Red Dirt Duchess Page 3

  He was absently scratching a non-existent mosquito bite when Charlie interrupted his thoughts. ‘But there’s lots to see closer up. You should really get out to the river and the waterhole.’

  ‘And how am I supposed to do that?’ He didn’t bother to temper the asperity in his tone.

  She shrugged. ‘Drive.’

  His spirits lifted. ‘Will you lend me a car?’ That would be perfect. Unable to rely on the expensive marketing shots he usually used, he’d dusted off his old Pentax. There could be a picture of him at the wheel of a four-wheel drive looking suitably rugged. Not only would he see the floods but he could battle the Australian outback to do it. Alone. He paused the impromptu film in his mind. He did not want to drive off into that nothingness by himself.

  ‘No.’

  He let out a breath of relief. He wouldn’t lend him a car either, not in these circumstances. So he was going to have to approach one of those groups of men and ask a favour. He turned and started to scan them, trying to work out who to approach.

  ‘But I could take you.’

  His eyes swivelled back to Charlie. Her head tipped to one side as those blue eyes regarded him steadily. This close he could see the dark-blue ring that surrounded her iris, a frame for the brilliant mid-blue. His libido kicked up a notch. Interesting idea.

  ‘You’d do that?’

  ‘It’s either that or have you hang around here making a nuisance of yourself.’ As if to emphasise her point she picked up his glass, wiped the wet ring under it and put it down on a coaster.

  He let out a huff of laughter.

  ‘It would have to be tomorrow morning, but I could take you out there.’

  She seemed to have made up her mind. Why not say yes? Why try to get some stranger to take him when an attractive woman was offering to do it? It would certainly be more fun. ‘Great. I’ll look forward to it.’ He nodded towards the set-dressed wall. ‘Interesting place.’

  ‘It’s home,’ she said simply. She’d started to wipe down the stainless-steel bench now and the vigorous movement made her breasts jiggle. Life was looking up.

  ‘Have you always lived here?’ he asked, taking a deep draught of the beer and watching her over the rim of the glass. He couldn’t imagine growing up in such a remote and isolated place. You’d need to be resilient and maybe just a little crazy. He glanced across at the groups of men again.

  ‘Only nine years. Before that we lived in Sydney.’

  ‘So your family is here,’ he stated. It suddenly made sense. Of course she wasn’t out here running this place by herself.

  ‘Nope, it’s just me left now.’ She didn’t elaborate but turned as the door to the kitchen swung open. ‘Oh, and Rhonda.’

  A middle-aged woman carrying two plates only just large enough to contain a T-bone steak and pile of chips emerged from the kitchen. The greasy scent of hot chips made his stomach rumble.

  She slid a wary glance at Jon as she edged out from behind the bar and walked towards one of the tables. Charlie leaned forward and lowered her voice. ‘Rhonda’s a refugee from the corporate world,’ she confided. ‘She had a fabulous job in the money market in Sydney but there was a tiny problem about a bottle of chardonnay for lunch and the case of a misplaced zero.’ She straightened and brushed her hands together. ‘Still, she’s perfect out here. That woman can defrost, cook and serve a steak within ten minutes. Genius.’

  He’d bet no one gave Rhonda any shit. She looked like she could handle herself, with or without the bottle of chardonnay. But he wasn’t interested in Rhonda. Charlie intrigued him. Her whole world seemed to be this godforsaken hotel, not even part of a bloody town, plonked for whatever reason in the middle of nowhere.

  Rhonda was back, standing beside Charlie, her beefy arms folded across her chest and unblinking eyes focused on him.

  ‘The grill is still on. Want me to defrost you a steak?’

  Defrost? Steak was thirty-five-day, dry-aged New York sirloin with tempura onion rings at Cut in Park Lane, not something that had spent ten minutes in a microwave. Jon closed his eyes, remembering the taste of the succulent beef, the smoky, charcoal flavour. As for those onion rings —

  A cough interrupted his thoughts and he opened his eyes. He was still here, in the outback, and Rhonda was waiting.

  He plastered on his very best look of regret. ‘I think I’ll pass, thanks.’

