Princes of the Outback Bundle (24 page)

“It’s not that easy.” She shook her head, hoping to clear the heat that seemed to be hazing her good sense. Why else would she be feeling the insidious tug of temptation? “I don’t know where he is.”

“An investigator would locate him in a day.”

“Maybe, but that’d be—” Underhanded. Over-the-top. “—wrong.”

“Scared?”

She bristled at the low-voiced taunt. “Scared of what?”

“I don’t know, Catriona,” he said in that same low, dangerous voice. “Maybe you’re scared of what you’ll find out about your cowboy.”

“Scared of the truth? No way.”

“Then let me—”

“No,” she said quickly, adamantly. “If you insist on repayment, you can buy me that dinner sometime.”

“Think about it.”

“Oh, I’m sure I will think about it.” With a rueful half smile, Cat shook her head. She would think about it most every waking hour, and dream about it while she slept. “I’ll think about it but I won’t change my mind.”

After he disconnected, Rafe’s smile curled with the thrill of a challenge innocently laid down and not-so-innocently ac
cepted. He didn’t know how he would change her mind, only that he’d give it one hell of a shot. And not only because she’d challenged him, not only because his life had become too easy, too predictable, too dissatisfying.

He knew his brothers treated his part in their baby-making pact as a joke.
Rafe as a father? Shoot, he’s too irresponsible, too reckless. Too shallow. He hasn’t grown up himself.
Not that he blamed them for that opinion, since it amused him to overplay his reputation. Charm, after all, was the one and only thing he excelled at.

But now it was time to show his hand. Time to show his brothers that he was up to the challenge, that he could do something as well as—even better than—them.

For once he could give something back to his family.

He’d found the right woman, but could he find the means to change her mind?

“W
hat made you change your mind?”

Cat sighed, unleashing a fraction of the tight breath she swore had been backing up in her lungs for days. Ever since she left a message on the man at her side’s voice mail to say,
I have changed my mind. I would like to accept your offer to help.
The man she’d found already seated when the flight attendant walked her through the curtain into first class on this Sydney to Los Angeles flight.

Clever, clever man. He knew she’d have balked at accepting a first-class ticket and his company, so he’d waited until the last minute to spring both on her.

Shaky already with nerves and an awful sense of what-have-I-gotten-myself-into, he hadn’t helped matters by standing and kissing her shell-shocked lips. Nothing explicit, nothing extreme, just a brief taste of mint and a wicked lick of temptation that curled Cat’s toes and weakened her knees. So much so that she’d slumped into her seat while he calmly
explained about having some business to attend to. Thought he might as well travel with her. Make sure she found her cowboy, who he’d located recovering from injury in Vegas. Two birds with the one stone. Etc, etc.

How could she dispute what sounded too glib and convenient but could be the straight truth? He worked, apparently, as some kind of executive with Carlisle Hotels. He was, reputedly, a gambler. He could, easily, do business in Las Vegas.

With a small elite audience and a hovering flight attendant wanting to make her feel at home—in first class with champagne? not likely!—she couldn’t kick up a fuss. And when she did open her mouth to question his motives, Rafe pressed a finger to her lips and suggested she follow the safety demonstration.

As if a whistle and light would do her any good if this big bird went down over the Pacific Ocean!

By then the plane was rolling and he was asking why she’d changed her mind and it was much too late to change it back again.

“My stepmother,” she replied. “She changed it for me.”

“I’m going to have to meet the wicked stepmother. Find out how she managed the impossible.”

She turned her head and found him watching her, his eyes alight with the same smile that laced his voice. Silky and sexy and altogether too satisfied. As if he’d known she would change her mind, which he couldn’t possibly have done since she hadn’t known herself.

Not until after she’d dialed his number in a furious fit of pique, driven by one phone call from the step-monster. No one had the power to play her emotions like Pamela McConnell Smythe—not even Gordon Samuels, although he came close!

“She manages the impossible by being impossible,” she told Rafe. “You do not want to meet her, believe me.”

“Okay. But I would like to hear how she influenced your decision.”

The jumbo had reached the runway and it lumbered in a slow arc to face east, the ocean, her future. Cat’s heart started to thunder like a stampeding steer. Why not tell him? Talking might take her mind off the rising panic that threatened to engulf her—a turbulent anxiety that rivaled the high-pitched whining of jet engines impatient for takeoff.

“Pamela loves to tell me all about her daughters and their brilliantly successful careers.” Compared to, say, her own spectacular struggle to survive. “And she can’t resist reminding me, in subtle little ways, how much keeping Corroboree in the family meant to my father.”

“And has she helped you to do that?”

