FRASER'S BRIDE

Elizabeth Graham

“You have a lot to learn about men, Ice Maiden,” Matt said "Maybe I can teach you a few things. I might be doing Jerry a favor!”

His words echoed in Lara’s mind as she fled. She had told him she was Jerry’s fiancée in a momentary impulse intended to get under his leathery skin.

But why not marry Jerry? The life he offered was one she knew. Who needed Matt Fraser and the prairie dust that covered him most of the time!

CHAPTER ONE

The sleek, low-slung gold car turned off the main highway on to a gravelled road, broad tyres leaving a cloud of dust in their wake. A wide sky held the brassy gold of a descending sun, and the driver of the car stifled an oath as he flipped down the sun visor in front of him.

‘Much further now, Jerry?’ Lara Stevens glanced anxiously at her companion and saw an unaccustomed frown of irritation on his flushed, handsome face. They had left the soaring towers of Vancouver early that morning and, apart from a brief stopover for lunch, had been on the road ever since.

‘About forty miles, give or take a few,’ Jerry Fraser replied shortly to her question, adding on a bitter note: 'The last ten will be on what’s little more than a trail.’

‘But you did say the ranch is civilised?’ she asked, her voice rising slightly in alarm.

He sighed impatiently and snapped: ‘Of course it is! It’s just getting to it that’s the problem.’

Surprised by the note of ill temper, Lara glanced quickly at Jerry’s well-cut profile, severe now and with beads of perspiration dotting his brow. Even at this moment, when he wasn’t at his best, his good looks sent a thrill of pleasure through her slim body. The straight nose under light brown eyes led to a mouth which could have been moulded for a Greek god, firm and full and curving upwards in a good-natured arc.

She was beginning to feel the effects of the long hot drive herself now, and she barely stifled a sigh as she turned her head with its smoothly bound hair, so fair as to appear silver, to stare unseeingly at the rolling landscape of dry grass hills and sweeping valleys of British Columbia’s interior cattle country.

This side of Jerry’s normally sunny nature had never surfaced in her presence before. Always, he had been charmingly witty, the high-spirited soul of the parties they attended together in the city, and somehow the marked contrast in his behaviour as they neared his childhood home disturbed her.

‘Well,’ she told herself silently, closing her eyes against the glare of sun glinting off the car, ‘that’s exactly why I’m going to his family’s ranch. I have to get to know him better if I’m to marry him.’

Jerry, apparently, had no such doubts as his frequent urgings that they marry right away testified. Urgings which had become more intense when he had decided to follow her father’s footsteps into the political arena.

When Jerry had first joined her father’s law firm in Vancouver as a young lawyer with a dazzling future she, as well as every other unattached girl in her circle, had fallen under the spell, of his tall good looks, his charm, and his ability to make any woman he was speaking to at that moment feel as if she alone mattered to him. Lara admitted freely to herself that when he had singled her out from the others she had been flattered, and conscious of the envy generated in her direction.

‘You’d be a wonderful wife for a politician, Lara,’ he had told her enthusiastically. ‘Having helped your father in his campaigns and in his home office all this time, you couldn’t make a better helpmeet.’

‘Is that all I mean to you, Jerry? A helpmeet?’ she asked wistfully. ‘Shouldn’t love come into it somewhere?’

‘Love? Well, of course I love you, honey!’ He laughed protestingly and pulled her into his arms to hug her into breathlessness. ‘Why else would I be asking you to marry me?’

His smile, charmingly tender, had once again melted the doubts that haunted her when they were apart. His mobile lips, practised in the arts of love, could always make her forget temporarily the small beat of feeling deep inside her. It was a feeling that insisted' there should surely be something more than this pleasant fluttering when they were closest to each other—a flame that would ignite between them to melt the icy core she sensed at the very centre of her being.

She sighed again as yet another valley, sweepingly majestic, opened up before them. Perhaps she was dreaming of a quality that didn’t exist, that couldn’t exist outside a book or television script. She started when Jerry’s hand touched her knee.

‘Sorry I was such a bear, Lara. July in the Cariboo never did agree with me.’

She laughed tremulously, glad that he seemed himself again. ‘It’s all right, Jerry. I was—lost in my thoughts, I guess.’

He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket to mop the moisture from his face, then glanced over quickly at her slender figure in well-tailored pale blue trouser suit. She had a -Nordic look about her, with the pale wild rose complexion complementing the slightly almond shape of her blue eyes, the small aristocratic nose and a full lower lip that denied the surface coolness she presented.

‘I don’t know how you do it, honey,’ he said with a rueful shake of his head as he turned back to the wheel. ‘You always look so cool and calm, as if you’ve just stepped out of an ice-cold shower.’

‘Huh! ’ she retorted, smiling. ‘It may look that way, but I’m keeping sane only by the thought of that shower awaiting me. There are such things as baths and showers at the Fraser Ranch, I presume?’ she added teasingly.

He grinned. ‘As many as you like. I doubt the Fraser Lake would go down by too many feet if you decided to stay under the shower all day.’

‘Fraser Lake,’ she mused quietly as pebbles leapt to strike the under parts of the car. ‘Fraser Lake—Fraser Ranch—is everything in the Cariboo, prefixed “Fraser”?’ Her smile touched the soft outline of her lips and reached up to crinkle her sapphire blue eyes.

‘Only about half a million acres/ he told her casually, and she gasped.

‘Half a ‑?’ She leaned forward to look incredulously into his eyes. ‘Jerry! You didn’t tell me it was such a huge property. I imagined a fairly large sized farm and your family scraping a bare living from it.’

‘Well, it’s not all Fraser land, of course,’ he conceded. ‘A lot of it is leased from the Crown for grazing rights.’

‘And your brother—Matt?—he runs it all by himself?’

‘My half-brother,’ Jerry corrected, his lips tightening perceptibly. ‘His mother died when he was two, and his father married my mother a year or so later. He’s four years older than me.’ He smiled across at her with a twisted smile. ‘Sounds complicated, but you’ll soon get the hang of it.’

‘Hmm ... And then you have a younger sister, Peg?’

Lara had tried to piece together the fabric of Jerry’s past life, but found it difficult because of his reluctance to discuss it in any detail. Now, however, as they neared the ranch, she made a last effort to pin him down.

‘Let’s see, then—there’s your mother and Peg living at the main house, Matt and presumably his wife, and ‑’

‘Matt isn’t married,’ he interjected shortly. ‘He was engaged a couple of years ago, but that fell through.’

‘Oh, that’s too bad. What happened?’ She knew she was sounding inquisitive, but the more she knew about the Fraser family the easier things would be for her initially. It wasn’t altogether curiosity that prompted her question. She had an innate shyness in her nature that made her hate to be found wanting when contingencies she knew nothing about rose up to face her.

Jerry seemed annoyed by her question and shrugged irritably. ‘She—ran off with another man.’

‘Oh! Poor Matt. Is that why he’s never married since?’

‘I really don’t know, Lara! And Matt isn’t the type you’d ask about that kind of thing. He’s—well, he keeps himself to himself.’

‘I see.’ A sudden spurt of sympathy went through her for the older brother, who must have suffered a severe blow to his pride, at least.

‘Mother and my young sister Peg have lived at the main house since my father died when I was seventeen. Matt’s been managing the ranch since then. Our father left the place to him and me in equal shares, if I stayed to help run it.’ A bitter edge crept into Jerry’s voice. ‘Dad knew even back then that I wasn’t interested in the five-barred corral gate and being frozen to death chasing after cows who had no more sense than to get caught in a drift.’

‘So you’ve no real connection with the ranch at all now?’

He shrugged. ‘Matt makes me an allowance out of the kindness of his heart. I finally persuaded him that my future lay further afield than the god-forsaken summer pastures! ’

‘I’m sure Matt understood how you felt,’ Lara murmured soothingly. ‘Or why would he make you any kind of an allowance?’ She laughed softly and put a hand on his sleeve. ‘I really can’t see you as a cowboy anyway. It’s much easier to picture you as the Member for Cariboo.’

Jerry took his eyes off the road momentarily to flash her a warm smile, his irritation forgotten. ‘You think so, honey? It would really be something if I did it the first time out, but very few people do that.’ He put a hand on her knee again and squeezed it meaningly. ‘It would be a lot easier if you would marry me and help out.’

She removed his hand firmly. ‘I can help you without being married to you, Jerry. I wasn’t married to my father for the past four years. Anyway, I ‑’ she hesitated, then went on: ‘I really don’t know you that well, Jerry.’

A quick frown creased his smooth brow. ‘That’s crazy, Lara—we’ve known each other for at least a year and a half!’

Her lashes, shades darker than her fair hair, dropped fleetingly to her cheeks. ‘Not so crazy, Jerry,’ she said in a small voice. ‘For instance, I’m having to ask you now, when we’re almost at the ranch, about your family. I know next to nothing about your background.’

‘Good God, Lara, you sound like a Victorian father asking the prospects of a future son-in-law! Isn’t it enough that you know me?’

He swung the car off the gravel on to a wide track that consisted mainly of dusty earth and hardened mud ruts. Dust clouds flew behind them. Fence posts joined by several strands of wire enclosed hilly pastures on either side of the rough track, and Lara gasped as the car lurched over the rough ground. ‘Fraser land, I suppose?’

‘Naturally,' Jerry said dryly, though Lara detected a note of smugness in his voice and wondered if he had, after all, a certain amount of pride in the family holdings.

Ignoring his previous outburst, she asked: ‘What about your sister, Peg? She’s around my age, isn’t she?’

He looked across at her poised profile and grinned. ‘About a year younger in years, but centuries in feminine know-how. Like Matt, she lives for the ranch—animals, winter feed, the whole thing.’

‘Isn’t she interested in men and getting married one day?’

Jerry shrugged. ‘Marriageable men are few and far between out here,’ he said, and then chuckled. ‘At least the ones who’d be interested in a harum-scarum tomboy like Peg.’

He fell silent as the car negotiated a. rise and a valley suddenly spread out beneath them. Broad, and greener than the country they had seen so far, \he valley swept from a crystal clear azure lake between treed hills to the far horizon and its snow-topped mountains towering into the deep blue sky.

‘This is it,’ said Jerry, halting the car to gaze with possessive eyes at the vista before them.

‘Oh, my!’ Lara breathed, her blue eyes wide as they swept round the view and then back to what looked like a small village nestled at the lake’s edge. Log-fenced corrals and barns lays to one side of a large two-storied white house, and on a slope further round the lake were several smaller houses, each with its own white-fenced garden area. Apart from the cleared area, trees of pine and aspen crowded the hillsides and seemed to march into the lake itself, Beyond the lake* stretched an undulating prairie that seemed to stretch to infinity.

‘It’s quite something, isn’t it?' Jerry threw out the question casually, but when Lara spared a quick glance at his well-moulded face she saw that his detachment was a surface thing.

‘Like Eden before it was spoiled,’ she agreed softly. ‘I can’t wait to ride out on those hills,’ she told him with shining eyes a minute later. ‘It seems as if a person could ride for ever and never come to the end of it.’

Jerry gave her a dry smile as he eased the car into motion once more. ‘Believe me, it seems that way when you’re out on a drive and the cows have hidden their calves in the most unlikely places! ’

The long car slid almost silently downhill until Jerry applied the brakes when they had turned into a gravelled parking space at the side of the main house.

‘Let’s go right in,’ he said wearily. ‘I could do with a drink, and I can get the luggage later.’ He eased from behind the wheel and came round stiffly to open Lara’s door, taking her arm to lead her past the vividly green lawns and bright flower beds she had seen from their vantage point above. Through the trees backing the lawns she glimpsed the sparkling lake.

‘I can just feel that cold water!’ she sighed blissfully. ‘Is it fit for swimming?’

He smiled. ‘It’s the fastest way of cooling off in these parts. There’s a little beach round the curve over there, and a raft and boathouse. Matt does a lot of fishing when he has the time.’

