Deadly Intent

Chapter 3

Judy wasn’t sure how she felt; everything was happening too fast. She didn’t need anything else on her plate. Least of all Ryan trying to pressure her into a hot and heavy affair.

No, not an affair. She could have handled a fling. And she couldn’t pretend she hadn’t thought about becoming involved with him. But she doubted she could protect her heart if they took their attraction to the next level.

He wasn’t the only one struggling to deal with the chemistry between them. She also remembered the awareness that had flashed between them like summer lightning when they were both too young to understand what was going on.

Every time she’d seen him since then, she’d felt the pull growing stronger, more irresistible, until she’d found herself making excuses to fly to wherever she knew he was working, usually as a stockman on some outlying property. He’d greeted her cordially enough, but she’d never been able to tell whether he was pleased to see her. Once or twice, he’d acted as if he couldn’t wait for her to leave, making her wonder if there was another woman involved. Still she’d kept tabs on him. Some people never learned.

Sometimes she wished she could forget all about him, putting as much distance between them as humanly possible. Was that how he’d felt when he’d run away from Diamond Downs as a teenager? When he’d gone, she’d felt as if something precious had been taken away. She’d told herself she was worried about how he would cope on his own, although he’d been doing it long enough. The truth was she’d missed him.

Not that she’d been short of companionship. Blake, Tom and Cade were good fun when they’d been persuaded to forget that she was—shock, horror—a girl. Ryan had never needed persuading; every look and casual touch acknowledged the inescapable fact. She’d missed that, too.

Especially that.

Yet now, facing him and hearing him say point-blank that he wanted her, she wished she were anything but female. Anything but the focus of his single-minded attention. What was going on with her?

The feel of his kiss lingered on her mouth more strongly than the food they’d shared. She knew she would taste him long into this night.

Ever alert to her moods, he pushed his coffee mug to one side and rested his forearms on the table. “Where do you want to start?”

With her mind still on his kiss, she almost answered the wrong question. Then she realized he meant the diamond mine.

She marshaled her scattered wits. “You went over the map with Blake and Tom, so you know roughly where they think the mine should be found.”

“The hidden valley that leads off Cotton Tree Gorge,” he said, showing he’d done his homework.

She smiled. “Blake wants Dad to call it Francis Valley after Jo.”

“Sounds fair. I gather she took quite a tumble falling into the place while dodging Eddy Gilgai. Then she picked herself up and went exploring. Resilient as well as smart. She did well for herself snagging Blake.”

Judy made a face at him. “Couldn’t he be the lucky one?”

“Ideally, the benefits are mutual.”

“Big of you to admit it,” she muttered under her breath.

Ryan didn’t react. “They did us a favor finding the remnants of your great-grandfather’s canoe in the Bowen River,” he went on.

“If they’re right, a branch of the river disappears underground not far from the Uru cave—where Tom and Shara found the rock paintings,” she said.

“I know where it is. I haven’t seen the cave yet, but the others brought me up to speed on the discovery. They were pretty excited to find evidence of a prehistoric civilization living in the area. No wonder the world’s scientists are already beating a path to your door.” A frown arrowed his brow. “Didn’t Max Horvath find traces of diamonds somewhere near the Uru cave?”

She inclined her head in agreement. “Jo found a couple more along the creek in her hidden valley.”

He drew patterns on the checkered cloth with a finger. “So the truth lies somewhere along that creek between the cave site and the floating island where Jack Logan’s canoe fetched up sixty years ago.”

Ryan’s nails were short and blunted by hard manual work, Judy noticed, distracted. But his hands were clean and well cared for. A man’s hands, she thought. Hard when touching her softness. Gentle but irresistible. How would they feel seeking greater intimacy? The thought sent streaks of flame licking through her, homing in on the places she imagined him touching.

A physical relationship with him would never be enough to satisfy her, she sensed. Against all her self-imposed rules, he would make her want more, need more, leading to the very future she was determined to avoid. So she pushed the images away although the quivers of sensation lingered, making concentration difficult.

As a pilot, she was trained to shut out extraneous images. She made herself think of the problem of Ryan as a tricky landing on a too-short outback strip littered with rocks.

In other words, a recipe for a crash landing.

“Do you know anything about a family file Blake and your dad were talking about?” Ryan asked.

She pulled out of the crash dive barely in time. “Cade’s the only one who saw it. He was helping Dad by catching up on some accounts when he came across a folder of very old records that had been misfiled and forgotten. He didn’t think much about them until a friend showed Blake and Jo an old photo they recognized as Great-grandpa Logan’s canoe washed up on the island. According to Cade, there were more photos and paperwork from the same era, giving us more clues to the mine’s location.”

“And did they?”

