“Then what exactly is it that you want, Darcy?” About the Author Title Page CHAPTER ONE CHAPTER TWO CHAPTER THREE CHAPTER FOUR CHAPTER FIVE CHAPTER SIX CHAPTER SEVEN CHAPTER EIGHT CHAPTER NINE CHAPTER TEN Copyright

“Then what exactly is it that you want, Darcy?”

“I don’t want anything from you!” As Cooper came closer, she stepped back, but he reached out without haste and took hold of her wrist, pulling her inexorably back toward him.

“Don’t you?” he asked softly. His other hand cupped her chin, and his thumb stroked the line of her jaw. “Are you sure?”

Jessica Hart had a haphazard career before she began writing to finance a degree in history. Her experience ranged from waitress, theater production assistant and outback cook to newsdesk secretary, expedition PA and English teacher, and she has worked in countries as different as France and Indonesia, Australia and Cameroon. She now lives in the north of England, where her hobbies are limited to eating and drinking and traveling when she can, preferably to places where she’ll find good food or desert or tropical rain.

Look out for Jessica Hart’s next book, Birthday Bride #3511, coming out in July 1998.

Partner for Love
Jessica Hart

www.millsandboon.co.uk

CHAPTER ONE

DARCY stood under her umbrella and lifted her feet in turn to inspect her shoes with a grimace. She could remember Uncle Bill boasting that Bindaburra was in the driest part of the driest state in the driest continent in the world, but after two days of rain Darcy was beginning to wonder if he had been pulling her leg. The Australian outback was supposed to be hot and parched, not cold and wet and extremely muddy.

Scraping her shoes against each other gingerly to remove the huge clods of mud that kept gathering around them, Darcy looked around her, profoundly unimpressed by the spindly gum trees that lined the track and the low, sparse scrub stretching interminably off towards the horizon. Although there was still nearly an hour to go before dark, the rain had cast a dull pall over everything. Had she come all the way from London just for this?

Darcy sighed and continued trudging along the track. It was like walking through concrete. Every time she put one foot in front of the other, she had to drag it up through the mud, half of which stayed clogged around her shoes until they were so heavy, she had to stop and knock it all off again. She just hoped Bindaburra wouldn’t be much further. She had been driving all day along slippery mud tracks like this one and she was tired and fed up. Why couldn’t the car have managed a few minutes more instead of getting bogged frustratingly close to her goal?

Just then the sound of a vehicle changing gear as it approached the creek made her dark blue eyes brighten with hope. Surely whoever it was would be able to give her a lift for the last mile or so? Tightening her grip on her umbrella, Darcy picked her way cautiously into the middle of the track and got ready to wave enthusiastically.

It seemed a long time before the engine growled out of the creek and the vehicle accelerated towards her, its headlights boring through the gloom. Darcy, swinging the umbrella around, was transfixed by the powerful beams, a slim, incongruously vivid figure in the inhospitable landscape.

For one awful moment she thought that the driver hadn’t seen her. Screwing up her eyes against the rapidly approaching light, she flapped her free arm frantically as she staggered out of the way.

To her relief, the car was slowing until she could see that it wasn’t a car at all but a mud-splattered ute. Hardly the most glamorous of vehicles to be rescued by, thought Darcy, but since she hadn’t seen another car for the last three hours she supposed she should be grateful it had come along at all.

The ute came to a halt beside her and the driver wound down the window as Darcy slithered towards it. The mud was so thick and slippery that she almost lost her footing and had to make a grab for the door to steady herself.

Slightly breathless but relieved still to be upright, she looked down into the cab with a winning smile. ‘Hello,’ she said, quite unconscious that her English accent was as incongruous out here as her appearance.

Her first thought was that the driver looked rather unfriendly. He had leant his elbow out of the window and was frowning at her with a mixture of exasperation and disbelief. Beneath his bushman’s hat his face was coolly angular with a firm nose and an unyielding look to his jaw. Darcy found herself looking into a pair of wintry grey eyes and hastily revised her first impression.

He looked very unfriendly.

‘What do you think you’re doing?’ he asked curtly, making no attempt to return her greeting.

Darcy looked at him in surprise, a little affronted by his tone. Men usually reacted to her smile quite differently. ‘I wanted to be sure you’d see me,’ she explained.

The man looked at her umbrella. It was bright yellow and green and cleverly designed as a banana tree with each spoke marking the point of a leaf and jolly bunches of bananas hanging from the middle. A friend had given it to Darcy for her birthday, and she loved it.

He didn’t look as if he shared her sense of fun. ‘I could hardly avoid seeing you,’ he said in a deep Australian drawl that still somehow managed to sound crisp, and his gaze left the garish umbrella to travel down over Darcy’s scarlet jacket and narrow striped trousers to the ridiculously unsuitable shoes that were now clogged with thick, orangey red mud. ‘You don’t exactly blend into the background,’ he added disapprovingly. ‘It’s over two hundred miles to the nearest town. I want to know what you’re doing wandering along here as if it were some shopping mall.’

Darcy wasn’t used to being treated with such brusqueness, but since this rude man appeared to be her only chance of a lift she decided that it was best to ignore it.

‘My car got stuck in the mud,’ she explained.

‘So that’s your car I passed before the creek?’

Beneath her banana leaves, Darcy nodded. ‘I’m sorry if it was in your way, but it was completely bogged. I couldn’t move it forwards or backwards, so I just had to leave it.’

The rain chose that moment to redouble its efforts, crashing down on the umbrella and on the roof of the car, and effectively drowning out his reply. ‘You’d better get in,’ he shouted, and leant across the bench seat to open the passenger door.

Darcy slipped and slid her way round the bonnet, too relieved at the prospect of getting out of the rain to object to the unenthusiastic invitation. ‘Thank you,’ she gasped, manoeuvring herself into the seat and shaking out her umbrella vigorously before attempting to scrape the worst of the thick mud from her shoes. They were utterly ruined, she noticed ruefully; if she had known the outback was going to be a sea of mud, she would have brought her gumboots with her.

The roar of the rain was deadened as she pulled the door closed, marooning them in the shelter of the cab, although it still drummed on the roof in frustration and sluiced down the windscreen. Darcy shivered and stored her precious umbrella down by her feet before turning to take stock of her rescuer.

He had switched on the overhead light and was regarding her with ill-concealed impatience. There was something austere about him, Darcy decided, studying him covertly. Used to the flamboyance of the theatrical world, she was struck by his air of cool reserve, a kind of quiet, contained strength that was somehow overwhelming. It wasn’t a face that gave much away. The planes of his face were lean, his features strong and sharply defined, and there was a distinctly cool set to his mouth. This wouldn’t be a man who showed his emotions easily, thought Darcy, who was fond of instant analysis. Even so, it wasn’t hard to tell that he was less than impressed with her. His mouth was turned down at the corners and the cold grey eyes were uncomfortably observant.

Under his disapproving gaze, Darcy felt herself flush, realising for the first time what an odd spectacle she must have presented, tripping along in the middle of nowhere beneath her banana umbrella. ‘I’m terribly grateful,’ she said, suddenly conscious too of how English she sounded, and tried her smile again.

It had no more effect than before. ‘You should never leave your car in country like this,’ he told her in a stringent tone. ‘Why didn’t you stay with your vehicle and wait for someone to come and help?’

‘I thought it would be quicker to walk,’ said Darcy.

‘Walk?’ echoed the man incredulously, staring at her as if she had proposed cartwheeling to the moon. ‘Where to?’