“She offered once, but…” Cat shrugged instead of finishing the sentence.
But I chose to take Drew’s money instead.
At the time it had seemed the better option. Better than accepting help from a woman who didn’t think she could do the job, who undermined her confidence at every turn, who made her sweat with guilty, angsty fear over letting down her father.

“But…?” Rafe prompted.

The giant engines roared and he leaned across the console between their seats, ducking his head to wait for her answer. Expecting her to speak that answer close to his ear.

Cat stared. At the smooth curve of hair behind his ear and the bristly texture of his sideburn before it. At the squared edge of his jawbone and the flat plane of his cheek. She swallowed. Her fingers curved reflexively around the ends of the armrests, gripping tight, partly because the plane was accelerating down the tarmac and partly because her senses had been hijacked by wild imaginings.

Pressing her lips to that ear. Touching his skin. Biting the lobe.

His prompting question forgotten, she closed her eyes and held on tighter. Then his hand covered hers, enclosing it in heat and the surprise of his palm’s texture. Not silky smooth like the rest of him, but slightly rough and very male.

She couldn’t stop the sensual shudder that rose from deep
inside when the pressure of his hand increased, stroking over her knuckles and between her fingers. And when he leaned closer to say, “We’ll be up there soon. Just hang on tight,” she couldn’t help the flare of her nostrils as she breathed deeply and caught the musky note of his scent.

Yes, she was slightly nervous of flying.

Yes, he was helping her overcome it—not with his reassuring words, but by guaranteeing she forgot all about the unlikely physics that kept 350 tons of metal airborne.

Did he know how violently he affected her?

Probably. She imagined all women responded the same way to his sexy sweet-talking appeal. God knows, the gossip magazines insinuated so. Not that Cat read them, as a rule, but in the last week she’d allowed her curiosity to type his name into an internet search engine. She’d allowed that curiosity to start reading from some of the sites unearthed…until she’d realized what she was doing and shut her computer down in self-disgust.

The plane lifted and her stomach took a lifetime to catch up. She eased her grip on the armrest but he didn’t take his hand away until she wriggled and tugged. “I’m okay now.”

And because he was looking at her too closely, his amazing eyes narrowed and fixed on her face, his expression speculative and ready to call her on that lie, she circled back to their interrupted conversation about her stepmother.

“Pamela withdrew her offer of help. She’s just waiting for me to fail.”

“Is that why you want to save your station so badly?”

“No, that’s for my father and myself.” The quiet intensity of her words resonated with the same vibrant power as the climbing jumbo for several seconds. Maybe longer. Then a touch of wryness curved Cat’s lips. “Although I wouldn’t knock back the chance to do something—just once—to wipe the floor with her patronizing attitude.”

“I imagine that goes for Samuels, too.”

“Crikey, yes! Doubly.”

Settling back in the superwide seat, she allowed herself to image that scenario. For the short time it lasted, my, it was good, but then the raw reality of her situation shoved its ugly head into her fantasy. She had no clue how to resolve her mess. This trip to America was only to answer questions, to close her past with Drew, to arm herself with the truth before facing her future.

“I take it he’s not looking after your place then, while you’re away?”

Cat pulled a face. “Good guess. Bob and Jen Porter are feeding the animals and keeping an eye on things.”

“Good neighbors.”

“Yes.” Her only good neighbors. Her only support. And not nearly enough in the long run.

Perhaps he saw the change in her expression because he leaned closer, his voice lowered to an intimate, conspiratorial level. “Whatever you’re thinking, Shauna will be along in a minute to cure it.”

Cat frowned. “Shauna?”

He indicated the flight attendant with a nod and a wink. The latter was for the sleek and beautiful Shauna. Figured that he knew her name already. Figured that he was flirting with her already. What didn’t figure was Cat’s own fierce reaction.

“How will she cure me?” she asked, testy with herself for what felt like the razor’s slice of jealousy. She had no right to those feelings. No right to any feelings for Rafe Carlisle.

He turned her way again, just a slight roll of his head against the soft leather headrest and he was looking right into her eyes. Smiling right into her eyes. “She’ll be along with champagne.”

“The universal first-class cure-all?”

“I didn’t know you were such a cynic.”

“I’m a realist, Rafe, and this—” she waggled her hand, indicating everything around her in the first-class cabin, in
cluding him “—only happens in the movies. It’s not real. Not in my life.”

He raised a lazy eyebrow. And before she realized his purpose, he twined his fingers through hers and picked up her hand. Mesmerized by the soft stroke of his thumb across the center of her palm, by the unwitting intimacy of their linked fingers, by the flare of heat in her belly, Cat blinked slowly. She sat helplessly entranced while he stroked her knuckles against the soft leather of the seat. While he lifted them to brush his cheek and then to touch the sensual fullness of his bottom lip.

