The Australians' Brides: The Runaway and the Cattleman. Lilian Darcy

       www.millsandboon.co.uk

      The Runaway and

       the Cattleman

      Lilian Darcy

       Chapter One

      He looked like a cowboy, against the backdrop of rust-red outback dirt and endless blue sky.

      Or to be more accurate, like every woman’s fantasy of a cowboy.

      An ancient, broad-brimmed hat tilted low over his forehead. It shaded his face so that the color of his eyes was impossible to read, but one look at his profile would tell a red-blooded woman all she needed to know. Strong jaw, firm mouth, an intensity in the way he watched the world … even when he looked as if he wasn’t really seeing it.

      His body was even stronger than his jaw, but he wasn’t the type who needed to wear his T-shirts too tight to emphasize washboard abs and bulging biceps. The muscles were just there, hard and motionless beneath faded denim and stretch cotton. He’d learned to conserve his energy for when he really needed it—for a long day of boundary riding, cattle branding or herding his animals to fresh pasture. Right now, since he didn’t need it, he leaned his tanned forearms on the wooden rail in front of him, the way he would have leaned them on a stockyard gate.

      Yes, any woman who’d picked him as a cowboy would have been close. He was a cattleman, an Australian outback farmer, owner of his own huge spread of acreage. He was no one’s wage slave, but answered only to his land, his animals and his family.

      Nine out of ten women took a good look at him as they walked past. Eight out of ten were impressed with what they saw, and would have liked to find out more. Just what color were those eyes? Did he have tan lines around those solid upper arms? What did he have to say for himself? Did he like dressy blondes or down-to-earth brunettes? Was he available? Was he as good as he looked?

      But if the cattleman noticed any of the female attention he was getting, it didn’t show. You would have said that Callan Woods’s thoughts were at least two hundred miles away, and you wouldn’t have been wrong.

      “Look at him, Brant! What are we going to do?”

      Branton Smith felt helpless at his friend Dusty Tanner’s question. Like Callan himself, they both lived most of their waking hours out of doors. They worked with their hands. When they struck trouble, it was something physical—drought or flood or fire or an injured beast—and the solution to it was physical, also.

      They just worked harder. They climbed on a horse and herded cattle or sheep to higher ground. They got out of bed two hours earlier in the morning and fed their animals by hand, dropping feed bales off the back of a truck until their hands were callused like leather and every muscle burned. They were big, strong, capable men, and they had brains. They looked for active, assertive answers.

      But what could they do about Callan?

      “Just be there for him, I guess,” Brant said in answer to Dusty’s question.

      He wasn’t surprised at Dusty’s bark of derisory laughter. “You sound like an advice column in a teenage magazine, mate!”

      True.

      Had to be cruddy advice, too, because they’d both “been there” for Callan since his wife Liz’s death four years ago, and he only seemed to have folded in on himself even more this year.

      He stood, as they did, with his forearms propped on the rail that kept spectators back from the racetrack, while around him swirled the color and noise of Australia’s best-known outback racing carnival. Judging by Callan’s thousand-yard stare, his slumped shoulders, his tight mouth and his silence, however, he barely knew that he was here.

      The three men had been best mates for years, since attending Cliffside school in Sydney more than seventeen years ago. Then, they had been three strong, shy outback boys, boarding away from home for the first time, in the company of the sons of stockbrokers and car dealers and property tycoons.

      Now they owned racehorses together, five sleek beautiful animals at the present time, of which two were racing at today’s carnival. Three of their horses were trained at a place near Brant’s extensive sheep-farming property west of the Snowy Mountains, while the two running today were with a trainer in Queensland, near Dusty.

      As a hobby, the racing syndicate just about paid its way. As an exercise in mateship, it was solid gold.

      Their spirited two-year-old mare Surprise Bouquet had put in a reasonable performance in her maiden event this morning. She’d placed fifth in a field of sixteen after a poor jump from the barrier, and she should do better next time around. Saltbush Bachelor was the horse they had real hopes for today.

      Callan, Brant and Dusty couldn’t meet face-to-face all that often, given the distance between their properties, but this race carnival was a tradition they kept to whenever they could. Callan had missed a couple of years when Liz had been ill. She’d died at around this time of year. A couple of weeks along in the calendar—end of September. Maybe that was part of Callan’s problem. The Birdsville Races and September and Liz’s death were all wrapped up together in his heart.

      “He’s thirty-three,” Dusty muttered. “We can’t let him go on thinking his life is over, Brant.”

      Standing beside his two mates, Callan wasn’t thinking that.

      Not exactly.

      But yeah. He knew Brant and Dusty were concerned about him. They weren’t all that subtle on the issue. Those frequent anxious looks, the muttered comments he didn’t always hear but could guess the gist of, the over-hearty suggestions about going for a beer, the occasional comment about a woman—nothing too crude, just “nice legs” and that kind of thing—after which they’d both nudge him for an agreement, which he would dutifully give.

      Yes, she had nice legs, the blonde or the brunette or the farmer’s daughter with her hair hidden beneath her hat.

      Brant and Dusty both thought it was time he moved on, found a new mother for his boys.

      Callan had thought so, too, once.

      Three years ago, to be exact, here at this same annual racing carnival.

      To him, it felt like yesterday.

      He could still remember the panic, the loneliness, the physical hunger, the ache for his own loss and the even harder ache for what his boys would miss without a mother, after that first endless year without Liz.

      But, sheesh! What the hell had he been thinking that day? Had he really thought that a party-going, city-bred twentysomething with “nice legs,” carrying a glass of champagne in one hand and in the other a race guide she wasn’t interested in, could possess the slightest power to help him move on?

      There had been a nightmarish wrongness about that woman’s