Partner for Love. Jessica HartЧитать онлайн книгу.

      CHAPTER ONE

      DARCY stood under her umbrella and lifted her feet in turn to inspect her shoes with a grimace. She could remember Uncle Bill boasting that Bindaburra was in the driest part of the driest state in the driest continent in the world, but after two days of rain Darcy was beginning to wonder if he had been pulling her leg. The Australian outback was supposed to be hot and parched, not cold and wet and extremely muddy.

      Scraping her shoes against each other gingerly to remove the huge clods of mud that kept gathering around them, Darcy looked around her, profoundly unimpressed by the spindly gum trees that lined the track and the low, sparse scrub stretching interminably off towards the horizon. Although there was still nearly an hour to go before dark, the rain had cast a dull pall over everything. Had she come all the way from London just for this?

      Darcy sighed and continued trudging along the track. It was like walking through concrete. Every time she put one foot in front of the other, she had to drag it up through the mud, half of which stayed clogged around her shoes until they were so heavy, she had to stop and knock it all off again. She just hoped Bindaburra wouldn’t be much further. She had been driving all day along slippery mud tracks like this one and she was tired and fed up. Why couldn’t the car have managed a few minutes more instead of getting bogged frustratingly close to her goal?

      Just then the sound of a vehicle changing gear as it approached the creek made her dark blue eyes brighten with hope. Surely whoever it was would be able to give her a lift for the last mile or so? Tightening her grip on her umbrella, Darcy picked her way cautiously into the middle of the track and got ready to wave enthusiastically.

      It seemed a long time before the engine growled out of the creek and the vehicle accelerated towards her, its headlights boring through the gloom. Darcy, swinging the umbrella around, was transfixed by the powerful beams, a slim, incongruously vivid figure in the inhospitable landscape.

      For one awful moment she thought that the driver hadn’t seen her. Screwing up her eyes against the rapidly approaching light, she flapped her free arm frantically as she staggered out of the way.

      To her relief, the car was slowing until she could see that it wasn’t a car at all but a mud-splattered ute. Hardly the most glamorous of vehicles to be rescued by, thought Darcy, but since she hadn’t seen another car for the last three hours she supposed she should be grateful it had come along at all.

      The ute came to a halt beside her and the driver wound down the window as Darcy slithered towards it. The mud was so thick and slippery that she almost lost her footing and had to make a grab for the door to steady herself.

      Slightly breathless but relieved still to be upright, she looked down into the cab with a winning smile. ‘Hello,’ she said, quite unconscious that her English accent was as incongruous out here as her appearance.

      Her first thought was that the driver looked rather unfriendly. He had leant his elbow out of the window and was frowning at her with a mixture of exasperation and disbelief. Beneath his bushman’s hat his face was coolly angular with a firm nose and an unyielding look to his jaw. Darcy found herself looking into a pair of wintry grey eyes and hastily revised her first impression.

      He looked very unfriendly.

      ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ he asked curtly, making no attempt to return her greeting.

      Darcy looked at him in surprise, a little affronted by his tone. Men usually reacted to her smile quite differently. ‘I wanted to be sure you’d see me,’ she explained.

      The man looked at her umbrella. It was bright yellow and green and cleverly designed as a banana tree with each spoke marking the point of a leaf and jolly bunches of bananas hanging from the middle. A friend had given it to Darcy for her birthday, and she loved it.

      He didn’t look as if he shared her sense of fun. ‘I could hardly avoid seeing you,’ he said in a deep Australian drawl that still somehow managed to sound crisp, and his gaze left the garish umbrella to travel down over Darcy’s scarlet jacket and narrow striped trousers to the ridiculously unsuitable shoes that were now clogged with thick, orangey red mud. ‘You don’t exactly blend into the background,’ he added disapprovingly. ‘It’s over two hundred miles to the nearest town. I want to know what you’re doing wandering along here as if it were some shopping mall.’

      Darcy wasn’t used to being treated with such brusqueness, but since this rude man appeared to be her only chance of a lift she decided that it was best to ignore it.

      ‘My car got stuck in the mud,’ she explained.

      ‘So that’s your car I passed before the creek?’

      Beneath her banana leaves, Darcy nodded. ‘I’m sorry if it was in your way, but it was completely bogged. I couldn’t move it forwards or backwards, so I just had to leave it.’

      The rain chose that moment to redouble its efforts, crashing down on the umbrella and on the roof of the car, and effectively drowning out his reply. ‘You’d better get in,’ he shouted, and leant across the bench seat to open the passenger door.

      Darcy slipped and slid her way round the bonnet, too relieved at the prospect of getting out of the rain to object to the unenthusiastic invitation. ‘Thank you,’ she gasped, manoeuvring herself into the seat and shaking out