‘Oh, I’d love to fish!—do you think he would take me some time?’ She looked eagerly into his face, but saw that he was frowning.

‘I don’t know, Lara, but I doubt it. Matt’s a loner, likes to be by himself most of the time. He’s not what you’d call the sociable type.’

‘Oh!’ Of all Jerry’s family, Lara looked forward least to meeting his older brother. From remarks Jerry had dropped, she gathered the impression that Matt was an austere, humourless man, the kind she was always at a loss with. But now Jerry was urging her up the steps of the house to the wide porch surrounding it. Patio chairs and lounges upholstered in bright yellow and white stripes gave a festive air to the outdoor living room, which had long glass doors leading into it from either end of the house.

The wide front door of the house stood open to let in the cool breeze from the lake, a screen door taking its place. Jerry called through the mesh: ‘Hi! Anybody home?’ before opening the door and ushering Lara into a spacious hall, cool and dim. A broad red-carpeted staircase, curving into the hall at the bottom, led upwards to a galleried upper storey. A huge grandfather clock ticked steadily and noisily opposite the staircase, giving Lara the feeling that in the big ranch house even time was controlled to a level, unhurried rhythm.

A flutter at the back of the square hall presaged the arrival of a smallish, plump woman trailing wisps of gossamerlike fabric from the shoulders of a brightly patterned silk summer dress.

‘Jerry! Darling—I thought you’d never get here. What took so long?’ The older woman’s arms reached up to pull Jerry’s head down to hers and Lara watched, smiling, while a pink flush suffused his neck and ears.

‘Mother, please!’ Jerry extricated himself from his mother’s embrace and turned to Lara, drawing her forward with an arm round her waist. ‘This is Larraine Stevens, the girl I told you about on the phone. She’s going to help me in my campaign.’

‘Oh, yes. You’re Jerry’s secretary, aren’t you?’ His mother’s eyes, of the same light brown as Jerry’s, went dartingly over Lara’s slim figure, their sharpness belying the fluttering movement of her arms.

‘In a way, Mrs Fraser,’ Lara returned smoothly before Jerry could speak. ‘At least, I manage to type well enough to keep his correspondence in order.’

‘Mother, Lara is the daughter of George Stevens, head of the firm I work for. He’s also a Member of Parliament, and Lara has helped him with his political duties.’

‘Oh, that Miss Stevens! I thought—Matt said …' Jerry’s mother looked so bewildered Lara was sorry for her embarrassment.

‘I can well imagine what Matt said,’ Jerry told her dryly. ‘Now, how about offering a couple of weary travellers some refreshment?’

‘Yes, of course—I don’t know what I’m thinking of,’ the older woman fluttered, smiling tentatively at Lara. ‘Come in, my dear, you must be tired after such a long drive.’ She led the way to an arched doorway to their right, waving them on while she herself paused there. ‘Pour your drinks, Jerry, will you? I have to see Carrie about something.’

She floated away in a cloud of barely concealed agitation, and Jerry took Lara’s elbow to lead her into a large airy living room and settled her in a comfortable chintz-covered armchair set close to one of the many windows leading out to the porch. While he went to pour their drinks at a black oak sideboard, Lara glanced round at her surroundings, surprised by the air of expensive but quiet good taste. A natural rock fireplace dominated one end of the spacious room, and the heavy darkness of elaborately carved sideboards and tables was offset by the pale delicacy of gold broadloom covering the floor like a field of ripe wheat.

'I'm amazed,’ she told Jerry when he handed her a tall frosty glass containing mostly a soft drink flavoured with a dash of vodka. 'I really expected something a lot more primitive away out here, but it’s really,’ she lifted her shoulders expressively, ‘—beautiful. I’m glad I brought clothes for any occasion.’

‘That’s the beauty of it here,’ said Jerry, taking his drink and strolling to the window. ‘Anything goes—you can be as dressy or casual as you like. Peg never wears anything except jeans and shirts, though Mother’s been nagging her for years about it.’

‘Now, Jerry, you know I don’t make a habit of nagging, dear,’ said Mrs Fraser, catching the last of his words as she bustled back into the room. ‘Though if you’re talking about Peg and the way she dresses, I will admit to a little gentle persuasion.’ She sank into the chair opposite Lara’s with a sigh, accepting Jerry’s offer to pour a drink for her. ‘But who knows,’ she resumed, looking again at Lara’s svelte figure, ‘perhaps her attitude will change with another girl in the house who knows how to dress properly.’

‘I doubt if even Lara could change Peg’s ways,’ Jerry told her with a wry smile as he brought her glass over. ‘Where is Peg, by the way?’

‘Oh, she’s out in the barns somewhere,’ Mrs Fraser returned vaguely.

‘And Matt?’

His voice was strangely tense when he asked the last question, and Lara saw mother and son exchange odd glances. ‘He—he’s out seeing to some cattle up on the range. They have some disease—I’m not sure what.’

‘He’ll be back for dinner?’

‘Oh, yes. He said he may be a little late, but we’re not to wait for him.’

The slender figure of a girl appeared in the doorway, her light brown eyes searching for and finding Jerry’s. Her long legs were clad in well-used denim jeans, the short sleeves of a pink top revealing tanned, slender arms.

‘Peg!’

Jerry went forward to throw his arms round his sister and twirl her round several times while she laughed excitedly. Then he brought her over to Lara and introduced them, telling Peg: ‘This beautiful girl is Larraine Stevens, Peg, but I’m hoping I can persuade her to change that to Larraine Fraser before too long! ’

His smiling enthusiasm brought a pale flush to Lara’s cheeks, her embarrassment finding an echo in Peg’s awkward and somewhat boyish bob of the head in welcome. ‘I hope you’ll enjoy your stay at the ranch, Larraine,’ she said shyly, then turned back to Jerry with evident relief.

‘We’ve built a new calf pen since you were here last, Jerry—want to come and see it?’

Their mother answered for him. ‘Not now, Peg dear. Jerry’s just arrived and I’m sure he and Miss Stevens would like to freshen up before dinner. Run along and ask Carrie if she’s prepared the room for Miss Stevens, will you?’

As Peg turned obediently to the door Lara said with a friendly smile: ‘I wish you’d call me Larraine—or Lara, as my family does.’

‘That’s a nice name,’ Peg turned back to say in her light breathless voice. ‘Mine is so—ordinary.’

‘That’s strange,’ said Lara. ‘I’ve always like Peg—there’s something sweet-sounding about it.’

Jerry laughed and swatted his sister’s jeans with a playful hand. ‘That’s more than I can say about the rest of you—I take it you’ve been among the calves all day?’

‘Now don’t you two start bickering the minute you get together,’ Mrs Fraser said with a worried frown. ‘You’ll have Miss St—Larraine—thinking she’s come to a land of savages.’ She smiled at Lara and went on: ‘It took me such a long time to get used to the Cariboo and its ways, the informality and so on.’

‘You’re still not used to it. Mother,’ Jerry told her, dropping an affectionate kiss on the top of her head. ‘You’re dressed well enough to attend the Queen’s garden party instead of presiding over a rough ranch table.’

‘I haven’t seen anything that could be called “rough” so far,’ Lara protested, glancing round the spacious living room. ‘It’s a beautiful house, modern and ‑’

‘Well, it isn’t an old house exactly,’ Mrs Fraser told her. ‘Matt pulled down the old place and had this one built to his own specifications when ‑’ She stopped abruptly and looked nervously at Jerry.

‘It’s all right, Mother,' he said as their brown eyes met. ‘I’ve explained about Matt’s engagement to Adrienne falling through at the last minute.’

‘Oh! Good. Well, when it happened, the old house was already gone and this one half built, so Matt carried on with it. I must say we all appreciate the conveniences he added to this one. My brother visited last year—he lives in New York City—and he said we have all the amenities they have in his home there.’

Peg came back into the room, a puzzled frown between her brows. ‘Mother, Cassie’s muttering under her breath about having to get another room ready. Says she was told to prepare the little room at the back, and now ‑’

Mrs Fraser gave a hurried little laugh. ‘Oh, dear, Cassie never seems to understand what I tell her for some reason. Is she working on the right room now?’

‘Mmm, it’s ready. Well, if you’ll excuse me, I have to attend to the rest of the calves now.’

‘Oh, darling, you’re not going out there again, are you?’ her mother wailed. ‘Why don’t you get washed and change into a pretty dress?’

‘Mother!’ Peg exclaimed in a long-suffering voice, then spun around and a moment later they heard the front screen door slam behind her.

Mrs Fraser sighed and Jerry said with a laugh: ‘The only way you’ll succeed in changing her ways is by persuading her that the calves would like to see her in a pretty dress now and then! ’

‘Well, I'd never be able to do that,’ his mother said despairingly. ‘So I’ll have to pin all my hopes on Larraine.’ Lara gave an embarrassed laugh and told the older woman not to depend on her to set the example everyone seemed to think Peg needed. She herself had brought mostly casual clothes to wear at the ranch.

But later, when Jerry had brought up her suitcases to the spacious two-bedded room Mrs Fraser had ushered her into, his mother exclaimed delightedly as she watched Lara unpack the dresses she had brought.

‘I just love that black silk,’ she said, fingering the light material admiringly. ‘It must look really well with your fair hair.’

‘It’s one of Jerry’s favourites,’ Lara admitted. ‘I thought there might be an occasion to wear it and the others at campaign dinners and so on.’

‘Wear the black tonight,’ Mrs Fraser urged. ‘When Peg sees you in that ...’

Lara wasn’t sure she was comfortable about being used as a carrot before Peg’s balky eyes, but this was Jerry’s mother and it was, after all, natural for a mother to want her daughter to look prettily feminine on occasion.

She had been delighted with the charming bedroom her hostess led her into, with its blue floral spreads on twin beds, long dressing table with mirror and a full-length mirror at one side, dark blue thick carpeting from wall to wall, and a huge picture window overlooking the gardens and lake. Best of all was the small private bathroom tucked away in one corner and also decorated in blue, her favourite colour.

‘I’m sure the smaller room would have been just fine,’ she murmured, ‘but this is beautiful.’

Mrs Fraser dismissed her reference to the small room by saying: ‘Nonsense, my dear, I wanted you to have this one. You have a fine view of the lake and everything from here, and complete privacy, of course.’ She smiled brightly. ‘We may have to ask you to share when Peg has her birthday barbecue at the beginning of September. It’s her twenty-first, so I guess everybody in the area will be coming.’ Her smile became arch. ‘And who knows, perhaps you and Jerry will have occasion to use this room as a bridal suite! ’

Lara blushed, her eyes reflecting the embarrassment she felt. ‘I—there’s a lot of work ahead of us in the campaign, Mrs Fraser. We won’t have time to think of other things.’

‘Ah, that’s what you young folks always say, but I’ve never known any of you not to find the time for that! ’ Mrs Fraser turned to the door. ‘We usually have drinks in the living room before supper. We’re running a little late tonight, so you’ll find us in there around seven-thirty. And please, Larraine. call me Beth, everyone else does except Jerry and Peg.’

Lara thanked her and when the older woman had gone she wandered over to stare at the magnificent view of water and trees and hills, narrowing her eyes against the orange-red glow of the sun, which rested on top of the distant mountains.

She knew instinctively that she would love her stay in this lovely ranch house set in the midst of such beautiful scenery, but a nagging doubt tugged at her mind. The house itself obviously belonged to Jerry’s older brother, although it was shared as a family home. If Matt was as unsociable as Jerry had said, he could make life here uncomfortable by showing resentment at her presence on the ranch. But then Jerry would never have brought her here if he’d thought that was so.

Relieved, she took the long-awaited shower in the blue bathroom, finding thick and thirsty towels of dark blue solid and lighter blue floral on the rails. She had washed the dust collected on the last part of their trip from her hair, too, and it was almost dry when she sat down before the dressing table mirror to apply her make-up. Her fair skin needed very little cosmetic help apart from a stroke or two of blue eyeshadow and a covering of pale rose lipstick on her curved mouth.

