Outback Marriage
Autor
Meredith Webber
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11
CHAPTER ONE
BLYTHE knew, from the sidelong glances and puzzled frown, exactly what he’d been thinking so when the man-mountain with whom she’d been partnered finally asked the question, a hissed ‘Are you really Lileth’s sister?’ she was ready with a sardonic ‘Do I look like Lileth’s sister?’
She nodded towards where the small, dainty, dark-haired and olive-skinned bride was seated at the table inside the chapel’s tiny office. The space was so limited only the bride and groom, and the bishop flown in to perform the ceremony, would fit, so Blythe, acting-bridesmaid, and the best man, whom no one had bothered to introduce, were standing outside the rear door, awaiting the call to witness the happy couple’s signatures.
The sun pressed down on them, adding to the heat the man’s scrutiny was causing. Though admittedly she’d drawn his attention to the difference between her and her stepsister—had virtually invited him to look!
And look he did—his intent grey gaze travelling slowly over her body, hesitating where her breasts were squeezed into the too-small dress, no doubt noticing the unfashionable curves the clinging material accentuated.
She contemplated slapping his hard-planed, suntanned, arrogantly handsome face and decided her mother was already under enough stress without adding to it by making a scene at this stage of the proceedings.
‘Not much!’ he drawled—eventually—and she rolled her eyes and thought unkind things about whether heat affected the working of these western men’s brains, or if it was life among the cattle made them so slow.
Here she was, five-ten and blonde and definitely not a size ten, positively squeezed into a bridesmaid’s dress intended for her other—smaller—stepsister and he’d just figured out he had the wrong partner. Afraid she’d pop a seam, she edged gingerly into the inch of shade—all the midday sun was offering—beside the wall.
Any minute now sweat would start oozing from her body, leaving unattractive damp patches on the aqua stretch satin of the dress.
How could a couple of signatures take so long?
Or was the bishop giving the newlyweds a pep talk?
‘You’re blonde, for one thing.’
‘Staggering powers of observation!’ Blythe muttered at her companion, as the sun sucked out any last vestige of politeness she might have retained under the trying circumstances.
‘Slow!’ the man remarked, nodding to show he’d understood her rudeness. ‘Actually, I’m surprised I’m functioning at all. I didn’t arrive until late last night, then was hijacked into a party. Some of the lads who work here decided Mark needed a bachelor party and, though he trotted off to bed at a reasonable hour, the hands seem to feel I should stay. I think I managed a few hours’ sleep although they seem to have made things worse, not better.’
He was rubbing his forehead as he spoke and, pitiful though he looked, this massive country bumpkin, Blythe steeled herself against offering any sympathy. In fact, she was feeling bitchy enough to do the opposite.
‘Self-inflicted pain—serves you right!’
The glare he shot her way would have shrivelled a lesser mortal, but she’d been glared at by experts in her life, so ignored it.
Although the eyes that delivered it were arresting, now she looked a bit closer. Grey, definitely, but with a darker line around the outsides of the irises, complementing night-dark lashes and eyebrows.
‘I am not hungover.’ He stated the words with a grimness that suggested he might have felt better had he been. ‘Merely tired.’
Blythe ignored the protest and continued her assessment. His hair was the same heavy black, cut ruthlessly short—no doubt in honour of the big event.
‘Witnesses, please.’
The bishop called to them, then stepped aside to let them in, but the big man took up all the room, so in the end the bride and groom had to be evicted while Blythe and…she peered across to where his name was printed on the official document—Callum Whitworth—heavens! He was one of them, one of the cattle kings!…signed their names.
Then it was done, and the string quartet, imported to the cattle property at great expense by Lileth’s grandfather, swung into some approximation of a triumphant wedding march. The bishop led the bride and groom back into the church and down the aisle with the attendants moving decorously behind.
‘I always feel the triumph is overdone at this stage,’ Blythe’s partner whispered. ‘I mean, who’s won?’
‘True love, of course!’ Blythe whispered back, allowing only a little sarcasm to leak into the words. ‘I thought you country lads were romantics, not cynics!’
‘Once bitten, twice shy!’ he growled as flash bulbs popped and handfuls of rose petals were flung at the radiant bride.
