—Tommy, as well— or the slurs on her character could very well taint the good name of the resort, most especially with the wealthy guests who invariably passed on good or bad word of mouth to their friends.

“You’d better warn Tommy that you talked about marrying me,” she said tiredly. “The guests might bring it up with him.”

“I’ve told him. He’ll play along.”

“They might chat with others on the resort, too. The guides...Sam...”

“A pleasant piece of gossip doesn’t matter. And I made it clear it was me pursuing you, Miranda, not the other way around,” he added drily.

“And eventually I’m to decide not to marry you.”

He expelled a long breath. “As I’ve said before, most women wouldn’t choose my kind of life.”

“Is that what happened with Susan?”

The words slipped out, probably because she was too stressed to monitor what she said, though she didn’t regret the intrusion into his private background, justifying it on the grounds that he knew all of hers now. Why not get the truth out in the open? Then maybe she could get a fix on where she actually stood with Nathan, instead of feeling as though she was caught in another web of deceit.

“No,” he answered slowly. “Marriage was never on the cards with Susan.”

“You just had a mutual sex thing going,” Miranda muttered bitterly, having been all too freshly reminded of how Bobby Hewson had used her.

“I suppose you could put it that way, though we were also friends and I always enjoyed her company,” he said quietly. “Because of injuries from a car accident in her teens, Susan couldn’t have children. She told me straight up not to ever get seriously attached to her. It was her unshakable belief that one day I would want children of my own and she’d hate not being able to give them to me.”

Had he tried to shake that belief? Out of a whirl of confusion came one definite fact. “Sam told me she did marry.”

“Yes. To a widower who already had two young children. Susan is a schoolteacher. One of the children was in her kindergarten class last year. She told me it was her chance to be a mother and she was taking it. I was not prepared to argue that, Miranda. It was her choice.”

Never judge anything before hearing all the circumstances, Miranda silently berated herself, shamed by the full story of Nathan’s relationship with the woman who had engaged his interest for two years. He hadn’t said he’d loved Susan but there’d been caring in his voice, caring for her personally and respect for the needs he couldn’t answer.

There had to have been a sense of loss when she’d chosen the widower with the children, closing Nathan out of her life. The ending of any long relationship left an empty place. Even Bobby’s defection had left her ravaged. For Nathan it would have been much worse, presented with a set of circumstances he couldn’t fight, forced to let go by his own code of decency. And since then, he’d been alone for months, Sam had told her, not interested in picking up with anyone else.

Until she had arrived on the scene and a strong sexual chemistry had hit both of them.

Had it been that way between him and Susan?

Impossible to ask. It was wrong to make comparisons. People were different and their relationships were different. She darted a glance at him but his expression was closed to her, his concentration fixed on the road. It startled her to see they were driving through the station’s community, almost at the homestead.

“I’m sorry,” she blurted out. “I shouldn’t have brought up Susan like that.”

He shrugged. “It was on your mind.”

He brought the Land Cruiser to a halt in front of the entrance to his homestead and switched off the engine. For a few moments he sat frowning, his fingers tapping the steering wheel. Then he turned to her with a look that was searing in its intensity.

“I’m not another Bobby Hewson, Miranda. I have never acted dishonourably over any woman and never would. I don’t want you coming into my home, feeling at risk in any way. If you do feel...compromised in some fashion...I’ll take you somewhere else...to one of the families on the station...”

“No. This is fine,” she protested in an agony of embarrassment at her own blind and bitter thoughts about him. “I do trust you, Nathan. God knows you’ve proved you’re a decent person and I thank you, very sincerely, for all the trouble you’ve gone to on my behalf.”