A few flicks of her wrists and quick smoothing with her hands bound her hair into a shining silvery roll at the back of her head and she secured it with a few strategically placed hairpins. Last of all came the black calf-length dress, intended for light summer evenings such as this. It barely touched her shoulders with bare cap sleeves, and she filled part of the expanse of white skin with a heavy silver medallion necklace.

It was almost seven-thirty when she snapped off the bedroom lights and set off down the short corridor lined with other doors to the roomy upper hall. She hesitated, but heard only the sound of voices from the living room below and concluded that Jerry had already gone down.

She had placed one black high-heeled sandal on the top stair, her hand lightly on the banister, when the front screen door opened suddenly, almost violently, and closed with a decisive bang behind the shadowy figure of a man— a man who seemed enormous in the dimmer light of the lower hall. Lara had a quicksilver impression of impossibly broad shoulders and chest tapering to narrow-hipped leanness and powerful, long legs in faded blue denim. Then as he turned his head sharply to look into the living room without breaking his long stride, which brought with it the hollow sound of heeled boots on the black and white tiled floor, his profile was etched momentarily against the far wall. She saw the spring of vital jet black hair over his deep forehead, a nose that was high-bridged and arrogant, a well-cut mouth held in a firm line, a chin showing determinedly through a day’s shadow of dark bristles.

He passed the living room and was just beyond the staircase when an instinct seemed to tell him to look upwards to Lara’s frozen figure, her eyes widely blue as they gazed down at him. He had halted abruptly as his head jerked upwards, and stunned disbelief now took the place of mild surprise in his dark eyes as they travelled slowly over her white shoulders and elegant black dress to her slim ankles and sandalled feet.

She knew that this was Matt Fraser, whose family seemed to hold him in some kind of awe. Her own heart was beating uncomfortably fast under his leisurely appraisal, and it was with relief that she heard Jerry’s voice in the hall behind her, his arm sliding round her waist to pull her close to him.

‘Lara darling, you look wonderful,’ he said, kissing her cheek lightly. ‘But then you always ‑’ He stopped when his eyes followed Lara’s to the foot of the stairs, his arm tightening on her waist as he called: ‘Matt! I didn’t know you were back.’ His arm urged Lara down the red carpet, and her legs seemed strangely unwilling to carry her to Jerry’s half-brother. His height was intimidating for one thing, she thought as she stood before him and bent her neck backward slightly in order to look into his face, and for another he seemed to dwarf even Jerry, who had always appeared tall to her.

While the two men shook hands and talked about the drive from the city, Lara studied the rancher’s oddly hawklike features. His eyes were as black as his hair, deep-set and piercing, his skin deeply tanned under a layer of dust powdering his face except for the upper forehead which had been protected by the broad-brimmed hat he carried in his hand. It, too, was covered by the fine grey dust, as were his faded denim shirt and jeans. Not a conventionally handsome man, she decided, but one who could command by sheer physical size alone. In contrast to his brother’s whipcord lean but muscled frame, Jerry’s seemed sleek and somewhat too well fed in city style.

She was aware suddenly that the black eyes were looking down into hers and that Matt was saying in a pleasant midtone: ‘Welcome to the Fraser Ranch, Lara. I hope you’ll enjoy your visit with us.’

‘Thank you—thank you very much,’ she stammered, feeling gauche for the first time since her teenage. ‘I hope it’s not too much of an imposition having me thrust on you like this.’

One black brow arched upwards with his smile, which revealed strong teeth markedly white against the brown of his skin. ‘It’s no imposition for me—quite ,the contrary, in fact, but ...’ his gaze flickered over her white shoulders and came back to the almond shape of her eyes, ‘... you might find us a little rough and primitive after the kind of living you’re used to.’

‘Oh, I’m sure I won’t,’ she said quickly. ‘In fact, I’m amazed at how ‑’ She stopped, searching for a word which he seemed to take amused pleasure in supplying.

‘Civilised?’ He threw back his head and laughed. ‘I’d bet my bottom dollar you expected Indians to send smoke signal warnings of your arrival! ’

‘Of course I didn’t,’ she defended herself warmly, then looked directly into his eyes. ‘There aren’t any around here, are there?’

‘Any what?’ He was more serious now, but a twinkle still lurked at the back of his eyes.

‘Indians.’

‘I have a few very fine horsemen who happen to be Indians, yes,’ he said, his eyes faintly watchful as they met hers. ‘Their ancestors knew this country long before white men set foot on it.’ He glanced at the big watch strapped to his wrist. ‘If you’ll excuse me now, I’ll go and take a stab at transforming myself into a civilised being.’ With an ironic tip of his fingers to his forehead he turned and, to Lara’s surprise, went to the back of the hall instead of to the bedroom floor above.

‘Come on, Lara, let’s have a drink before dinner. And I want you to meet Vern Asher,’ said Jerry as he pulled her by the arm towards the living room. ‘He’s Matt’s right-hand man, and a great guy ... a widower, and he has a boy …'

CHAPTER TWO

‘You’re a real sight for sore eyes. Jerry’s a lucky man.’ Vern Asher, a tall but stockily built man of about thirty-three, had looked Lara over with masculine approval when she entered the room with Jerry. Vern’s hair was dark blond, his eyes an intense blue and brows bleached almost white by the sun.

‘You’d better believe it,’ Jerry said as he came back with drinks for himself and Lara. ‘So hands off, Vern! Go find your own girl.’

‘I’ll do that one of these days,’ said Vern with a grin, and moved over to sit beside Peg on the big sofa set along the wall between two windows. ‘Maybe Peg’ll have me— what do you think, Peg?’

Lara glanced at them together on the sofa, then looked back quickly again at Peg’s blushing face. ‘Peg’s in love with him,’ she thought with the shock of discovery. ‘And he’s acting as if she’s a little girl incapable of feelings like that.’

Her suspicions were more than confirmed when Peg, her heart in her eyes, looked up to his teasing face. ‘I’ll have to think about that, Vera,’ she told him with a light, forced laugh.

Beth Fraser bustled into the room and exclaimed: ‘Why, Larraine, you look positively lovely! Don’t you think so, Peg? I wish you’d worn your yellow dress tonight, you look so pretty in that.'

‘I have to check on the calves later, Mother, and I don’t think they'd appreciate the yellow,’ Peg said dryly, then smiled at Lara. ‘But Lara does look beautiful.’

Lara wrinkled her nose. ‘I doubt whether the calves would appreciate my black any more than your yellow, especially when they found out I couldn’t do a thing for them! ’

She sensed a presence behind her when the eyes of Peg and Vern went to the doorway and she turned to see Matt, freshly shaved and showered, standing there with his hand firmly on the shoulder of a young fair-haired boy of about ten.

‘This boy of yours is going to have square eyes, Vern, if he sits in front of that television set much longer.’ Matt looked down at the young face upturned to his, his eyes kindly but showing distinct authority in the way he propelled the boy towards the sideboard. ‘Go pour yourself some lemonade, Billy, then come and be sociable.’

‘Oh, Matt! ’ the boy protested indignantly, twisting his neck to look up at the towering rancher while his reluctant feet led him to the sideboard. ‘The sheriff was just about to ..

‘Never mind what the sheriff was about to do, young man,’ Matt told him sharply with a wave of his hand. Neither Vern nor Billy appeared to resent or be surprised by this high-handed show of authority, and Lara looked speculatively at Matt’s commanding figure as he followed the boy to the sideboard. His hair was still damp from the shower, though it was already beginning to wave over the crown, and he had changed into a long-sleeved shirt of pale yellow which contrasted vividly with the weathered darkness of his skin. His slacks were well tailored over the lean hips and long legs, and he had exchanged the tooled leather boots for brown casual shoes.

Vern rose when his son came over with a tall glass of lemonade in his hand, and introduced him to Lara. She smiled spontaneously into the chubby, fair-skinned face and Billy said: ‘Ho—you’re pretty. Are you and Jerry going to get married?’

‘Mind your manners, son. It’s not polite to ask questions like that of anyone.’ Vern was visibly annoyed and Lara hastened to reassure him.

‘It’s all right, Vern, really. Children should be able to ask any question they have/

Jerry came over to slip a possessive arm round her waist. ‘Even I don’t know the answer to that one Billy. Lara’s the old-fashioned kind of girl who wants to be very sure before she tells me yes.’

‘Wise girl,’ Matt commented as he sauntered across the room, a stiff shot of whisky over ice in his long-fingered hand. ‘Can’t be too careful.’

Lara looked quickly up to his dark eyes and found them inscrutably bland. Was he wishing that he himself had been more careful before choosing as a marriage partner a girl who loved him so little another man’s charms had lured her away?

Jerry’s arm slid away from her waist and he moved a short distance away to talk to Vern, leaving Matt and Lara facing each other. He seemed absorbed in the pattern the ice made in his whisky, and she searched her mind frantically for something to say to this man whom she found oddly unsettling.

‘You—you’ve been having a problem with your cattle today?’ she asked at last, blushing at the sound of her own schoolgirlish voice.

One black eyebrow shot up and there was a hint of malice in the dark glitter of his eyes as he looked down at her. ‘Trouble with the cattle?’ he repeated slowly. ‘Do you know anything at all about ranching?’

‘I—no—I don’t.’ Her natural coolness came back to her then and she looked at him with steady blue eyes. ‘But I wasn’t trying to diagnose the trouble for you, I was just making polite conversation.’

‘Oh, yes,’ he said. ‘Beth tells me your father is George Stevens, so I guess you’re pretty good at that.’

‘I hope I’m civilised!’ she said sharply, only a slight quiver at the corner of her left eye betraying the spurt of anger she felt at his boorishness.

‘Ah, there we go on the “civilised” bit again,’ he said softly. ‘You set a lot of store by that, don’t you?’

‘Most people appreciate good manners,’ she snapped, her eyes beginning to flash icily.

He seemed amused by her irritation. ‘But you wouldn’t expect to find civilised manners in a backwoods rancher, would you?’

Fortunately, Billy saved her from replying by tugging at her arm and saying: ‘Do you live in Vancouver, Lara? I go to school there.’

‘Do you, Billy?’ She turned gladly away from Matt Fraser’s sardonic smile to talk to Billy about Vancouver and thought no more about him until Beth came in again, her flushed face suggesting she had been in the kitchen.

‘Well now,’ she announced breathlessly, ‘I think we can make a move towards the—oh, Matt! You’re not going to smoke that now, are you?’ The last words were uttered in a despairing wail, and all eyes went to Matt as he leaned negligently against one of the window frames rolling a cigarette. ‘Supper’s been held up already because you were late getting back. Carrie will threaten to walk out again.’

Matt stood up straight in a leisurely fashion and tucked the cigarette into the breast pocket of his shirt. ‘Carrie’s been threatening that for thirty years that I know of, Beth,’ he commented dryly, but he finished his drink in one gulp and followed the others to the door.

‘Can I show Lara where she’s to sit?’ Billy asked, taking her hand without waiting for a reply from anyone.

‘You seem to have made another conquest tonight, Miss Stevens,’ Matt murmured from behind her and, choosing to misunderstand him, she turned to flash him a brilliant smile.

‘Why, thank you, Mr Fraser. I’d no idea you would succumb so quickly.’

Her instant reward was in hearing the swift intake of his breath and the lowering of black eyebrows into a scowl of displeasure.

Matt Fraser had evidently decided to treat her as a rarified city plant, but he would find that she was not to be dominated by him as easily as his family and employees were.

Lara was hungry suddenly when she took her place beside Beth Fraser, who presided at one end of the long table opposite Matt at the other. Jerry was at his mother’s right, and teased Billy with pretended indignation about his sitting next to Lara.

The table was covered with hearty serving bowls of steaming, colourful vegetables as well as crisp green salads and a variety of pickles in smaller dishes. At the far end of the table Matt, flanked by Peg and Vern, concentrated on the carving of an enormous roast of beef, allotting generous slices of the succulent meat to each plate.