“We never found out. When Cade went to have a more thorough look at the file later, he was attacked from behind. When he came to, he had a concussion and no memory of the attack.”

Ryan steepled his hands in front of him. “Of course the file was gone.”

“What do you think?”

“I think our next move should be to try and get it back.”

She picked up he coffee mug and stood up. “Easier said than done. There’s no proof, but we suspect that Max had something to do with the theft.”

Ryan shot her a curious look. “No fingerprints or other evidence?”

“He’s too smart for that. If he was involved, he would have put Eddy Gilgai up to the actual attack.”

“Now that Eddy’s dead, Max might have to start doing his own dirty work,” Ryan mused. “Do you still think it’s a good idea to be involved with him?”

She knew how reckless her insistence that she was attracted to Max made her look. But admitting the truth would only intensify Ryan’s efforts to claim her. And she couldn’t deal with that now. “So far Max’s part in this is purely circumstantial.”

“You said yourself you think he was behind the attack on Cade and the theft of the file.”

She planted a palm on the table. “Look, maybe Max was behind this and maybe he wasn’t. Under the law, he’s innocent until proven guilty.”

Ryan’s chair scraped back as he stood to face her. “You know he needs the diamonds to repay his creditors before they foreclose on him. And there’s a better than even chance he’s behind some of the attacks on your family. Yet you insist on seeing him. I’d never have picked you for a gold digger, Judy.”

He’d invaded her personal space, but she held her ground. “You’d better have a good explanation for that remark.”

“Do I need one? You can’t possibly be in love with the man after all he’s done and is doing to your family. So you must have another reason for sticking with him. The only one I can think of is money. Did he offer you a share of the mine if you become his wife?”

Ice dripped into her tone. “You’re treading on dangerous ground.”

“Not really. Just stating the facts as I see them.”

“You forget yourself,” she raged.

Her anger washed off him. “Of course. I’m only a drifter who can’t hold down a steady job for more than a few months. Max inherited a substantial chunk of land, and potentially a lot more if he gets his hands on Diamond Downs. From your point of view, he’s a better bargain as a lover.”

So angry she could barely stop herself from lashing out at him, she slammed the coffee cup down and spun out of the room.

Out on the veranda she dragged in a lungful of the cleansing air, hardly aware of the splendor of the night sky, like a velvet cloth strewn with the diamonds her home was named for. Did Ryan know that the sky with its myriad stars was the reason for the property’s name, not the fortune in precious stones said to be located here? Did he have the foggiest idea of what this place meant to her?

The land itself was her legacy, as it had been for generations of Logans. Only her father’s illness and his miscalculation in mortgaging the land to the Horvaths had changed everything. She had grown up knowing the legend of the diamonds, but never cared much about finding them until they were her only hope of holding onto the land for the next generation. The money itself was strictly a means to an end.

God, she hated to lose. And losing her heritage because she hadn’t done everything in her power to retain it would be the cruelest loss of all.

Intellectually she knew why Ryan had made his vile suggestion, but in her heart she felt mortally insulted. How could he think she would sell herself to Max for money?

That wasn’t the real reason she was so angry, she realized as she fought to bring her labored breathing under control. She was affronted because Ryan was the one making the accusation.

Buying and selling favors was probably second nature to him. The kind of women he was accustomed to dealing with probably wouldn’t have minded, she thought. But being placed in the same category had hurt her beyond belief.

Aware that he had followed her outside, she tensed, primed for battle.

His next words came as a shock. “I apologize. I was out of line.”

With the wind taken out of her sails, she didn’t turn around. “Have you any idea how close you came to being smacked across your big mouth?”

“Wouldn’t be the first time,” he said, an infuriating note of humor in his tone. “I shouldn’t have accused you of gold-digging. I know you better.”

How could he know her at all? She wondered. They’d spent so little time together as adults that his memory was of her as a teenage girl, not the woman she now was. He couldn’t possibly understand her fear of falling in love and losing control of her life. “Apology accepted,” she said evenly. “My reasons for seeing Max are my own affair, nobody else’s.”

“Doesn’t stop me being jealous as hell,” he said.

He moved up beside her and rested his hands on the top rail. “Beautiful night, isn’t it? Every time I go away from Diamond Downs I forget how magnificent this place is. Then I come back and wonder why I ever leave.”

Still shaken by his admission that jealousy had caused his outspokenness, she asked, “Why do you?”

“Work mostly.”

“You could work around here. Any cattle station in the region would make an opening for a man with your skills.”

“And what skills would they be?”

“Working cattle, horse breaking, mending fences.” She thought of the steaks he’d served tonight. “You could get a job as a cook. Not just a camp cook—in a restaurant,” she added.

