The Cattle Baron's Virgin Wife

CHAPTER TWO

‘COME to a decision, Sienna?’

They were in Finn’s study at Eastwood. They hadn’t had their session yet—he’d been delayed so Walt had shown her into the study and provided coffee.

Finn had just put the phone down and he continued, ‘I really need to know today.’ That, and his earlier question, were the first words he’d spoken to her.

They eyed each other. While she was wearing a track suit and joggers he was more formally dressed in navy trousers and a blue and white pin-striped shirt. He looked every inch a powerful businessman; he didn’t look to be in a good mood.

‘Why? What difference does a day or two make?’ Sienna replied. ‘Incidentally—hi! How are you?’

‘I’m sorry, that wasn’t very polite,’ he acknowledged. ‘But I have quite a bit on my plate today,’ he added briefly.

‘So do I. Obviously not the weight of the McLeod empire, but enough.’

Those dark blue eyes narrowed on her as Finn McLeod took in the shadows beneath her eyes, indicative of a miserably sleepless night.

‘Aren’t you well?’ he asked abruptly. ‘You know, a break on a cattle station could do you the world of good. Or…’ he paused significantly ‘…are you such an all-luxury-dependent city girl, the country terrifies you?’ There was a wealth of derision in his eyes.

She drew a tumultuous breath, exhaled audibly, then said quite calmly, ‘No, it doesn’t. However, you’re not the only one with an agenda, Finn. I have my own so I’m prepared to bargain with you. I’ll come to Waterford if you’ll agree to be my escort to my sister’s wedding.’

Her first reaction when she’d finished speaking was, Got you, Finn McLeod!—as his jaw dropped and he stared at her incredulously.

Her next reaction was—what had she been thinking? What had she done?

He closed his mouth and said, ‘I think you better explain.’

She went hot and cold. Colour flooded her cheeks, then left her looking pale and mortified. ‘I—uh—disregard that, Finn, it—sort of came out in the heat of the moment and—’

‘No. Tell me, Sienna,’ he ordered.

She swallowed and wished herself a million miles away.

‘Sienna,’ he warned, ‘I won’t let up until you do.’

She closed her eyes frustratedly, then sighed and told him as clinically as she could. It was only at the end of her explanation that she got emotional.

She said, ‘Funnily enough, I don’t want to be estranged from my family, I do want Dakota to be happy but the final humiliation—’ sudden tears blurred her eyes ‘—would be to be there amongst them on my own and still, obviously, on the shelf.’

He hadn’t interrupted once and all he said when she pulled out a hanky and blew her nose was, ‘Dakota?’

Sienna smiled shakily and explained. ‘As kids we used to thank our lucky stars we weren’t conceived in Timbuktu or Harare. We had a whole alphabet of weird place names we could have ended up with.’

‘I see what you mean.’ He looked humorous, then sobered. ‘But why me?’

‘When this bizarre thought literally popped into my head,’ she said ruefully, ‘that maybe I should hire an escort, my next thought was that it would have to be someone really impressive otherwise it could even be worse!’ She shrugged. ‘I couldn’t, at that moment, come up with anyone more impressive than you. But I never intended to—’ She stopped.

‘So what do you think made you say it?’

She stared at him and a little flame kindled in her eyes as she forgot about herself and thought about him.

‘Finn, you’ve been really high-handed and arrogant about this. You’ve gone to my boss behind my back, he’s been on the phone to me and the net result is that I’ll feel bad if I don’t do this on his account, not yours, but all the same,’ she insisted, ‘so—you’ve even gone to the Augathella Hospital behind my back!’

He looked amused.

‘All right, maybe that’s not so serious—’ she waved an exasperated hand ‘—but you have been extremely manipulative and I got mad but—’

‘I’ll come.’

‘But—’ Sienna stopped as if shot. ‘Oh, look, I don’t know if that’s a good idea. I mean, it sounded all very well, throwing down my own gauntlet in the heat of the moment, but that’s essentially what it was.’

‘Sienna,’ he said dangerously, ‘let’s keep it simple—if you come to Waterford, I’ll go to the wedding with you.’