‘I’m on my way to a property called Bindaburra,’ she said with dignity.

‘You’d have been in for a long walk,’ he said grimly. ‘It’s a good thirty kilometres to the homestead from here.’

Darcy’s blue eyes widened in dismay. ‘But on the map it looks as if it’s just off the main track! I thought it would be just round the next bend.’

‘I can only suggest that you look at the scale next time you attempt a bit of map-reading,’ he said with a caustic look. ‘It would make better sense than heading off into the unknown like a complete idiot.’

‘How was I supposed to know it would be that far?’ said Darcy a little sulkily.

‘That’s the whole point—you don’t know, and in those circumstances you never leave your car, no matter how close you think you are. It’s very easy to get lost out here, even when the track looks obvious, and you’d have been wandering around in the dark, which would have made it even easier. We would have found your car eventually, but we might never have found you.’

‘Well, you did find me,’ Darcy pointed out crossly, beginning to wish that he hadn’t. A thirty-kilometre walk might have been preferable to being rescued by this disagreeably unsympathetic man. Why wasn’t he rushing chivalrously to tow her car out of the mud instead of lecturing her about outback safety?

‘Only by chance,’ he said dampeningly. ‘What do you want at Bindaburra anyway? There aren’t any camping facilities there, if that’s what you’re hoping.’

‘Camping?’ Darcy stared at him in astonishment. ‘Who would want to camp in this?’ she asked, gesturing largely at the rain.

‘I thought you might be looking for somewhere to spend the night instead of driving on to Muroonda,’ he said. ‘Obviously I was wrong.’

‘I’d rather drive back to London than camp,’ she assured him. She had never been near a tent in her life and she didn’t intend to start now!

He looked at her with some exasperation. ‘If you’re not looking for somewhere to stay, what are you doing here?’

‘What’s it to do with you?’ said Darcy, who was fed up with the inquisition.

‘Since I own Bindaburra, I think I’m entitled to an explanation, don’t you?’

Darcy stared at him. ‘I think I’m the one who’s entitled to an explanation,’ she said in a frosty voice. ‘I was under the impression that I owned Bindaburra!’

There was a moment’s frozen silence. His hand had closed convulsively on the steering-wheel at her announcement and the black brows snapped together.

‘What ... ?’ he began in disbelief, then stopped. To Darcy’s astonishment, his angry expression changed to one of exasperated resignation. ‘Don’t tell me!’ he said wearily. ‘You’re Darcy.’

‘Miss Meadows to you!’ Darcy’s eyes flashed dangerously blue. She could hardly believe the effrontery of the man. He didn’t even look embarrassed at having been caught blatantly lying! This must be some station hand who was taking advantage of Uncle Bill’s death. Well, he wouldn’t be taking advantage much longer; he had her to deal with now! ‘How dare you tell people that you own my property?’

‘Because it’s not your property—’ he began with infuriating calm, but Darcy interrupted him.

‘It most certainly is!’ She glared, digging into her bag to produce an envelope which she waved at him. ‘This is a letter from solicitors in Adelaide informing me of my great-uncle’s death and that I was his sole beneficiary. Read it if you don’t believe me!’

‘Oh, I believe you, Miss Meadows,’ he said with an edge of contempt. ‘I just wasn’t expecting you to rush out quite so quickly to see what you’d got out of the old man, that’s all.’

‘What do you mean by that?’ demanded Darcy furiously. ‘Who are you?’

‘My name’s Cooper Anderson.’ He watched her closely for a reaction, but by now Darcy was too angry to notice.

‘Well, Mr Anderson, you can consider yourself unemployed as from now!’ she said with magnificent disregard for the fact that she had been relying on him to rescue her. She would rather walk, she decided, and was reaching for the door-handle when Cooper stopped her.

‘I hate to disappoint you, but you can’t sack me,’ he said.

‘Give me one good reason why not!’

‘If you’d let me finish earlier, I would have told you that Bindaburra isn’t your property, it’s ours. I’m your partner.’

Darcy looked at him, aghast. ‘What are you talking about?’ she said faintly. ‘I haven’t got a partner!’

‘I’m afraid you have,’ said Cooper. To Darcy’s chagrin, he seemed more amused than offended by her appalled expression. The cool eyes gleamed and there was an intriguing suspicion of a smile about his mouth. ‘I can assure you that I don’t like the idea any more than you do.’

Darcy wrenched her mind away from the lurking humour in his face and clutched the solicitor’s letter like a talisman. ‘But Uncle Bill left all his property to me! The solicitors said so.’

‘He did,’ Cooper agreed coolly, his smile vanishing. ‘But he only owned fifty per cent of Bindaburra. Unfortunately for you, I own the other half.’

The downpour had exhausted itself, and was now no more than a weary patter on the roof. Darcy looked at the rain dribbling down the windscreen and struggled to assimilate the idea of having a partner. ‘I suppose you can prove this?’ she said after a moment.

‘I should hardly have bothered telling you if I couldn’t,’ he pointed out with some acidity.

Darcy bit her lip. ‘I didn’t realise... Uncle Bill never said anything about having a partner...’

‘It might have been sensible to have found out a little more before you rushed out to claim your inheritance,’ said Cooper astringently as she trailed off.

This thought had already occurred to Darcy, but it didn’t make it any more welcome. She eyed her new partner with hostility. ‘I wanted to come and see if everything was all right,’ she said bravely. ‘There might have been any number of problems on the property, with nobody to deal with them. Given that I didn’t know I had a partner then, I thought the sensible decision was to come out as soon as I could.’

Cooper raised an eyebrow. Darcy didn’t look like a girl much given to sensible decisions. Her eyes were a huge midnight-blue in a vivid face, and the dark, wavy hair that tumbled to her shoulders was spangled with rain. She looked vibrant, glamorous, dazzling, but definitely not sensible.

‘It’s a nice thought,’ he said drily, reluctant amusement bracketing his mouth again. ‘But you don’t know anything about running a property like this. How did you propose solving any problems that you might find?’

Darcy didn’t like the way that lurking smile made her heart miss a beat. ‘I’m very adaptable,’ she said loftily, trying to ignore it.

‘Irresponsible is the word that springs to my mind,’ said Cooper. Darcy thought he sounded just like her father.

‘I am not irresponsible!’

‘How else would you describe turning up here out of the blue?’ he asked. ‘Why didn’t you let me know you were coming?’

‘How could I do that when I didn’t even know you existed?’

‘You could have thought to let someone know you were coming,’ he said with a gesture of impatience. ‘Or did you just assume that there would be someone at the homestead, the same way you assumed that Bindaburra would be round the next bend?’

This was pretty close to the mark, but Darcy had no intention of admitting it. ‘I remember Uncle Bill talking about the men who worked for him, and I thought they’d be there. Surely they won’t have left already?’

‘No, but it so happens that they’re working at one of the out-stations this week.’

‘What, all of them?’

‘There are only three at this time of year, but yes, all of them.’

‘But isn’t there anyone at the house? A cook, a housekeeper or somebody?’

‘The housekeeper left last week, and I haven’t got round to replacing her yet. I wasn’t planning on coming back myself, but if the rain keeps up like this all the creeks will be up, and I didn’t want to be stuck on the other side.’ He glanced at Darcy’s mutinous face. ‘If I’d decided to come back earlier, or not at all, you could have been stuck out here for a week before anyone else came along. You don’t know how lucky you are.’

