Red Dirt Duchess Read online

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Sneak Peek: Her Italian Aristocrat

  For my beautiful mother, Patricia.

  CHAPTER ONE

  It was one hell of a punishment.

  Jonathan Hartley-Huntley stared out the plane’s window at the stretch of desert below. They seemed to have been in the air forever, flying over endless miles of red dirt and low, sage-coloured scrub, a barren landscape perfectly suited to his mood.

  He checked his watch again and frowned. It was precisely thirty-five minutes since they’d left the tiny outback airport at Longreach, but before that there’d been the interminable flight from Heathrow to Australia and an overnight stay in Sydney.

  And with every flight, as though underscoring his editor’s anger, the aircraft had become smaller until he’d ended up here, jammed into a tiny Cessna and cursing fate.

  Jon shifted his legs restlessly. Hemmed in next to the pilot in a cabin that seemed overly small for two large men, claustrophobia gripped him. He was used to the attentions of attractive flight attendants, a reclining seat and drinks service, not the bank of dials and knobs that flashed and clicked alarmingly, as well as the second control stick which seemed to invite him, if he were so inclined, to take over. And every time the other man twisted in his seat Jon caught a waft of eau de bush pilot.

  He’d caught the pilot’s look of scorn when he’d boarded, his designer jeans, Italian linen shirt and expensive watch contrasting with the pilot’s grubby khaki shorts and shirt.

  Ahead, a silver shimmer, alluring as a desert mirage, glistened on the horizon. As they drew closer he could see that the landscape was sluiced with water, running in interconnected webs of sky-blue channels, edged with brilliant green where grass had sprung up. The arterial mosaic stretched into the distance, covered with huge flocks of water birds that took synchronised flight as the aircraft passed overhead.

  A hundred-year flood event in the Australian outback was news. And because of one error of judgement, one tiny blip on his record, Jon’s editor Caro had decided that an assignment with a little more rigour was required. Something that pulled him away from his cushy niche reviewing five-star resorts and arty big-city hotels and hurled him straight into wilderness travel. It was her way of showing who was in control. He rubbed a hand over a bristled jaw and scowled. He’d do the damned story. He’d be in and out of this place in twenty-four hours and back to civilisation. And he’d never make the same mistake again.

  The pilot glanced across from the controls. ‘Up ahead, mate. That’s the Bindundilly Hotel.’

  Jonathan squinted out the window. A lone building sat on the horizon, a squat blob hunkered down on a wide plain and thrown into stark relief against the blindingly blue sky. Unease made him sit forward, watching as the plane ate up the distance.

  Within minutes they’d reached it. Below, a large, deeply sloping corrugated-iron roof, almost covered by black-painted letters and numbers, topped a low stone building sitting at the intersection of two dirt roads. The rear of the building was flanked by water tanks, and a surprising number of four-wheel drives were pulled up outside. It was the only building in sight.

  ‘That’s it?’ Jonathan gave a disbelieving laugh and turned to the pilot. ‘That’s Bindundilly?’ His voice faltered over the ridiculous name. ‘What’s the writing on the roof?’

  ‘Radio frequency.’ The pilot leaned forward and pushed some of the controls. ‘They’ve got the phone on, of course, but if some bloody Pom wanders off into the desert, radio is the only way to coordinate a search out here to find the bastard.’ He grinned and gave Jonathan the thumbs up.

  Jonathan had no intention of wandering off into the desert. He’d been looking forward to a cool glass of sauvignon blanc, a long, hot shower and a soft bed. Fat chance of that now.

  The plane turned and banked abruptly, the wing dropping low over the hotel as the engine roared. Jonathan gripped the armrests. ‘What the —’

  ‘Hang on, mate. We buzz the hotel to let them know we’re here and they’ll come out to the airstrip to pick you up.’

  The plane did another pass, dropping in altitude until it levelled and landed on a bumpy airstrip about half a kilometre from the hotel. It coasted to a stop and then the engine cut. Wind buffeted the plane and, reluctantly, Jonathan unclipped his seatbelt and peered out the window. There was no one waiting. ‘So how long before they get here?’