‘But—’

‘Sienna,’ he growled.

‘All right. Thank you. I mean—’ her shoulders slumped ‘—at least you’ve made my mother’s day.’

‘Why?’ she said suddenly about an hour later.

They were in the pool doing floatation exercises.

It was a warm, muggy Brisbane day; the humidity of semi-tropical Brisbane was something Sienna wondered if she’d ever get used to. So it was pleasant to be in the pool surrounded by the gardens of Eastwood.

She wore a hat and dark glasses and a sleek navy Speedo. She was anointed with sunscreen, and she’d broken off her instructions suddenly to ask her question.

Finn lay suspended in the fluorescent blue water on his back, then he flipped over and paddled to the side. He pushed his wet hair out of his eyes and studied her for a long moment. ‘You may not want to know why.’

‘Yes, I do,’ she insisted.

He shrugged. His shoulders were broad and tanned and powerful and the only blemishes on his body were several scars from the accident and the operations he had had to have on his leg—in that respect he’d been amazingly lucky, no facial scars at all. ‘It all sounded rather like a cry for help.’

Sienna flinched.

‘It also sounded as if you had no one else to call on. Being dumped in favour of your little sister would no doubt account for that, although isn’t two years a fair while to be carrying a torch?’

‘In two years’ time, you may find you have to ask yourself that same question, Finn,’ she said quietly.

‘Touché.’ He rubbed his jaw. ‘Well, something like that. Incidentally, I had been advised you had no ties and seemed determined to stay that way, so I wasn’t quite as high-handed as you imagined.’

Sienna sank down to her sunglasses and came up spluttering. ‘Peter, I suppose!’ she said indignantly.

He nodded.

Sienna said something highly uncomplimentary as she called the wrath of God down on Peter Bannister, all men for that matter, and possibly even Melissa Bannister with her kind but gossipy ways.

‘If you’re imagining I’m all droopy and sad, I’m not.’

‘No.’ He shook his head and his lips quirked. ‘The opposite if anything. A bundle of energy and intelligence, actually. But I can’t help wondering if you see yourself as turned off men for the duration?’ There was something curiously intent in the way he watched her.

‘Yes and no,’ she said slowly. ‘I guess, as much as anything, it’s my own judgement that’s a bit of a worry.’ She smiled humourlessly and rippled the surface of the water with her fingers. ‘Then again, while you obviously can’t condemn all men because of one man’s erratic emotions, to be honest—’ this time her smile was genuine although wry ‘—it’s hard not to sometimes.’

‘So have you thought about the rest of your life in this context? Marriage? Children?’

Sienna bit her lip. ‘Yes,’ she said quietly. ‘I love kids, I think I’ve done some of my best work with children, but I can’t see myself falling madly in love again so—’ she looked away and her voice was a little clogged as she went on ‘—I don’t know.’

‘Where is this wedding and when?’

She told him. ‘You should, at the rate you’re going, be pretty mobile.’

‘Glory be,’ he said dryly.

‘Look,’ Sienna said carefully, ‘I feel really bad now, Finn. I mean, a wedding, after—after what happened to you, might be the last thing you want to go to.’ She stopped and sighed. ‘I just didn’t think. So I’ll come to Waterford but you don’t have to come to the wedding—I’d quite understand.’

‘Sienna—’ his eyes were laughing at her although he spoke gravely ‘—you surprise me. I would never have taken you for such a mass of indecision.’

‘I’m not, usually.’ She took her hat off, splashed some water on her head and repositioned the hat. ‘My mother rang me yesterday—that’s really wheeling in the heavy guns—and I don’t seem to have known if I was on my head or my heels ever since!’

He laughed openly. ‘I’ll come.’

‘Are you sure?’ She eyed him anxiously.

‘I’m sure.’

Sienna pulled herself out of the pool, entirely unaware, as she had her back to him, how he studied her sleek slender figure as water streamed off her. Then she turned round and planted her hands on her hips.