Friends and relatives crowded around, pushing Blythe and her partner aside, though the man had the good manners to take her arm when a particularly insistent matron in flowered dress and matching hat shoved against her in an effort to get a picture.
‘So who are you?’ he asked, in a voice that told her he couldn’t give a damn but understood being polite to her was part of his duties for the day.
‘I’m Lileth’s stepsister. Not included in the wedding party on account of not fitting the size requirements, but a last-minute replacement when Mary-Lynne developed mumps.’
Halfway through delivering this succinct explanation, another thought struck Blythe.
‘If you’re a Whitworth, you’re a relative. You must have known I wasn’t Mary-Lynne.’
Her comment surprised a smile into life on his face, and for a moment she wondered if she’d have to rethink her opinion of cowboys. The man was devilishly handsome when he smiled—heart-stoppingly so!
‘No one in the family’s seen much of the girls since they were little,’ he said, the smile disappearing and a faint frown returning. ‘I think when their mother died and their father decided he was better qualified to raise them than the string of governesses and maids my grandfather wanted to provide, they were not cut off so much as set beyond the pale.’
‘And, of course, once their father had the bad taste to marry my mother, they went further out of favour.’ Blythe found her cynicism matching his with ease.
‘Which is your mother?’ he asked, peering across to where a clutch of women pressed around the bride.
‘The one with the sway back from bending over backwards to make sure she treated her stepdaughters just as well as she treated her own daughter.’
The grey eyes studied her more sharply, something in the regard making Blythe regret her silly flippancy.
‘That sounded worse than I meant it to be.’ She rushed to make amends. ‘My mother is actually the sweetest, kindest woman imaginable and would do anything for anyone. She’s also genuinely in love with Brian and unstinting in her love for all three of her daughters, step or not!’
‘You don’t sound exactly happy about having this paragon for a mother,’ Callum Whitworth remarked.
Blythe grinned at him.
‘Makes it very hard to say no when she asks a favour of you. Look at me. For a start I was meant to leave for the UK two weeks ago, but Lileth’s whirlwind romance, her decision to get married, meant I had to delay my departure and give up the job I’d arranged to take on there. Then her grandfather steps in and insists she wed on the family’s kingdom, and I have to fly up here to the back of beyond, spending money I can ill afford. And what happens within minutes of my arrival late yesterday, but Mary-Lynne swells up. Mum does her “please, Blythe” thing again, and I’m squeezed into a dress two sizes too small and made look like an absolute gig as part of the wedding party.’
‘Why did it cost you money to fly up?’
Of all her complaints, it was the last bit she’d expected him to pick up on.
‘It’s a long way from Brisbane to the Northern Territory. You may not realise it, but this place is actually a long way from anywhere. I had to fly to Darwin, then get another plane to—’
‘But my grandfather arranged to fly in all the wedding guests.’ He cut into her catalogue of complaints. ‘One flight from Brisbane and another from Sydney.’
‘Yes, well…’ Blythe said, and looked around for distraction. It was hard to explain that she didn’t want to be beholden to a man to whom she wasn’t related. It was something even her mother hadn’t understood.
‘Seems we’re wanted.’ Before she had to put this reluctance into words, the man took her arm and steered her towards the newly married couple. ‘Photo call!’
They posed for group photos with the parents of both bride and groom, then the photographer ushered them into a golf buggy and, with one of the property’s workmen driving, they followed another buggy containing bride, groom and photographer along a carefully smoothed track.
‘Photos by the lagoon are a tradition at Mount Spec,’ Blythe’s companion remarked, his voice as dry as the hot air stirred to a feeble breeze by their progress.
‘Been there and done that, have you?’ Blythe guessed, and the man smiled again.
‘Been there and done that!’ he agreed.
‘You don’t sound as if marriage has brought you a lot of joy!’ Blythe remarked, and heard confirmation of her guess in the harshness of his laugh.
‘It’s worked better for my brother,’ was all he said, because by now they’d reached the banks of the placid, tree-shaded lagoon, its waters strewn with Lileth’s name flowers—blue, pink and white waterlilies.
‘It is lovely,’ Blythe found herself admitting.
‘Come on, don’t turn sentimental on me,’ Callum complained. ‘Your caustic tongue’s just about made things bearable because I find myself wondering who you’re going to knife next! If you’re about to become increasingly mawkish and womanly as the day progresses, I may as well drown myself now and be done with it.’
