Her Outback Commander

The handsome features visibly tightened, highlighting his fine bone structure. “Duchess was a very special horse, so of course she was a spirited animal. Something must have badly spooked her, as I’ve said. Mark was nearly off his head at the time. No one could get much sense out of him—especially me. He acted like I was accusing him of something. Dad could recall nothing of that day, although much of his past memory came back over time.”

“So you never could piece the exact sequence of events together?”

“No.” His expression grew darker.

Two tragic accidents that had claimed father and now son. “When did Mark abandon his family and fiancеe, exactly?”

“Far too soon.” He didn’t tell her Mark had shied clear of visiting their father in hospital. Mark had been long gone before their father’s second unsuccessful back operation.

“Mark must have been crushed, given what had happened,” she offered, as some sort of mitigating circumstance.

“It was my father who was crushed.”

“Sorry, sorry—wrong word,” she apologized. “But Mark could well have felt guilt. Would you have shot the mare?’ She waited, wanting his answer.

“No.” His reply was emphatic. “My father wouldn’t have wanted it. I have to see it this way: something spooked the mare. An encounter with a camel in heat is a possible explanation. They can be ferocious. Male camels come on heat, not the female. They can’t be avoided. They’re part of the Outback now. They were brought in by Afghan traders in the early days of settlement. They thrived.”

“So it could have been a rogue camel, then?” she asked.

He shot her a searching look. “There was any number in the area. But we were all well aware of that. Dad had handled plenty of rogue camels. I have myself. One doesn’t waste a moment getting away. Or, if forced to, one takes the camel out. They come at full charge.”

“So there remains a question hanging over that dreadful day?”

He took his time to answer. “A question that will never be answered, Sienna. Dad is dead. A disaster that fell like an impenetrable fog over our lives. It has never lifted. Now Mark is dead too.”

“How much sadder could that be?” She bowed her head.

“Sienna, I must appeal to you to speak to Amanda on my behalf.” He spoke more urgently. “This is no time for inaction. Mark was her husband. I want her to come back to Australia with me. She won’t be alone in her grief. Hilary loved her son. She missed him every single day he was gone.”

“Of course she would, as his mother.” She well understood the strength of the bond. She was very close to her own mother. “And he did write to her, if only to inform her of his marriage. But his twin? Marcia? You seem to have avoided mentioning her much?”

She was proving very insightful. “Strangely enough, the twins didn’t get on all that well. They could be antagonistic, although they understood one another completely. Marcia isn’t feeling her twin’s loss like their mother. Which is not to reduce the close bond entirely—Marcia is deeply distressed. I’m afraid Mark’s behaviour put us all off side. Marcia and Joanne remain good friends. Marcia felt Joanne’s pain of betrayal. If Mark thought he was abandoned it wasn’t true. Leaving was Mark’s choice. It was his family and his fiancеe who felt abandoned. I think it’s time now to bring closure. If Amanda can’t do it on her own, you’re the one who can help her.”

Some strong communication was passing between them. She couldn’t begin to speculate on what it was. All she knew for sure was that he had made it sound as if her very destiny hinged on her going to Australia.

CHAPTER TWO

SIENNA was hardly inside the door of her apartment when the phone rang. She didn’t hurry to answer it. It could only be Amanda, wanting a second-by-second account of how the evening had gone. That was Amanda! It was well after midnight. But time—everyone else’s time—meant nothing to her cousin. Maybe some time soon the family could start treating Amanda like a woman instead of an ever needful little girl. It was a role Amanda had settled into as the best and easiest way to get her through life. Now her husband’s tragic end. No one could have foreseen that. Amanda needed support. It always had been Sienna’s job to prop her cousin up. At such a time as now it would be cruel not to.

“Hell, Sienna, have you only just got home?” A slurred and highly irritable voice greeted her.

Amanda’s modus operandi was to put her on the back foot. Sienna drew a calming breath. “Hi, Mandy. Calm down, now. I fully intended to ring you first thing in the morning. Can’t it wait? It’s well after midnight.” Blaine Kilcullen had insisted on seeing her home. They’d had to wait for a cab. Despite all her earlier misgivings time had flown. One could even say on wings. The man was so charismatic a woman might well need to build protective walls.

“No, it can’t!” Amanda retorted. “I’m ill with grief.”

Of course she was. Sienna softened her stand. “I’m sorry, Mandy. I truly am. But drink won’t help.”

“Always the role model!” Amanda warbled. “As if that’s all there is to life—being a role model. My wonderful, clever, oh-so-beautiful cousin.” A pause while she took another gulp of whatever drink was to hand. Vodka, most likely. Amanda had started bending her elbow not all that long into her marriage. Now it was getting out of hand. “Tried to take him off me, didn’t you?” Amanda was back to her sickening accusations. “It wasn’t me who made my dear husband’s hormones soar. It was you—and I was powerless to do anything about it.”

