The Socialite and the Cattle King (9 page)

His hands slipped beneath her clothes as their mouths touched and he teased her lips apart. She moved her hands and slid them beneath his windcheater, responding to his kiss as she hugged him. From then on she forgot the cold and the discomfort of the river bed; she was lost to all good sense, she was to think later.

But, at the time, it was magic. She remembered something he’d said to her at the masked ball about celebrating her lovely, slim body to both their satisfactions. It wasn’t quite like that—they were too hampered by clothes, covers and freezing night-air for that—but he
gave her an intimation of what it would be like if they were together on a bed, or anywhere smooth and soft.

He transported her mentally to an oasis of delight where her skin would feel like warm silk—as he’d also promised. Even in the rough environment of a dry riverbed he managed to ignite her senses to a fever pitch as he kissed and caressed her, as he touched her intimately and made her tremble with longing, need and rapture.

She had her own sensory perceptions. She drew her fingers through the rough dark hair on his chest; she laid her cheek then her lips on the smooth skin of his shoulder, before returning her mouth to his to be kissed deeply again. And again.

She cupped her hand down the side of his face; she moved against the hard planes of his body. She was provocative, pressing her breasts against him and tracing the long, strong muscles of his back.

She was alight with desire for Brett Wyndham, she thought, when she could think. Alight, moving like a warm silken flame he couldn’t resist in his arms.

How much further things would have got out of hand between them, she was never to know as a belligerent bellow split the chilly air.

They both jumped convulsively then scrambled to their feet, rearranging their clothes as best they could as Brett also searched for the torch. When he found it, it was to illuminate a mob of wild-looking cattle, some with huge horns, advancing down the creek bed towards them.

‘Bloody hell!’ Brett swore. ‘Stay behind me,’ he ordered. He reached up and tore a spindly limb from a tree
growing out of the bank. ‘They’re probably as surprised as we are.’

With threatening moves, and a lot of yelling and whistling, he dispersed the mob eventually—but only after they’d got uncomfortably close. Then they took to their heels as if of one mind and thundered back the way they’d come, causing a minor sandstorm and leaving them both coughing and spluttering, sweating and covered in sand.

‘Just goes to show, you don’t have to go to Africa for wildlife excitement,’ he said wryly.

‘You have quite a way with cattle!’

‘That was more luck than anything.’

Holly frowned. ‘They didn’t look like Brahmans.’

‘They weren’t, that’s why I was a bit lucky. They were cleanskins, in case you didn’t notice.’

‘Cleanskins?’

‘Yes. Rogue cattle that have evaded mustering and branding and therefore are not trained to it. Independent thinkers, in other words. Throwbacks to earlier breeds.’

‘Oh.’

‘Yep.’ He dragged a hand through his hair and put the torch on the ground. ‘Where were we?’

T
HEY
stared at each in the torchlight then started to laugh.

In fact, Holly almost cried, she laughed so hard; he put his arms around her.

‘I know, I know, but one day I will make love to you with no interruptions,’ he said into her hair.

Holly sobered and rested against him.

‘Look,’ he added. ‘You can just see the horizon. A new day.’

‘How long will it take them to come?’ she asked.

‘No idea, but just in case we have to spend another night we’ll need to get organized.’

Holly sat up. ‘Another night?’

‘That’s the worst-case scenario,’ he said. ‘The best is that they know we’re missing and they know roughly the area. So they’ll keep looking until they find us.’

But full daylight brought another challenge: rain and low cloud.

‘I thought this was supposed to be the dry season,’ Holly quipped as a shower swept up the river bed.

They’d moved all their gear under tree-cover on the bank as best they could as soon as the clouds had rolled
over. They were sitting under the cover of the plastic V-sheet Brett had hooked up from some branches.

‘It is. Doesn’t mean to say we can’t get the odd shower. You know…’ He stared out at the rain drumming down on the river bed, then looked at her. ‘If you cared to take your clothes off, it might be quite refreshing.’

Holly looked startled. ‘Do you mean skinny-dip?’

He shrugged. ‘Why not? It’s our only chance of getting clean for a while.’

Holly drew a deep breath and closed her eyes. ‘Clean,’ she repeated with deep longing. Her eyes flew open and she jumped up and started shedding clothes.

Brett blinked, not only at the fact that she did it but at the speed she did it. A rueful little smile twisted his lips as she stopped short at her underwear—a lacy peach-pink bra with matching bikini briefs.

‘That’s as far as I’m going to go,’ she told him, and climbed down the bank to run out into the rain with something like a war cry.

He had to laugh as he watched her prancing around for a moment, then he stood up to shed his clothes down to his boxer shorts and climbed down the bank to join her.

It was a heavy, soaking shower but it didn’t last that long. As it petered out, Holly—now more subdued—said in a heartfelt way as her wet hair clung to her head and face, her body pale and sleek with moisture, ‘That was divine!’

She ran her hands up and down her arms and licked the raindrops from her lips.

‘Yes, although I didn’t expect you to do this.’ He
grinned down at her and flicked some strands of wet hair off her face.