‘But…’ she began—and couldn’t go on as she realized she seemed to be under a rather particular scrutiny from her patient.

And indeed, high, perfect little breasts with delicious peaks, Finn McLeod found himself thinking as he gazed up at her, not to mention those tantalizing hips. What kind of a mix would his no-nonsense physiotherapist with that desirable figure be in bed?

‘But…’ Sienna said again—and again couldn’t seem to go on.

Finn grimaced and swam out into the middle of the pool. ‘I am coming to your sister’s wedding, Ms Torrance, that’s final.’

Sienna decided not to call her mother that night. She still couldn’t quite believe Finn McLeod would accompany her to Dakota’s wedding, or that she should let him. So she thought she’d wait a day or two before breaking the news. She was still curiously perturbed by those moments beside the pool when she’d completely lost the thread of what she’d been going to say!

Her mother had other ideas, however. She rang Sienna from a private line so the number wasn’t displayed on the mobile screen.

Sienna answered a bit distractedly as she cooked a pasta dish for her dinner. ‘Hello, Sienna Torrance here.’

‘I know, darling,’ her mother’s voice said down the line. ‘I’m afraid I’ve been a bit sneaky. This is not my phone. I didn’t want you to know it was me in case you didn’t want to talk to me.’

‘Mum—’ Sienna felt a shaft of guilt as she put the phone on its stand and turned on the loudspeaker ‘—of course not.’ She drizzled the pasta with garlic butter and freshly chopped herbs. ‘I—’

‘But I just wanted to tell you again that I know it would be difficult for you to come to the wedding. Please don’t think I—we’re being thoughtless and only thinking of Dakota, although she is miserable and—’

‘Mum,’ Sienna broke in as she scooped some pine nuts into her pasta, ‘it’s OK. I’ve been able to get a weekend off for the wedding, but could I bring someone with me?’

‘Who?’

‘Well, a friend—’

‘A man?’

‘Yes, he is.’ Sienna deployed a pasta spoon on the mixture.

‘Oh, my darling,’ her mother breathed, ‘of course you can! Who is he? Tell me about him. You haven’t ever mentioned him, but you must know him pretty well if you want to bring him to Dakota’s wedding! Is he nice? Of course he would be! Is he good-looking?’

Sienna abandoned the spoon and closed her eyes. ‘Mum, we’re just…friends.’

‘What’s his name?’

Sienna hesitated, then said reluctantly, ‘Finn McLeod.’

‘Not—not those McLeods?’

‘Yes, but—now listen to me, Mum, I don’t want you to tell a soul otherwise I won’t come. It’s—we’re just friends.’

‘Your secret is perfectly safe with me,’ her mother said with a tinge of reproach, but added immediately, ‘That’s wonderful news. I’m so happy for you! Oh, darling, I have to go, I borrowed this mobile phone and it’s blinking red lights at me now. I think the battery may be going but we’ll talk soon…’

Her mother’s voice faded away.

Sienna switched off her phone, then banged her head against the corkboard on the kitchen wall, twice.

How could her pleasant if uneventful life have turned into such a minefield in the space of twenty-four hours?

I’ll tell you, she told herself grimly. Pride. And little white lies.

Then she sniffed and realized her pasta was burning. She turned the plate off, pushed the pan away, suddenly not hungry in the slightest. She poured herself a glass of white wine, which she took outside onto the balcony.

Dusk was drawing in and it was cooler but still humid. A family of squeakers, raucous, bright-eyed, inquisitive little birds, was settling down in a grevillea tree that clung to the slope below the building. The creamy cone-shaped grevillea flower heads with their delicate tendrils glowed almost candlelike in the gathering gloom.

But what occupied her mind was the distinct possibility that Finn McLeod could shortly find his name linked to one Sienna Torrance, whether he liked it or not.

So what do I do about that? she wondered.

Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it? I have to nip this in the bud. No more pride, no more little white lies, and the sooner the better.

It was Walt who admitted her to Eastwood an hour later and showed her into the den.