‘How come I don’t feel very lucky?’ grumbled Darcy who was tired of men telling her how irresponsible she was. ‘It’s taken me two days to get here from Adelaide, most of it along roads that don’t seem to be much more than muddy swamps. I’m cold and I’m tired and I’m wet, and I’ve had to trudge for miles along this rotten track and I’ve ruined these shoes,’ she added, recalling another grievance. ‘They were my favourites too!’

‘You’re pretty lucky if ruining your shoes is the worst thing you can find to complain about,’ said Cooper with a complete lack of sympathy, starting the engine and swinging the ute round through the mud so suddenly that Darcy had to catch hold of the dashboard to steady herself.

‘Where are you going?’ she asked in some alarm.

‘You don’t want to sit here all night, do you? We’re going to get your car. If we don’t go now, the creeks will all be up and we’ll both be stuck here.’

Darcy supposed she ought to be glad he wasn’t intending to leave her there as he obviously wanted to, but the thought of wallowing around in the mud trying to extricate the car and then negotiate another thirty kilometres made her feel quite exhausted.

Fortunately, the creek had risen so dramatically since she had picked her way across it earlier that Cooper decided that they couldn’t afford to waste time towing out the car.

‘We’ll just collect your things and go,’ he said, peering out of his window at the water level as they bumped slowly across the creek bed.

‘Does it always rise this fast?’ asked Darcy nervously, taken aback by the power of the water swirling around the wheels.

‘It does when it rains like this. There are another five creeks between here and Bindaburra, too, so the sooner we cross them the better.’

The car sat where she had left it, ploughed into a deep trough of mud. In spite of her relief at not having to drive any further, Darcy eyed it doubtfully. ‘Do you think it will be all right just to leave it here?’

‘If it carries on raining like this, no one’s going to be along to steal it, if that’s what you’re worried about,’ said Cooper, looking resigned as Darcy put up her banana umbrella fastidiously before slithering through the mud to unlock the car. ‘No one would want a car like this, anyway,’ he added, and gave one of the tyres a disparaging kick. ‘This kind of thing is worse than useless out here. It’s a miracle you didn’t get bogged before this. Why didn’t you hire a four-wheel drive?’

‘I couldn’t afford it,’ she said simply, opening the boot to reveal a suitcase and a bulging stuff bag.

Cooper lifted out the suitcase. ‘You seem to have been able to afford a flight to Australia at short notice,’ he pointed out.

‘My father lent me the money for the ticket,’ Darcy confessed. ‘I didn’t know how long it would take to get here from Adelaide, so I had to hire a car, but I thought I should get the cheapest in case I couldn’t take it back after a few days.’ She hoisted out the stuff bag and banged the boot shut. ‘It’s just as well I did! I didn’t realise it would take two days just to get here!’

‘There seem to be a lot of things you didn’t realise about Bindaburra,’ said Cooper unpleasantly, tossing the case into the open back of the ute.

Darcy peered in after it. ‘It’s going to get a bit wet like that, isn’t it?’

‘Not as wet as we’re going to be if we don’t get moving,’ he said, but she was reluctant to give up on her case that easily.

‘Isn’t there room inside?’

‘Not unless you’d like to have it on your lap,’ said Cooper impatiently.

‘My clothes are going to be sodden,’ Darcy complained. ‘Couldn’t we cover it with something?’

Muttering under his breath, Cooper unearthed a grubby tarpaulin from beneath the clutter of tools, jerricans and ropes and threw it over the case. ‘There! Happy now?’

‘I suppose so,’ said Darcy, gloomily contemplating a case full of damp clothes.

‘In that case, will you please shut up and get in? If the creeks keep rising, your wet clothes are going to be the least of our problems!’

In the event, they made it across all the creeks—but only just. Each one was deeper and more alarming, until the water in the last was swirling over Darcy’s feet. She swallowed. The car she had hired would never have got through, and she would have been in real trouble if she had been stuck in the middle of the creek. Perhaps she ought to be a little more grateful that Cooper had come along after all.

It was completely dark by the time they arrived at Bindaburra homestead, and Darcy was too relieved at having reached it safely to be disappointed that she couldn’t see more of the house. She had a confused impression of a long, low house with a deep veranda before Cooper led her down a dim corridor lit by a single naked electric light bulb and opened a door. ‘This is where the last housekeeper slept, so it shouldn’t be in too bad a state,’ he said, dumping her cases inside. ‘I’ll find you some sheets, and I presume you’d like a shower, but then we’d better talk.’

He made it sound rather ominous. Left alone, Darcy sat rather uncertainly on the bed and looked around her. It was a plain room, with spartan, old-fashioned furnishings and that indefinable smell of emptiness. Suddenly she felt rather forlorn. She had imagined a bright, welcoming house bathed in bright sunshine, not rain and gloom and a hostile partner. She should have listened to her father and stayed at home, she thought glumly.

She felt better after a shower. Lugging her suitcase over to the bed, she draped the damp clothes over a chair and burrowed down to find something dry. Eventually she pulled out a dress made of soft, fine wool that swirled comfortingly about her. It was a wonderfully rich colour, somewhere between deep blue and purple, with a narrow waist emphasised by a wide suede belt. Darcy pushed a selection of Middle Eastern bracelets up her arm and regarded herself critically in the mirror.

The dim light gave her the look of a Forties film star, just catching the silky gleam of dark hair and making her eyes seem bigger and bluer than ever. Why was Cooper so determinedly unimpressed? True, she didn’t look like the most practical girl in the world, but she was pretty and friendly and—whatever he might think—not completely brainless. What was so wrong with that?

Darcy gave herself an encouraging smile that faded as she remembered how Cooper had simply ignored it. She had never met anyone so resistant to her charms. It wasn’t that she wanted him to find her attractive, she reminded herself hastily, but he could have been a little more...welcoming.

Her bracelets chinked against each other as she walked down the long, ill-lit corridor. She found Cooper in the kitchen, a large, old-fashioned room with a row of steel fridges and an antiquated-looking stove.

Cooper was sitting at the scrubbed wooden table, turning a can of beer absently between his hands. His face was intent with thought and there was a slight crease between his brows, as if he was pondering some difficult problem, but he looked up at Darcy’s approach, his clear, cool grey gaze meeting her warm blue one across the room.

Darcy stopped dead in the doorway, overwhelmed by a sudden and inexplicable sense of recognition at the sight of him. The line of his cheek, the curl of his mouth, the long brown fingers against the beer can, all suddenly seemed almost painfully familiar. It was as if she had always known him, had already traced the angles of his face with her hands and counted each crease at the edges of his eyes. Darcy felt jarred, breathless, quite unprepared for the peculiar certainty that her whole life had led to this moment, standing in a strange kitchen, staring into the eyes of this cool, watchful man while a clock ticked somewhere in the silence and outside the rain drummed noisily on the corrugated-tin roof.

‘What’s the matter?’ Cooper got to his feet, frowning.

Thoroughly unnerved by her bizarre reaction, Darcy swallowed. ‘Nothing,’ she croaked, and cleared her throat hastily. ‘Should there be?’

‘You look a bit peculiar.’

‘I was under the impression that you thought that everything about me was peculiar,’ she said waspishly, desperately trying to recover herself and wishing that Cooper’s eyes weren’t quite so acute.

‘What makes you say that?’ he asked politely.

Typically, Darcy couldn’t then think of a single thing he had said to hold against him. ‘It’s just an impression you give,’ she said a little sullenly. ‘You make me feel as if I’m a complete idiot.’

