The Australians' Brides: The Runaway and the Cattleman

“I’m watching Carly,” she called back.

“Lockie’s with her now. She’s dressed. She’ll be fine.”

“No, really …”

“I’m going back to the sand, Dad,” Josh said. He and Callan did one last whooping jump from the ledge together, with legs kicking wildly in the air and arms turning like windmills, then they swam toward the stretch of beach.

“She’ll be fine with the boys,” Callan repeated when he approached Jacinda, as if there’d been no break to the conversation. “She’d have to go in pretty far to get out of her depth here.”

He touched bottom and stood waist-deep, then began to stride toward the beach, the water streaming from his body as he got closer and shallower. He reached Jacinda, his skin glistening and his dark, baggy swim shorts hanging low on his hips. He wasn’t self-conscious about his body, just took it for granted.

Jac didn’t. She saw hard bands and blocks of muscle, a shading from tan to pale halfway down his upper arm, a neat pattern of hair across his chest, and the way the cold and wet made every inch of his skin taut.

Standing calf-deep, he gestured behind him. “See, there’s about six meters of sand all the way along this side, before it starts to shelve down. She’s safe without you. And you’d be safe, too, if you came for a jump off the ledge. It’s so much fun, Jac.”

He used the same tone that some men might reserve for attempting to get a woman into bed, and it was the first time he’d called her Jac, even though she’d asked him to three days ago.

“Mmm …”

That’s not an answer, she realized. I can’t believe I’m even considering this.

“Hey?” he cajoled. “Thinking about it? The rush as you race forward and hit the air? It’s so good. And you have to yell, that’s a requirement. Lockie first did it when he was five. Promise you’ll yell?”

Live a little, said his eyes. There was a contained eagerness coming from him. He was like Carly about to give Mommy a special piece of artwork from preschool. How could you not respond just exactly the way those eyes begged you to?

“Callan, I’m not even promising to—”

“You need a reason to yell in life, sometimes, and this is the best one I know.”

“Yeah?”

I don’t believe this.

I am considering it.

I’m seriously thinking about it.

The yelling idea is incredibly attractive.

Her heart started beating faster. She could smell horse on her body, dust in the air, creek water in Carly’s wet hair. She was eight thousand miles from the place she called home, on six hundred thousand acres of land.

And she was seriously wondering if she might be brave enough to run and jump, while yelling, into a deep, creepy water hole.

Just do it.

“Gotta earn those yabbies.” Callan held out his hand, ready to pull her up. Behind him, Lockie had started putting lumps of meat inside old stocking feet and tying them with string. Under his direction, Josh was searching for good long sticks of eucalyptus to act as fishing poles.

“This is way outside of my comfort zone!” Jacinda warned as Callan’s grip locked with hers.

A moment later, she reached a standing position and they came face-to-face, confronting Jac with something else that was way outside of her comfort zone. His hard, wet body, his slightly quickened breathing, his exhilarated grin. All of it was too close and too real when they stood just inches apart like this.

Feeling it, too, and clearly not liking it, he let her go and told her in an awkward way, “Strip, before you chicken out.”

She was only wearing a T-shirt over her two-piece tank-style animal print swimsuit. She crossed her arms, peeled the T-shirt over her head and dropped it on a patch of dry sand safely distant from the kids’ messy play. She discovered Callan looking over at the kids. His lean, strong neck looked too tight and twisted. It wasn’t a natural angle. He’d been—what?—averting his eyes while she stripped?

In her animal print, she felt like Jane to his Tarzan. But had Tarzan been that much of a gentleman?

“I’m coming as far as the ledge, but I don’t promise to jump,” she said.

His head turned again, back to her, and a frown dropped away, replaced with a twinkle in the depths of those eyes. “We’ll see,” he drawled.

He grabbed her hand and galloped her into the water. Getting deeper in two seconds than she’d gone with Carly in fifteen minutes, she gasped again. He was right, the deeper you went, the colder it got. “Let me go!”

“Swim,” he said, and struck off ahead of her with a powerful stroke.

She followed, terrified. The water felt so different to California pool water or salty ocean. So smooth. Sooo deep. How far down did it go? She had to fight away images of creatures lurking down there.

Before her imagination got out of control, they reached the lower part of the ledge and she hauled herself up onto the warm rock, copying Callan’s fluid movement with a more awkward one of her own. Her body tingled all over and she panted for breath.

“You did great,” he told her. “You’re a good fast swimmer.”

“Only because things were chasing me.”

“Bunyips?”

“Wha-a-at? There is something down there! I knew it! What the heck are bunyips? Oh sheesh, I’ll never get back to the beach, now! I’ll have to go the long way around, over the rocks.”

Which didn’t look easy.

“Don’t panic. Bunyips are mythical. Kind of an Australian version of the Loch Ness monster.”

“You know, Callan, there are people who don’t think the Loch Ness monster is just mythical. I don’t think these things should be dismissed. I’ve read articles about it, and there’s also that in-some-ways-quite-credible urban myth about alligators in the New York—”

He wasn’t listening. He’d somehow gotten hold of her hand again and they were climbing to the higher part of the ledge, over the rough shelves of rock that acted like steps. At the top, he turned away from the water and led her back into the shade of the gorge’s overhanging sides. He had her in a kind of monkey grip now. He was holding her forearm in the circle of his fingers, and she held his forearm the same way. It was so strongly muscled that her fingers went barely halfway around.

“Repeat after me, Jac,” he said. “Bunyips are mythical.”

“Bunyips are mythical. But I have a very powerful imagination, I’m telling you.”

“Okay, louder. Bunyips—are—mythical.”

“Bunyips—are—mythical. And if they’re not, you know how to scare them away, right?”

“Bunyips are mythical. And plus they’re very friendly.”

“Callan …”

“Right, now, let’s go, but this time we’ll yell it. Ready?” He didn’t give her a chance to tell him she wasn’t. Hand in hand, they sprinted forward, with Callan yelling at the top of his lungs. “Bunyips … are …”