‘I suspect most girls would have done the same if they’d been through what we have. Now, if only I had a towel…’

As she spoke, thunder rumbled overhead and a fork of lightning appeared to spear into the river bed not far from them.

Holly jumped convulsively and flew into Brett’s arms. He picked her up and carried her swiftly to their makeshift shelter.

‘Th-that was so close,’ she stammered.

‘Mmm…I don’t think it’ll last long; it’s just a freak storm.’ But he held her very close as more thunder rumbled.

‘Lightning,’ she said huskily, ‘Is right up there with flying foxes for me. It’s funny; there are a whole heap of things I can be quite cool about.’

‘Mexican bandits and sheikhs?’

‘Yep—well, relatively cool. But lightning—’ she shivered ‘—I don’t like.’

‘Just as well I’m here, then,’ he murmured and bent his head to kiss her.

‘This—this is terrible,’ Holly gasped, many lovely minutes later.

‘What’s so terrible?’ He drew his hands down her body and skimmed her hips beneath the elastic of her briefs.

They were lying together beneath the protection of the plastic sheet in each other’s arms on one of the blankets. They were damp but not cold—definitely not cold…

‘How did I get to the stage of not being able to keep my hands off you?’

He laughed softly. ‘For the record, I’m in the same boat.’

‘But it’s been so
fast.
There’s got to be so much we don’t know about each other.’

‘It’s
how
you get to know people that matters.’

‘Maybe,’ she conceded. ‘I guess it helps, but there’s an awful lot I don’t know about you.’

He opened his mouth, appeared to change his mind and then said, ‘Such as?’

Holly went to sit up but he pulled her back into his arms.

‘In fact, you know more about me than most people,’ he growled into her ear.

‘But, for example—’ She hesitated suddenly aware that she was about to tread on sacred ground, from an interviewer’s perspective. But surely she was more than that now? ‘I know you were engaged and that it didn’t work out, but I don’t know why. And I sense some—I don’t know—darkness.’

She felt him go still for a moment, then his arms fell away and he sat up and stared through the dripping view to the river bed.

Holly sat up too after a couple of minutes, during which he was quite silent.

‘Have I offended you?’ she ventured hesitantly. ‘I didn’t mean to.’

He turned his head and looked down at her. Her pink bra had a smudge of mud on it, but he could see the outline of her high, pointed breasts clearly. Her waist
was tiny, tiny enough to span with his hands, but her hips were delicately curved and positively peachy.

He rubbed his jaw. ‘No.’ He smiled suddenly and ironically. ‘Are you open to a suggestion?’

‘What is it?’ she asked uncertainly.

‘That we put some clothes on? Just in case a rescuer arrives.’

Holly stared at him, convinced she’d crossed a forbidden barrier, then she looked down at herself and took a sharp little breath. She scrambled up. ‘Definitely!’

The thunder storm moved away pretty quickly as Brett had predicted, and there was no more rain, but the low cloud-cover remained.

‘That’s got to make it harder for them to find us,’ she said as they ate a very light lunch, with a view to preserving their limited supplies. They’d also rationed the water, but Brett had found some shallow rock pools with fresh water in them for future use.

By mid-afternoon the cloud cover had cleared and they heard two planes fly over—not directly overhead, but fairly close.

They said nothing during the tense wait both times, just exchanged wry little looks when the bush around them returned to silence.

Brett returned to the plane and, after crawling in with some difficulty, spent some time working on the radios but to no avail.

By four o’clock they were sitting back against their rock in the shade when he put his arm around her. Without any conscious thought, she leant her cheek against his shoulder.

‘There is an option to consider now,’ he said. ‘We could walk out.’

‘Is that a viable option?’ she queried.

‘It’s not what I’d prefer to do. At least we’re visible here—the plane is, anyway. I do have a rough idea of where we are, though, and where this river leads. But it’s a long walk—maybe a couple of days.’

‘What’s at the end of it?’

‘A cattle station near the head waters. We’d have to travel light, more or less food and water only. We’d really have to eke out the food, but it could be done.’

‘What if someone spots the plane but we’re not there?’

‘We’d leave a note, but anyway they’d automatically assume we’ve followed the river bed. You see—’ He paused and glanced at her, as if he wasn’t quite sure whether to go on, then said, ‘I didn’t mention this yesterday but there’s the possibility that none of our signals or radio calls were picked up. That means our position won’t be known except very roughly, and we did make a detour.’

‘Ah,’ she said on a long-drawn-out breath. ‘Well, then, I guess it makes sense to take things into our own hands. At least,’ she added rather intensely, ‘We’d be doing something!’

‘My thoughts entirely.’

‘And if we take the V-sheet with us we can always wave it if anyone flies overhead.’

‘Good thinking,’ he said, and kissed her on the top of her head. ‘But listen, it could mean a very cold night. He sat up. ‘Unless I make a sled of some kind so we could take a bit more with us—a blanket, at least. Come to
that,’ he said as if he was thinking aloud, ‘once we’re well away from the plane, we could make a fire. I had thought of doing that this afternoon, but well away from the plane.’