Blythe opened her mouth to retaliate, then closed it again when she couldn’t decide which bit of his insult to protest at first. In the end she settled on what was probably the weakest point of all, firing a look of loathing at him as she straightened to her full height and expanded her chest.
‘I do happen to be a woman!’ she snorted, then heard the sound of fabric tearing as the chest-expansion exercise proved a disastrous mistake.
‘Oh, sh—’
Firm fingers closed over her lips, cutting off the word she’d intended saying.
‘Not in front of the bishop,’ Callum said, the grey eyes dancing with delight at her predicament.
Blythe pressed her arm against the seam that was giving way and glanced frantically around.
‘The bishop’s not here and it’s not funny!’ She scowled at her companion in case her whispered retort didn’t carry enough aggravation. ‘Hell’s bells, what do I do now?’
She was clutching the top of the strapless dress with one hand and trying to hide the split with the other when Lileth approached.
‘What have you done now?’ she demanded, and Blythe, though used to her younger step-sibling’s uncanny ability to sniff out problems, was staggered to find it working so well on her wedding day.
‘Split the damn dress!’ she admitted. ‘I told Mum this was likely to happen.’
If anything, Lileth looked relieved. Of course, relief wasn’t enough to stop her bringing up the list of disasters Blythe had already caused, including Mary-Lynne’s mumps and Blythe’s failure to be the right size for the aesthetic balance of the wedding party, but in the end she mellowed.
‘I suppose the dress thing isn’t so bad,’ she finally declared. ‘Mark and I had already decided we wanted more photos of just the two of us. I mean, if Mary-Lynne had been here, it would have been different, but Callum’s only best man because he works with Mark…’
Blythe glanced at the maligned attendant to see how he was taking his cousin’s blunt assessment of his friendship with the groom.
He seemed remarkably unfazed, even going so far as to wink at Blythe, as if to assure her he was OK with the put-down.
‘You’re a funny lot, you Whitworths,’ she remarked, when Lileth had gone to reclaim her groom and one hundred per cent of the photographer’s attention.
‘Be grateful we are,’ Callum told her. ‘Now, where are you staying? At the main house or in one of the bungalows? As we’ve been officially dismissed, we can go back and you can change.’
To Cal, it seemed an eminently sensible suggestion, but the look of dismay in the brown eyes of the stand in told him she didn’t see it in the same light.
‘More problems?’
‘Not of my own making,’ she hastened to point out, a reassuringly waspish tone back in her voice. ‘Any more than Mary-Lynne throwing out a swelling or two was my fault.’
She hesitated, then added almost in an undertone, ‘Not that anyone’s likely to believe that!’
Cal found himself chuckling.
‘What are you? Some harbinger of doom?’
Blythe nodded, the movement shifting the abundance of wavy fair hair so golden light shot through it.
‘I’m known in the family for being a walking disaster area—an accident looking for somewhere to happen. It got that way I was paranoid about stepping on cracks in the pavement, thinking I must be doing something wrong to be causing so much trouble. While as for cats, black, brown or brindle, I steer clear of them as well.’
Cal laughed again—she had to be joking—though she didn’t smile. In fact, for someone in a wedding party, she looked particularly gloomy.
The gloomy expression failed to diminish the attractiveness of the face framed by the fair hair, and he found himself waiting for her to smile—guessing the effect would be pleasant.
Though why he was laughing, he didn’t know. Fate had embroiled him in this ‘happy families’ reunion, but nothing was going to make him like it. They’d walked as far as the buggy but the reluctance he was feeling stopped him climbing in.
His companion, in spite of a dress that was slipping lower by the minute, and incidentally revealing a better and better view of full, rich, creamy breasts, seemed even less eager to return to the homestead.
‘I haven’t any clothes to change into.’
The blunt statement drew his attention back to the woman.
‘None?’
‘Well, I’ve the jeans and shirt I wore to come up but, having glimpsed, as we scampered down the aisle, the outfits other women are wearing, I think changing into jeans and a T-shirt, which says “I suffer from occasional feelings of adequacy” could well send the bride into hysterics.’