It had taken Sienna many years to recognize Amanda’s jealousies and deep resentments. People had pointed it out to her over the years but she had chosen not to listen. “Amanda, please stop this” She tried to ignore the sick lurch in her stomach. “We’ve been over it too many times. I was not attracted to Mark. Mark was your husband. If he’d been the sexiest man in the world—which he wasn’t—he’d have been totally off-limits. I refuse to be drawn into any more discussions on the subject, much as you’re compelled to bring it up.”

Amanda must have made a wild sweep with her hand, because Sienna could hear glass breaking. Probably the glass she’d been drinking out of.

“Aren’t you forgetting I discovered the two of you together?” Amanda raged on, in that upsettingly slurred voice.

“Face it, Amanda. You know the truth.” Yet irrational guilt settled hard and heavy on Sienna’s shoulders. Her conscience couldn’t have been clearer in regard to that appalling evening. Still she felt a measure of guilt for the pain that had been caused to her all too vulnerable cousin.

“He loved you—don’t you realize that?”

Sienna held the phone away from her ear. “What Mark loved was creating great disharmony. You’re upsetting us both with this talk, Amanda. My sole loyalty is to you. Look, I can’t talk to you while you’re in this mood. I’m going to hang up now. Get some sleep. I promise I’ll ring you in the morning.”

“You’d better!”

The force of the threat stopped Sienna in her tracks. “Don’t make me withdraw my support, Amanda,” she said quietly. “And by the way, Mark’s half-brother—he didn’t tell us that, did he?—is nothing like Mark tried so hard to present him. He’s a very impressive man.” The polar opposite of everything that had been Mark.

“Such camaraderie in a few short hours!” Amanda hooted. “Just tell me this. Is there any money? Did he look like he’s got pots of money? God knows, Mark left me with nothing.”

But Amanda had always had a safety net in the family. They would have been expected to pick up the shambles Amanda had made of her life. But now there was Kilcullen money. “To be fair to Mark, he did keep you both in some style. Apparently his mother proved to be a bottomless well when he needed topping up. She must have done it pretty regularly. And just look how he treated her! I’ll tell you another thing, so you can sleep on it. Blaine—”

“Blaine?”

Sienna moved the phone away from her ear again. “I can hardly refer to him as Mr Kilcullen,” she said, suddenly sick to death of her cousin. “Your late husband’s half-brother very much wants you to accompany him back to Australia. He’s assured me you will be welcomed. Mark has a twin, by the way, name of Marcia. Apparently they weren’t all that close—unlike most twins.” Now definitely wasn’t the time for Amanda to learn about the scorned fiancеe.

“Mark wouldn’t have deliberately lied to me,” Amanda asserted in a thick voice, when her normal tones were soft and breathy.

“Mark had a twin, Amanda,” Sienna said. “The truth was an alien concept to him. He lied to us all the time. He kept his true self and his true life well under wraps. Probably he was laughing at us. He had a cruel streak.”

“He was a fabulous husband.”

Clearly Amanda was in denial. “Mandy, you contradict yourself all the time. Why were you always so desperate for me to join you and Mark? You never did explain. Was the marriage all but over? Was that what it was all about, Mandy? Do you ever come clean?”

Silence for a moment, then Amanda’s harsh reaction. “I need you to understand something, Sienna. If my marriage was over, it was because of you. You had to take the one thing I had.”

Sienna was too appalled to continue. Drink turned some people happy. It turned others abusive. “I’m hanging up now, Amanda,” she said, thinking things would never get better. Amanda would most probably worsen. “You’ve been drinking. You don’t know what you’re saying. You’re exhausting my good will. In case you’re thinking of ringing back, I’m taking the phone off the hook.”

“Do it. Go on—do it!” Amanda urged, her voice rising to a crescendo.

Sienna did, wrapping her arms around herself. There were only two ways to deal with Amanda. Put up with her, or remove her from her life. After all these years since decided she could never do that. Maybe a good man would come along to take care of her cousin.

Sienna was upstairs, talking to valued client and family friend Nadine Duval, when Amanda walked through the front door of the gallery.

“Sienna, where are you?”

Her voice was pitched so high and loud it was startling. It echoed right through the large open space, its white walls hung with stunning paintings from her father’s last sell-out showing. In the last fifteen years Lucien Fleury had moved on to international eminence with numerous critically acclaimed exhibitions. Sienna was enormously proud of him. He in turn was enormously proud of both his children. Both had been hailed as major talents.

“In the genes, Sienna, my darling.”

Of course he took the credit.