Lara discovered that her own appetite was exceeded only slightly by those of the ones who worked outdoors all day, and much of Beth’s incessant chatter floated over her head. Cassie, the grizzle-haired and irascible-looking housekeeper, obviously knew what was necessary to keep a ranch family well fed, and would have done credit to the best of city restaurants. A rich bodied red wine complemented the meal, and Lara was amazed anew by the sophistication where she had expected crudeness.

‘Matt, can’t you talk about those things later?’ Beth raised her voice to be heard at the other end of the table where Matt was discoursing to an interested Vern and an avid Peg about the advantages of a new vaccine he had read about which might help the disease bothering a few of the cattle. ‘It’s really not fit talk for the dinner table.’ Lara wished the older woman had said nothing, for now Matt’s eyes were bent on her. ‘Sorry, Beth. What do civilised people talk about at mealtime, Lara? The high cost of living, the latest stockmarket reports?’

‘I think Larraine could tell us something about herself. It must have been an interesting life, with your father being in politics and all those wonderful parties. Your mother must have loved it too, hmm?’ Beth leaned forward eagerly to hear something other than the constant talk of ranch matters, which bored her to distraction.

Lara seemed lost in thought as she stared at the dessert fork she turned over and over on the white cloth. ‘I don’t think she did,’ she said almost to herself. ‘Love the political life, I mean,’ she explained then to Beth, who was beginning to look disappointed, having expected a recounting of social affairs attended by prominent people.

‘Oh, come on now, Lara,’ Jerry put in. ‘Your mother’s one of the most contented women I know—she’s always the perfect hostess whether it’s a dinner for four or a big bash for two hundred.’

‘That just goes to show what a great person she is,’ Lara returned hotly. ‘She went along with my father because that’s what he wanted to do. But I think if she’d had her choice she would have settled in the country and had a brood of children.’

‘Yet she had only one?’

The question, articulated quietly, seemed to reverberate round the room. There was an odd look about Matt’s eyes as he waited for an answer and Lara blushed faintly.

‘Yes, she had only one—me,’ she said softly. ‘She didn’t think it would be fair to haul children around the country, and the only other alternative would have been to stay at home with the children while my father travelled alone.’ She looked up into Matt’s eyes. ‘After all, what’s the point of marrying someone to be with them, then spending half your lives apart?’

‘So were you hauled around the country with them?’ Matt asked quietly, a look that might have been compassion crossing the darkness of his eyes.

‘Not too much,’ she admitted. ‘Mother divided her time pretty equally between Ottawa and Vancouver—but I was always well taken care of by Anna, our housekeeper,’ she added defensively.

The conversation had dredged up long buried memories of searing loneliness while she marked off the days on a calendar until her mother’s return from the excitement of the capital. Somewhere deep inside her lurked a resentment that her mother had chosen to follow the husband she adored rather than stay with the child who needed her so desperately, a child without even a brother or sister to console her loneliness and make it bearable. She had learned then to control her emotions, pushing the hurtful ones deep inside to form an impregnable, frozen barrier between herself and the inevitable disappointments of life until she had emerged as a coolly controlled person, in command of every reaction. Tears were unknown to her, and she told herself she had cried all the tears of a lifetime in her childhood.

When dessert had been disposed of Beth announced that coffee would be served in the living room so that Carrie could clear away the dishes.

‘Can I help with the dishes?’ Lara offered. ‘It would be the least I could do after such a delicious meal.’

‘Oh no, my dear,’ Beth fluttered, ‘Carrie doesn’t like anyone in her kitchen—and she has a dishwasher, though I suspect she doesn’t use it half the time.’

‘I'll take my coffee into the office with me,’ said Matt as he rose. ‘I have some work to clear away.’ To Jerry, he added: ‘You can use the office for your stuff if you want to. I’ll only use it on the occasional evening, so we shouldn’t get in each other’s hair too much.’

Jerry thanked him in a perfunctory way, and Lara sensed again the faint animosity between the brothers. Was Matt still holding a grudge against Jerry because he had chosen not to follow the life of ranching? The two men walked to the door together, and Lara could not help but compare them as she followed them to the hall. Jerry’s neck had the faintly pink, fleshy look that good living brought, while Matt’s was a powerful column of steel rising from broad muscled shoulders to end in a shock of black hair curling slightly at the ends over the tanned skin of his neck.

Her eyes followed Matt as he went with deceptively lazy stride to the rear of the hall. Deceptive because Lara sensed that if the occasion demanded, Matt Fraser would move with rapier swiftness to his goal.

Billy continued by her side while they sat in the living room drinking the strongly brewed coffee. Beth and Peg listened attentively to Jerry’s conversation about his political campaign, while Vern disappeared in the direction Matt had taken, saying he had a few things to discuss with Matt.

Lara learned that although Billy and Vern had their own bungalow on the ranch, they were often invited to the main house for meals.

‘Dad’s a horrible cook,’ Billy admitted with innocent candour. ‘That’s one reason I wish he’d –'

‘He’d what, Billy?’ Lara asked, amused.

‘Well, that he’d get married again. Mom’s been dead for four years now, and it’s time he had another wife,’ he went on with all seriousness. Then his face split into a grin. ‘Besides, if I had a new mother, I wouldn’t have to go back to that school in Vancouver.’

‘Don’t you like the school, Billy? It’s supposed to be a very good one.’

He shrugged! ‘I guess it’s all right, but I’d rather go to school with the rest of the ranch kids right here in the Cariboo. They’re all away on vacation now, and they won’t be back for nearly a month, after the cattle camp.’

‘Cattle camp?’ Lara asked with a frown. ‘What’s that?’

‘You mean you’ve never heard of a cattle camp?’ Billy looked at her in disbelief with wide blue eyes and then when she shook her head, proceeded to tell her in detail what a camp was all about. ‘Everybody goes up to the cabin at the summer pastures,’ he explained, ‘and we round up the new calves and their mothers so they can brand the calves and give them shots. It’s fun, Lara, and maybe you can come this time. We sleep round the campfire, except when it rains and we have to sleep in the bunkhouse, and we sing songs at night and—everything.’ At a loss for words describe the bliss of camp life, Billy contented himself by smiling happily up into her face.

‘It all sounds very exciting, Billy,’ she told him with a quick hug and smile, ‘but I’m going to be awfully busy helping Jerry with his campaign. That’s what I came here for.’ She stopped herself from adding that Matt would, in all likelihood, look with a jaundiced eye on her own participation in a cattle camp organised by himself.

‘Dad says Jerry wants people to vote for him when the election comes around, but how does he do that?’ Billy asked.

‘Well, he has to go around and see as many of the people in the area as possible,’ Lara said patiently. ‘And he has to attend meetings and give talks about what he believes is best for everyone who lives here.’

Vern came quickly into the room then and said to Billy: ‘Come on, son. Time you were in bed.’

‘Oh, Dad, Lara was just telling me ‑’

Vern looked stern. ‘Never mind that now, son. Lara will be here for quite a while, and you’ll see her again. Goodnight, Beth, goodnight, Peg—Lara. See you around, Jerry.’ Lara felt her exhaustion from the long trip as soon as Vern and Billy had disappeared and she said to Beth: ‘If you don’t mind, I’ll go upstairs now.'

‘Of course, my dear.’ Beth was surprisingly solicitous, and rose from her chair to put an arm round Lara’s slim waist. ‘You must be tired after such a long day, and please don’t worry about rising early. Peg and Matt are always outside at first light, but I don’t come down myself until around nine. If you’d like something cooked for breakfast just ask Cassie, but otherwise there’s cereal and toast and coffee, of course, on the buffet.’

Jerry accompanied her to the bottom of the stairs. ‘Think you’ll like it here, honey?’ he asked, sliding his arms round her waist. ‘Everybody seems to like you.’

She smiled up at him. ‘And I like them, Jerry,’ she said, keeping to herself her qualms about Matt. No point would be served by making an issue of his older brother’s obvious antagonism. ‘Do we start work tomorrow?’

He grimaced. ‘You’re a real taskmaster, aren’t you, darling? Matt’s offered us the use of his office, and there’s a typewriter and so on.’

‘So I can carry on the secretarial duties for the future Minister?’ she teased.

‘I’d much rather you were carrying out the duties of my wife, Lara.’ Jerry looked seriously down at her, his warm brown eyes searching the cool blue depths of hers. Before she could move away, his mobile lips were claiming hers with an intensity she had never known before and she drew back instinctively.

‘Jerry—I—we’re here to do a job together, and get to know each other better in the process. Don’t let’s spoil it. Let’s play it cool for now.’

His eyes were baffled, hurt as they looked into hers. ‘Oh, yes, Lara,’ he said bitterly. ‘You’re very good at playing things cool, aren’t you?’

‘Jerry, I—’

‘Never mind,’ he said with a short laugh. ‘I won’t force you—for now.’

A movement from the rear shadows of the hall drew her eyes in that direction and to her mortification she heard Matt’s amused tones.

‘Am I interrupting a tender moment?’

Jerry was staring balefully at Lara while she looked with sudden loathing at the tall rancher, whose intensely black eyes held a look of gleeful mockery as he passed them.

‘Not at all,' Lara said frigidly. ‘I was about to go to bed. Goodnight. Goodnight, Jerry.’

As she ascended the stairs she was conscious of two pairs of eyes on her back, which stiffened when Matt’s amused words floated up after her.

‘Hard luck, Jerry! I’d have thought that cracking the Ice Maiden would be a simple matter for you.’

Her outraged gasp was lost in Jerry’s low outburst of anger.

‘Keep out of this, Matt, just leave me alone. Do I have to pay for ever because of Adrienne?’

Lara closed her bedroom door behind her and leaned against it for a moment with her eyes closed. Jerry was right, of course. Matt was so embittered by the defection of his almost-bride that he couldn’t bear to see another man, even his own brother, happy with the woman of his choice. Anger, diluted by a strange kind of pity, coursed through her as she crossed to the dressing table to remove her jewellery.

Matt, a man vulnerable in his pride, had been deeply hurt by the rejection he had suffered at the hands of the woman he loved, and even now after several years had gone by, he still felt bitter.

When she was ready for bed she switched off the bedside lamp and drew the curtains back, catching her breath softly when the night view of the lake unfolded before her. From behind the house, the moon cast silvery streaks across the water and bathed the lawns and trees in an ethereal halflight that was almost magical.

She left the curtains open and chose the bed nearest the window to sleep in so that the view would still be hers as she fell asleep.

Her drowsy mind went back over the events of the long day, but again and again Matt Fraser’s hawklike features rose up before her. His eyes, the darkest she had ever seen, had reflected so many moods—welcome, sarcasm, amusement, and even compassion of a kind for her own lonely childhood. Once or twice during the meal she had surprised a look that was hard to categorise—withdrawal, perhaps, or a pain so deep it was almost hidden behind the black eyes. Had her own coming to the ranch with Jerry evoked painful memories for him of the fiancée he had loved, perhaps still did?

Lara wondered idly what sort of person the elusive Adrienne had been. For all his faults of personality, Matt was physically attractive, with the lean dark look of animal magnetism that could easily overwhelm a girl. Had the runaway Adrienne found deeper character flaws in his personality which made the prospect of marrying him impossible? She decided sleepily that Matt Fraser’s affairs were none of hers, and fell asleep to dream of a superhuman man, dark and evilly smiling, pursuing a silvery blonde girl who was herself.

CHAPTER THREE

Lara woke early and lay listening to the sounds of the ranch awakening to the new day. The lusty crowing of a rooster seemed to be the signal for other animals to come slowly to life. The rich, deep lowing of cows mingled with subdued whinnies from the horses and the agitated cackle of hens.

Calves in their pen bawled hopefully in answer to the cows, and even the household was astir. Lara heard the crunch of feet on the gravel path beneath her window and hopped out of bed in time to see Matt’s tall figure angling across the lawn in the direction of the corrals. He was wearing a shirt of pale-coloured plaid and clean denim work pants thrust into the polished leather boots, and as he disappeared behind the trees he raised an arm to jam an off-white broadbrimmed hat on his black hair.