  The pilot opened the door and put the steps down. ‘She’ll be here, don’t worry.’

  Jonathan stepped out into a blast of hot air, his highly polished tan boots instantly coated in a powder of fine red dust.

  The pilot was busy unpacking supplies from the side of the plane while Jonathan scanned the horizon, unease nudging him in the ribs. ‘I don’t see a car.’

  ‘She’ll be right, mate. No worries.’

  His leather holdall was unceremoniously dumped at his feet before the pilot pulled some cartons, a canvas mailbag and a crate of plastic-wrapped lettuce from the plane. He slammed the door shut. ‘Righto, I’m off.’

  ‘You’re going?’ Alarmed, Jonathan twisted around.

  The pilot glanced at his watch. ‘Too right. Got a few more deliveries to make before I head back to Longreach.’ He climbed back into the plane, closed the door and gave Jonathan one more maddening thumbs up.

  The plane taxied along the runway then soared towards the horizon with a drone. Soon it was a tiny speck, an insect buzz. And then it disappeared.

  Silence.

  Wind whipped the long, dry grasses nearby, bending them and swirling dust into Jon’s eyes. He cursed as he pulled a pair of sunglasses from his top pocket. Stifling heat lay thick in his nostrils and he took a deep, gulping breath.

  Nothing. There was nothing here but the lonely hotel in the distance and an endless expanse of powdery red dirt. He shuddered. His editor really had him in her sights.

  He didn’t need to glance at his watch to check the time. The sun was high and his shadow clung to him as if seeking shelter from the fierce heat. Overhead, a pair of large black birds wheeled on the breeze. His gaze shifted downwards. A sun-bleached animal skull lay abandoned like a child’s toy in the grass. He peered at the hotel again, willing a car to come.

  But there was nothing but the thin, reedy whisper of wind rustling across flat land.

  Finally he picked up his bag and started towards the hotel. He could die out here, standing on an airstrip in this heat. It was so bloody hot he might not even make it to the hotel. They’d find him with ants already crawling over him, into every orifice of his body. The bile rose in his throat.

  If his editor had wanted to punish him, she was well on the way.

  He hated Aristo and its uppity style. The magazine was full of Hons and Earls, the ‘right’ sort of people. Not one of them would be interested in coming out to the middle of nowhere. He should know: the Hartley-Huntleys had spent generations arguing about whether they’d arrived with God or the conqueror.

  Sweat trickled down his chest, the expensive linen shirt clinging to it. He pulled it away with one hand and watched it slap depressingly back against his ribs.

  He hated his job, shuttling from resort to resort just one step ahe
ad of the hoi polloi. He had to find the new and exclusive before readers did, and then make them feel like they were ahead of the crowd. Just a few words from his editorial alter ego could make or break a new resort, or put an unknown location on the map.

  But most of all he hated that natty little top-hatted caricature nestled against the by-line of his Jonty’s Jottings column. At thirty he was hardly old, yet it made him look like he was born during the reign of Victoria rather than that of the paparazzo. A prize fool.

  His ankle twisted painfully and he let out an explosive curse. Where the hell was the bloody transport? He looked down and saw a treacherous rabbit hole. And then another. His hand twisted sweatily around the handle of his case.

  He was close enough to see the hotel properly now. The deep verandah cast the front in shadow and it looked, if not cool, at least like a refuge from the sun. He picked up his pace until he stood on the far side of the worn bitumen that ran in front of the hotel, before petering out a hundred metres on either side. A handmade signpost beside the road pointed to towns and cities unimaginable distances away. A large wooden board nailed to the post advised travellers to boil their billy at Bindundilly. He rolled his eyes and crossed the road.

  The hotel was unnaturally quiet, which seemed strange given the number of four-wheel drives parked out front. They looked dangerous, with big tyres that could cut through scrub and ford rivers. And gun racks on top. He’d seen Wolf Creek.