Finn was sitting on a settee watching cricket on a large-screen television. There was a coffee-pot and two cups on a table in front of him. He wore a white cotton shirt and cargo pants. His cane was leaning against the settee beside him.

‘Sienna,’ he murmured in a way that she couldn’t identify as welcoming or unwelcoming—actually quite noncommittal, she decided, and flinched inwardly.

He also took his time about looking her over.

She’d changed after making the phone call to ask if she could come and see him, into a silky lemon blouse tucked into indigo jeans. Her hair, straight and shoulder-length and usually tied back in a pony-tail, was loose and naturally streaked light and darker honey-gold, and held back by a silver slide on one side.

For some reason, his appraisal of her caused her to look down at herself, but she couldn’t see anything wrong with her outfit and she looked up and into his eyes with a faint frown.

He shrugged. ‘It’s the first time I’ve seen you out of track suits, swimmers and pony-tails. You scrub up well.’

She blinked and a ghost of humour lit his eyes.

‘Believe me,’ he murmured.

‘I—thank you. So do you, for that matter.’ She drew a deep breath. ‘Finn, I’m really sorry about coming to see you like this, but it is Friday, so I wouldn’t have seen you until Monday in the normal course of events and it wouldn’t be easy to do over the phone.’

‘That’s OK. Sit down and pour the coffee,’ he invited. ‘Something’s come up?’ he hazarded.

‘Yes, my mother,’ Sienna said exasperatedly and poured the coffee before she went on, sitting adjacent to him in an armchair. ‘Please believe me when I say I love my mother dearly, but this is what happened.’ And she recounted the recent conversation she’d had with her mother.

At the end he raised an eyebrow and said, ‘So?’

‘Well, not only is she convinced—because it’s what she wants to believe!—that you and I are—’ She paused.

‘Lovers?’ he suggested.

‘Oh, well—oh, well, on the way to it anyway—’ Sienna looked discomforted ‘—but—only in her happiness for me!—it’s quite possible she won’t be able to keep it a secret.’

Finn sat up and reached for his coffee-cup, but before he took a sip he said, with obvious amusement, ‘What a tangled web we weave—and I guess you know the rest of it.’

‘Exactly,’ Sienna responded with some urgency. ‘And because it’s you, it could get out of hand. The press could get onto it. Come to that, even without my mother—why didn’t I think of this sooner?—just your being at the wedding with me could spark all sorts of speculation!’

‘How terrifying,’ he remarked, causing Sienna to blink at him again.

‘You mean you—wouldn’t mind?’ She stared at him, round-eyed.

‘I never take any notice of the press in those circumstances,’ he drawled. ‘Besides, isn’t that the object of the exercise—to have your family and friends of the opinion you aren’t on the shelf?’

‘But—after what happened to you—and it’s not that long ago…’ She stopped and steepled her fingertips, rapping them together lightly. ‘I really don’t feel I could do that to you.’

He watched her tapping fingers for a moment. ‘Well, I appreciate that, Sienna,’ he said almost lazily, ‘but you don’t have to worry about me. I can take care of myself.’

Sienna discovered herself to be counting beneath her breath, but she’d only got to three when she burst out frustratedly, ‘What do I have to do to get you not to come to this wedding?’

‘If you hadn’t brought it up in the first place, that might have helped. Besides, you’ve been a real inspiration to me, and it seems like one small way I could repay you.’

She opened her mouth, but closed it because nothing—coherent at least—would come out.

‘Anyway,’ Finn McLeod continued reasonably, ‘do you want this family turmoil of yours to continue?’

‘No, of course not—’ She broke off abruptly.

‘Do you want him back?’

‘No! Definitely not!’

‘Then this is one way to get a reunion over and done with. It’s one way to allow your sister to ride off happily into the sunset.’

‘But it’s a farce all the same!’

‘You know, my dear…’ he paused and studied her thoughtfully ‘…sometimes sticking to the straight and narrow truth-wise may be all very well—but it can also be a kind of self-righteousness that’s self-defeating.’

She gazed at him with her lips parted.