Cooper looked amused. ‘Anyone would feel a complete idiot, carrying a ridiculous umbrella like that,’ he said. He raised an eyebrow at Darcy, still hesitating in the doorway. ‘Are you going to stand there all night, or would you like to come in?’

That was exactly the kind of comment she had meant, Darcy thought crossly, but of course it was impossible to explain it to him. At least that odd feeling had gone. Obscurely grateful to Cooper for reminding her that he was simply a disagreeable stranger, she went over to the table and pulled out a chair. She was tired, still jet-lagged, lost and disorientated in a strange place. Nothing else could explain that brief, swamping sense of recognition when she had stood in the doorway and looked across at Cooper.

‘Like a beer?’ he asked.

‘I’d rather have tea if you have some,’ she said, proud of how cool she sounded.

‘Sure.’ Cooper crossed to the sink and filled the kettle, and Darcy found herself watching him as if she had never seen him before. There was a lean ranginess about him that hadn’t been so obvious in the ute. His body was compact and very controlled, and his movements had a sort of quiet, deliberate economy that was curiously reassuring.

He could hardly have been more different from Sebastian, she thought. Sebastian was fair and flamboyant, Cooper dark and unhurried, and yet Darcy had a sudden conviction that if she put them in a room together it would be Cooper who was the focus of attention. He wasn’t nearly as handsome as Sebastian, but there was something much more compelling about him than mere good looks, and for the first time she appreciated just how alone they were together. The outside world seemed a long, long way away.

Darcy fiddled nervously with her bracelets, but the chinking silver sounded abnormally loud and she forced herself to link her hands together and think of something to say instead.

Unperturbed by the silence, Cooper had propped himself against the cupboards while he waited for the kettle to boil, arms folded across his chest and long legs crossed casually at the ankles.

‘How did Uncle Bill die?’ Darcy asked at last. “The solicitor just said that he died suddenly, but he seemed so healthy when he was in England.’

‘It was a freak accident,’ said Cooper quietly. ‘He broke his neck when he came off his motorbike. He’d hit an anthill and must have fallen the wrong way.’ He paused and glanced at Darcy. ‘He died instantly.’

Darcy closed her eyes. Her great-uncle had been such a strong, colourful character that it was impossible to imagine him killed by anything as small as an anthill.

‘Is that why you came?’ asked Cooper abruptly. ‘To find out how he died?’

‘Partly.’

‘And partly to see what he’d left you?’

There was an unmistakably sardonic edge to his voice and Darcy stiffened. ‘Uncle Bill always wanted me to see Bindaburra,’ she said defiantly.

‘He wanted you to see it; he didn’t want you to have it.’

‘That’s not what his will said,’ said Darcy in a cold voice. ‘I’m his great-niece and he was fond of me. Why shouldn’t he leave his property to me?’

‘Because he said he would leave it to me.’

‘To you? Why you?’

The kettle shrieked and Cooper turned calmly away to make a pot of tea. ‘I was his partner. He knew he could trust me to look after Bindaburra the way he had done.’

‘You can’t have been partners all that long,’ Darcy objected. ‘Uncle Bill never mentioned you when he was in England and that was only two years ago.’

‘He wouldn’t have done.’ Cooper put the lid back on the teapot and carried it over to the table. ‘Bill hated the fact that he couldn’t manage financially without a partner. I think he thought that if he didn’t talk about it it would mean that Bindaburra was still completely his.’

‘So were you a sort of sleeping partner?’ asked Darcy as he looked in one of the fridges for some milk.

‘In a way. I put in the capital he needed, but we agreed that Bill would continue to run Bindaburra without any interference from me. We had a tacit understanding that I would take over when he couldn’t manage any more, and that on his death the whole property would revert to me.’

He pushed the milk across the table towards Darcy, who poured some into a mug, frowning slightly. ‘Does that mean you’ve only taken over here since he died?’

‘Exactly. I haven’t had time to sort out the homestead yet, but Bindaburra will be my base.’

‘Doesn’t that rather depend on me?’ said Darcy coolly, reaching for the teapot.

Cooper looked grim. ‘It does now. Bill was a man of his word, but he obviously never got round to changing his will. I can assure you, though, that he intended Bindaburra to go to someone who could continue to look after it as he would have wanted.’

‘I’ve only got your word for that,’ she pointed out.

‘You needn’t worry,’ said Cooper contemptuously. ‘I don’t expect you to honour Bill’s agreement. I’ll give you a good price for your share.’

Darcy stirred her tea vigorously and laid down the spoon with a click. ‘Suppose I don’t want to sell?’

‘What else can you do?’ he said with an irritable look. ‘You’re surely not proposing to stay here yourself?’

He made it sound such a ludicrous idea that Darcy, who hadn’t got as far as proposing anything other than proving to Cooper Anderson that she had no intention of meekly giving in to whatever he suggested, sat back in her chair and pushed the chinking bracelets defiantly up her arm.

‘Why not?’ she said.

CHAPTER TWO

‘DON’T be ridiculous!’ said Cooper impatiently. ‘You can’t stay here.’

‘I don’t see why not.’ Darcy was looking mutinous. ‘It’s my house, isn’t it?’

He sucked in his breath, obviously having trouble controlling his temper. ‘If this is a way of trying to get me to force up my price, you can forget it, Darcy...sorry, Miss Meadows.’

‘I’m not interested in the money,’ she said with a glare at his sarcastic reminder of the way she had mistaken him for an employee. ‘I’m interested in doing what Uncle Bill would have wanted, and that doesn’t include handing it over to you as soon as you wave a cheque-book under my nose!’

‘Are you sure you want to turn your back on that kind of money?’

‘I loved Uncle Bill,’ Darcy said fiercely. ‘That means far more to me than anything, and if you thought I came out here just to bump up the price of some crummy little outback station you’ve got another think coming!’

‘Is that what you think Bindaburra is? A “crummy little outback station”?’

Darcy shifted a little uncomfortably at the sting in his voice. ‘I know it didn’t seem like that to Uncle Bill,’ she admitted sulkily. ‘I only meant that the property isn’t likely to be of any interest to me financially.’

‘Bindaburra covers over ten thousand square kilometres,’ said Cooper coldly. ‘It’s a very valuable property,’ he went on, ignoring Darcy’s dropped jaw. ‘You should consider that before you claim not to have any financial interest. Personally, I think you would be mad not to accept my offer to buy your share from you. You’re unlikely to be able to sell it as easily with a hostile partner already in place.’

‘I had no idea it was that big,’ said Darcy, struggling to convert kilometres into miles to try and work out just how big ‘big’ was. Not that she needed to bother. The answer was obviously huge.

‘Perhaps now you’ll realise how impossible it would be for you to stay!’

Darcy lifted her chin stubbornly. ‘No.’

‘Bindaburra can’t support someone who just sits around looking decorative,’ said Cooper with a scathing look, and she bristled.

‘I don’t just sit around! I’m used to working.’

‘Oh, yes?’ He didn’t even bother to hide his disbelief. ‘Doing what?’

‘I’m an actress.’

‘Oh, an actress ... that’ll be handy!’ Cooper was predictably sarcastic. ‘I’m talking about real work.’

‘Acting is work,’ she protested. ‘It’s much harder work than most people realise. It only looks easy.’

‘It’s still not exactly relevant experience for running a cattle station, is it?’

Darcy took a defiant sip of her tea. ‘I could learn.’