When he had gone, Lara raised her eyes to the further view, shrouded in light early morning mist over the lake. Like a spectre, a high-antlered deer came down to drink at the edge of the water, a female coming to join him when he had drunk his fill. Ducks skimmed in to land on the lake’s surface and upend their feathery tails while they searched below water for breakfast. Close to shore fish jumped to catch early flies and left ever widening circular ripples behind them.

The whole scene was tempting to Lara, used to the confining cement structures and small gardens of the city, and she longed to explore the undulating plains and hill country beyond the lake. She should have asked Matt if she could use one of his horses, perhaps one he’d be glad to have exercised, but the opportunity hadn’t presented itself last night.

Perhaps if she hurried she could still catch him before he rode off to wherever he went during the day. Hastily, she dressed in pale blue shirt and darker blue slacks, then tied her hair back in a ponytail, unaware that it made her look more girlish and less poised than normal.

She stole quietly on her soft-soled casual shoes to the stairs and down them, glancing over her shoulder as she crossed the hall and heard kitchen sounds from the rear. Carrie must be an early riser, she thought, and marvelled at the elderly woman’s capacity for long hours and hard work. The last of a dying breed, she told herself with a wry smile.

The front door already stood open to the cool, damp morning air and the grass was heavily covered with glistening dew as she followed Matt’s footsteps across the lawn and through the belt of trees.

The road skirting the lake led directly to the corrals and barns and Lara quickened her step to a trot when she saw Matt close and fasten a gate, then swiftly mount a magnificent bay horse and urge him gently with the reins in the opposite direction.

‘Matt!’

He turned in the saddle, surprise in his eyes giving way to the same kind of disbelief they had shown the night before when he saw her on the stairs.

‘Lara?’ His voice was momentarily uncertain and then as she drew alongside the horse his gaze sharpened. ‘Anything wrong at the house?’

‘No, no,’ she said breathlessly. ‘I’m sorry if I startled you. I wanted to catch you before you left to ask if there’s a horse I might use.’

He sat silently looking down at her for several seconds, one hand holding the reins loosely while the other rested lightly on the saddle horn. His face was sharply alert, only his eyes showing faint traces of deep sleep during the night.

‘Dan would have obliged you if you’d asked him,’ he said at last, indicating a white-haired old man who had just stepped from the stable. ‘You’re not thinking of going riding alone, are you?’

‘Well, I—yes, I thought I’d just go around the lake and ‑’

‘It’s not wise to ride alone out here, especially for a ‑’

She was sure he was about to add ‘a city greenhorn’ but instead finished with ‘—a girl. Why can’t Jerry go with you?’

‘Well, Jerry’s not—I mean, early morning isn’t his time, and it’s the part of the day I like best.’

‘Do you?’ He seemed surprised again, then gave a short laugh. ‘You’re right about Jerry—it was never easy getting him going in the morning.’

Vern and Billy walked along the road towards them, both faces breaking into smiles when they saw Lara.

‘You’re just the man I want to see, Billy,’ said Matt, looking down seriously at the delighted Billy. ‘Lara wants to go riding, but I’ve told her she needs somebody with her who knows the country. Do you want to take care of it for me?’

‘Sure, Matt. I won’t let her get in trouble. Which horse is she going to have?’ The boy’s fair-skinned face was as serious as Matt’s as he accepted responsibility for Lara’s welfare.

‘Tell Dan to saddle up Dainty, she’s pretty quiet. And don’t go too far.’ Matt turned to Vern. ‘I have to put a new shoe on Sam here. You can pick me up there when you’re ready.’ He tipped his fingers to his hat and said to Lara: ‘Have a good ride, but don’t take chances.’

Later, when she and Billy were picking their way round the lake, she on the well-mannered chestnut Dainty and Billy on his own white pony unimaginatively called Snow, Lara asked curiously: ‘Does Matt always worry so much about safety?’

Billy, leading the way through the thinning trees, glanced back at her. ‘I guess so, ’cause he’s responsible for everybody on the ranch. He told me that once when I said I wanted to have a big spread like his when 1 grow up. He said Td have to learn how to take care of everything all alone, and make all the de—de ‑’

‘Decisions?’ Lara prompted thoughtfully.

‘That’s it. He said it’s hard sometimes to know what’s best to do.’

‘Yes, I’m sure it is,’ Lara said softly to his back, and fell into deep thought. She hadn’t looked on this side of Matt’s authoritarian manner that brooked no argument from his family or hired men. The loneliness of command had come through poignantly in Billy’s reiteration of Matt’s words. Pity, the last emotion she would have expected to feel for the self-contained rancher, rushed over her. He had expected a wife to share that loneliness, but even that comfort had been denied him when she deserted him for another man.

She enjoyed the ride with Billy and walked back to the house with the light step of healthy vitality. No one was in the dining room when she went to pour herself some coffee from the percolator plugged in to keep warm on the buffet. It was unbelievable how hungry she was again, but she hesitated to bother Carrie, who was banging pans around in the kitchen next door. She had just popped two slices of bread into the toaster when the swing door opened and Carrie came in, jumping when she saw Lara.

‘Merciful heaven!’ she exclaimed in her gruff voice. ‘I didn’t know anybody was up yet.’

Lara smiled. ‘I’ve been out for a ride with Billy, so I thought I’d better make myself some toast.’

‘If you’ve been out riding this early you’ll need more than toast,’ the housekeeper said in a disgusted tone.

‘I am hungry,’ Lara admitted. ‘It must be the fresh air here, and I’ll have to watch it or I’ll get fat as a pig.’

Carrie’s eyes went over her slim figure, long legged in the close fitting slacks and grunted: ‘Not you, you’re not the kind to put fat on. Wish I could say the same for me. I’ll cook you up a nice breakfast while you drink your coffee.’

When she brought, in a remarkably short time, a huge plate covered with slices of fried ham, two eggs and even a small steak Lara protested.

‘Of course you can eat it,’ Carrie said in a voice which expected no contradiction. ‘It’s a pleasure to cook for somebody who enjoys it. Matt’s the only one in this house who eats a good breakfast however early he has to be away.’ She refilled Lara’s coffee cup before going back to her kitchen.

Beth came in just as Lara was finishing and was surprised too, to learn that Lara had arisen so early and been for a ride before breakfast. As she helped herself to orange juice, cereal and coffee from the buffet, Jerry wandered in wearing a red striped robe over his pyjamas, yawning widely as he slumped into the chair opposite Lara’s.

‘You look disgustingly fresh and full of Cariboo air, honey,’ he said to Lara.

‘So she should,’ his mother told him, coming to place a cup of black coffee at his elbow. ‘Larraine’s been out riding already.’

‘Good God!’ He stared owlishly across the table, then took a quick drink of his coffee. ‘Alone?’

‘No, Matt didn’t want me to go on my own, so Billy came with me.’

He yawned again. ‘You should have given me a shout, honey, though I have to admit I prefer afternoon rides myself.’

‘Well,’ Lara said crisply, rising and ignoring his last remarks, ‘I’ll go upstairs and get ready for work while you’re having breakfast.’

Jerry winced. ‘Oh, darling, don’t be such an eager beaver! We’ve all the time in the world to get started to work.’

‘The election takes place exactly six weeks from yesterday, Jerry. There’s an awful lot of work to do between now and then.’

‘I know, honey, I know. And I promise I’ll buckle down to it as soon as I’ve had some breakfast.’

She left mother and son to their meal and went upstairs to shower and change into a cotton dress. The day promised to be hot again, and she chose a dress that had the advantage of a low boat-shaped neck and no sleeves. Lastly, she made her bed and tidied the room and bathroom, knowing Carrie had more than her hands full with the general housekeeping and cooking for the family.

When she went back to the dining room it was to find Jerry still in his robe, reading the weekly newspaper while Beth chattered beside him.

‘Jerry, if you’ll show me where the office is, maybe I can get started on mapping out the campaign,’ she said impatiently. ‘Do we have the constituency lists and a map of the area we have to cover?’

‘I put them in there last night,’ Jerry said almost sulkily, sighing as he got to his feet. ‘Come on, then, I’ll show you where it is and you can get started while I dress.’

‘You must come out later, Larraine, and see my flowers,’ Beth called after them. ‘I work out there most mornings while it’s cool.’

‘I’d love to, Beth,’ Lara said, surprised to learn that Jerry’s loquacious mother was responsible for the colour-splashed beauty surrounding the house. ‘Maybe when we have a coffee break.’

Jerry led her to the back of the hall and along a wide passage with doors on one side. The other, she presumed, was the side wall of the living room at the front of the house. The first door they passed was open and Lara’s eyes were automatically drawn to the interior where an unmade large-sized bed dominated the room. With a vague sense of shock, she realised that this must be Matt’s bedroom and averted her eyes quickly from the tossed covers, feeling she invaded his privacy by seeing the evidence of a restless sleeper.

The office was a pleasant wood-panelled room; part office with broad dark desk, filing cabinet and wall safe, part sitting room with a cosy arrangement of comfortable chairs and sofa near a closed door which obviously led again to Matt’s bedroom.

Jerry spread out their papers on the neatly cleared desk, discarding the map he had brought. ‘This one is much more detailed,’ he told Lara, turning to a large wall map behind the desk. ‘You can mark out on that how many ranches and homesteads we can cover in any one day.’

‘But Matt may not appreciate my messing up his office map,’ she objected, only to have her protest waved aside by a casual gesture of Jerry’s hand.

‘We’ll buy him another when we’ve finished with this one,’ he said absently as he bent his head over the lists on the desk. ‘Look, honey, will you sort out the people for each day’s visits on separate pieces of paper? And leave spaces between the names for me to add any information I need to know about the people—Matt knows just about everybody in the area, so he should be helpful.’

It seemed not to occur to Jerry that Matt might not want to help with his campaign, and was another instance, she thought wryly, of the way his family took for granted that Matt would provide for their needs in any way required.

When Jerry had gone to get dressed she rescued the discarded map from the wastebasket, deciding to use Matt’s only for reference purposes. Soon she was so absorbed in her work that the sounds of Carrie’s bedmaking and tidying in Matt’s bedroom a little later barely registered on her mind. She brought over the large typewriter on a stand against the far wall and by the time Jerry came back, shaved and showered and dressed casually in fawn opennecked shirt over brown slacks, she was a good quarter of the way through the list.

They worked steadily for half an hour and then Jerry threw down his pen and said: ‘Let’s have some coffee on the porch, Lara. Mother’s anxious to show you her garden, anyway.’

Somehow, by the time Beth had shown her the blazing zinnias, tumbling petunias and roses massed in separate colours it was time for lunch. Billy joined them for the meal, coming along with Peg, who had been keeping him busy with chores around the corrals all morning.

‘Boy, it’s hot!’ he sighed when the meal was over. ‘Anybody want to come for a swim?’

‘Now, Billy,’ Beth said nervously, ‘you know you should wait at least an hour after a meal.’

To Lara’s surprise, Jerry said: ‘Wait the hour, Billy, and I’ll come with you. I could do with a cooler and a touch of sun to take the city paleness away.’ He turned to Lara. ‘How about you, honey? You could do with some tan, too.’

‘I never tan, Jerry,’ she said with a little laugh. ‘I can lie in the sun for hours and still be as pale as I was at the beginning. Maybe I’ll join you later for a swim, though. I want to get a little more work done first.’

Jerry came back with her to the office and when the hour was up said: ‘Sure you won’t come for a swim, honey? The work will wait for a while.’

‘No, I’ll carry on for now, Jerry. There’s really not much you can do right now, so go ahead. I’ll join you later.’

After a few halfhearted protests he went, and Lara was immediately immersed in her work again. Time passed quickly and she knew only that it was late afternoon when she looked up to see Matt standing in his bedroom doorway. His clothes, brightly clean that morning, were again covered with the light grey dust of parched earth, his eyes tired looking in his drawn face.