  Charlie’s visitor sure was a snob. He didn’t need to treat Rhonda like that; she was just trying to be helpful. Charlie was almost sorry she’d offered to take him out the next day. He was over by the wall now, poking around among the akubras. He moved one aside with a tentative finger, as though expecting a giant spider to run out from behind. For a moment Charlie was tempted to sneak up behind him and yell boo. He’d probably scream like a girl. But that would be childish. Best to just let him poke around like all tourists did and he’d be out of her hair before she knew it. But darn if he wasn’t taking a hat off the wall. Then another. She hadn’t said he could start pulling the place apart. Now he stood back. Tipped his head to one side. Narrowed his eyes. Paced a step closer. His hand reached out and traced over the wall.

  So he’d found Cliff’s mural. Most of the time she forgot it was there. No one took much notice of the fact that the wall seemed to have something painted on it. Over time she and Cliff had hung up the old hats as they’d been donated by local bushies who couldn’t squeeze another day’s wear out of them. The visitors seemed to like them.

  But in the beginning, when they’d first come to Bindundilly, the wall had been a large, bare expanse that Cliff couldn’t resist. It was an artist’s dream, a blank canvas, and Cliff had been dying to paint. It had been the only way he could express the pain of separation from her mother Maddie, the hope of a better future for his daughter.

  Charlie.

  So let the nosy Brit poke around all he liked. He had no idea what leaving Sydney had meant to Cliff Hughes and his daughter, no idea what a refuge Bindundilly had become. Tears welled in her eyes. Cliff had sacrificed a lot for her, but now she was alone.

  Any minute now, Jon would be back at the bar. She didn’t want to talk about the mural because it would lead to questions. How to explain the Sydney art world’s adulation for a rising star, who seemed to have arrived on the scene from out of nowhere, only to disappear fifteen years later. She didn’t want to talk about Maddie, crazy, darling Maddie, with her multitude of addictions.

  Charlie tucked the bar towel into the waistband of her shorts and collected some empty glasses from the end of the bar while keeping her eyes on Jon. He was still at it. All the hats were off the wall now, stacked in a teetering pile on the floor, and he was reaching for one of the rabbit traps. She set the glasses down with a rattle. ‘Oi!’

  He turned and raised a brow, perhaps surprised by her abrupt shout. He seemed oblivious to what was happening around him.

  ‘What’s going on?’ she called.

  Several men turned. ‘Watch out. Charlie’s gonna skin you like a lizard, mate,’ one called. The rest howled with laughter.

  He took a few steps towards the bar and gestured with one hand. ‘There’s a painting on this wall.’

  ‘Excellent work, Sherlock.’ He was a sharp one, all right.

  He moved closer. ‘Look, I’m sorry about the hats. I’ll put them all back. I just wanted to see the painting.’

  Suddenly she didn’t want him to. There was something about him that was starting to get to her. Maybe it was the accent. Maybe it was the tiny hint of little-boy-lost underneath that upper-crust urbanity. Probably it was because he was just drop-dead, breath-catchingly gorgeous.

  ‘It’s just a mural. Plenty of old pubs have them. Some artist winds up stranded for a week or two and is bored out of their brain, so decides it would be fun to paint the wall.’ Of course that’s not how it had been, but it might shut him up.

  ‘It looks familiar.’ Jon had reached the bar and stood with one arm resting on it. He turned back towards the paint
ing, his brow furrowed.

  ‘But you’ve never been here before, so how can it?’ She peered along the bar, hoping to spot someone waiting to be served. But there was only old Maxie, both elbows propped on the bar and a half-full pint in front of him.

  ‘No, I mean the style,’ Jon persisted. ‘It’s bugging me, but I just can’t put my finger on it.’ He turned back and looked at the mural again, shaking his head.

  ‘Then don’t try. There’s nothing special about it,’ she snapped. She turned her back and started to rearrange the bottles on the shelf but when she turned around he was still watching her, one brow arched and those cool, grey eyes frankly assessing her.

  ‘I’m not sure I agree. The style looks remarkably similar to something I’ve seen before,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  He blew out a frustrated breath and wiped a hand across his forehead as though that simple action could tease the answer out. ‘That’s just it. I can’t remember.’