Cal nodded. From the little he knew of Lileth, the ersatz bridesmaid was probably right. And though his mind was having trouble with the notion of a woman arriving at a wedding—or anywhere for that matter—without several suitcases packed with clothes, the T-shirt intrigued him.
‘Do you?’ he asked.
She looked at him, the luminous brown eyes puzzled.
‘Do I what?
‘Suffer from occasional feelings of adequacy?’
The smile lit up her eyes and seemed to produce a kind of radiance beneath her clear, creamy skin.
‘Only very occasionally,’ she told him, her tone suggesting it was a secret she was sharing just with him.
Was it the implied intimacy, or the smile—perhaps the radiance? Cal didn’t know, but he found his body reacting in a way it hadn’t for a long, long time.
Oh, no!
Definitely not!
He brought it under control with the question he should have asked.
‘You came to wedding without any spare clothes? What were you going to wear if you didn’t end up as bridesmaid?’
‘I didn’t set out without any clothes,’ she told him, her voice weary with the acceptance of bad luck. ‘They just missed the mail plane out of Darwin. Actually, they didn’t so much miss the mail plane as were put on the wrong one. I came to Mount Spec and they went to Tokyo.’
Cal suspected laughter would be the wrong reaction, so he shook his head while trying to control it, but in the end he lost the battle and the light-hearted chuckle grew until he found himself laughing more heartily than he had for months.
Since, in fact, his long-lost cousin had arrived in Creamunna on a ‘find her family’ mission and proceeded to fall in love with his boss.
Not that Mark hadn’t reciprocated the love thing—poor fool that he was.
‘When you’ve quite finished enjoying yourself at my expense, perhaps we could return to the homestead. I’m in the shearers’ quarters but Mum’s in a bungalow that has curtains. Perhaps I can do a sarong type thing with one of them.’
The snappy tone stopped his laughter, although the idea of someone wearing a curtain to a wedding threatened to start it again.
‘Mum always has a packet of safety pins in her luggage so you can help me fix it,’ the unusual bridesmaid continued, as if this was a perfectly normal conversation.
He stared at the woman, unable to believe she was serious. First about the curtain, and secondly about him helping her.
The dark eyes flashed fire, daring him to refuse.
‘After all,’ she said, ‘it was your fault in the first place. If you hadn’t been so rude, I wouldn’t have had to breathe in…’
Cal shook his head. Perhaps he had had too much to drink the previous night, though he could swear all he’d touched was light beer.
Maybe someone had spiked it.
That would explain this increasingly bizarre scenario.
Though the woman was real enough, sitting there in the beribboned golf buggy, clutching her dress in one hand and impatiently beckoning him to get on board with the other.
‘We don’t have all day,’ she told him. ‘I mean, how many photos can they possibly want?’
He got in and directed the young driver to take them back to the homestead.
‘The little blue bungalow, in fact,’ his companion corrected, then she turned to Cal and put out her free hand. ‘By the way, I’m Blythe Jones. If you’re going to be wrapping me up, the least I can do is introduce myself.’
Cal shook the hand, and introduced himself with a brief ‘Cal Whitworth’.
He should have added, And I have no intention of being part of the wrapping process, but he suspected she’d ignore him.
They reached the neatly laid-out settlement that was the heart and soul of the Whitworth cattle empire. The huge old homestead set in lush, borehole-watered gardens dominated the cluster of outbuildings and sheds, while the bungalows gathered around the perimeter fence like chicks around a hen.
‘Good! It’s out of sight of the marquee so no one will notice one of the curtains coming down,’ Blythe said, hopping out of the buggy and reaching back to grab his arm. ‘We’ll have to hurry. We don’t want to attract attention by being late.’
‘More attention than wearing a curtain will attract?’ Cal muttered at her, but he allowed himself to be dragged inside.
‘There—the green one. The colour’s not good but the material looks soft and reasonably drapable. Can you get it down and remove any hooks from the top? Or should I just cut the top off? That might be better. Get it down and we’ll have a look.’
Cal had a very good idea of what Grace, his ex-wife and current chatelaine of Mount Spec, would have to say about guests cutting up the curtains.
‘Couldn’t you borrow a dress?’
The bridesmaid sent him a look that suggested he was, in her opinion, down in the bottom percentile in the IQ lists.