‘Send up smoke signals, you mean?’ she asked humorously.

‘Something like that,’ he replied with a grin. ‘But everything’s still damp. Tomorrow it may have dried out if we get no more rain. Uh, I have to warn you, though—this river bed could have rapids in it that would mean rock climbing, now its mostly dry, so it could be a very arduous walk.’

‘And there could be wild cattle, there could be dingoes, heaven alone knows what,’ she said with a delicious little shiver of anticipation of adventure.

His eyebrows shot up, then he laughed down at her. ‘You’re a real character—you’re actually looking forward to it.’

‘I was never one for sitting around! Perhaps we should have gone today,’ she added seriously.

‘No. It’ll have done us the world of good to have a lay day after all the trauma of yesterday. But an early night’ll be a good idea. Should we put it to the vote?’

‘Aye aye, skipper—I vote yes.’

‘OK. We’ll get to work before the light runs out so we can leave at the crack of dawn tomorrow morning.’

It was just that, barely light, when they set off the next morning.

They’d finished all their preparations the afternoon before and spent a companionable night. Holly was at least buoyed up by the prospect of some action rather
than sitting around waiting for what might not come. The more she thought about the vast, empty terrain surrounding them, the more she realized it could be like looking for a needle in a haystack.

Brett used the axe to make two long poles from tree branches and, using a variety of clothes, they constructed a light but sturdy sled for carrying stuff. Holly wrought two back-packs out of long-sleeved shirts.

Between them they smoothed an area of sand in the middle of the creek bed, helped by its dampness, and in big letters they wrote walked upstream, with several arrows pointing in the direction they would take. Then they lined the scores the letters had made in the sand with small rocks to make them more lasting and visible.

Brett also wrote a note and left it in the plane. He pointed out that the heavy shower of earlier had been a blessing for another reason, apart from allowing them to clean up a bit—it would also provide rock pools of fresh water along the way.

Not surprisingly—after a light supper of sardines on biscuits, and half a tube each of condensed milk for energy plus one cup of water each—they had little trouble falling asleep. Even the cold hadn’t bothered Holly as much as it had the night before. Being curled up in Brett’s arms gave her a lovely feeling of security.

She did wonder, briefly, where all the passion that had consumed them last night had gone, and concluded that either she had touched a nerve he hadn’t wanted to be touched although he’d been perfectly normal during the day—or the physical exertion they’d expended had simply worn them out too much even to think of it.

She was to discover soon enough that being tired was no guard against anything…

It was a long, arduous day.

They walked in the cool of the morning, they slept beneath some leafy cover through the midday heat and they walked again in the afternoon.

It was fairly easy going, as far as sand could be easy, and they encountered no rocks they had to climb over.

They did see some pools of water and a couple of times they saw freshwater crocodiles slither into them.

She marvelled at Brett’s strength and tirelessness as he towed the sled with a belt around his waist, as well as carrying a backpack.

As for herself, she sang songs to keep herself going when she would have loved to lie down and die. And she thought a lot as she trudged along, thoughts she’d never entertained before, about mortality and how, when you least expected it, swiftly, you could be snuffed out. It was delayed reaction to the plane crash, probably, but nonetheless to be taken seriously. It was about seizing the day or, instead of looking for perfection in every thing you undertook, letting the way life panned out have some say in the matter.

Brett took a lot of the credit for keeping her going. Every now and then he made her stop and he massaged her shoulders and back, or he told her jokes to make her laugh. He’d insisted on adding her backpack to the sled when she was battling.

Fortunately they both had hats in their luggage and Holly had a tube of factor thirty-plus sunscreen with
which they’d liberally anointed themselves. This proved to be a mixed blessing, causing the sand to stick to them.

But there were some marvels to observe along the way: some black cockatoos with red tail feathers sailed overhead, with their signature lazy flight and far-away calls. They also saw a huge flock of pink-and-grey galahs and a family of rock wallabies.

Otherwise, the hot, still bush all around them was untenanted, even by wild cattle. Again they heard plane engines a couple of times but, the same as the day before, the planes were nowhere near enough to see them.

Then, just as they were about to call it a day, they got a wonderful surprise: the river bed wound round a corner and opened into a lagoon, a lovely body of water full of reeds, water lilies and bird life and edged with spiky, fruit-laden pandanus palms.

‘Is it a mirage?’ Holly gasped.

Brett took her hand. ‘No, it’s real.’

‘Thank heavens! But is it full of crocodiles?’

‘We’ll see. Look.’ He pointed. ‘There’s a little bay and a rock ledge with a beach above it. There’s even a bit of a shelter. Good spot to spend the night.’

Holly burst into tears, but also into speech. ‘These are tears of joy,’ she wept, and laughed at the same time. ‘This is just so—so beautiful!’

He hugged her. ‘I know. I know. Incidentally, you’ve been fantastic.’

The shelter was rough-hewn out of logs, closed on three sides with a bark roof. There was evidence of occupation, a burnt ring of sand within a circle of rocks outside,
and a couple of empty cans that had obviously been used to boil water over a fire.