  Charlie shrugged. ‘So, it’s derivative. Lots of artists are influenced by other styles.’

  ‘Derivative,’ he repeated, his mouth quirked with amusement. ‘Sounds like you know something about art.’ When she didn’t respond he changed tack. ‘Who painted it?’

  ‘Cliff. My father,’ she muttered. He was starting to get annoying with all the questions.

  ‘And your father is …’

  ‘Dead. He died three years ago.’ She crouched down on the pretext of looking for something under the counter. She blinked hard, keeping the tears at bay. Not now. She made a fuss of opening and closing cabinet doors then stood.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. Then, ‘You called your father by his first name?’

  Cliff and Maddie hadn’t exactly been Mike and Carol Brady. And there was no way Cliff would have stood for being called Dad. ‘Yes’, she replied coolly. ‘What do you call yours? Sir?’

  His smile slipped as he turned to face the mural again. ‘I’ll put my finger on it sooner or later. Before I leave here, I’ll remember what that painting reminds me of.’

  The last patrons had left, in clouds of dust and a roar of engines. It was just Charlie, Jon and Rhonda, and one of them was superfluous to needs. Jon gave Rhonda several dark looks, willing her to disappear. The evening yawned ahead and he didn’t fancy spending it under her baleful scrutiny.

  Charlie was still bustling around the bar, arranging stools tidily along its edge, stocking the fridges and cleaning the taps. He’d watched her from a table in the corner while he’d eaten a solitary and surprisingly good dinner of lamb chops and salad. She was efficient, with quick, no-nonsense movements that said she’d done these tasks a thousand times. He noticed the toned arms, the way her muscles bunched as she lifted the stools, the swing of her hair as it fell forward against her cheek. He’d been fighting a growing attraction, a mounting fascination for this free-spirited woman who was unlike anyone he’d met before.

  Jon pulled out his notebook and started to make some notes. Outback location, check. Quirky pub, check. Increasingly beguiling publican – uncheck. He scrubbed a line through that. She was off-limits in so many ways he couldn’t even start to explain.

  He closed the notebook in frustration and hooked an arm over the back of his chair. Every woman he met had a problem. He tapped the end of his pencil against his lips. Well, that wasn’t quite right. Every woman he met didn’t meet the strict family criteria.

  And wasn’t that the joke of the century. He flung the pencil onto the table and his lips twisted at the grim irony.

  What had induced him to enter into his most recent debacle? Caro was not only his boss but she’d revealed herself as some kind of man-eater, simmering with an animal passion that was frankly alarming. The affair had been thankfully short-lived.

  And now his attention had been snagged by a woman so out of his sphere he almost laughed. What would his mother make of a girl who lived on the other side of the world and ran a pub?

  It seemed that when it came to women, the sort who’d be suitable for marriage, he came up short every single time.

  Receding into the past was a conga line of inappropriate but bewitchingly luscious potential candidates as wife of the Honourable Jonathan Hartley-Huntley.

  His eyes shifted back to the mural. Despite the fact that he’d put all the hats back on the wall, he could see enough to recreate it in his mind as he had seen it this afternoon. It was like a bushfire, in maddened tones of red and orange, flames winding through upright strokes of ochre and cream. Splashes of green were tipped with high-leaping explosive flares. It wasn’t the almost audible crackle and snap of burning wood that unnerved him. It was the way the painting tugged at him, in an entirely inexplicable way, somewhere deep and locked away. He felt like a man pressing with all his strength against a weakening door, with the hounds of hell on his tail. He closed his eyes a moment, pushing hard against the sensation, then heard footsteps and opened his eyes. Charlie leaned on a broom, a small pile of dirt in front of it.

  ‘Go out and sit on the verandah. It’s cool now and you ought to see something other than the inside of the pub. I’m just about finished here, and I’ll bring some wine soon.’

  He was glad to step outside. The night air was cool, refreshingly so after the heat of the day. A full moon lit the landscape for at least a hundred metres. What was out there? That endless nothingness was a terrifying thought even by day. But what of the night? A dog howled somewhere and he shivered, imagining being lost or stranded out there.

