Outback Angel

“I’m trying to help you.” Angelica laid a hesitant hand on his arm. “Moreover, I’m trying to help myself. You give me the impression you think I’m the sort of woman who might hurt you.”

She was so beautiful, with that abundant hair flowing around her face, and her eyes as dark as night. He wanted to kiss her, deeply, lavishly, with all the passion that beat in his blood.

“I never believed in a witch until I met you,” he said, wondering what it would be like to keep her forever.

“Yet you still call me Angel? I have to tell you that no one else has called me that.” It seemed important to bring that fact to his attention. “You need to think about that, Jake McCord. Because I can’t be both….”

Margaret Way takes great pleasure in her work and works hard at her pleasure. She enjoys tearing off to the beach with her family at weekends, loves haunting galleries and auctions and is completely given over to French champagne “for every possible joyous occasion.” She was born and educated in the river city of Brisbane, Australia, and now lives within sight and sound of beautiful Moreton Bay.

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

THE heat and clamour of the day had been frightful, Jake reflected. Truly exhausting even for him. It had been easy enough rounding up the mob on the spinifex plains at the height of the Dry, fields of burnt gold like an endless harvest of wheat, but galloping after cattle in rough terrain was no fun. And dangerous.

Last year his Brit jackeroo, Charlie Middleton, had sustained a back injury as a result of his boundless derring-do and yen for action and had to undergo surgery, which mercifully turned out fine. Charlie, the Honourable Charles Middleton, no less, was back on the job a whole lot less inclined to go swashbuckling around the bush. He really liked Charlie and mostly looked on his enthusiasm and sense of adventure with favour, but the ever-present hazards had to be taken seriously. Driving cleanskins, the unbranded cattle, out of their hiding places was one of them. The horned beasts, dangerous on that count alone, buried themselves deep in the vast network of lignum thickets that wrapped themselves around the waterways and billabongs, finding green havens after the semidesert with its scorching red sands.

This was the final muster before Christmas. The Big One, though work procedures had been revolutionised since he was a boy. Today on the station good chopper pilots—and he was one of them—matched the skills of the pioneer stockmen when it came to moving cattle. The name of the game was efficiency and the use of helicopters had greatly increased the speed of the musters as well as cutting the workforce. But there were some places the choppers couldn’t safely go, so the horses got involved, every last one of them well trained. That was his job. Overseeing their management. A man had to be multi-skilled these days to survive on the land. He was a smart businessman, too. He had a degree in commerce behind him. A man for all seasons you might say.

And speaking of seasons, the Wet had officially begun in the tropical north of his giant state of Queensland, but not one drop of rain had fallen on his neck of the woods; the far south-west of the state, the Channel Country, riverine desert with some of the loneliest, most dramatic landscapes on the planet. Home to the nation’s cattle kings. He guessed he had to be one of them now.

Jake McCord. Cattle king. Jake was grittier than Jonathon, his real name. Of course his father had come up with the alternative. He supposed it was reasonably close. Only his mother had called him Jonathon. Three years after his father’s premature death—Clive McCord had been bitten in the leg by a poisonous copperhead while out on one of his solitary desert walkabouts—he still thought of himself as the heir apparent. The man in waiting. He supposed it was to his credit he had never thought of himself as being overshadowed by his father when his father had clearly enjoyed cracking the whip as a means of keeping everyone around him under control.

Especially his son. However, in his case, his father had never tasted success. Some inbred fighting spirit had allowed him to shrug and take it. He knew a lot of people in their far-flung Outback community put the discord between father and son down to Clive McCord’s not unrare jealousy of his heir and his deep-seated bitterness. The fact was, both of their lives had been tragically disrupted by the death of beautiful, much loved, Roxanne, wife and mother, in a riding accident on the station when Jake was barely six. From then on his father had turned into another person, with hardly a nodding tolerance for others, not drawing closer to his bereft child, but seeming to blame him for living when his wife hadn’t. There was ample proof that sort of thing sometimes happened.