“See—” the warm breath of his word washed against her knuckles “—it is all real.”

Crikey, he was lethal.

She was in trouble if he kept this up all the way to L.A.

She tugged her hand, and after a short tussle that brought heat to her cheeks, he let her reclaim it. He touched the back of his hand to her face and she jerked back, furious with herself for overreacting, but also with him for playing his games with her. Surely there had to be better in-flight entertainment.

“This is a long flight.” She kept her voice and her gaze even, despite the furious heat in her cheeks. “Let’s get a few things straight, so there are no mixed messages.”

“I’m listening.”

“I’m serious, Rafe. Please.”

“So am I,” he said, mimicking her stern tone. “What messages are getting mixed, Catriona?”

“I’m not a plaything,” she said tightly. “Don’t toy with me.”

“Toy with you?”

“This…
thing
…you do with women.”

“This…thing?”

She clicked her tongue with annoyance. Did he have to repeat everything she said in that pseudo-studious way? “Flirt. Kiss. Touch. The lines, the looks. We both know you don’t mean it, so just cut it out!”

For a long moment he eyed her in a way she couldn’t fathom. Then, with devastating slowness, he brushed his fingertips down the length of her hair. “I promise I won’t toy with you, Catriona. But I can’t promise not to touch you.”

What was that supposed to mean? Cat’s heart beat hard and high in her chest. She had to swallow before she could attempt to speak. “What if I don’t want you to touch me?”

“Let’s make a deal.” His voice was low, lazy, lethal. “Just so there are no mixed messages.”

Cat swallowed again.

“I won’t touch you if you don’t want me to. I won’t do anything you don’t want me to.” He extended his hand. “Do we have a deal?”

Did they? Mouth dry, heart thumping, she stared at his hand a second, two, three, while she mulled over his terms. It sounded too good to be true.

“Well, Catriona?”

“My call? You’ll back off whenever I say?”

“Promise.”

They shook on that, just as Shauna appeared with the promised champagne. Cat settled back into her cushy seat and rubbed her fingers over the warmth lingering from his handshake while her trepidation remained, unallayed, unrelenting.

After all, hadn’t a handshake deal with another charmer gotten her into this mess?

The investigator Rafe employed had found Drew Samuels easily enough, shacked up with a woman named Cherrie. He’d told Catriona about the injury but not about the woman. That’s why he’d hung around outside the apartment complex after Catriona disappeared inside. That’s why he was waiting when she came out half an hour later, ready to take her back to their hotel for some intensive play time.

Yes, he’d promised not to toy with her, but this wasn’t that kind of play. This was about making her laugh and forget the
ex and everything he’d done to hurt her. This was about treating her and indulging her and reminding her that she was a desirable woman.

Then
he would get serious.

As for their deal…well, like all contracts, the devil was in the detail. As he’d told her on the plane, he couldn’t agree to not touching but he could shake on not trying anything she didn’t want. And Catriona did want him. He felt the spark when their gazes connected, the heat when their fingers meshed, the soft sexy tension when he brushed his mouth with her knuckles.

She might not have realized it yet, but she would.

Slowing with the traffic as they approached the Strip, he cut her a sideways look and felt the same gut kick of reaction as five minutes before, when she slid into the passenger seat of the rental sports car without a word. At worst he’d expected a short dose of cynicism on men in general; at best a fiery diatribe on the specific worm who’d sold her out without a breath of warning.

He hadn’t counted on her looking so pale. So lost. So damn beaten.

He hadn’t counted on his own savage response, either. If the bastard had had the common courtesy to walk her outside—hell, she hadn’t known he was waiting, she’d told him to go and attend to his business, she’d catch a cab—Rafe would likely have given in to the violent need to grind his face in the dirt. That rocked him almost as much as Cat’s silence. He wasn’t a violent man. And he didn’t even have the full story on Drew Samuels…although he intended to get it once they arrived back at their hotel and he could concentrate only on her, instead of the car and the traffic and the tourists who wandered around in a bright-lights-induced coma. Even though it was only midmorning.

They were half a block from their hotel when he changed his mind and kept on driving. It was a whim, but the kind that
sat right in his gut and even righter in his mind the farther he drove without her taking any notice. When he pulled over to dispense with the convertible’s roof, she finally sat up straighter and looked about. Behind her dark glasses he couldn’t see her eyes, but he knew they roamed the red desert vista with dawning realization.

“Where are we? Where are we going?”

“Nowhere in particular. Just driving.”