He smiled faintly. ‘You don’t want him back, you don’t want to be at odds with your family, you particularly don’t want to feel like a wall-flower at this wedding so—’

‘Don’t go on,’ Sienna interrupted stiffly.

He grimaced and rubbed his jaw.

‘I feel awful now,’ she continued. ‘Really awful. Proud, insufferably priggish—’

He laughed aloud. ‘Sienna, it was your idea in the first place! I’m just telling you I think it was a good one and a fitting exchange for all you’ve done for me.’

‘I—see.’ She couldn’t think of anything else to say.

‘So it’s a deal? No more doubts?’

‘It’s a deal,’ she said slowly.

In bed that night, Sienna found she was puzzled.

She and Finn had finished their coffee companionably as they’d watched the cricket, an exciting one-day international match. In fact so companionable had it been, she’d stayed to the end of the match.

But, as the overhead fan revolved above her bed, she found herself trying to sum Finn McLeod up in the light of recent events, only to decide he was still something of an enigma.

Yes, his decision to come to the wedding was a gesture she had to appreciate. Yes, he was good company with a rather dry sense of humour that she appreciated. Yes, she’d certainly spent a lot of time with him over the last few months so they did have a rapport of a kind and she was able to read him in some ways.

For example, although they didn’t happen often, she’d learnt to identify his bad days just by looking at him. Days when he was pale and moody, haunted almost—and who wouldn’t be after what he’d gone through? And she’d adjusted her responses accordingly to purely businesslike.

But it was hard to shake the feeling that he was—how to describe it?—a cool customer, and despite the quid pro quo he’d agreed to as a way of repaying her for what she’d done for him, why did she still feel there was something going on she didn’t understand?

She reached above her and turned the fan to a higher speed, and closed her eyes as the faster air wafted over her skin. She did have an air-conditioning unit but she hated sleeping with the windows closed and in the air-conditioning.

What on earth could be going on, though? she wondered. And why did she have this feeling? Because she had genuinely thought, when she’d stopped to think about it, that a wedding would be the last thing he’d want to go to after his own wedding plans had been so tragically destroyed.

Because, she mused, she had thought that to have his name linked to another woman, even falsely, should not appeal to him after those same tragic events.

Yet he’d been totally relaxed about it all. Or did that mean Finn McLeod had shut himself off, put his emotions on ice, in other words, because it was the only way he could cope?

Finn had no reservations about taking advantage of air-conditioning to get a good night’s sleep, but even in the cool, climate-controlled atmosphere of the master bedroom of Eastwood he was having trouble sleeping that night.

Of course, there was something else he could take advantage of, a sleeping pill, but he had grave reservations about becoming dependent on them, so he didn’t.

And things were improving. The pain in his leg was gradually diminishing, he was getting more and more mobile, the terrible tearing, crashing nightmares were less frequent.

The twisted remains of his life were another matter, however.

And there was this mysterious urge he’d succumbed to, to force his physiotherapist to come to Waterford with him.

His lips twisted as he recalled Sienna’s desperate indecision after flinging down her own gauntlet in the heat of the moment. But, if anything, it reinforced his belief that she was a thoroughly nice person.

She was also attractive in her own quiet way. She was certainly capable, intelligent and, as he’d told her, a bundle of energy. She was pleasant company.

Did that justify his behaviour, though?

He stirred restlessly. It was true that he was feeling frustrated and needed a change of scene. It was true enough that he thought she’d worked wonders for him whatever she might like to think to the contrary, although it was hard to pinpoint exactly how she’d done it. A born carer? he wondered. With a knack for people and a passion for getting them moving again? Possibly.

So why was he feeling guilty now?

It made sense for him not to want to swap horses midstream, so to speak, but was that all that was behind it?

Sienna continued her work with Finn throughout the next week, and discovered again that he could be “difficult”, as she thought of it.

It all came about over her refusal—at first, that was—to agree to him discarding his stick.

They finished their session in the gym—a late session as it happened, to fit in with a meeting he’d had earlier—but he refused point-blank to be pushed back to the house in his chair.

‘I’ve also decided I don’t need the stick any more,’ he stated.