Outback JourneysHer Outback RescuerA Bride For the Maverick MillionaireThe Prince's Outback Bride by Marion Lennox

Author:Marion Lennox
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin Enterprises, Australia Pty Ltd
Published: 2014-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT

FOR a long while Finn thought Rachel wouldn’t answer. She stayed staring at him in the dim light, as if she was trying to figure him out. Whatever conclusion she came to, it obviously wasn’t cut and run. Finally she sighed and lay down again. He put his arms around her and tugged her close.

She lay stiff for a while, but finally he felt her relax.

‘You’re not being honest with me,’ she said. ‘Why should I be honest with you?’

‘You don’t need to tell me,’ he said softly into the night. ‘I’m just trying to distract us from lack of barley sugar.’

‘Tomorrow morning’s breakfast is roast lizard,’ she said, and he felt her body relax even more. Good. They both needed contact, the feeling that they weren’t alone. They also needed food. A breakfast of lizard was something they could laugh about, even if the laughter was kind of hollow. He really was hungry.

‘Do we know how to cook roast lizard?’ he asked.

‘We could check it out on the Internet,’ she suggested. ‘If you have an Internet connection on your Boy Scout’s knife. Or we could use the method my grandma taught me.’

‘Your grandma taught you how to cook lizard?’

He heard her smile, and their bodies moved infinitesimally closer.

‘In theory. We never got to practise. There was a dearth of lizards in the apartments where we lived. Come to think of it, there was a dearth of campfires, too.’

He lay and held her and let the thought drift. A grandmother teaching a child how to cook lizard...

She’d told him her grandma was Koori. Rachel wasn’t all Koori but the best parts of her must surely be. The lovely dusky skin. The gorgeous dark eyes...

‘Your grandma was a lizard cooker?’

‘Extraordinaire,’ Rachel said and chuckled. ‘And fire maker. If she were here she wouldn’t have needed a sissy knife.’

‘Hey!’

‘Sorry,’ she said, and she chuckled again and nestled closer. The laughter died. The silence grew deeper. ‘You really want to hear about my baby?’ she asked into the stillness, and his breath caught in his throat.

He was being offered something, he thought. Why did it feel like...a gift without price?

He should say now. He didn’t get that kind of close. He’d only asked to divert her, but now...

He did want to know. He badly wanted to know. ‘If you want to tell me,’ he said, and waited.

‘I sort of do,’ she confessed. ‘I don’t talk about her very often but... If I talk about her, somehow she’s real. She is real. I don’t want her to be gone for everyone except me.’

‘So tell me about her,’ he said softly, and she heard the sincerity in his voice.

So he held her close and listened, while she talked about falling for the principal dancer in the company her sister belonged to, about emerging from the academic world she lived in to become a lovesick kid who couldn’t see past the fact that this gorgeous male dancer wanted her. She talked about a marriage—brief, fiery—and a guy’s temper that made her afraid.

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