Outback Angel. Margaret Way

      MILLS & BOON

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      CONTENTS

      CHAPTER ONE

      CHAPTER TWO

      CHAPTER THREE

      CHAPTER FOUR

      CHAPTER FIVE

      CHAPTER SIX

      CHAPTER SEVEN

      CHAPTER EIGHT

      CHAPTER NINE

      CHAPTER TEN

      CHAPTER ELEVEN

      CHAPTER ONE

      THE heat and clamour of the day had been frightful, Jake reflected. Truly exhausting even for him. It had been easy enough rounding up the mob on the spinifex plains at the height of the Dry, fields of burnt gold like an endless harvest of wheat, but galloping after cattle in rough terrain was no fun. And dangerous.

      Last year his Brit jackeroo, Charlie Middleton, had sustained a back injury as a result of his boundless derring-do and yen for action and had to undergo surgery, which mercifully turned out fine. Charlie, the Honourable Charles Middleton, no less, was back on the job a whole lot less inclined to go swashbuckling around the bush. He really liked Charlie and mostly looked on his enthusiasm and sense of adventure with favour, but the ever-present hazards had to be taken seriously. Driving cleanskins, the unbranded cattle, out of their hiding places was one of them. The horned beasts, dangerous on that count alone, buried themselves deep in the vast network of lignum thickets that wrapped themselves around the waterways and billabongs, finding green havens after the semidesert with its scorching red sands.

      This was the final muster before Christmas. The Big One, though work procedures had been revolutionised since he was a boy. Today on the station good chopper pilots—and he was one of them—matched the skills of the pioneer stockmen when it came to moving cattle. The name of the game was efficiency and the use of helicopters had greatly increased the speed of the musters as well as cutting the workforce. But there were some places the choppers couldn’t safely go, so the horses got involved, every last one of them well trained. That was his job. Overseeing their management. A man had to be multi-skilled these days to survive on the land. He was a smart businessman, too. He had a degree in commerce behind him. A man for all seasons you might say.

      And speaking of seasons, the Wet had officially begun in the tropical north of his giant state of Queensland, but not one drop of rain had fallen on his neck of the woods; the far south-west of the state, the Channel Country, riverine desert with some of the loneliest, most dramatic landscapes on the planet. Home to the nation’s cattle kings. He guessed he had to be one of them now.

      Jake McCord. Cattle king. Jake was grittier than Jonathon, his real name. Of course his father had come up with the alternative. He supposed it was reasonably close. Only his mother had called him Jonathon. Three years after his father’s premature death—Clive McCord had been bitten in the leg by a poisonous copperhead while out on one of his solitary desert walkabouts—he still thought of himself as the heir apparent. The man in waiting. He supposed it was to his credit he had never thought of himself as being overshadowed by his father when his father had clearly enjoyed cracking the whip as a means of keeping everyone around him under control.

      Especially his son. However, in his case, his father had never tasted success. Some inbred fighting spirit had allowed him to shrug and take it. He knew a lot of people in their far-flung Outback community put the discord between father and son down to Clive McCord’s not unrare jealousy of his heir and his deep-seated bitterness. The fact was, both of their lives had been tragically disrupted by the death of beautiful, much loved, Roxanne, wife and mother, in a riding accident on the station when Jake was barely six. From then on his father had turned into another person, with hardly a nodding tolerance for others, not drawing closer to his bereft child, but seeming to blame him for living when his wife hadn’t. There was ample proof that sort of thing sometimes happened.

      The total lack of love and approval had left him damaged he supposed. It had certainly charged him with a lot of hurt and anger and an almost chronic wariness that even extended into his love life. He supposed it was all about his mother and his idealisation of her. It had been very hard on his girlfriends because one way or another they had all fallen short. Or perhaps he believed that love was an illusion. Yet he had known love when his mother was alive. He was still capable of remembering. Her loss had been overwhelming and it had come at a bad time in a child’s life.

      Two years after his mother’s death, Stacy had come along. Stacy, his stepmother, his father’s second wife. Poor Stacy! God what a life she’d had with such a hard strange man who’d only married her because she was nothing like his late wife, but she was young, gentle and tractable and could provide from her delicate body more sons to work the giant station. All Stacy could manage was his half sister, Gillian, who had proved as easy to dominate as her mother, flinching whenever her father’s hard gaze fell on her. It would have been easier for Gillian had she been a McCabe in appearance. His clan tended to be really handsome people with a surplus of self-confidence. Gillian favoured her mother. Pretty, sure, but living life under a modern-day despot who never saw her as any kind of asset had clipped Gilly’s wings. Sometimes he thought it hadn’t helped anyone when he’d come so repeatedly to their defence. It had only made his father look more harshly on all of them.

      McCord’s sudden violent death was an appalling shock when they all thought he was going to live forever, but in the end he hadn’t been mourned. Stacy and Gillian had made a pretence at grief—surely it was expected—but it wasn’t in Jake to play the hypocrite. All of them after the initial shock had felt a vast sense