‘Hey, it’s all right.’ He’d heard her fear, she thought, and, damn, there was suddenly laughter behind his concern. ‘We colonists know not to intrude on a lady’s ablutions. Even though you imperialists do wander round strange men’s bedrooms at will.’
Damn the man, he was laughing at her! ‘Oh, go away,’ she snapped. She shoved the pump handle down so hard that a thoroughly satisfactory stream of water gushed down over her hot-and-bothered body. That was all it needed. Anger. Well, if that was all it needed, she had anger by the bucketload. ‘I can’t concentrate with you out there,’ she told him, pumping with a vengeance, and she could hear his grin broaden.
‘Do you need to concentrate?’
‘Yes,’ she snapped. ‘I can’t handle the soap and the pump at the same time. This pump was built for Superman.’
‘You want me to come in and help?’
‘No!’ It was a yelp and there was a broad chuckle from outside the door. Which, strangely enough, seemed reassuring. Then the door opened a crack and Jenna went back to clutching her breasts. But all that appeared was a tanned, sinewy arm, holding a shirt. The arm reached up and hooked the shirt behind the door-and then the arm retreated.
‘Never let it be said that I didn’t offer,’ Riley told her, sounding wounded. ‘But if you don’t want help, then far be it from me to push. I’m off to bed. There’s coffee on your bedside table. Is there anything else you need?’
‘Privacy,’ she snapped, and again there was a chuckle.
‘What, no thank you?’
She thought about that. Thank you. Okay, maybe he deserved one of those.
‘Thank you,’ she whispered and heard a sudden arrested silence on the other side of the door.
‘Think nothing of it,’ he said at last.
‘I mean it,’ she managed. It was surreal, standing naked and dripping and talking to a complete stranger on the other side of the door. But she had to say it. ‘Without you we’d be in desperate trouble,’ she told him. ‘We’re incredibly grateful. Both of us.’
‘Yeah,’ he said, and the laughter was suddenly gone from his voice. ‘Yeah, well, that’s just fine. Goodnight.’
And he left her to it.
He left her disconcerted to say the least. She pumped on, but she was thoroughly confused.
Why did he have this effect on her? Despite the cold water, her body seemed to be burning. The man had her unnerved, and it wasn’t just the strangeness and isolation that were making her jumpy.
It was the way her body reacted to him, she decided. It was as if he had the power to flick a switch inside her, making her achingly aware of herself-of nerve endings she’d never imagined she had.
Which was really, really dumb. She was here with Karli. As well as looking out for herself, she now had to look after a child. The responsibility was almost overpowering.
The last thing she needed to do was to complicate her life by pretending she was attracted to some yahoo cowboy in the Australian Outback.
Pretending?
‘Okay, so you’re attracted,’ she conceded. ‘But you’re not stupid. Now stop fantasising and get your hair washed and get out of here.’
Even that was easier said than done. Jenna’s hair was full of dust, but there was no shampoo and the soap refused to lather. No matter how she scrubbed, there were no suds. Finally she pumped the soap out, but her hair still felt stiff and matted.
At least the worst of the dust had gone, and without Riley’s disturbing presence her body was finally cool. She towelled herself dry, put on Riley’s shirt-it hung almost to her knees-and tried to run a comb through her hair.
She winced at the feel. Why wasn’t it clean? Puzzled, she pumped a little water into her hand and tasted. It was thick with salts-coarse, untreated bore water.
At least the tap in the kitchen was connected to rainwater, she decided. She could rinse her hair there.
She retrieved her kerosene lamp from the corner of the wash house, gathered her belongings and took a cautious step back onto the veranda.
Riley was already in bed.
There was a hump under the bedclothes on his end of the veranda and he didn’t stir as she came out. She thought back to the man’s face as she’d first seen him. One of her first impressions had been exhaustion. ‘I’ve been working in the sun for the past twelve hours,’ he’d told her.
He deserved his sleep.
Well, she wouldn’t disturb him. She checked on Karli, who was also sleeping soundly, dumped her filthy clothes at the foot of the bed she’d be sharing with her sister, drank her coffee-which tasted surprisingly good-then tiptoed past Riley and back out to the kitchen.
Here was the rainwater. She gave a sigh of relief, turned on the tap and lowered her head under its flow. And let it run…
‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’
She bumped her head on the tap. She gasped, got a mouthful of water and choked. When she finally managed to raise her head, Riley was towering above her. The tap was firmly turned off and it didn’t take a genius to see that he was angry. More than angry. He was full-blown furious.
‘What…?’ Jenna tried to talk, coughed and tried again. ‘What do you mean?’ The man was dressed only in a pair of boxer shorts. He was almost as naked as Jenna felt. In Riley’s shirt, bra-less and with no knickers, she felt exposed and…and…
Well, just plain exposed.
‘Bloody English twit.’ Riley placed his hands on Jenna’s arms and physically lifted her away from the tap. Then he tilted her chin, forcing her to face him. ‘Lady, there is one fact of life you learn here and you learn it fast. There is nothing-nothing!-more precious than rainwater. Rain water is the only thing we can drink and it hasn’t rained for six months. And here you are, letting it run all over your hair and down the drain. I reckon you’ve just used two weeks’ drinking water.’
‘But…’ Jenna’s voice faltered into appalled horror ‘…are you so short?’
‘Short enough that a couple more hair washes will make the place uninhabitable.’
Jenna stared up at him in the flickering light cast by her lantern. She was appalled. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘You’ll be a lot sorrier if you die of thirst,’ he said grimly. ‘All for the sake of clean hair.’
Silence.
‘The cattle…’ she managed. ‘How do they survive?’
‘They have a stronger tolerance for salts than we do. They’ll drink bore water.’
‘Oh, help.’
‘Help’s right.’ He stared down at her for a moment longer. And then, before she realised what he intended, before she could possibly react, he bent and lifted her into his arms, tossing her against his bare chest as if she weighed nothing.
‘What…what are you doing?’ Jenna squeaked. ‘Put me down.’
‘You, Miss Svenson, have caused enough trouble for one day,’ Riley said grimly, only the sides of his mouth twitching as though he was suppressing laughter. ‘You may have come from a privileged background where everything you wanted you got, but there are rules in this place and you obey them or you pay the consequences.’ And holding her effortlessly against him, he stooped to turned down her lamp and then strode out to the veranda.
She held herself rigid in his grasp. There was nothing she could do except clutch her dignity to herself as best she could and submit. She couldn’t fight him. If she wriggled…well, Riley’s shirt was making her respectable but only just, and there wasn’t a lot of wriggle room.
But, the feel of this man’s arms, of this man’s skin against hers… What was happening to her?
She trusted him, she told herself fiercely. She trusted him and her instincts weren’t wrong. Were they?
‘What are you doing?’ she managed as he kicked the door open before him and made his way unerringly through the darkened house.
‘I’m doing what everyone does with misbehaving juveniles,’ he told her, with only a hint of wicked laughter in