‘We’re not talking about a part in some play!’ A muscle hammered in Cooper’s lean jaw. ‘Bill worked hard all his life to build up Bindaburra into one of the finest properties in this part of Australia. I’m not going to let you throw it all away. Quite apart from anything else, I’ve got my investment to consider. That’s why I am now running Bindaburra, and I’m more than capable of running it without assistance from you!’

‘And I’ve got my inheritance to consider,’ she retorted. ‘What about all these other properties you said you owned? How do I know that you won’t be so busy that you’ll end up neglecting Bindaburra?’

Cooper clenched his teeth together. ‘There’s no question of that. I have managers who deal with problems on a day-to-day basis, and I’ve already made arrangements to come and live here permanently.’

‘That was a bit premature, wasn’t it? You could at least have waited to see what I wanted to do!’

‘It never occurred to me that you would want to do anything other than sell,’ he snapped. ‘I certainly didn’t think you would drop everything and hotfoot it out from England to see exactly what the old man had left you!’

‘It wasn’t like that,’ Darcy protested, stung.

‘It looks like that from where I’m standing. You and your family ignored Bill for forty years. It was only when he went over to England and looked you up that you suddenly discovered that he owned a cattle station and you started making a fuss of him. Oh, there have been plenty of letters since then but it’s funny how you’ve only kept in touch since you thought you might get something out of him—as you have.’

Darcy banged her mug down on the table so hard that tea slopped over the edge. ‘I’ve told you, I had no idea that Bindaburra was worth anything!’

‘So you say. I’ve only got your word for that.’

‘Well, you’ll just have to take it, then, won’t you?’

‘I will if you’ll take my word that Bill intended to leave Bindaburra to me,’ said Cooper in a hard voice.

There was a hostile silence as they glared stubbornly at each other. It was Darcy who spoke first. ‘It sounds as if you’ve got other properties. Why do I have to sell up just so that you can have another one?’

He hesitated. ‘Bindaburra’s special,’ he said after a moment. ‘I’ve waited for this property a long time. I want all of Bindaburra, and I don’t care what I have to do to get it. If that means paying you a fair and generous price for something that’s rightfully mine, then that’s what I’ll have to do, but I’m not prepared to play silly games with you about it.’

‘I’ve got no intention of playing games,’ said Darcy, angrily shaking back her dark hair. ‘What makes Bindaburra rightfully yours? If Uncle Bill had wanted you to have Bindaburra, then he would have left it to you, but he didn’t. I came out here not because I wanted to see what I’d “got out of him”, as you put it, but because I felt I owed it to Uncle Bill to come. If he left Bindaburra to me, it’s because he wanted me to have it, not you, and I’m not going to casually hand it over on your say-so, no matter how fair and generous you think your offer is!’

Cooper crunched his empty beer can in his hand with an angry exclamation. ‘Fine words, but why don’t you face facts? A cattle station is no place for someone like you. It’s a hard, uncomfortable life, and you wouldn’t last five minutes out here on your own.’

‘Perhaps, but I’m still not going to be bullied into selling,’ said Darcy, draining her tea and pushing back her chair to stand up. ‘You’ve made it very plain that you don’t want me here, but you’re not going to get rid of me that easily. I may well decide to sell, but I’ll make up my own mind in my own time, and until I do I’m going to stay, so you’ll just have to lump it, won’t you?’

In spite of her brave words, Darcy lay awake wondering what on earth she had got herself into. It was wet and miserable, the house was cold and dingy and she was stuck in the middle of nowhere with a man who apparently both disliked and distrusted her. If she had any sense, she would take whatever Cooper Anderson was offering and head back for civilisation as soon as she could.

No, Darcy corrected herself gloomily. If she had any sense she wouldn’t have come at all.

Cooper was right—there was nothing for her here. She was an actress—she needed lights, music, people, an audience. Cooper was very unsatisfactory. He wasn’t in the least bit sympathetic, and showed no inclination to admire or applaud. Darcy longed to ring up half a dozen friends and ask their opinion; she was already getting withdrawal symptoms from not having a phone. It would be easy to describe her arrival at Bindaburra, more difficult to explain what Cooper was like.

Drawing the blankets up round her chin, Darcy rolled over on to her side and stared into the darkness. At first sight he seemed a typical outback type, with that lean, rangy body and the air of unhurried deliberation, but there was nothing typical about those penetrating eyes or that mouth...

Darcy clamped down firmly on thoughts of Cooper’s mouth and threw herself on to her other side with much readjustment of blankets. Much better to think about how arrogant and disagreeable he was. She frowned as she remembered how contemptuous he had been about her relationship with her great-uncle. It was true that the family had ignored him for forty years, but that was because they hadn’t known that he was still alive. Bill had left for Australia in 1924 after a bitter row with Darcy’s grandfather, and nothing had been heard from him since their mother had died just after the war. Until two years ago, that was, when Bill had turned up at the house that Darcy’s parents still lived in. They had been surprised, but delighted to welcome him back into the family. When Darcy had met him, she had been amazed that this stocky, pugnaciously colourful Australian could possibly be related to her grandfather, whom she dimly remembered as a stiff and punctiliously correct figure.

Both her parents had been occupied with other things that summer, so it had been Darcy who had spent the most time with her great-uncle. They could hardly have been more different, but each had struck a chord in the other, and much to everyone’s surprise, not least their own, they had enjoyed each other’s company. Darcy had swept her great-uncle off to parties and introduced him to all her friends with a complete lack of inhibition, and Bill had been in turns alarmed, astounded, suspicious and finally charmed.

Remembering her uncle made Darcy glad she had come. He had always wanted her to see Bindaburra, and see it she would, Cooper Anderson or no Cooper Anderson! She knew perfectly well that she wasn’t capable of running the property by herself, but she was damned if she was tamely going to hand everything over to Cooper. She would have to sell in the end, she supposed, but in the meantime she had a perfect right to be here, and it wouldn’t do him any harm to sweat a little!

It was still raining the next morning. Darcy had finally fallen into a deep, exhausted sleep which left her feeling jaded and disorientated and she rubbed her eyes with the heel of her hand as she wandered down the corridor to the kitchen, pulling her dressing-gown about her. It was an old one of her father’s, a dark red Paisley-pattern silk that had become a little worn over the years but which was still Darcy’s favourite. She hadn’t thought to bring any slippers, though, and her feet were cold on the polished wooden floor.

It was so dark that Cooper had the light on in the kitchen. He was standing looking out at the rain as he drank a mug of tea, but he turned as Darcy came yawning into the kitchen. She was never at her best in the morning. Her blue eyes were still smudgy with sleep and the thick dark hair tumbled wildly about her face.

An unreadable expression flickered over Cooper’s face as he watched her pad over to the kettle, but his voice was as astringent as Darcy remembered. ‘You’ll have to get up earlier than this if you’re planning to run the property,’ he said, looking pointedly at his watch.

‘It’s only half-past nine,’ said Darcy, squinting at her own watch.

‘It’s quarter to ten.’

‘Oh, well, that’s more or less half-past nine.’ Oblivious to Cooper’s stare, she peered into a cupboard. ‘Is there any fresh coffee?’

‘I doubt it very much,’ said Cooper. ‘Bill lived a very frugal existence. If you’re looking for luxuries, you’ve come to the wrong place. You’ll find some instant in the cupboard below,’ he added. ‘Do you want some breakfast?’