‘I’ve already split the dress I borrowed. I am two sizes larger than anyone in my family, and probably at least one size larger than anyone at the wedding. Now, are you going to get it down, or shall I?’
Too bemused to argue further, he pulled a chair over to the window and climbed on it. The woman had disappeared, presumably in search of safety pins and scissors.
And Grace was far too obsessed with possessions anyway!
He allowed himself a small chuckle as he unhooked the curtain.
‘Certainly a cutting job,’ he said, hearing footsteps behind him.
He turned to find his bridesmaid wrapped in a towel, revealing not only the tops of the soft creamy breasts but considerable length of fine, shapely legs.
‘Just pull the other curtains across so you don’t notice it’s missing,’ the legs’ owner ordered. ‘If Mum happens to come back here before the reception, I don’t want her freaking out.’
He rearranged the remaining material and climbed carefully off the stool, proffering the curtain.
‘I can’t cut and hold the towel up,’ she informed him, passing him the scissors but lifting the bottom of the curtain and weighing it experimentally in her free hand.
With only a slight qualm, he hacked the top folded part off the curtain.
‘Great!’ Blythe told him. ‘Now give it to me. I’ll duck into the bathroom and see what I can do, while you stand by with pins.’
She handed him a packet of safety pins, took the curtain and disappeared again, but a howl of frustration suggested things weren’t going too well.
‘You’ll have to help,’ she said, storming back out, this time wrapped in shiny green curtain rather than the towel. ‘See, I can get this round here but it keeps slipping down and I’ll end up falling out into the ice cream. This one-shouldered sarong style is all the fashion, so if you could pin this bit around here…’
She twisted to show him where and the slippery material slid downward, revealing more of the full breasts—even a shadow of pink aureole.
‘Y-you’re not wearing a b-bra!’ he stammered, his eyes drawn inexorably to the beautiful sight.
‘Of course I’m not wearing a bra.’ She hitched the material back up before he had time for more than a quick glimpse. ‘Bras one wears under T-shirts have straps—you can’t wear one with a strapless dress. Just pretend you’re a doctor examining a patient and get on with it.’
He got on with it, an exercise which involved having to slide his fingers inside the wrappings so they pressed against the yielding flesh. And try as he may to think like a doctor, his fingers had never trembled when examining a patient, and other bits of his anatomy never showed an interest in patients.
‘Actually, it doesn’t look too bad,’ he admitted ten minutes later when Blythe pronounced herself satisfied with the result. ‘The colour suits you.’
She’d fluffed her hair around her shoulders with her fingers, producing a carelessly sexy look, and ‘doesn’t look too bad‘ was an understatement. But she seemed unaware of the effect, simply studying the finished result in the mirror for a moment before walking—carefully—away.
‘Just as well I’m not a pink person or I’d have had to nick one of the living room drapes from the homestead.’
She grinned at him and he found himself smiling back.
‘Shall we?’ he said, offering her his arm.
‘I guess so,’ she replied, slipping her hand into the crook of his elbow, although something in her voice told him she wasn’t nearly as certain about this escapade as she made out.
But as they walked through the garden, dread at the prospect of spending the rest of the afternoon playing ‘happy families’ overwhelmed all other concerns. He’d be flat out maintaining a polite façade himself, so the bridesmaid would have to fend for herself.
‘Oh, did your luggage come?’
Grace was standing beside her grandfather-in-law, greeting the guests as they entered the marquee. She ignored Cal for the moment, but he saw the way she looked at Blythe and read a level of pique in her expression. Grace liked to outshine all opposition, and to have to compete with a tall, statuesque blonde, even one draped in a curtain, wouldn’t sit well with her.
Cal felt better immediately.
Intrigued by the little byplay, he waited for Blythe’s answer, but she managed to avoid answering, merely shaking hands with his grandfather and moving on into the room.
‘Grace!’ Cal acknowledged his ex-wife with a polite smile and a kiss on the cheek, then he, too, moved on, shaking his grandfather’s hand, promising to catch up with the old man later, before following his partner further into the reception area.
It seemed to Cal that males of all ages were making a beeline for his curtain-clad partner, but she obviously had a destination in mind for she swayed gracefully through the crowd until she came to a slim, upright woman standing quietly beside a tall, elegant man.