‘Still working?’ he asked quietly. ‘I thought you’d be down at the lake with the others.’

‘No, I—there was some work I wan ted. to finish.’ Why was she so tongue-tied in the presence of Jerry’s older brother? Something about him made her feel gauche and uncomfortable, like a young girl exposed to the company of adult men for the first time. She glanced hurriedly at her watch. ‘Oh, my, Jerry will be wondering where I’ve got to. I said I’d go down for a swim, and I forgot the time.’

If he thought it odd that Jerry should be enjoying a swim while she worked the only indication of it was a slight lifting of a black eyebrow. ‘I’m going down there myself— if you can be changed in five minutes you can come along with me.’ He turned away, not waiting for her answer, and closed the door firmly behind him.

In a dreamlike state Lara pushed the papers she had been working on together into a neat pile and rolled the typewriter back to the far wall. She was half way up the staircase when she stopped abruptly. It was as if she had been hypnotised into the following his lead as everyone around him seemed to do. He had said something, and she had obeyed blindly because it was Matt who said it in his quietly commanding way. Perversity made her linger over the change into an azure blue floral swimsuit with matching short jacket, but she found him waiting at the screen door in black swim trunks, a towel slung round his neck.

His eyes went quickly over her outfit and down to the long slenderness of her shapely legs and feet encased in blue beach sandals, but his face was expressionless as he leaned past her to open the door and gestured to her to go before him. The towel round his neck did little to hide his bronzed torso, and she turned her eyes away from the curling short black hairs on his broad chest. Something about his uncompromising masculinity disturbed her. She sensed a quality in him that was strange and almost frightening; a barely leashed primitive driving force that would allow nothing to stand in his way if he wanted something.

She shivered when he took her elbow to guide her across the lawn to the dirt road and then to a cut-off between the trees that led to a small crescent of golden beach and the sounds of shrieking laughter from the water. The vague discomfort she had felt with Matt’s long fingers on her arm dissolved when she saw Vern and Jerry ducking a screaming Peg close to a good sized raft a hundred feet out.

‘Oh, I just can’t wait to feel that water on me,’ she said, looking up at Matt, eagerness lighting her blue eyes to bright sparkles.

‘Just a word of warning,’ he said, putting out a hand to touch her arm and hold her back when she had thrown down her jacket and shucked off the sandals. ‘The lake gets pretty deep about halfway to the raft—are you a strong swimmer?’

There was irritation in the swift look she cast behind her to his serious face. ‘As strong as I’ve ever needed to be,’ she said tartly. ‘I’m not quite as helpless as you seem to think, Matt! We have ocean beaches in Vancouver, and I’ve been swimming in them all my life.’

He shrugged and dropped his hand. ‘Fine,’ he said, but she noticed that he stayed just behind and to her right as she stroked towards the raft. As if I was an incompetent child, she fumed inwardly, then gave herself up to the cool caress of soothingly soft water on her body.

Billy had hauled himself on to the raft 'and put down a small hand to help her up and she lay beside him on her back, her breath coming in deep gasps. Matt came to join them and lay on his stomach, water beading his dark lashes and slicking his hair back from his brow. Lara was conscious again, of her own whiteness against the dusky tan of his skin and wished for the millionth time that she could tan like other people. However much she stewed in the sun, her complexion retained its wild rose clarity, and she had always envied the friends of her childhood whose brown skins became browner as summer went on.

Her thoughts were interrupted by a sudden tugging at her ankles and she shrieked: ‘Jerry!' as he pulled her off the raft into the water. She forgot everything else in the ensuing fun, aware vaguely that although Matt joined in there was still an aloofness that set him apart.

Yet he seemed to come into his own that night at dinner when Jerry asked for information about some of the constituents he would be calling on.

‘We can spend some time in the office later and I’ll tell you anything I know,’ he told Jerry. ‘But you should be warned that the other fellow stands a good chance of winning this election.’

‘Nice to have your faith,’ Jerry retorted sarcastically.

Matt shrugged. ‘It’s better to know what opposition you’re facing. This Roberts is a rancher himself, and he knows all the problems this area has.’ He paused, then went on quietly: ‘Tom Rostack is his biggest backer.'

‘Adrienne’s father?’ Jerry ejaculated, his jaw dropping as he looked along the table to Matt’s inscrutable eyes.

‘The same,’ Matt agreed dryly. ‘He’s been having trouble with his sawmills lately, and I guess he thinks Roberts will do something to help him if he gets into power.'

‘Well, I have Henry Farrer heading my campaign committee,' Jerry said confidently. ‘He’s well known around here too, with his hotel and stores in town.'

With an air of wanting to change the subject, Beth intervened: ‘I suppose you’ll be calling at the Mallory place, Jerry—you’ll find big changes there.'

‘Oh yes, I heard old James Mallory had died,' said Jerry, diverted immediately. ‘Is Kent still managing the place, or are there new owners now?'

Beth, delighted to be the imparter of unheard gossip, launched into a recital of how Kent Forrest, the ranch manager, had been left half-shares in the ranch with old James Mallory’s niece in England. ‘It was such a surprise,’ she went on avidly, ‘because nobody knew he had any relatives, and then suddenly this red-haired English girl comes along and that’s that. It was so romantic, Jerry,’ she sighed, ‘they fell in love right away and got married not long after.’

‘A convenient marriage for Kent,’ Jerry said dryly, helping himself to more carrots. ‘It must be very easy to fall in love with the other half of the ranch if you hold the first half!’

Matt’s voice came like a whiplash down the table. ‘That’s not the way it was at all,’ he said, his voice harsh. ‘I know Kent Forrest better than any other man around here, and it isn’t in him to make a “convenient” marriage, as you call it. It’s the same with Jessica.’

Peg laughed and broke the tension. ‘I bet that if Kent hadn’t snapped Jessica up, Matt would have.’ She looked at her older brother teasingly. ‘Don’t scowl like that, Matt —you know you always rave about Jessica.’

Lara looked at Matt with new eyes. If Peg was right, then he hadn’t become impervious to the charms of other women when his fiancée left him flat. Her mind flitted back to that afternoon, when she herself had felt so strongly his male attractiveness, and she knew that other women must find the bachelor rancher irresistible in ways other than his holding of half a million acres.

CHAPTER FOUR

When they started work on the campaign in earnest Lara saw little of Matt and the rest of the family and almost too much of Jerry.

The Fraser name was well known in the Cariboo, though Lara noticed that it was Matt who was most frequently asked after. She was surprised, too, by the number of people who intended to help Peg celebrate her twenty-first birthday.

‘How’s Matt these days?’ was the typical greeting from ranchers, followed closely by: ‘Haven’t seen much of him lately, but guess we will at Peg’s barbecue.’

It seemed everyone in the Cariboo had been invited, and a* natural friendliness prevailed everywhere they went. Shy wives of younger men were just as eager as established ranch women to welcome Jerry and Lara into their homes and ply them with coffee and homebaked goods.

Somehow Jerry managed to create the impression that he and Lara were on the verge of marriage, and this seemed to sit well with the more conservative ranch people, especially when they discovered that her father was a successful politician in the city.

‘This is Larraine Stevens—at least, that’s her name at the moment!’ Jerry would say with a charming smile, his arm round Lara’s waist. ‘Her father is the M.P. George Stevens.’

His ploy of using not only herself but her father in his efforts to win confidence and therefore votes began to irritate Lara. One day, as they drove away from a particularly hard-to-win rancher and his unbending wife, her repressed feelings spilled over.

‘Honey,’ Jerry started as he manoeuvred the gold car back to the highway, ‘it might be best if you don’t mention that Fm not crazy about ranching. Some of these older people, like the Mathesons back there, don't take kindly to remarks like the one you made about my preferring city life to the wide open spaces.’

Lara’s eyes snapped open and she turned their sudden icy blueness on him. ‘But you do prefer the city, don’t you, Jerry?’

‘Of course I do, but ‑'

‘Then it won’t pay you to be dishonest with these people. They know without me telling them that you don’t care for cows and horses. They’ll think much more of you if you admit that freely, then stress your background here and your legal training ...’

An angry flush had spread over Jerry’s neck and face, and his foot descended sharply on the accelerator pedal when they at last reached the paved highway and turned on to it, heading for home.

‘For God’s sake, Lara, don’t try to tell me about the people around here! You’ve been in the district less than three weeks, and already you think you know everything about it.’

She gasped indignantly and a full minute passed before she recovered her coolness. Then, her voice quietly controlled, she said: ‘I think you’ll admit I know a fair amount about campaigning for political office, Jerry. After all, most of my adult life has been spent in campaigning for my father and running his constituency office.’

‘Yes, in an urban setting,’ he argued shortly, ‘which is a lot different from a sparsely populated back-country voting area.’ He glanced across at her. ‘Look, Lara, let’s not argue about something like this. We have to pull together on it—that’s what we came here for.’ He put a hand on her knee and she felt his fingers tighten on it. ‘That and getting to know each other better, which has been hard to do at home with so many people around at the times when we could be more—affectionate.’

He slowed the car suddenly and she looked round at him, startled, when he pulled over to a gravelled area beside the highway.

‘Jerry, what’s wrong? Why are you pulling off?’

He said nothing for a minute as his arms came round her to draw her unresisting body along the bench seat to his. ‘I can’t think why we haven’t taken advantage of the privacy available right here in the car,’ he murmured, and in the next instant his lips were hotly insistent on hers, his arms crushing her painfully to his chest. She was surprised into numbed acceptance for a moment, then when the kiss began to deepen still more she found her strength and wrenched violently away from him.

‘Don’t, Jerry,’ she said shakily; her hands going up to smooth into neatness the hair his arm had ruffled. ‘Somebody might drive by.’

Jerry jerked his body back behind the wheel but made no effort to start the engine. ‘Maybe Matt was right,’ he said, his mouth and eyes bitter. ‘I should take you by storm and make ‑’

‘You just did, and it wasn’t very successful,’ she told him dryly, then realised fully what he had said. ‘You mean you’ve discussed me—that way—with Matt?’ Anger struggled with shame in her darkened eyes.

‘I wouldn’t call it a discussion,’ he shrugged. ‘Matt gives his opinion whether it’s asked for or not.’

‘Oh, really, Jerry!’ she exclaimed. ‘You’re twenty-eight years old—surely you feel mature enough to stand up to your older brother now! You act as if you’re actually afraid of him sometimes, and with everyone treating him like a Chinese god who can do no wrong naturally he’s going to rule their lives for them. Why, even Vern lets him order Billy around as if he's the father, not Vern.’

Jerry seemed taken aback by her passionate outburst and it was a solely automatic movement when his hand went to the ignition and switched on the engine. Instead of moving off, however, he turned chastened eyes to her. ‘Matt’s always been the dominant one in our family—partly because he was older, but mostly because our father relied on him so much. They were very much alike. Matt was only twenty-one when Dad died, and he had everything to take care of suddenly, including the family. He just stepped in and did it. Somebody had to make the decisions, Lara, and I guess that’s why we don’t go against him much now.’

‘Oh, Jerry,’ she said, putting a contrite hand on his knee. ‘I’m sorry I sounded off about him, and I do understand why it was necessary way back then. I guess I just have a feeling that Matt doesn’t like me, that’s why I blew up when I heard that he’d given you his opinion of— of ‑’

‘Don’t worry, honey,’ said Jerry, his hand covering hers which still lay on his knee. ‘Matt and I didn’t discuss that. It was just a remark he made a couple of nights ago when you rushed upstairs to bed without giving me a chance to kiss you goodnight. And I think you’re just imagining he doesn’t like you. He’s never been much of a ladies’ man, and since ‑’

He broke off and left the sentence unfinished as he eased the car back on to the highway, but she knew he referred to Matt’s ex-fiancée.

She scarcely noticed the ruggedly beautiful country unfolding around them, the road dipping and curving between stands of spruce and aspen, giving way in places to the dried grass hills she was so used to now. The grass was tinder dry on the sloping inclines, and even the hardy pines seemed to droop for want of water.