Darcy shook her dark head. ‘I can only cope with coffee at this time of the morning,’ she confessed. ‘You go ahead and have some, though.’

Looking up from stirring her coffee, she caught the gleam of amusement in his grey eyes. ‘I’ve already had breakfast, thank you,’ he said. ‘Four hours ago. I’ve just come in for a cup of tea.’

With some difficulty, Darcy mentally subtracted four hours. ‘You had breakfast at five-thirty?’ she asked incredulously.

‘You’d better get used to it if you’re still planning to stay. Or has a good night’s sleep made you see things in a more sensible light?’

‘I haven’t changed my mind, if that’s what you mean,’ said Darcy, although privately she doubted that she would be able to bear any regime which meant getting up at five o’clock, and as for eating breakfast then...! She shuddered at the thought.

Shifting from foot to foot on the cold floor, she made herself a coffee and went to sit cross-legged on a chair, tucking her feet up beneath her. ‘It’s freezing,’ she grumbled and cradled her hands around the mug. ‘I thought this was supposed to be a desert?’

‘It is mid-winter,’ Cooper pointed out. ‘You should be glad it’s like this.’

‘How do you work that one out?’ she asked, still grumpy with sleep.

‘If you’re going to be part-owner of a property like Bindaburra, you’re going to have to learn to pray for rain. If we don’t have rain, we don’t have feed for the cattle, and if we can’t feed our stock we’ll both be selling up.’

Darcy stared morosely at the rain pouring off the roof of the veranda outside the kitchen window. Surely they had had enough rain in the last two days to be going on with? It was June, summer at home. Everyone would sitting outside the pubs in the sunshine, walking across the parks in bare feet, drinking Pimms in the garden. Of course, it might be raining at home, too, she admitted honestly.

Cooper came over to the table and pulled out a chair. Darcy watched him a little warily. He looked bigger in daylight, and everything about him was more pronounced. She was very conscious suddenly of his solidity and the latent power of his body, and she thought of the French expression—being at ease in one’s skin. It described Cooper perfectly. He was quiet and controlled and somehow centred.

He must have been outside for his face had a damp sheen and his eyelashes were still wet. Darcy found herself staring at them. They were short and thick and the rain had emphasised how their darkness contrasted with the startling lightness of his eyes. For no reason, a tiny shiver slid down her spine and she pulled her dressing-gown closer around her.

‘How long had you intended to stay?’ he asked abruptly.

‘As long as necessary,’ said Darcy, irritated by that ‘had’. She put up her chin. ‘I booked a return flight to London in a month’s time, but I can easily change it if I decide to stay longer.’ ‘I wouldn’t have thought a busy actress could afford to be away that long.’

‘It just so happens that I don’t have any commitments at the moment,’ said Darcy in a dignified way. She was rather sensitive about the fact that the play that had given her her first big break had turned out to be a flop, and had folded after a disastrous two weeks.

‘Ah,’ said Cooper with one of his disquieting gleams of humour. ‘So you’re...what’s the word...resting?’

She gave him a cold look. ‘That’s one way of putting it, yes.’

‘What happens if a starring role comes up while you’re away?’

That was about as likely as one of his cows jumping over the moon, but Darcy didn’t feel like telling Cooper that. She had spent the last six weeks sitting by the phone, but no call to instant stardom had come, and, while she was normally the most optimistic of souls, she couldn’t help thinking that a month or two away wouldn’t mean missing more than a couple of television adverts. Still, it wouldn’t do for Cooper to guess that she was something less than a household name.

‘Naturally, I’ll have to let my agent know how she can contact me,’ she said grandly.

‘I hope she knows how to use a radio,’ said Cooper in a dry voice. ‘Bill didn’t have a phone, but if it’s an emergency she can always leave a message with the Flying Doctor Service.’

Darcy tried to imagine her perennially harassed agent coping with the Flying Doctor Service. ‘I’ll send her the details,’ she said, avoiding the sceptical glint in Cooper’s eye. ‘There’s nothing to stop me staying here as long as I want.’

‘So you won’t reconsider your decision not to sell?’

‘I didn’t decide not to sell,’ said Darcy. ‘I decided not to make a decision yet, and I have no intention of changing my mind about that!’

To her surprise, Cooper looked resigned rather than angry. ‘I didn’t think you would,’ he said. ‘You may not have had much in common with Bill, but you seem to be just as stubborn as he was. It seems to me that the sooner I accept that the better.’

Darcy eyed him suspiciously. Cooper Anderson hadn’t seemed to her the sort of man who gave in that easily. ‘What are you suggesting?’

‘A truce,’ he said. ‘I’ve just been out to check the creeks, and they’re way up. Whatever you decide to do, we’re stuck here for the next few days at least, so we may as well make the best of it. I think that means facing facts.’

‘What sort of facts?’ she asked cautiously.

‘The fact that we’re not going to agree about what Bill wanted for Bindaburra, for instance. I think—I know—that he wanted me to have it and you think he intended to leave it to you. It’s obvious that neither of us is going to change our mind.’ He paused and looked thoughtfully across at Darcy. ‘We got off to a bad start last night. You were tired, and I wasn’t expecting to have a partner thrust into my plans. Let’s say that neither of us was at our best. You didn’t like me and I didn’t like you, and we both think the other is being unreasonable.’

He quirked an eyebrow at her, obviously waiting for her to agree. Trying to ignore an unpleasant sinking feeling at the cool way he had admitted that he didn’t like her, Darcy nodded. She didn’t like not being liked, and she wasn’t used to such brutal candour.

‘I suggest that we start again,’ Cooper went on. ‘You’ve said you’ve booked a flight for a month’s time, and I can’t make you leave before then. Since for reasons best known to yourself you seem determined to stay, I think we should try and forget about what Bill wanted and assume that we’re willing partners. It’il mean that we both have to make an effort, but we ought to be able to manage that if it’s just for a month.’

‘Why just a month?’ said Darcy.

He met her gaze directly. ‘I think a month will be quite long enough to persuade you that you’d be better off selling your share to me.’

‘And if it doesn’t?’

‘Then we can talk again.’ He pushed his mug away from him. ‘If you agree to this, though, it’s on the understanding that we’ll treat each other as partners. That means that you do your fair share of the work. You won’t be a guest, and I won’t treat you as one—unless, of course, you decide to sell. If you stay, you work, and if you still want to stay after a month... well, I’ll admit that I was wrong.’

Darcy swirled her coffee in her mug and considered the proposal. She had a nasty feeling it wasn’t going to work to her advantage, but it was hard to find anything to object to. She could hardly refuse his overture of peace, nor would she be in a very strong position if she said she didn’t want to work. Perhaps she had been a little quick to imply that she wanted to run Bindaburra herself, and she suspected that Cooper was going to call her bluff by setting her impossible tasks.

‘Will I have to brand cows and wrestle bulls to the ground?’ she asked nervously.

Cooper looked as if he didn’t know whether to be exasperated or amused. ‘You’re welcome to try, but that wasn’t quite what I had in mind.’

‘What did you have in mind?’ said Darcy, trying to conceal her relief.

‘Bill always had a housekeeper who cooked for him and the men and kept this place in some sort of order. The last girl left a couple of weeks ago, and I haven’t had time to do anything about finding a replacement yet. One of the men has been doing the cooking since then, but he’s more useful to me outside, so if you took over the cooking you’d be making more than a token contribution.’

Darcy toyed with the idea of objecting to the sexist way he had assumed that all she was good for was cooking and cleaning, but when she thought that the alternative might be fencing in the rain or much worse she decided that she might be better off in the kitchen after all.

