‘Why…’ Bradley, the sort of half-wit who couldn’t decide whether to look like a Really Important Person or a half-baked kipper, looked stunned but incredulously delighted. ‘Of course.’
‘Of course.’ Matt beamed. ‘I’ll leave you be, then. Will you come out and watch Cecil in the grand parade tomorrow, Charlotte?’
‘I might,’ she said peevishly. She was seriously annoyed. ‘It depends on what Bradley’s doing.’
‘Right ho,’ said Matt, with all the amiability in the world, and made his escape.
They hadn’t missed him a bit. That much was clear the moment he walked into the cattle pavilion.
While he’d been wining and dining Charlotte, the cattlemen had set up a barbecue. The aroma of seared sausages and steak hit him the moment he entered the doors, and he thought fleeting of the grossly overpriced steak back at the hotel and wondered how much better it had been.
A hundred bucks better? he wondered, and he knew darned well it wasn’t.
He’d missed out on sweets back at the hotel, but he needn’t have worried. The moment he was sighted, he was handed a plate of pavlova.
‘Get that into you, Matt McKay,’ a cheerful young matron told him. ‘You almost missed out. And then get into a set. Your family have been at it an hour or more, and if you don’t join in soon they’ll have danced their legs off without you.’
His family…
It was the strangest feeling, but that was exactly how it felt. He stood on the sidelines absently spooning in pavlova-which was a shame because the crisp meringue and the gorgeous sun-ripened strawberries deserved all his attention-and he watched his ‘family’ dance.
The square dancing was at a frantic pace. One of the cattlemen had produced a fiddle, another a mouth organ, and the centre of the pavilion had been cleared for the dancers. Now it was a mass of whirling, laughing, cattlemen and women, teenagers, kids and even the odd dog.
And Erin and her twins were in the middle of everything. They were part of a set, the twins were obeying the caller’s instructions as if their lives depended on it, and Erin…
Erin was being swung from one appreciative cattleman to another. And what she was wearing…
It was the new dress she’d bought in town with Shanni and it was gorgeous! All the colours of the rainbow, with a full circle skirt that flew out like a whirling, flaming hoop around her, it was a dress that had to be seen to be believed. Her hair was flying free, her gorgeous blue eyes were sparkling with laughter and her face was flushed with exertion.
She looked so desirable that it almost killed Matt to stay on the sidelines and eat his pavlova. But to join the set you needed a partner, and there were no spare women. Except…
Except the pavlova lady who’d just handed over her last piece of pavlova. With a whoop of triumph, Matt cast off his coat and tie, seized the unsuspecting lady and whirled her onto the dance floor before she had time to object.
Now it was just a matter of working his way up the line to Erin…
‘Hey, William, Matt’s here!’ Henry was doing his darnedest to whirl around a very fat lady of advancing years- and not doing such a bad job of it either. The lady was whirling as required, though Henry, trying valiantly to clutch her around the waist, merely had an armful of thigh, and her breast was threatening to crush him at any moment.
William was doing better. He was paired at the moment with a young lady not much older-or bigger-than he was, but the responsibility of the occasion didn’t give him time to respond. There was a twirly bit coming up and he had to get it right…
But Erin had heard.
‘Matt!’ She was flying past him as she threaded in and out of the dancers. Darn! Matt hadn’t realised this wasn’t a ‘change your partners’ set. She was threading and so was a stud of a cattleman who he didn’t recognise but disliked on sight. ‘What have you done with Charlotte?’ she called, and he dredged up a smile.
‘Left her with Bradley.’
Her eyebrows hit the roof. She gave that delicious chuckle and then someone else swung her away, she flew back to the arms of her cattleman and she was lost to him.
There was no more contact then for about five minutes, until it was time for Matt and his partner to take their turn threading to the lead. Then, as he whirled Erin around to change to the other side of the set, she laughed up into his face.
‘You must have the utmost faith in her,’ she teased, and he glowered.
‘Why wouldn’t I?’
‘With your bank balance?’ Still she was laughing. ‘No, indeed.’
And then Erin was gone, leaving him to glower some more and then regain his composure as he joined his partner again and found she was looking up at him in mute enquiry.
She really was bouncy and pretty herself, he told himself. The twins were having the time of their lives and the whole pavilion was having fun. Even the cattle were watching with bovine approval.
There was no earthly reason-or even a logical one-for a man to sulk just because Erin was dancing with someone else. He gave himself a huge mental shrug and decided to have fun.
Which he did.
They danced on. The music went on into the night. The twins decided it was more fun whooping around the cattle stalls with other kids than being squeezed from bosom to bosom. The cattlemen ended up with their wives or lovers. And Matt…
Matt finally ended up with Erin. They danced on. The music slowed, and maybe he should have stopped, but Erin felt sort of nice, with her hands in his, then sort of closer, her breasts against his chest, his mouth nuzzling her soft curls, the scent of some faint perfume drifting upward and making him feel…
That was enough of that! Enough! This was tantalising, unwise, unplanned, thoughtless, and hopeless.
The music stopped as the musicians finally ran out of puff, and Erin and Matt were left looking at each other in the middle of the dance floor-cum-cattle shed. They were still holding each other. Still sort of feeling…
They had twins!
As the music stopped, the kids in the pavilion returned reluctantly to their respective parents. Most were heading off with one or both parents to a hotel, but a few were camping with the cattle tenders, as Matt and Erin were.
‘It’s time to go to bed,’ William announced importantly for what must surely be the first time in his life he had ever asked voluntarily to go to bed. He was head-butting Erin’s thigh to get her attention. Totally unaware of the currents of sexual awareness between the two adults, he was onto the next thing on the twins’ agenda. Which was sleeping in the straw.
‘We need to set up our beds,’ Henry told them, and reluctantly, Erin’s hands were released and the twins were included in between them. There was a sandwich of adults with kid filling, and the frisson of warmth and linkage remained the same. It felt so right!
‘So we do,’ Matt said, but his eyes were still on Erin. There were matters here that were unresolved.
And that had to remain unresolved, he thought fiercely, forcing himself to remember Charlotte back at the hotel and all the logical reasons why he’d decided to marry her. Charlotte was a sensible choice, he told himself harshly. Good grief! If he married because of a spur-of-the-moment attraction, he could have married fifteen years ago, and where would he be now? Burdened with school fees, chaos, change to his mother’s lovely, ordered house…
Marry with your head, not your heart, his mother had said over and over, until it had become almost a mantra.
There was more of his mother in him than he thought, he decided ruefully. Fifty-fifty gene split? Yeah, there he had it. He was half his father who loved the farm and didn’t mind a little chaos occasionally, and half his mother who liked order and beauty and…
‘Hey, Matt, we’re just organising somewhere to sleep.’ Erin’s voice was chiding him gently, and her blue eyes were full of laughter. She could see exactly what he was thinking! Damn her!
‘Do you think we’ll all fit in with Cecil?’ William was asking anxiously, and somehow Matt tore his mind from where it definitely wanted to go and forced himself to think of sleeping arrangements.
