Her Outback Protector. Margaret Way
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They were good. Plenty of filling on fresh multigrain bread.
“Okay I know you’re twenty.” He concentrated on her intriguing face with her hair now all fluffed up.
“Nearly twenty-one.” She picked up another sandwich. “Or I will be in six months time when I inherit. If I’m still alive, that is. Once I’m on Moondai and at the mercy of my relatives who knows?”
He set his cup down so sharply, a few heads turned to see if he’d cracked the saucer. “You can’t be serious?”
“Dead serious,” she confirmed. “My mother and I left Moondai when I was ten, nearly eleven. She was a basket case. I went into a frenzy of bad behaviour that lasted for years. I was chucked out of two schools but that’s another story. We left not long after my dad, Trevor, was killed. Do you know how he was killed?”
“I’d like you to tell me.” Obviously she had to talk to someone about it. Like him, she appeared to have much bottled up.
“He crashed in the Cessna.”
He sat staring at her. “I know. I’m sorry.”
Her great eyes glittered. “Did your informant tell you the Cessna was sabotaged?”
“Dear oh dear!” He shook his head in sad disbelief.
“Don’t dear oh dear me!” she cried emotionally.
Clearly her beliefs were tearing her to pieces. “Sandra, let it go,” he advised quietly. “There was an inquiry. The wreckage would have been gone over by experts. There was no question of foul play. Who would want to do such a thing anyway?”
She took a deep gulp of her coffee. It was too hot. It burnt her mouth. She swore softly. “You may think you’re smart—you may even be smart—I’m sure you have to be to run Moondai, but that was a damned silly question, Daniel Carson. Who was the person with the most to gain?”
He looked at her sharply. “God, you don’t think very highly of your uncle, do you?”
“Do you?”
“My job is to run the station, not criticise your family.”
Tension was all over her. “So we’re on different sides?”
“Do we have to be?” He looked into her eyes. A man could dive into those sparkling blue lagoons and come out refreshed.
“I don’t want Moondai,” she said, shaking her shorn head.
“So who are you going to pass it on to, me?” He tried a smile.
She sighed deeply. “I’d just as soon leave it to a total stranger as my family.”
“That includes cousin Berne?”
She put both elbows on the table. “He was a dreadful kid,” she announced, her eyes darkening with bad memories. “He was always giving me Chinese burns but I never did let him see me cry. Worse, he used to kick my cat, Olly. We had to leave her behind which was terrible. As for me, I could look after myself and I could run fast. I bet he’s no better now than I remember?”
“You’ll have to see for yourself, Alexandra.” He kept his tone deliberately neutral.
“I won’t have one single friend inside that house,” she said then shut up abruptly, biting her lip.
He didn’t like that idea. “I work for you, Sandra,” he told her, underscoring work. “If you need someone you can trust you should consider me.”
She continued to nibble on her full bottom lip, something he found very distracting. “I certainly won’t have anyone else. I wasn’t going to offload my troubles onto you, not this early anyway, but I’m a mite scared of my folks.”
He was shocked. “But, Sandra, no one is going to harm you.” Even as he said it, his mind stirred with anxiety. The Kingstons were a weird lot, but surely not homicidal. Then again Rigby Kingston had left an estate worth roughly sixty million. The girl stood between it and them. Not a comfortable position to be in.
Frustrated by his attitude, Sandra dredged up an old Outback expression. “What would you know, you big galah!”
He choked back a laugh. “Hey, mind who you’re calling names!”
“Sorry. Galah is not the word for you. You’re more an eagle. But surely you realise they must have been shocked out of their minds by the will. Uncle Lloyd would have fully expected to inherit. He wouldn’t want to work the place. He’d sell it. Bernie would go along with that. Bernie disliked anything to do with station work. You must know that, too. Where do you live?” she asked abruptly.
“I have the overseer’s bungalow.”
“Roy Sommerville, what happened to him? He was the overseer when we left.”
“Died a couple of years back of lung cancer. He was of the generation that chain smoked from dawn to dark.”
“Poor old Roy! He was nice to me.”
“Anyone would be nice to you.” His response was involuntary.
She grimaced. “I don’t recall Uncle Lloyd ever bouncing me on his knee. His ex-wife, Aunty Jilly, used to dodge me and my mother all the time. No wonder that marriage didn’t work out. Bernie was always so darn nasty. Now they must all think I’m the worst thing that ever happened.”
He couldn’t deny that. “What was your grandfather like with you?” he asked, really wanting to know. “Any fond memories?”
“Hello, we’re talking Rigby Kingston here!” she chortled.
“The most rambunctious old son of a bitch to ride out of the Red Centre.”
He shook his head. “When you’d melt any man’s heart.” A major paradox here when Kingston had left her his fortune.
“I don’t want to melt men’s hearts,” she exploded, the blood flowing into her cheeks. “It’s all smiles and kisses one day. Rude shocks the next. I don’t like men at all. They don’t bring out the best in me.”
He held back a sigh. “I think you must have had some bad experiences.”
“You can say that again! But to get back to my dear old grandpop who remembered me at the end, I do recall a few pats on the head. A tweak of the curls before he was out the front door. I didn’t bother him anyway. He was happy enough when my dad was alive. After that, he turned into the Grandad from Hell. He seemed to put the blame for what happened to my dad on my mother.”
“How could she have been responsible?” he asked, puzzled.
“Uncle Lloyd blew the whistle on a little affair she had in Sydney,” she told him bleakly. “Mum used to go away a lot and leave Dad and me at Moondai. Uncle Lloyd said she was really wild, but then he was a great one for airing everyone else’s dirty linen.” She broke off, staring at him accusingly.
“You must have heard all this?”
Why pretend he hadn’t when an unbelievable number of people had made it their business to fill him in on Pamela Kingston’s alleged exploits? Lloyd Kingston wasn’t the only one who liked airing the world’s dirty linen. Apparently Sandra’s mother had been famous for being not only radiantly beautiful but something of a two-timing Jezebel. There had even been gossip about who Alexandra’s father really was. Alexandra didn’t look a bit like a Kingston which now that he had seen her Dan had to concede. The Kingstons were dark haired, dark eyed, tall people with no sense of humour. Pamela had routinely been labelled as an absentee wife and mother who spent half her time in Sydney and Melbourne living it up and getting her photo in all the glossy magazines. Dan knew she had remarried eighteen months after her first husband’s death. Wedding number two was no fairy tale, either. It too had gone on the rocks. Pamela was currently married to her third husband, a merchant banker with whom she had a young son. It seemed Sandra had moved out fairly early. He wondered exactly