  ‘It freaks you out, doesn’t it?’ Charlie said, coming out with two glasses and a bottle of white wine beaded with condensation. She put them on a table then turned and wedged the door open with a rough piece of wood. A slab of golden light fell across the verandah and bled down into the yard, mixing with the cool, white moonlight.

  He didn’t think she was baiting him. He could either be a total knob or give her a straight answer. ‘A bit.’

  It wasn’t quite a straight answer – he wouldn’t tell her that while she’d been getting the wine, he’d upturned his chair looking for deadly spiders.

  ‘There’s really nothing to be frightened of. You’ve got a hundred times more chance of getting killed in the city than out here.’ She poured the wine and passed him a glass. She’d pulled on a light shirt and left it unbuttoned over the T-shirt but otherwise she probably looked just as she had at seven o’clock that morning.

  He glanced towards the door. ‘Where’s your sidekick?’

  ‘Rhonda? She’s gone to bed to read. She’ll be knee-deep in pirates and ripped bodices by now.’

  He let out a relieved sigh. ‘Don’t you get scared out here? A woman on your own?’

  ‘Not much. And I do have Rhonda for backup.’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure Rhonda can be quite terrifying. But seriously, you’re out in the middle of nowhere.’

  She took a sip of wine and paused. ‘It was easier when Cliff was alive. But him dying didn’t seem like a good enough reason to pack up and leave.’

  ‘But —’

  ‘Don’t worry, I have a very finely attuned judgement of character. If a man turns up here late at night looking for accommodation he’d better be toting a wife and kids. Otherwise he sleeps in his car and gets fed and watered in the morning.’

  He could imagine her, even without the formidable Rhonda, telling a stranger to come back in the morning. He was beginning, to his surprise, to enjoy himself.

  ‘So what does this excellent judgement tell you about me?’

  He didn’t really expect her to answer. He ran his fingers up and down the stem of his wineglass while she considered the question.

  ‘You’re not what you seem,’ she said finally.

  His hand stilled and tightened on the glass. He lifted it and took a sip. ‘Really.’

  She hadn’t noticed his reaction. ‘You’re actually not as uptight as you’d like to project.’ She gave him a sunny smile, as though this was the ultimate approval. ‘However, you did g
o a little strange when you saw the mural.’

  So, someone else had noticed the effect that painting had had on him. He wanted to change the subject.

  ‘How come it’s so cool out here at night?’

  ‘Remember how blue the sky was when you flew in?’ She stretched out her legs and toed off her boots then wiggled her toes, sighing in relief.

  He nodded. It had been breathtakingly, blindingly blue.

  ‘There’s no cloud cover, so nothing to keep the heat in at night. Hence lovely cold nights.’ She turned to him with a smile. ‘By the way, I had Housekeeping go in and open your window while you were in the bar. Your room will be much cooler when you go to bed.’

  He watched the way her lips curved. Housekeeping? She’d been gone for a few minutes earlier in the evening and he imagined her in his room, sliding open the window to let in the refreshing night air.

  ‘Although you may want to pull the sheets back and check there are no spiders.’

  The sideways look she gave him from under lowered lids shot straight to his loins. She raised her arms and slid her hands around the nape of her neck, cupping them and lifting her hair with a deep, relaxing sigh. He was watching the sweet curve of her breasts, mesmerised by the erotic gesture, when his eye was caught by a tiny tattoo at the base of her neck.

  ‘Cute.’

  She turned towards him, blue eyes peering through her still bent elbow and the fall of rumpled dark hair. ‘What?’

  He swallowed slowly, fighting the attraction that had been building all day. ‘Your tattoo.’

  She let her hands drop and her hair fell in a tumble. ‘Yeah, well, I’m sure your sort don’t go in for that kind of thing.’ She took a small sip of her wine and sighed with contentment.

  ‘Don’t count on it. One of the Queen’s granddaughters has a pierced tongue. And I wouldn’t put it past Harry to have a tatt or two.’ He tipped his head to one side and considered. ‘Although we did see him butt-naked in the tabloids a year or two ago and there was no sign of one.’

  She gave him a dark look and wiggled her brows. ‘The photos where he was shielding his manhood from prying eyes? We don’t know what else he was hiding with his hands, though.’ She laughed, a delighted, tinkling sound that made him feel good.