‘We’ll truck them out,’ Riley told her. ‘They can survive here but they won’t thrive. As soon as the house is habitable I’ll send men in to base themselves here while they work. They’ll bring trucks, they’ll build holding yards and they’ll muster this lot. Then they’ll bring them back to Munyering where they can recover. There’s feed enough on Munyering to make these beasts think all their Christmases have come at once. Munyering is south of here and we’re not drought-affected. I said it’s better, Jenna. Believe me.’

‘But this place is awful. How could it ever have been a farm?’

‘It’s in drought, Jenna,’ Riley told her. He’d drawn to a halt before the muddy bank, a sheet of hoof-marked mud leading to deep water. ‘This place isn’t always so awful. When the rains come I’ll bring cattle back here again. I won’t depend on this place for permanent pasture, though. The last owner did that. It worked for five years, but then he lost the gamble. If you gamble with nature you’ll always lose. If I can just use it in the good times, though, it makes a decent little addition to my own property.’

A decent little addition. Three thousand square miles. Jenna was trying hard to do some adjusting in her head, but all she could do was boggle.

Karli was trying to outstare the cow. Jenna was doing arithmetic. Riley climbed out of the truck and he grinned at them both.

‘Are you guys intending to sit in the truck all evening and commune with nature, or are you serious about that swim?’

Jenna stared out at the cows. The cows stared straight back.

‘I’m not sure I can swim with an audience,’ she said nervously and Riley chuckled.

‘Don’t mind them. They’ll love it. I bet they’ve never seen anything like you guys in their lives.’

‘This one likes me,’ Karli announced.

Jenna still had some qualms.

‘Won’t we stir up the water? Make it too muddy for drinking?’

‘You have to be kidding!’ Riley shook his head. ‘Lady, until two weeks ago this place was a muddy puddle. The pump had packed up completely and if I’d arrived three days later all these cattle would be dead. What they’re drinking now is cattle nectar. Mud and all.’

‘I’m not sure I want to swim in cattle nectar.’

‘Hey, I’ve driven three miles in the heat to give you a swim,’ Riley retorted, exasperated. ‘Now, are you going to get out of this truck and go for a swim or are you not? If not, then stay here while Karli and I swim. Karli, do you want to swim?’

‘Will I have to walk through the mud to reach the water?’ Karli asked.

‘Yes. It’ll ooze through your toes.’

‘Ooh,’ Karli gasped, and bounced out of the truck, heading for oozing mud.

‘What about it, Miss Svenson?’

‘I’m…I’m swimming.’

‘Then do it,’ Riley told her. ‘Before our audience starts slow-clapping in impatience.’


Going for a swim here wasn’t quite as easy as it sounded. Nor was the mud as inviting to Jenna as it was to Karli.

Jenna had her costume on-until now demurely hidden under shorts and shirt. She slipped off her outer garments, took two steps from the truck-and stepped right into a cow pat mixed with mud.

Jenna yelped.

‘Lesson one,’ Riley said, strolling round the truck to investigate and grinning in appreciation of her problem. ‘You’re in cattle country now, ma’am. Expect a little dung.’

Jenna stared down at her toes.

‘I think,’ she said carefully, ‘that I’d like to go home now, Mr Jackson.’

‘What, back to the house?’

‘I mean back to England.’

‘Oh, dear.’ Riley’s laughter was not so subtly hidden behind the concern. ‘But now you need a swim more than ever.’ He hauled off his shirt and tossed it into the back of the truck. Then his boots. And then his jeans.

It was as much as Jenna could do not to yelp again.

Riley paused. ‘Is there something else wrong?’ he asked blandly.

‘Y…yes.’ Jenna swallowed. ‘I would have thought…well, you’re not exactly decent!’

‘I’m wearing shorts.’

‘Yeah, but…’

‘But what? These are as respectable as swim gear.’

They were too. They were aged boxers. They shouldn’t be enough to make her gasp.

Every time she saw this man’s body she wanted to gasp.

‘When I packed to come here, I thought any possible audience would be cows,’ Riley told her. ‘If I’d known you were coming maybe I’d have packed my neck-to-knees. But I didn’t know, so I didn’t bring them.’ His eyes ran over her body in its not-so-demure one-piece and his smile deepened. ‘And I’m almost as decent as you are. Not as noticeably eye-candy, but almost as decent.’