Matt Fraser occupied her thoughts as they sped quietly home, It was true she felt an underlying antagonism in his attitude towards herself, though on the few occasions when he spoke directly to her, he was quietly polite. He had made no further comments on the ‘civilised’ theme, but she sensed when his black eyes rested on her that the light glint of mockery in them was for the city girl she was.

But already the life of the ranch had unfolded for her like the curl of rose petals under a noon sun, and she found herself looking forward with increased eagerness to each new day. The glorious sunrise and before-breakfast rides with Billy; the lake golden with late afternoon sun on days when she and Jerry got back in time for a swim before dinner; Carrie’s expert cooking; the tenderness of moonlight on the lake after dinner when the family gathered on the porch for coffee. Sometimes Matt joined them, talking quietly with Vern while the red stab of light from his cigarette described arcs in the semi-darkness.

And while she settled like a broody hen into ranch life, Jerry became more and more restless. He wanted and needed the bustle of city life around him in place of the drowsy loneliness of hot prairie, candlelit restaurants rather than the fireflies which flared briefly under a Cariboo sky.

On one of their morning rides Lara asked Billy where Matt hid the cattle. ‘We’ve ridden out in just about every direction and I haven’t seen hide nor hair of one cow,’ she said with a laugh.

‘The ones Dad and Matt have been working with lately are south of where we’ve ridden, Lara,’ he explained patiently. ‘But most of them are way up there at summer pasture in the hills.’ He pointed to where the hills began to rise sharply in the far distance.

‘Who takes care of them up there?’ she asked curiously. The terrain Billy had indicated looked even more untamed than their present surroundings.

‘Well, right now all the men are up there except Matt and Dad. They’ve been there for a while, rounding up the cattle and cutting out the calves for branding. We’re all going up to the cabin next week, Dad and Matt, and Peg and me.’ His round face looked up at her excitedly. ‘Say, Lara, why don’t you come up there with us? It’s lots of fun ... we sleep out round the campfire when it’s not raining, and ‑’

‘And what happens if it rains?’ she asked with a dry smile.

‘Oh, there’s a cabin and bunkhouse and everything there. Please come, Lara—I can show you where I pan for gold on the Fraser River,’ he added as extra inducement.

'Pan for ‑? Heavens above, Billy, I thought gold fever died out years ago! ’

‘I guess it did for big-time operators,’ he told her knowledgeably, ‘but I Just try for little nuggets on the gravel bars. I found thirty dollars’ worth last year when we went to camp.’

‘Well, I’m not sure I approve of you grubbing around in the gravel in the hopes of finding bits of gold, Billy, but I’ll ask Jerry what he thinks about us taking a few days off to go to the camp with you. I’d like to see what lies beyond those hills.’

But she had not had an opportunity to speak to Jerry about taking some days away from the campaign, and now was not the time, she decided after looking at his frowning face over the wheel. ‘I’ll wait till after dinner,' she told herself. ‘Maybe a few days off is what Jerry needs right now.'

The sun lay like an orange ball low in the sky when they at last pulled in beside the main house. As he followed Lara up the steps to the porch Jerry said: ‘Let’s go in and have a long cool drink. Coffee and tea are fine, but I need stronger sustenance at this time of day.’

‘Why don’t we sit out here and have them, Jerry? The colours are so lovely on the lake now. Look, there’s orange and red, gold and ‑’

He laughed shortly. ‘Sounds as if you’ve really fallen for this place, Lara, but don’t get too fond of it. As soon as the election’s over we’ll be heading back to the big lights, and it won’t be a minute too soon for me.’

He went inside to mix their drinks and Lara was lost in sighing contentment at her view of the vari-coloured lake when a movement beyond the trees caught her eye. She watched as Matt came across the lawn towards the house with his deceptively lazy stride. He climbed the steps and paused before coming across to where she sat, his boots sounding hollow on the wooden floor.

He came to stand only a few feet from her, and she was acutely aware of his figure towering over her, his dark skin reddish bronze where the descending sun’s rays touched it. The short sleeves of his beige-coloured shirt revealed arms that were long and leanly sinuous, his maleness accentuated by the short black hairs covering his forearms.

‘No swim today?’ he asked in his evenly polite voice, his dark eyes flicking down over the sleeveless pale lilac trouser suit she wore, then coming back to her eyes, holding there for so long that she looked uncomfortably away from him to the lake.

‘No, we—we just got back and Jerry needed a drink,' she stammered, annoyed at the gaucherie in her suddenly girlish voice whenever she spoke to him.

He took off his hat and perched lazily on the porch rail. ‘You look cool enough, anyway,’ he said casually, but the mocking appraisal in his eyes reminded her of the advice he had given Jerry—to take her by storm and force her into a loving response.

‘That’s more than I can say for you!’ she responded tartly, then gave a slight laugh. ‘I’m glad I’m not the one who has to do your laundry—it must be a full-time job.’

The line of his jaw hardened perceptibly. ‘I doubt if women like you ever think, when you’re enjoying steaks in fancy restaurants, that a rancher somewhere has dirtied his hands and clothes to bring that meat to your elegantly lit table,’ he said harshly, levering himself up from the rail when Jerry appeared with two tall glasses in his hands.

‘Hello, Matt. I thought I heard your voice—can I pour you a drink?’ Jerry asked as he handed one frosty glass to Lara.

‘No, thanks,’ Matt replied briefly, throwing a wintry smile in Lara’s direction. 'I'll have one later when I’ve made myself presentable for the ladies.’

Lara looked numbly after his tall figure as he strode decisively into the house. Mixed emotions struggled inside her for supremacy. On one hand, she knew that he was right—she had never given a thought to the work involved in the production of the steaks she enjoyed so much—but on the other, her resentment over his high-handed advice to Jerry was unabated.

At dinner that night Matt’s brow was like a thundercloud above the stark whiteness of his shirt. His scowl deepened when Billy, who was at the main house with Vern, asked him if Lara could come with them to the cattle camp.

‘A camp is rough, and dirty, and not the place for a lady,’ he snapped irritably, his black eyes lighting momentarily on Lara’s white skin above the boat shaped neck of her grey linen dress.

‘But Peg’s coming, and she’s a lady, isn’t she?’ Billy asked, round eyes looking trustingly up into Matt’s.

‘That’s different,’ Matt muttered darkly. ‘Peg’s used to rough conditions.’

‘I’d love for Lara to come!’ Peg exclaimed enthusiastically, turning to the fair girl who by now was staring in embarrassment at the white tablecloth. ‘Would you really like to come, Lara? I’m usually the only female there, and I’d appreciate your company.’

‘Well, I ‑’ Lara looked at Jerry, who seemed to be concentrating more on the food before him than the conversation flowing round the table. ‘Could we go to the cattle camp, Jerry?’

‘If you want to go, honey, it’s all right with me. But don’t expect me to come with you.’ Jerry’s smile was dry. ‘I had more than enough of camps when I was a youngster, but you go if it interests you.’

‘Oh no, I wouldn’t go without you,' Lara said quickly. ‘I just thought ‑'

‘No reason why you can’t go if you want to, honey,’ Jerry said easily. ‘There are things I have to see to in town— I’ll manage without you for a week.' He grinned amiably at her and Lara glanced at Matt’s forbidding countenance and then at Billy’s animated face.

‘Come with us, Lara—I told you, it’s lots of fun,’ the boy said eagerly.

‘Well,’ she hesitated, ‘if Matt doesn’t mind having a greenhorn along ‑’

‘You’re welcome to come along,’ Matt told her with grudging invitation, ‘as long as you don’t expect all the amenities of civilisation.’

Anger flared briefly in the blue of her eyes. ‘I wouldn’t expect to find a Hilton hotel in the middle of the Cariboo,’ she said sharply. ‘I can take care of myself.’

‘I’ll take care of you, Lara,’ Billy breathed, adoration beaming from the eyes he turned upwards to her.

She rested a hand briefly on his blond hair and forced a smile. ‘Thanks, Billy—I know you will.’

The subject was dropped then, but it was still uppermost in Lara’s mind when she said to Jerry, after coffee on the porch, that she would go to her room and write a letter to her parents. Peg and Matt had been called away to the calf pen after Vern and Billy departed and only Peg had returned to the house.

‘Don’t be too long, darling,’ Jerry whispered in her ear at the foot of the stairs. ‘This place is dead without you.’

She snapped on the light in her bedroom and discovered with an exclamation of disgust a moment later that she had forgotten to bring writing paper with her.

There was writing paper in the office desk, she knew, stamped in no-nonsense printing with the Fraser Ranch address. She could slip downstairs for the paper and be back in her room without being noticed.

She Sped quietly downstairs, hearing the faint murmur of voices from the living room as she passed to the back of the hall and along the corridor to the office. She opened the door and pulled up sharply. Matt, his head raised from a thick book on his knees, looked up at her with eyes that showed a flash of irritation at being interrupted.

‘I—I'm sorry,' she stammered, embarrassment bringing a pale rose flush to her cheeks. ‘I thought you were still at the calf pen. I didn’t hear you come into the house again,' she added half defensively as she turned to go.

‘You don’t have to leave.'

His words held more of command than invitation and her back stiffened instinctively. ‘It’s not important,' she said coolly. A glance backward showed he had unwound himself from the chair and was already close behind her, one supple hand holding the door open against the pressure of hers.

The light amusement in his voice flickered abrasively against her ears.

‘Are you afraid I’ll assault your well-entrenched virtue?' He turned back into the room, contempt written in the slight lift of his broad shoulders. ‘You don’t have to worry, little iceberg. I prefer women who return a certain measure of female warmth.'

Anger bubbled up inside her and came out in words of icy sarcasm. ‘Do you indeed? Strange, isn’t it, that one woman at least didn’t care for your brand of lovemaking?’

His breath drew in sharply on hurt or anger, and Lara immediately regretted the impulsive words. Something about his stillness, the sudden whitening of his face under the burnt tan, frightened her into taking a step backwards through the doorway.

Swift as a cougar he was beside her, his arm darting out to fasten cruelly strong fingers on her wrist and pull her roughly into the room. The heel of his polished boot banged the door shut with a violence that made her flinch.

Her heartbeats had quickened in fright, but her voice was without a tremor when she said: ‘Let go of me, Matt. I’m sorry I said that, but ‑'

'But what?’ he demanded, his face perilously close to hers when he jerked her arm painfully and brought her taut figure against the hard muscles of his.

‘It’s none of my business why your fiancée—left you. And by the same token, it’s none of yours how Jerry and I ‑’ She stopped and raised dark blue eyes to his.

‘Jerry and you—what?’ he asked impatiently. ‘As far as I can see there’s no flaming desire on your part to become Mrs Jerry Fraser!’

‘Not everyone cares to express their feelings in the animalistic terms you seem to think necessary,’ she said with quiet dignity, surprised when his laughter rang round the cosy, wood-panelled room. His grip on her wrist loosened and she freed herself with a slight wrench, but stood her ground before him.

‘I fail to see what’s so funny,’ she said coldly.

Shaking his head in disbelief, Matt rubbed a hand across his eyes before looking down quizzically at her stiffly held form.

‘You can’t really believe that Jerry doesn’t feel ‑’ He shook his head again in wonder, then said softly: ‘You have a lot to learn about men, Ice Maiden.’

‘Not from you, I hope,’ she snapped, the cool blue of her eyes level on his before she turned to leave the room and his disturbing presence.

‘Hold up there!’

His hand again imprisoned her wrist with the swiftness of a prairie cat and spun her round to pull her marble stiffness to him. Heightened awareness in her nostrils brought a drift of masculine cologne, the sharp spice of it underlaid with tobacco and something else—calf? As her nose wrinkled with distaste, she made an effort to free herself from the tightly muscled expanse of chest, but Matt had twisted her arm around to her back to hold her implacably in place. She felt the warmth of his breath on her face when he spoke again.