‘I’m not a very good cook,’ she warned him, with judicious understatement. Her dinner parties made popular disaster stories among her friends and she had learnt that it was easier to buy prepared meals from the supermarket freezers to shove in the microwave.

‘You must be better than Darren,’ said Cooper. ‘They don’t want anything fancy, just roasts and stews, and a cake or a biscuit for smoko.’

‘Oh, well, I expect I could manage that,’ said Darcy optimistically. The more she thought about it, the more she liked the idea of working, even if it did have to be in the unglamorous role of housekeeper. Uncle Bill would have wanted her to stay, at least for a while, she told herself. If she could prove her worth to Cooper, it would be a way of showing that her great-uncle had not been mistaken in her. She would be doing it for him as much as for herself.

Fired with enthusiasm, she beamed across the table at Cooper. Her hair was still tousled from sleep, but the dark blue eyes were wide awake now. ‘All right, I’ll do it.’

If she had expected Cooper to look delighted, she was disappointed. Instead he sounded almost disapproving of her ready acceptance of his idea. ‘There are other things you should think about as well,’ he said.

‘Like what?’

‘Can you afford to stay, for a start? Obviously it won’t cost you anything to stay here, but you won’t earn anything either. It would be a pity if you gave up opportunities at home just to prove a point out here.’

‘I don’t see that that’s a problem,’ said Darcy. ‘It’s not as if I had any responsibilities. I share a flat with a friend. We only pay a nominal rent because her father owns it, so I won’t be leaving her in the lurch. And as for work...well, as I said, I’ll let my agent know how to contact me just in case something unexpected comes up.’

‘Hmm.’ Cooper studied her critically, unimpressed by her insouciant attitude. ‘You should also consider how you feel about living alone with me.’

Carried away by the prospect of proving that she wasn’t as useless as he thought her, Darcy had forgotten how she had sat fidgeting with her bracelets, overwhelmed by that strange sense of awareness. Now she uncrossed her legs and dropped her feet to the floor, conscious for the first time of the intimacy of the situation. She hadn’t thought twice before about the propriety of sitting opposite him with nothing on under her dressing-gown, but now she tightened the belt automatically. The silk slithered sleekly against her skin and she had a sudden disturbing awareness of her own body.

She wished Cooper had never mentioned the prospect of living alone. She had been happily defiant before; now she couldn’t take her eyes off his hands, horrified by how easily she could imagine what it would be like to sit here like lovers, still sleepy and smiling after a night together, her body tingling with remembered desire. So vivid was the picture that Darcy’s skin seemed to burn as if she could feel his hands easing the dressing-gown apart to slide caressingly over her body and pull her against his tautly muscled strength...

Darcy swallowed and pushed the vision aside with an effort. Living alone with Cooper suddenly seemed fraught with unsuspected dangers, none of which she could explain. ‘W-we won’t be alone, though, will we?’ she said in a voice that sounded ridiculously high even to her own ears. ‘The other men will be back as soon as the creeks go down, won’t they?’ There would be safety in numbers, she reasoned, and with three other men around there would be none of the intimacy that might lead to more dangerous fantasising about just one.

‘They’ll eat with us here in the homestead, but they sleep in their own quarters.’

‘Oh.’ Darcy looked down into her empty coffeemug. ‘Well, couldn’t you sleep in their quarters?’

‘I could, but I have no intention of doing so,’ said Cooper in an acerbic tone. He got up impatiently and carried his mug over to the sink. ‘I intend to make Bindaburra my home, and I don’t see why I should move out just to make you feel better.’

‘You were the one who brought up the subject,’ she pointed out with a touch of sullenness.

‘I’m just advising you to think about what’s involved,’ he said austerely, swirling the mug under the tap. ‘There’s no point in you agreeing to stay and then suddenly getting maidenly scruples.’

‘I haven’t got maidenly scruples!’ Darcy protested.

‘Oh? Then why did you suggest I move out to the ringers’ quarters?’

‘I just thought it would be...less awkward.’

Cooper came back to the table. ‘Awkward for whom?’

‘Well, not exactly awkward—’ she began, wishing she’d never opened her mouth, but he interrupted her.

‘You mean you don’t trust me to keep my hands off you?’

‘No!’ Seeing Cooper raise his eyebrows, she hurried to correct herself. ‘I mean, no, I didn’t mean that. That you wouldn’t be able to keep your hands off me, I mean...’ Utterly confused about what she meant by now, Darcy floundered to a halt.

‘Could it be that you don’t trust yourself to keep your hands off me, then?’ he suggested provocatively.

‘Certainly not!’ Without thinking, she jumped to her feet, clutching her dressing-gown about her, dark hair bouncing around her face and blue eyes stormy and magnificent. ‘I’m hardly likely to have any interest in you!’

‘Why not?’ Cooper came round the table towards her, but Darcy was too angry to care.

‘Why? Why?’ she echoed, trying desperately to think of a convincing reason. ‘Because... because you’re just not my type, and even if you were I... I’m already involved with someone else,’ she finished in a rush.

It didn’t seem to have much effect in halting Cooper’s advance, which she had belatedly noticed. ‘What’s his name?’ he asked, calmly taking her waist between his hands. They were hard and strong and seemed to burn through the silk on to her skin.

’S-Sebastian,’ she stammered, trying to push away his steely grip.

‘Sebastian? Is he an actor, too?’

‘Yes,’ said Darcy, preoccupied with her futile struggle to free herself.

Cooper himself hardly seemed to notice her efforts. ‘How involved is “involved”?’ he said.

‘I’m in love with him,’ she said defiantly. She was, she reminded herself, remembering how heartbroken she had been.

‘And is Sebastian in love with you?’

Darcy hesitated. ‘Yes.’ Much the safest answer, even if the least truthful. She had given up her attempts to wriggle free and had brought her hands up to his chest to ward him off. Beneath her palms she could feel the disturbingly warm solidity of his body through the brushed-cotton shirt, and she drew her hands away slightly.

‘You don’t sound very sure,’ said Cooper conversationally, a smile lurking around his mouth.

Darcy drew a steadying breath. ‘I am sure,’ she said. ‘Sebastian trusts me utterly.’

‘Really?’ he said, drawing her inexorably closer until her hands were jammed back against his chest. His eyes were alight with an expression that set her heart thudding in a treacherous combination of alarm and anticipation. ‘Sebastian sounds like a rash man to me. If I were in his position, I wouldn’t tempt fate by letting a girl like you out of my sight, let alone disappear off to Australia on her own.’

‘He knows I’d never be interested in another man,’ whispered Darcy, who could hardly hear her own voice above the booming of her heart and was fighting a desperate battle against the terrible temptation to lean into him.

Cooper’s smile was speculative. ‘Well, let’s see if Sebastian was right or not, shall we?’ he murmured, and slid his hands up to cup her throat and lift her face to his.

CHAPTER THREE

THE touch of Cooper’s mouth sent a lightning bolt of reaction through her, catching Darcy off balance. It was as if the floor had dropped away beneath her, plunging her into a maelstrom of conflicting emotions, and she gasped, clutching instinctively at the front of his shirt as her only anchor.