‘Oh, you’re here,’ she said to Cal, after she’d greeted the couple with kisses and hugs. ‘This is my mum, Lorice Bell, and Brian, my stepfather,’ she explained.
‘And not a sway back in sight,’ Cal whispered in her ear as he stretched out a hand to greet the older couple. ‘I’m Callum Whitworth.’
‘Yes, I knew you were,’ Lorice said. ‘How do you do?’
The greeting was polite enough but her voice was distracted, and her eyes were focussed on her daughter.
‘Did it split?’ she asked with enough resignation to suggest to Cal she’d been expecting just such a disaster.
Blythe nodded, then began to talk about the ceremony, no doubt anxious to avert questions about the substitute garment. Brian Bell drew Cal aside, and seemed about to ask something when Chris arrived.
‘Stood up well to the pressure, old man,’ he said, clapping Cal on the back.
‘Brian, you’ve met my brother Chris, have you?’
Brian nodded but Cal was more interested in Blythe’s reaction. She was glancing from him to Chris, no doubt sizing up the similarities and differences. Though three years apart in age, they’d always been alike enough to have been twins so he’d seen people’s surprise all his life.
‘Where are the kids?’ he asked Chris, but before Chris could reply, they arrived. Jenny, slim—too thin?—and elegant even at twelve, while Sam at thirteen was struggling with the onset of adolescence—a brash loudmouth one minute, an uncertain kid the next. He’d spent the morning with them, but they’d been dressed in their usual home clothes of shorts and T-shirts. Seeing them dressed up made him realise how quickly they were growing up.
‘Hi, Dad! Good show!’
Blythe watched as the newly arrived youngsters greeted her partner-for-the-day. She was conscious of a spurt of disappointment when she heard the word ‘Dad’, then, forgetting the insecurity of her clothing, shrugged it off.
‘Careful,’ Callum whispered to her, before returning to a conversation with his children.
Blythe watched the interaction between the three, intrigued by Cal’s intensity—as if he didn’t have a lot of time to spend with them—and a look in his eyes that was a mix of sadness and regret.
Blythe hauled back her imagination before it got totally carried away. This man’s life—and the time he spent with his children—was nothing to do with her, and his eyes might always look like that.
She looked around, distracting herself by trying to guess which of the women at the wedding was his wife. Surely she must be here. Why hadn’t she come to lay claim to her husband?
And how come his brother Chris had greeted Callum as if this was the first time he’d seen him for a while? Perhaps he managed another property. But even if he didn’t live here, surely he’d have been at the pre-wedding dinner the previous evening.
She tried to remember an earlier conversation—had he said he’d arrived late last night?
The man called Chris was saying something, but Blythe missed it, too busy regretting her refusal to join the family at the same dinner where she might have been able to sort out who was who in the Whitworth dynasty.
But with nothing suitable to wear, grabbing a snack from the well-stocked kitchen in the shearers’ quarters had seemed the best option, no matter how much her mother had protested.
‘Come on, we’re due on stage again.’ Cal touched her arm and she realised the children had moved on and the guests were being gently herded towards tables.
He held her elbow to steer her through the crowd, then parked her behind a chair at the main table, at the top of a horseshoe-shaped arrangement of smaller tables.
‘Who else is sitting here?’ she asked, peering at the place-cards for a clue.
‘Mark’s parents beyond me, and on the other side the groom, then bride, then your parents, my grandfather and Grace.’
‘The woman I met as I came in? Is she a later wife? She’s very young.’
‘She’s thirty-five and his granddaughter-in-law,’ Callum said, and added, ‘Twice over.’
‘Twice over?’ Blythe turned to him as she repeated the cryptic remark, and saw a shadow of something she couldn’t understand flicker in his eyes. Then he smiled, lips tilting more on one side than the other.
‘Here comes the bride,’ he whispered, sidestepping her question.
The quartet, now installed in a corner of the marquee, began to play, and a hush descended as the gathering awaited Mark’s and Lileth’s entrance. They made their way through an aisle of clapping and cheering guests, finally reaching the table.
‘I won’t ask where it came from,’ Lileth whispered to Blythe, ‘but thanks.’
Rendered speechless by the expression of gratitude, Blythe took her place, sinking into the chair Cal held for her.