  Shouting erupted from inside the hotel, a great, masculine roar of approval. Jonathan switched his bag to the other hand, flexing the aching one. He staggered towards the hotel. What kind of place was this?

  A large aviary sat on the verandah beside a set of double doors with textured glass inserts and faded gold script. A cockatoo squawked and ran along his perch as Jonathan passed, practically mocking him. He pushed the door open and paused. The shouting had stopped and Jonathan was confronted by a solid wall of men, their backs turned to the door. He stepped inside and let the door swing closed behind him. The inside of the hotel was dim and cool with music playing, something whiney about a dog and lost love. He hated country music. The scent of beer and pressed bodies assailed him as he started to push his way through the bodies. He half expected to see a naked woman at the front, but then noticed a few women threaded among the crowd.

  The silence stretched, then Jonathan followed the movement of the heads in front as they tipped back and tracked something travelling through the air. He heard a sharp crack, followed by a clunk, and the crowd roared their approval again.

  He inched closer, squeezing between a burly, akubra-hatted man and a skinny woman. The crowd fell silent, waiting, and this time Jonathan saw it. A gold coin sailed in an arc above the bar, seeming to hang and spin in a shaft of sunlight, before hitting a plaque on the wall and dropping out of view.

  ‘Pardon me,’ he said, pushing further towards the front and earning an elbow in the ribs for his trouble. ‘What’s going on?’ he asked a square-jawed man beside him.

  Square Jaw didn’t even look at him. ‘RFDS, mate.’

  ‘RFDS?’

  ‘Royal Flying Doctor Service.’ He roared with the rest of the crowd then moved aside. ‘Go on, you Pommy bastard, get in there. You’ve gotta see this. Charlie should be playing for Australia, she’s that good a shot.’

  ‘Playing what?’

  Square Jaw gave him a pitying look. ‘Who cares? Anything. She’s got an aim like a Wild West gunslinger.’

  Jonathan wedged into the space vacated by the man and, between the shoulders of the spectators in front, caught sight of the young woman behind the bar. Dark-brown hair in a carelessly choppy cut framed a heart-shaped face and fell in rippling waves to her shoulders. A plain white T-shirt emblazoned with The beer’s better at Bin was tucked into a short black bar apron tied around her slim waist. As she turned to take a can from the refrigerator at the back of the bar, Jonathan swallowed. Tiny black shorts covered a bottom that sat like a ripe peach on top of impossibly long, tanned legs, slim ankles encased in work boots.

  Someone slid a coin across the bar and she smiled as she picked it up, her mouth quirking up at the corners as she said something he couldn’t catch. She had dark, finely arched eyebrows and little crinkles at the corners of her eyes.

  The crowd hushed as she turned side-on to the bar and bent her legs into a half-crouch, face clenched in concentration and eyes shut tight. The coin gleamed as she balanced it on her index finger and weighed it for a moment, flexing her knees before her arm lifted and, with a flick of the thumb, the gold coin sailed in a wide arc over her head, before hitting the wall behind her with a loud ping. It dropped into a bucket below with a satisfactory plunk.

  Jonathan’s mouth dropped open. The bucket had a sign on it, Royal Flying Doctor Service, and was half full of gold coins. His eyes tracked back to the girl and found her staring at him.

  ‘Okay, one more and then I’ll get back to the drinks. What about you, mate? When did you blow in?’

  Aware of the crowd’s sudden, watchful silence, Jonathan’s gaze locked on her eyes; they were a soft blue that reminded him of the bluebells in the woods behind Hartley Hall, which was ridiculous given he was on the other side of the world, in a land of harsh light and extremes.

  She was waiting, one slim hand on her hip, the other hooked around a beer tap, the fingers tapping slowly against the icy surface. Everyone was waiting.

  He had never felt more conspicuously English, or more uncomfortable in the presence of a group of men, some of whom had eyes that looked perhaps a touch too close together. But he called on generations of Hartley-Huntley confidence, took a step forward and drew himself up. ‘I didn’t blow in. I walked.’

