Prologue

       Queensland, Australia—January 1997

      “YOU KISSED HER?” CAL QUINN stared at his younger brother Teague in disbelief. It was one thing to kiss just any girl, but quite another to kiss a Fraser. Harry Fraser and Cal’s dad were in the midst of a land feud, a fight that had gone on for years.

      “I’m not spilling my guts to you boofheads,” Teague said. “You’ll tell Dad and then he’ll lock me in my room until it’s time for me to go to university.”

      Cal turned his gaze to the horizon. He and his brothers had spent the day riding the fence line along the west boundary of Kerry Creek Station, looking for breaks. On their way back to the homestead, they’d decided to make a stop at the big rock, a landmark on the station and a favorite spot for him and his brothers. They’d discarded their shirts in the heat, their bodies already brown from the summer sun, and crawled up on top of the rock.

      “Dad would be mad as a cut snake if he knew what you were doing,” Cal warned. “He hates Harry Fraser. All the Frasers.”

      “There are only two. Hayley and her grandfather. And Hayley doesn’t care about the land.”

      Cal scowled. “Still, you shouldn’t be talking to her. It’s—it’s disloyal.”

      “Oh, nick off,” Teague muttered, growing impatient with the conversation. “You can’t tell me what I’m allowed to do. You’re not the boss cocky on this station.”

      Cal’s temper flared. The hell he couldn’t. He was the oldest of the three Quinn brothers and if Teague or Brody were doing something that might hurt the family, then it was Cal’s duty to step in. “I will be someday. And when I am, you won’t be kissing Hayley Fraser.”

      “If you tell Dad about—”

      “I kissed a girl,” Brody confessed. “Twice.”

      Cal leaned forward to glare at his youngest brother. Brody had always done his best to keep up, but he usually didn’t resort to lies. “Twice?”

      “Yeah,” Brody said. “Once with tongue. It was kind of nasty, but she said we should try it. I thought I’d give it a fair go.”

      Brody had been living in Sydney with their mum, attending a regular school filled with real girls. He’d been to a proper dance and played footy with his school team and went to the flicks almost every weekend. Maybe he was telling the truth. If he was, then at fourteen, Brody had already passed Cal in worldly experience.

      “Tongue?” Teague asked. “What does that mean?”

      “When you kiss her, you open your mouth and touch tongues,” Brody explained. “It’s called French kissing. I guess the French do it all the time.”

      Teague considered the notion, his eyebrow raised in suspicion. “So who opens their mouth first, the guy or the girl?”

      “Whoever wants to French kiss,” Brody said. “If you don’t want to do it, you just don’t open your mouth. It’s probably not so good to do if you’re sick. Or if you have food in your mouth. Or if you haven’t brushed your teeth.”

      Cal listened as his brothers discussed their experiences with girls, unable to add anything to the conversation. Cal was seventeen, yet he’d never kissed a girl, or touched a girl, or even carried on a conversation with one his own age. He’d lived on the station his entire life, miles from any female worth talking about.

      Sure, he’d been to Brisbane a bunch of times with his family and he’d seen lots of pretty girls there. And his cousins had visited Kerry Creek when he was younger, and some of them were girls. But he’d never gotten close enough to…

      He knew what went on between men and women. He listened to the jackaroos after they’d come back from a weekend in town. And he’d discovered self-gratification and teenage fantasies years ago. But he wanted to know about the real thing. Sex. Something that Teague and Brody might end up experiencing long before he did.

      Cal had considered going into Bilbarra the next time the jackaroos took a weekend off and find himself a willing girl. He was old enough. His mother might disapprove, but she was living in Sydney and would have no idea what he was up to.

      As for his father, Jack Quinn had left his two eldest sons to their own devices since the separation. Brody was out of his control in Sydney, but Teague and Cal had only Mary, the housekeeper, to watch over them. Though she was strict about schoolwork, and their father firm about station chores, Cal and Teague were allowed to spend their free time in whatever way they chose.

      “Mac and Smithy said they’d take me into town the next time they went,” Cal said, trying to maintain an air of cool. “They know a lot of women in Bilbarra.”

      “Yeah, only they all live at the knock shop,” Teague said.

      “Not all of them,” Cal said. Though the boys did frequent the local brothel, they also spent time at the pubs. From what the jackaroos had told him, the brothel in Bilbarra was still a well-kept secret, one almost everyone in the territory knew. But there were other places in Oz where that type of thing was perfectly legal.

      Maybe