Outback bride - Hart Jessica (читать книги без регистрации полные TXT) 📗

Brett sighed and shook his head as he took a pull of his beer. ‘That’s why I was so glad when he married you-apart from my own bitter disappointment, of course!’ he interposed with a grin. ‘You’re good for him, Copper. He shut himself off for too long, as if he didn’t have any emotions at all. It’s a good sign that he can get angry again.’

‘I’ll remember that the next time we have an argument,’ said Copper with a rather twisted smile, and Brett put his beer down on the verandah.

‘Tell you what, let’s have a bottle of wine with our meal tonight,’ he suggested. ‘We deserve a treat. Mal’s snug in some hotel, so the least we can do is show that we can have a good time without him!’

In the end they had two bottles, and Copper felt decidedly fragile the next day. There was no word from Mal as to when he would be back, and when Brett came in that evening, also very much the worse for wear, she asked if she ought to ring the hotel and find out what had happened to him. ‘Do you think he’s all right?’ she said, despising the anxious note in her voice.

‘Of course he is,’ said Brett. ‘He must have decided to stay another night, that’s all.’

‘Wouldn’t he have let me know?’

‘Perhaps he forgot,’ Brett said casually, sinking down onto a chair and clutching his head. ‘God, I feel awful!’

Copper ignored the state of his head. Mal would come back when he was good and ready, and not before, but it wouldn’t kill him to let her know when to expect him, would it? He had probably written into his wretched contract that she was to wait dutifully and be prepared to serve him a meal whenever he deigned to appear!

She banged the oven door shut crossly and went to sit down at the kitchen table next to Brett. ‘Do you think another bottle of wine would make us feel better?’ he said.

‘Would Mal approve?’ she asked, and he grinned.

‘No.’

Copper smiled brilliantly back at him. ‘In that case, I’ll get the corkscrew!’

They had just started on their first glass when they heard the sound of the plane overhead, and they exchanged glances of ludicrous dismay. ‘Hadn’t you better go and meet him?’ she suggested, but Brett said that he was feeling brave.

‘He’s got the pick-up truck at the landing strip,’ he pointed out. ‘Let’s brazen it out!’

‘You’re right.’ Copper straightened her shoulders. ‘There’s no reason why we shouldn’t have some wine if we feel like it, is there?’

‘Absolutely not.’

The situation was so ridiculous that they both began to giggle nervously like naughty children, egging each other on with their bravado. When Mal walked in, it was to find his wife and his brother sitting at the kitchen table, convulsed with laughter.

Copper’s giggles stuck in her throat as soon as she saw Mal, and her heart constricted inexplicably. Her first impulse was to throw herself into his arms and beg him not to go away and leave her again, but somehow she forced her voice to a nonchalance she was far from feeling. She wasn’t the one who had swanned off to the city without bothering to let anyone know when she would return, was she?

‘Oh, you’re back.’

‘Yes, I’m back.’ Mal looked grimly from one to the other. ‘What do you two think you’re doing?’

‘We’ve been consoling each other for your absence,’ said Copper acidly.

‘Well, I didn’t mind you not being here,’ Brett put in, ‘but I thought it was my duty to comfort Copper.’

‘It doesn’t look to me as if she’s in much need of comfort,’ Mal bit out. ‘If I’d known you were going to be like this, I would have come back on my own.’

‘What do you mean?’ she said, puzzled. ‘You are on your own.’

‘No, I’m not. I’ve brought you a housekeeper. Although I don’t think she’s going to be very impressed when she sees what kind of state you get into as soon as I leave you alone!’

Copper exchanged a baffled glance with Brett. ‘You’ve brought a what?‘she said stupidly.

‘A housekeeper,’ Mal confirmed, and then turned at the light step on the verandah outside. ‘Here she is now.’

Even as he spoke a very slender, very neat girl with honey-coloured hair and intensely blue eyes stepped into the kitchen and smiled at Brett and Copper, who were staring at her, slack-jawed with surprise. ‘Hi,’ she said.

‘This is Georgia,’ said Mal.

Copper could hardly wait for Mal to close the bedroom door before she rounded on him. ‘How dare you bring that girl here without consulting me?’ she stormed. ‘I thought you were going to Brisbane on business?’ Mal’s jaw tightened ominously. ‘I was.’

‘And you just happened to find a pretty girl to bring home with you, is that it?’

‘I explained all this when I introduced Georgia,’ he said impatiently. ‘I had to go and see our accountant, who’s an old friend. He told me about a friend of his daughter’s who was looking for a job in the outback and asked me if I knew of anyone who might need someone.’

‘So you said you did?’ said Copper with a withering look, and he clenched his teeth, keeping his temper with difficulty.

‘No, I said you did. You were the one who was complaining that you had too much to do. It seemed a good opportunity to find a girl to help you, if only to prevent any more accusations of treating you like a slave! And Georgia’s an outback girl. She should be really useful.’

‘Oh, yes, she’s ideal,’ said Copper jealously.

Over dinner, Georgia had told them that her father had been manager of a station very similar to Birraminda, so she had grown up in the outback. Once he had retired, she had gone to the city to find work, but she hadn’t been happy and had jumped at the chance to come back. She was friendly and pretty and obviously competent, judging by the way she had rescued the disaster Copper had made of dinner, and the more she had talked, the more inadequate Copper had felt. Georgia could ride and lasso a calf and fly a plane

and she was a good five years younger than Copper.

‘What a pity you didn’t visit your accountant before I turned up here,’ she added nastily as she began to get undressed. Mal was stripping off his clothes too, both of them too angry to feel any of the awkwardness that had existed in the past.

‘Look, what’s the problem?’ he demanded. ‘You said you had too much work to do and I’ve found someone to help you. Georgia was free this afternoon, so it made sense to bring her back straight away. I thought you’d be grateful!’

‘We do have a phone,’ snapped Copper, stepping out of her jeans. ‘You might have asked me if I wanted some help!’

Mal swore under his breath as he tossed his shirt aside. ‘It never occurred to me that you’d be this unreasonable!’

‘I would have liked to have been consulted,’ she said stubbornly. ‘I am supposed to be your wife.’

‘Only when you feel like it!’

‘Only when I feel like it?’ Copper echoed incredulously. ‘You’re the one that treats me like a housekeeper, and not a very satisfactory one at that!’

He restrained himself with an effort. ‘I wouldn’t have gone to such lengths to find a housekeeper if I thought that’s all you were, would I?’

‘I don’t know.’ She peeled off her top and shook her hair irritably out of her eyes. ‘It doesn’t leave me much to do as a wife, does it? I don’t even get to be a wife in bed.’

‘And whose fault is that?’ said Mal unpleasantly. ‘You made it very plain at the time that you only wanted me for that one night. I agreed that I wouldn’t touch you unless you asked me to, and you certainly haven’t done any asking.’

‘A real wife wouldn’t have to put in a request,’ said Copper, unclipping her bra and reaching for her nightdress. ‘Why can’t we just behave normally?’

‘All right.’ Mal walked naked round the bed and twitched the nightdress from her fingers. ‘Let’s go to bed.’

‘What?’

‘Let’s go to bed,’ he repeated. ‘You want us to be a normal couple. Normal couples make up in bed.’