Then as her colour started to mount he grinned down to Karli who, in her own cute pink bathing costume, was tentatively exploring the mud with one small toe. ‘Karli’s not shocked. My cows aren’t shocked.’ He turned again, his gaze cruising from Jenna’s toes to her face, his eyes so warm that she felt her blush extend from the toes up. ‘I’m not even shocked at what you’re wearing,’ he told her. ‘Just deeply appreciative. May I remind you, you have seen me in less. Get over it.’

Oh, great. She really needed reminding of how much of him she had seen. She was the colour of beetroot. He turned away then, thankfully, so she could get her face together again. But…

She risked another peek.

He was magnificent. His body…

Will you stop thinking like this? she told herself desperately. You’re in dangerous territory. You have to walk away from this man.

You shouldn’t have come swimming. She was talking to herself.

Of course you shouldn’t have come swimming. You shouldn’t have even come to Australia. What on earth are you doing, swimming with an almost-naked man in the middle of the Australian Outback-watched by a hundred or more cows?

She had no answer.

There was no answer.

‘Come on, Karli. Let’s leave your sister to tut-tut over my lack of dress in private.’ Riley and Karli were already at the water’s edge. Riley was holding Karli’s hand, with Karli gasping in delight as mud oozed to their ankles. The mud was surrendering each foot with a delicious slurp as the pair moved forward.

But beyond the mud there was deep water.

She was in deep water already, Jenna thought desperately. Deeper water than she’d ever been in in her life. So…

So Jenna Svenson took a deep breath. She threw caution to the wind and squelched across to the water’s edge.

The mud was disgusting, but suddenly she didn’t care at all. The water was cool and delicious. She waded in to waist-deep. It was just plain wonderful.

Who needed swimming pools?

Forget how she was feeling, she told herself. Forget Riley.

Her body knifed forward into deep water as caution was thrown away on the hot north wind.

She’d enjoy her swim. She’d block him out somehow.

And if she couldn’t?

Whatever.

CHAPTER EIGHT

THE water was unbelievably cool.

Away from the edge, the dam sank to eight or nine feet-deep enough to allow Jenna’s whole body to sink. She promptly sank. She stayed under until she ran out of air, then she surfaced and promptly sank again. Karli was safely with Riley so she could concentrate on getting herself cool. On getting herself together.

‘Does she always bob up and down like this? It’s very distracting.’

He was too close. Jenna surfaced, spluttered and looked wildly round to find Riley’s face immediately behind her left shoulder. He was floating on his back, and Karli was seated happily astride his broad chest.

For the life of her she couldn’t think what to do. Or what to say.

So she sank again. She stayed under for as long as she could.

When she rose to the surface he was waiting. Riley had swung Karli onto a floating log, and as Jenna rose he caught her shoulders and held her above the surface.

‘This is very unrestful,’ he complained.

‘Unrestful for who?’ she asked breathlessly. ‘Let me go.’

‘Only if you promise not to sink again. It’s making Karli and me nervous. We keep thinking you’re being eaten by yabbies.’

‘Yabbies?’ Unconsciously Jenna’s toes lifted so she was floating with drawn-up knees.

‘Yabbies.’ Riley smiled. ‘Little lobsters.’ His face was glistening with water, and his streaming hair was plastered in curling tendrils across his forehead. He looked wickedly attractive. And his eyes were inches from hers. Too close for comfort.

Far too close.

And then suddenly he was not close enough for Jenna’s liking. There was an almost unbearable temptation to put out a hand and touch that laughing face. To push back the streaming hair. To press herself closer in the water-press herself against her man.

That was how she was thinking of Riley Jackson, she knew, with a sudden fierce realisation of how her heart was working. There was something deep inside that was telling her that Riley was her man. Her home. Whether he knew it or not.

‘I’m not scared of yabbies,’ she told him. She pulled away, and something of the way she was feeling must have come through. Riley released her and stayed treading water, his face watchful.

‘You don’t need to be scared of yabbies,’ he agreed. ‘And you don’t need to be scared of me. I won’t hurt you, Jenna,’ he said softly across the water now dividing them. ‘I have no dishonourable intentions.’

I wish you did, Jenna thought desperately. Because I certainly do.

She didn’t say it out loud. Instead she managed to smile at Karli, then gave her log a shove that had the little girl sailing across to the far side of the dam. Jenna followed, kicking hard, sending up a spray, propelling the log until she was about twenty feet from Riley. She was trying desperately to make herself relax.

‘Push me into the mud,’ Karli commanded. ‘I need to make mud pies.’