“I’ve done all that and more, but it’s not the work I do,” he said.

She turned to him curiously, unwillingly admiring the way the starlight turned his hair to burnished gold and made his eyes seem darker and more unreadable. “I’ve seen you do all those jobs,” she insisted.

“What you saw was my cover story.” He reached for his wallet and flipped it open to show her a card in a window-faced pocket. “This is what I do for a living.”

In the pale light spilling from the house she examined the document. Credit-card-sized, it had an unflattering photo of Ryan on the left with a date beneath it. The words Security and Related Activities Control Act 1996 were printed across the top. But it was another word in large red type that jumped out at her. “Investigator? Wait a minute. This says you’re a private investigator.”

“Duly licensed by the Commercial Agents Squad of the Western Australian Police Service,” he agreed. “Among other activities, I can run surveillance on individuals and organizations, conduct asset and liability checks, investigate insurance claims and gather information for legal proceedings.”

She wondered if she looked as foolish as she felt. “I always thought you moved around so much because you couldn’t hold down a job.”

He made a wry face. “In the beginning you were right. Then I met an old friend from Broome who turned out to be working undercover at a cattle station where I was a jackeroo. I didn’t know it when I got there, but the station was being used as a holding center for supposedly stolen cattle while their owners filed dodgy insurance claims. After I helped my mate shut the operation down, he offered me regular work. I qualified for my investigator’s license. Later, when he decided to retire, I obtained my Inquiry Agent’s license and bought him out.”

Ryan rested a booted foot on the lower railing and his arms on the topmost one. “My home and office are in Broome and I travel around the Top End and to the Torres Strait islands, wherever the job takes me.”

“My hero, the P.I.,” she said on a note of wonder.

“We can skip the hero part,” he growled. “This doesn’t make me some sort of glamorous secret agent. Most of the work involves tedious evidence-gathering for companies or the courts.”

“With an element of risk,” she pointed out.

He slanted a grin at her. “Some of the people I investigate don’t take kindly to the attention.”

“I can see why they wouldn’t. Why didn’t you tell me any of this before?”

“Being looked on as a no-hoper, even by the people closest to you, has advantages. Your attitude toward me helped convince quite a few people that I was no more than what I seemed.”

She straightened. “What attitude?”

“I call it your Mother Teresa thing, trying to help the poor and oppressed.”

Denial coursed through her. “I never acted like that.”

“You were forever checking on my welfare, wherever I was working, and bringing me stuff you thought I needed.”

He thought she’d been dispensing charity. She didn’t know whether to be glad or sorry that he hadn’t worked out the real reason. She’d welcomed—craved—the excuse to keep in touch with him. Now that she’d discovered the truth, what would be her excuse? “They were only books, CDs, clothing, nothing valuable. I didn’t mean you to take my gestures the wrong way,” was the nearest she dared come to admitting the truth.

Fortunately he didn’t probe, saying, “Admit it, I was one of your good causes, like that art foundation you and Shara are so committed to.”

When Shara Najran had first accompanied her father, King Awad of Q’aresh on a cattle-buying expedition to The Kimberley, the young Middle Eastern princess had been bored and lonely. Drawn together as the only teenage girls in the vicinity, she and Judy had discovered they shared a passion for ancient rock art. They’d stayed in touch for years. Then Shara had persuaded her father to set up an exchange program for indigenous artists between their two countries. These days, Judy represented the foundation locally. She looked forward to having Shara as her sister-in-law when she married Tom.

Heat flushed through Judy, making her wish she could be more honest about her motives for checking on Ryan. On the other hand, there had been times when she had considered him in need of uplifting, so he wasn’t entirely off track. “The Art Bridge Foundation is not a charity,” she denied.

“But I was.”

“Maybe a little.”

He touched her shoulders, moving her to face him. The heat of his hands burned through her cotton T-shirt. “I didn’t mind because it kept me in your thoughts,” he said.

She felt her vision start to blur. “I was always thinking of you, although at times you seemed angry when I turned up and couldn’t wait to get rid of me. That was when you were working on a case, wasn’t it?”

“I didn’t want you in any danger.”

“And now?”

“Now you’re mixing with Max Horvath and I can’t get it through your head that the man is high-risk.”

She tossed her head, wishing that her short-cropped hair didn’t make the gesture so ineffectual. “All men are high risk.” Another thought occurred to her. “Have you been checking Max out? If you have, I don’t want to hear about whatever you turned up.”

Ryan’s face had turned to stone. “Because you’re in love with him?”

“I’m not…” The betraying admission was out before she could stop it. “Damn you, Ryan. You know I could never love Max. I’m seeing him because it’s the best way to get close to him and find out what other tricks he has up his sleeve.”