  ‘My bloody lettuce!’ Charlie grabbed a set of keys and threw them across the bar. ‘Neil, can you whip over to the airstrip and save my lettuce? Oh, and there’s some mail and a —’

  Her eyes swivelled back to the man in front of the bar. Oops.

  ‘— guest.’

  Sensing that the entertainment was finished for the moment, the crowd drifted away until only the stranger stood in front of her. Perspiration beaded his forehead and gleamed along a razor-sharp, finely-stubbled jawline that was raised just a fraction too high, as though challenging her. His hair was short, dark and well-cut with the merest touch of silver at the temples. City hair, that looked like it saw the attentions of a barber regularly. Her eyes moved lower. An expensive-looking linen shirt clung to his chest. He’d worked up quite a sweat for the piddling walk from the airstrip to the hotel, and it wasn’t even high summer. She almost said as much, but when she raised her eyes to meet his, she paused. Dark grey, with long lashes and a slightly haughty look, they stared her down with a stiff self-assurance that would get him nowhere in Bindundilly.

  ‘Gosh, sorry ’bout that. I got a bit carried away. Anyway, all for a good cause.’ She smiled brightly and wiped her hands down the front of her apron.

  He looked like he couldn’t give a damn about the cause.

  She plastered on her best smile and shot a hand across the bar. ‘I’m Charlie. Welcome to Bin.’

  He looked at the hand for a second then reached out and shook it. ‘Jonathan Ha …’ Laughter from a nearby group drowned out the rest of his response.

  She jerked a thumb towards the other end of the bar. ‘The reservations book is back there. It’s a bit quieter.’

  She could feel his eyes on her as he followed her down the other side of the bar, lagging a step or two behind. She hit the corner and reached under the counter for the battered school exercise book kept there, along with an avalanche of paperwork. Charlie pulled the book out and leaned her elbows on the bar, glad to take a break. But she could see him out the corner of her eye, standing stiffly in front of her, a leather-clad foot tapping impatiently on the bare floorboards.

  ‘Okay.’ Charlie flipped the pages until she found the right date, then ran her finger down the page. ‘I’ve got you here as Jonathan —ʼ She squinted a
t the untidy scrawl and tipped her head to one side to see if it made more sense. ‘Hmm, Jonathan Hardly Hunky. That can’t be right.’ She chewed the nail on her index finger and heard a sharp intake of breath. She glanced up. ‘Or is it?’

  She had to agree. He wasn’t hunky, at least not in the muscled, six-pack and low-slung jeans kind of way. But as well as the classical good looks, there was something about him, something sophisticated and urbane, that made her skin prickle with awareness. She ran a hand through her hair, trying to remember if she’d brushed it since breakfast.

  His face tightened. ‘Hartley, hyphen, Huntley,’ he enunciated. He pronounced the ‘h’ in Hartley and Huntley like an exhalation on a frosty morning. It was the sort of name that might suggest wealth and breeding elsewhere. Out here a name like that was more likely to be owned by misfits and square pegs. She wondered if Jonathan Hartley-Huntley was a square peg, and decided he had to be. He had a hyphen and he was in outback Australia.

  ‘Sorry. Must have been noisy in here when the booking was made. Anyway, we’d best call you Johnno round here,’ she said, slamming the book closed and turning to snag a room key from a board leaning against the wall.

  ‘Jon will be fine,’ he said firmly.

  She turned and gave him a considering look. He sure was uptight. ‘C’mon, I’ll show you your room before the boys scent fresh blood.’

  She lifted the counter flap and gestured him in. ‘Your room’s out the back.’ She led him through the kitchen and out the back door to a long, covered breezeway running between the rear of the hotel and a row of prefab cabins. A strip of concrete ran down the centre of the breezeway with an orange plastic chair and a sand-filled ashtray neatly placed beside each door.

  ‘You’re in number two.’ She handed him the key and jerked her head towards the nearest door.