How had she known that his lips would be so warm, so sure, so treacherously persuasive? Darcy was caught between shock and the arrowing certainty that it had always been like this. Just as when she had hesitated in the kitchen door last night she had been swamped by that strange sense of familiarity, so now his kiss left her awash with recognition. It was almost like coming home; the touch and the scent and the hard, masculine feel of his body through the flimsy silk dressing-gown were all part of her, inseparable from the intoxicating rush of feeling that swirled through her senses and left her reeling and incapable of thought.

She was unaware of her hands slowly loosening their clutch on his shirt to spread and slide over his chest and up to his shoulders. Beneath the cotton, his body was tempered steel, solid and unyielding to her touch. Darcy clung to its reassuring strength, heedless of the instinctive arch of her body. Her head was tipped back invitingly so that her soft dark hair fell over his hand, which was smoothing seductively down her spine. She had forgotten her anger, forgotten Sebastian and the cold floor beneath her bare feet, forgotten everything but Cooper’s kiss, his mouth on hers, his hands burning through the silk on to her skin and the breathtaking thump of excitement that was beating ever louder and faster, drowning out the voice that should have been shouting at her to resist.

As her arms slid round his neck, Cooper lifted his mouth from hers, but only to gather her closer again into a kiss that was deeper and more demanding than before. Darcy was drowning, dissolving in a rising tide of desire, and her fingers tightened on his shoulders as the silk belt of her gown slithered apart and his hands slipped beneath to curve over her body. Darcy gasped aloud, electrified by their scorching exploration, and sheer, shameful pleasure shuddered over her skin.

Abandoned to the wash of sensation, Darcy hardly heard Cooper’s muttered exclamation or realised that his hands had stilled abruptly. They withdrew slowly, sliding reluctantly out from beneath the silk as he levered himself away from her. By the time Darcy had grasped what was happening, he was retying her belt with a wry smile.

‘I think Sebastian might have made a big mistake,’ he said. ‘A very big one.’

He might as well have dashed a bucket of cold water in her face. Darcy recoiled from the sharp slap of reality, aghast at her own response. White-faced, she pushed his hands away from her waist and retied the belt herself, pulling the sides of the dressing-gown together high around her throat with shaking fingers.

‘That wasn’t fair,’ she said unsteadily.

‘It wasn’t particularly fair of you to sit there with nothing on under that dressing-gown either.’ Quite unconcerned, Cooper propped himself against the table and calmly watched Darcy’s fumbling attempts to straighten herself.

It was impossible to believe that this cool, self-contained man eyeing her with faint amusement could be the same man who had been kissing her only moments ago, the same man who had buried his face in her hair, whose hands had explored the smooth softness of her body with such devastating skill. Darcy clutched her robe about her, her eyes huge and dark. She felt disorientated and lost, almost bereft. How could he look so indifferent? Hadn’t he felt anything?

She pulled herself together with an immense effort. If Cooper could appear so unmoved, she wasn’t going to let him know just how shattered she felt. ‘I know what you’re doing,’ she said, somehow managing to keep her voice steady. ‘You just want to make me leave and you’re prepared to do anything to make sure I go as soon as possible.’

‘If that were what I was trying to do, I would hardly have offered you a month’s truce,’ Cooper pointed out coolly. ‘However, now you mention it, it doesn’t sound like a bad policy. Have I persuaded you that you’d be better off leaving as soon as the creeks are down?’

‘No, you haven’t!’ said Darcy, who was regaining her temper with her composure. ‘If you think a paltry little kiss like that is enough to scare me into leaving, you’ve got another think coming!’

‘Does that mean you want to go ahead with a month’s trial partnership?’

Darcy felt as if she had been outmanoeuvred somewhere along the line. She wanted nothing better than to tell Cooper what he could do with his trial partnership, but then she would have little option but to leave, and she wasn’t going to give in that easily. ‘As long as there are no more... incidents... like the one that’s just taken place,’ she said.

‘But I thought paltry little kisses didn’t bother you?’

‘They don’t,’ said Darcy bravely and quite untruthfully. ‘That doesn’t mean I like them.’

‘That’s funny,’ said Cooper. ‘I was under the impression that you quite enjoyed it. I know I did.’

Darcy eyed him with acute resentment. ‘I’d rather it didn’t happen again,’ she said in a frosty voice.

‘I’ll tell you what,’ he said amenably. ‘I won’t kiss you again if you don’t provoke me again.’

‘I didn’t provoke you!’ she protested indignantly.

Cooper raised an eyebrow. ‘Didn’t you? It felt that way to me.’

‘I can’t help the way you feel,’ said Darcy, ruffled as much by Cooper’s calm discussion of the kiss as by the kiss itself.

‘No,’ he agreed, straightening from the table. To her fury, his eyes held not embarrassment but an unmistakable glint of amusement. ‘You could try wearing more clothes in future, though. Now,’ he went on in a brisk tone before Darcy had time to think of a suitably dignified retort, ‘I suggest we abide by the terms of our truce and start work. Since there’s just the two of us here, this seems like a good opportunity to clear out Bill’s office. You could give me a hand—once you’ve changed, of course.’

Darcy made sure she covered herself from neck to toe. Her bones were still weak with remembered desire as she stood under the shower and she felt hollow whenever she thought about Cooper’s mouth and Cooper’s hands and the lean, hard strength of his body. She closed her eyes, wishing she could banish the memory of his touch, but he might as well have been standing there still, his fingers tracing irresistible patterns of desire on her skin, for all that she could forget.

She felt better after pulling on jeans and a bulky cardigan over a cotton polo-necked jumper. There, Cooper could hardly accuse her of being dressed revealingly now! Darcy had given herself a stern talkingto, but she was more nervous than she cared to admit about the coming month. If only she and Sebastian really were still in love, it would make it so much easier. She wouldn’t have responded to Cooper’s kiss like that for a start, Darcy told herself, choosing to ignore a little voice which told her that Sebastian’s kisses had never been like that. Well, she would just have to pretend that she still was, she decided; she wasn’t an actress for nothing, and she was determined that Cooper wasn’t going to get the better of her. Darcy had always had a stubborn streak along with a certain instinctive contrariness when faced with a will as strong as her own. She would stick out this month, just to show Cooper Anderson that she could, and what was more she would be so useful that in the end he would beg her to stay, and she would have great satisfaction in refusing!

It was a comforting thought, and Darcy enjoyed herself imagining exactly what she would say to Cooper, and how he would grovel to try and persuade her not to go, but when she had finished dressing and had to face him again suddenly the scene didn’t seem quite so likely. She had to muster all her acting skills to appear cool and poised as she made her way down the gloomy corridor to her great-uncle’s old office, a dark, poky little room at the back of the house, overflowing with piles of letters, accounts, catalogues and old farming magazines.

Cooper was sitting at the desk, trying to clear a space among the clutter. ‘What a horrible little room,’ said Darcy, wrinkling her nose. ‘How could Uncle Bill bear to sit in here?’

‘I don’t think he could,’ said Cooper drily. ‘He just used to throw all his papers in here and shut the door—hence the mess. No one knew the land better than Bill, but he wasn’t a businessman.’

‘And you are, I suppose?’ Darcy was unable to prevent herself saying snidely.

He gave her a cool look. ‘I own five properties in this part of South Australia, as well as several businesses in Adelaide—I have to be.’

‘If you’re such a good businessman, why do you want Bindaburra so badly?’ she asked, wrapping her cardigan more firmly about her as she wandered over to the tiny window. It was much easier to pretend to be cool and poised when she wasn’t looking at him, she discovered. Bulky layers didn’t seem to make much difference; under that cool, amused gaze, she might as well still be wearing the silken robe.

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