Ryan extended his hand, palm upward. “I want to see it.”

“See what?”

“Your private investigator’s license.” When she didn’t move, he placed his hand against her cheek. “You’re not licensed or qualified to conduct an undercover operation, yet you’re prepared to put yourself on the line. For your father? For Diamond Downs? Does inheriting this place mean that much to you?”

She struggled to find the words, not least because his hold on her was clouding her thinking. “I love my dad. I’d do almost anything for him. And I love this land, but not because of any inheritance value. Andy Wandarra and the other indigenous people here would say it’s my country. They’ll travel thousands of miles to die in their own place, their own country. This is mine.”

“So you’d never want to leave?”

The bitterness she heard in his tone had her wondering. “I didn’t say that. One’s country isn’t necessarily where you spend your whole life. But it is the land where you’re born and where you hope to return before you die, what Andy would call your dreaming place.”

She saw some of the tension leave him. “I understand. I may not have a dreaming place of my own, but I understand.”

“Everyone has a dreaming place.”

His shoulders lifted. “I was born in Kalgoorlie and lived there until my dad disappeared. My mother came from Irish stock and had no relatives in Australia, only a pen friend in Broome. When she realized Dad was never coming back, we moved there to be closer to her friend. So is my dreaming place Kalgoorlie, Broome or where my parents originated?”

“It’s wherever you feel you belong.”

His bladed hand dismissed the sentiment. “When I find out, I’ll let you know.”

“This could be your dreaming place,” she suggested quietly. “You may not have chosen to remain at Diamond Downs, but I thought you were happy here.”

“I was for a time.” Until Des Logan had made it clear that the destitute youth had no business making eyes at his daughter, Ryan thought. Des had been careful not to say that Ryan wasn’t good enough, but what other reason could there have been? Des wasn’t exactly falling over himself to come between Judy and Max Horvath, Ryan noted. He wondered if Judy had noticed that detail.

“You could be happy here again,” she persisted. “The other boys will be pleased when they find out the truth about your activities.”

“They won’t find out because you aren’t going to tell them,” Ryan snapped, beyond caring that he was projecting his own past hurts into his voice. He regretted it when he saw Judy recoil. “The fewer people who know what I do, the more effectively I can do my job,” he said more gently.

He saw her master her hurt with an effort. “At least I know now why you think you can get that file back from Max.”

“Let’s say I’ve had a bit of practice at this sort of work.” He shifted so his face was half in shadow. “I want you to arrange a date with lover boy.”

Her chin came up and her eyes glinted with shock. “You want me to go out with him?”

He shook his head. “Believe me, I’d rather swim with crocodiles, but I’ll need you to lure him away from his house so I can go through his office.”

“Don’t you need warrants to do stuff like that?”

“Not if I’m there legitimately. Eddy’s death left Max shorthanded. We’re going to convince him to hire me, then I’ll do my investigator thing while he’s whispering sweet nothings in your ear.”

When he saw a shudder take her, he felt gratified. He hated throwing her to this particular wolf, but he couldn’t think of a better way to keep their target out of the way while he turned over Max’s place. “Just don’t let him get too close.”

“You will be careful, won’t you? I don’t want anyone else getting hurt.”

He stroked her hair lightly. “Who are you worried about, Max or me?”

Before she could answer, her cell phone chimed in the background. She hurried back inside and retrieved the phone from her bag in time to take the call.

Hoping it wasn’t Max, Ryan found himself following her. He should probably give her privacy but if it was the other man, Ryan knew he’d have to find a way to cut the call short. The thought of her dating that sleazy character was almost more than he could tolerate. Maybe they’d all get lucky and Max would be eaten by a crocodile before she had to see the man again.

“Is he going to be all right?” Ryan heard her say into the phone. His senses sharpened. “I’ll be there as soon as I can,” she said and ended the call.

“Your father?” he asked.

She nodded, so pale he ached to take her in his arms, but her body language negated the idea. “At dinner he complained of chest pains and difficulty breathing. Cade’s taken him to the hospital in Halls Creek.”

“I didn’t think they had cardiac services in a four-bed hospital. Shouldn’t he be airlifted to Perth?”

Her hand went to her hair and she pushed it back, a trick of hers when she was nervous, he’d noticed. “They’re arranging for the Flying Doctor to evacuate him, but he needs to be stabilized before he goes anywhere. He’ll be at Halls Creek for at least a couple more hours.”

He picked up his car keys. “Let’s go.”

“We’ll be quicker in the Cessna.”

His glance inventoried her pale features and shaking hands. “You aren’t in any condition to fly anywhere.”

“Maybe not, but I’m going to anyway. You don’t have to come.”

Stopped in his tracks, he said, “Would you rather I didn’t?”