‘Maybe I can teach you a few things any normal warm-blooded woman should know,’ he said softly, his black eyes narrowed speculatively on her coldly furious face below. ‘I could be doing Jerry a favour at that!’

Before Lara had time to take in the meaning of his quietly spoken words her head was grasped from behind with fingers of biting steel and pulled roughly upwards to meet the inexorable descent of his mouth.

‘No!' She shook her head vehemently against the vice-like grip of his hand, her panicked eyes glimpsing the hard line of his jaw, the black glitter of his eyes as they fixed on the target of his attack. Her second ‘No! ’ was muffled and suddenly lost against the shocking impact of his mouth on hers. Her surprised lips were soft under the brutal pressure of his, her body nerveless and unresisting under the savage assault from his forceful mouth.

All strength seemed to flow out of her as the room exploded into soft fragments, leaving her with a vague sensation of floating aimlessly on a sea of white foam. Nothing in the world existed for her except the bruising movement of his firm Ups on hers as he bent her head back against the steely hand entangled in her silver hair. She felt neither pain nor pleasure. There was only the frightening awareness of a warmth that spread from the centre of her being to melt and drain away the inner core of iciness that had lain there through all the years of childhood loneliness.

Her defences gone, her free hand clutched desperately at his white shirt front. Gently, his hand came up to dislodge her fingers and then he guided both her arms upwards to rest on his shoulders. At the same time, the quality of his kiss changed subtly from arrogant demand to an almost tender probing, a sensitive inquiry of her lips that sent her hands up to clasp together in the crisp blackness of his hair.

His hands moved slowly over her back, bringing her ever closer to the fiery heat of his muscular body. Flame from his warmth blazed with sudden fierceness in the new emptiness of her being, spreading to her veins and making them sing with the joyful knowledge that this alone was what life was about. This ecstatic joining of man and woman was the ultimate bliss, the supreme fulfilment.

Her fingers felt the steely column of his neck as she sought to bring his mouth even closer to hers in beginning response, and a pain that was knifelike went through her when he putted sharply away from her, his breath coming fast through white-pinched nostrils.

The hurt limpid blue of her eyes looked up at him with childish disappointment, and for a moment his eyes glittered blackly into hers as if they tried to tell her something. Then, as suddenly as a curtain being drawn, the flame died and a mocking smile sent down one corner of his mouth.

‘You’re an apt pupil, Miss Lara—more teachable than I’d expected,’ he drawled, releasing her so that she almost fell and going with his easy stride to the desk. He picked up a cigarette lying there and lit it with steady hands, taking in a deep breath of smoke and looking round at her, his expression veiled as the smoke wreathed round his head. ‘Jerry should be grateful to me.’

Humiliation rolled over her in gigantic waves. What had been an earthshaking experience for her had been no more than the breaking in of a new colt to him. Anger rose in her throat to almost choke her.

‘Grateful?’ she said coldly. ‘Jerry will kill you when I tell him what you’ve done!’

‘I doubt it,’ he returned with maddening equanimity as he moved back to his chair to pick up the discarded book as if nothing had happened. ‘For one thing, I’m stronger than he is. And for another, I don’t think you’ll tell him what took place here.’ His eyes flicked impersonally over her. ‘After all, he might try some he-man stuff of his own, and you wouldn’t care for that, would you? You wouldn’t be able to control him in the same way you do now with your cool “hands off” manner.’

‘You’re despicable ... and disgusting! ’ she hissed at him before running to the door to fling it wide. ‘What kind of man are you, to make love to your own brother’s fiancée?’

His eyebrows lifted in a black arc, and she had the satisfaction of seeing a muscle in his jaw twitch as if he had clamped his teeth together suddenly.

CHAPTER FIVE

Lara sped from the office, slamming the door behind her, and went full tilt along the corridor, slowing when she reached the hall and realised that her hair was a tangled mess Where Matt’s fingers had raked through it. Her brain raced as she stopped under the curve of the staircase to smooth the silvery strands as well as she could without a comb.

Her words to Matt echoed through her mind as she tried to still her breathing. She had told him that she was Jerry’s fiancée in a momentary impulse which was intended to reach under his leathery hide and stir up some shame— if someone like Matt Fraser ever felt anything approaching shame, she fumed to herself.

But why not marry Jerry? The episode with Matt in the study had convinced her of one thing at least—Jerry, with his easygoing nature, was the only man she could think of marrying. Not, as Matt had said, because she could ‘control' him, but because they were right for each other. The life Jerry would offer her was one she had been familiar with since childhood. She would feel comfortable in it, and happy in the knowledge that she could be a true helpmeet in every way. Who needed Matt Fraser and the prairie dust that covered him most of the time? Feeling suddenly happier, she quickly crossed the hall to the living room.

Beth sat crocheting on one of the long sofas while Jerry faced Peg over a checker board. It was a happy family scene; one that wouldn’t appeal much to the arrogant head of the house, she thought bitterly. He would rather sit alone in the office with only a book for company!

‘Jerry, may I see you for a minute?’

Three pairs of light brown eyes looked over to her slender grey-clad figure in the doorway.

‘Sure, honey.’ Jerry got up at once, saying to Peg: ‘Hold the game, I’ll be right back.’

‘Is anything wrong, Larraine dear?’ Beth asked, peering, over the top of the glasses she wore for close work. ‘You look a little bothered.’

Lara forced a smile to her lips. ‘No, nothing wrong, Beth. Something very right, I think.’

Jerry looked down anxiously at her when they reached the curve of the stairs and stopped under its shelter. ‘Sure there’s nothing wrong, honey? You look a bit feverish, and that’s not like you.’

‘Maybe I am a little feverish at that,’ she said lightly. ‘I’ve been—thinking a lot tonight, Jerry, and—if you still want to marry me I’ll be—very happy to be your wife.’

He looked at her in stunned amazement as if he hadn’t heard her properly. ‘You mean—you’ll marry me?’

‘That’s what I said,’ she laughed shakily, ‘if you still want me.'

'Want you! ... of course I still want you. Oh, honey, you’ve made me the happiest man in the world tonight!’

As he took her in his arms to kiss her flushed face, she saw a faint blur of white movement at the rear of the hall. Her hands slid up around Jerry’s neck, and if he was surprised by the ardour in her response he did not question it but pressed his lips even harder against the soft curves of hers, still bruised from Matt’s searing kiss.

The white blur had disappeared when Jerry at last released her, his look exultant. ‘Now I feel I can win this election, darling, with my future wife at my side! Who knows how far we can go together? Maybe even to the top of the tree! How does Mrs Prime Minister sound to you?’

‘I’ll be content just being Mrs Jerry Fraser,’ she answered quietly, afraid suddenly of the acceleration in his ambition. An ambition which seemingly took precedence over everything, including their new engagement.

‘I know you will, honey,’ he smiled indulgently, hugging her to him then. ‘But I know you’ll be as helpful to me as your mother’s been to your dad in his career.’

Memory of her lonely childhood, separated so often from the mother she loved, sent a pang of distress through her. Would the children of her own marriage be similarly deprived of her attention? Or would husband and wife be separated to have brief reunions when he could manage to leave the capital?

‘Let’s go and tell the family right now,’ Jerry was saying excitedly, urging her towards the living room with his arm around her waist. He stopped abruptly, hitting his brow with the heel of his hand. ‘I almost forgot—wait here for me, honey.’

He bounded up the stairs and she waited, perplexed until he returned a few moments later, a small jeweller’s box in his hand.

‘I’ve been prepared for this since the first time I asked you to marry me,’ he told her breathlessly, and opened the box to take out a ring which flashed expensively with three large diamonds and two small rubies in a straight setting.

‘It’s—lovely, Jerry,' she said when he had slid the ring down over her slim finger, where it fitted perfectly. ‘But how did you know my size?’

He grinned boyishly. ‘Your housekeeper, old Anna, stole a ring you hadn’t worn for a while and replaced it a few days later without you knowing a thing about it.’

Mention of Anna brought quick tears of homesickness to Lara’s eyes. The housekeeper had been the mainstay of her childhood, filling many hours when the two of them were alone with teaching Lara to knit and sew and even how to cook as well as she did herself. Lara longed for her parents, too, to be with her on this very special occasion in her life, but Jerry’s family helped to make up for that.

Beth cooed delightedly over the ring while Peg hugged Lara to whisper: ‘I’m really glad to have you as a sister.’ The admiring look she gave the ring had a wistful quality about it, and Lara wished with all her heart that Vern would wake up to the fact that Peg was no longer a child, but a woman capable of giving and receiving great love.

‘Where’s Matt?’ asked Jerry, and Lara’s heart stopped momentarily, then lurched ahead with a sickeningly heavy beat. She dreaded seeing Matt’s dark face again, knowing she could never look at his mouth in the future without remembering the crushing force of it on hers, the response he had awakened and dragged from her unwilling body.

Peg had gone to the office to get him, and a few minutes later he was shaking Jerry’s hand at the other side of the room, and then he was standing over her. She looked quickly up into his face, finding his black eyes blankly impersonal as he took her hand briefly and wished her happiness. The touch of his work-hardened hand seemed to burn her smooth skin, but he appeared to feel nothing, turning away when she had thanked him in a low voice.

He was quietly jovial when he crossed to the sideboard.

‘I think this calls for a celebration, and I’ve been saving just the thing for it.’ He crouched down before the sideboard and extracted a magnum of champagne from its deepest recess.

‘Did I hear “celebration”?’ Vern asked from the doorway, his blue eyes looking round with smiling question.

‘Yes, Vern, you did,’ said Beth. ‘Jerry and Lara have just become engaged, isn’t it exciting? Come and toast the happy couple with us. Matt’s been saving some champagne for the occasion.’

‘Well, I came in to tell Matt the calf problem’s straightened out, but I guess nobody’s interested in that right now.’ He thumped Jerry on the back and shook his hand. ‘You’re a lucky man, Jerry, there aren’t many girls like Lara around.’ He kissed Lara’s cheek to wish her well and said teasingly: ‘I’ve been hoping you’d forget Jerry and fall for me instead, but I guess I overestimated my attractions!’

Lara felt Peg’s pain in the averting of her eyes from Vern’s fair head bent over hers, and she forced a disparaging laugh. ‘What kind of a wife would I make for a rancher? I’m a city girl, and I’ll always be a city girl. You need a wife who knows about ranching and can help you in your work.’

‘Just as you’re going to help me, darling,’ Jerry said with a smug air as he came over and pulled her to him with one arm. ‘Everyone has his or her place in the world, and yours is with me.’

There was a frothing of champagne into glasses then and Matt said to Peg, who had arranged the glasses on a tray: ‘Don’t worry, Peg, I have another bottle to celebrate your engagement.’

‘You’d be better off saving it for your own,’ Peg returned ungraciously, then looked up at him with quick contrition. ‘I’m sorry, Matt, that was an asinine thing to say.’

He smiled tightly. ‘There won’t be cause for champagne for me again, honey. But you’ll need it one of these days.’ He picked up the tray and crossed to Lara first, his eyes avoiding hers, then to Beth and Peg and the others. But when the toast was being drunk Lara felt his dark gaze on her. When she at last lifted her eyes to his he shifted his look to a point beyond her shoulder, but she thought there was a strange quality that was almost sadness in his expression. Was he remembering the celebration of his own engagement to Adrienne and the promise of happiness which had never been fulfilled?

It was late when Lara reached her room, and she was exhausted emotionally and physically when she climbed into bed. She was about to switch off the bedside lamp when a tap came at her door, and there was irritation in her: ‘Who’s there?’ thinking that if it was Jerry he could surely have saved whatever he wanted to say until morning.

‘Lara, it’s me—Peg. Could I come in for a minute?’

‘Yes, of course, Peg.’ Lara struggled into a sitting position as Peg, still dressed, came in and looked shamefaced at finding Lara in bed.

‘I’m sorry, Lara, I didn’t think you’d be in bed already. I thought you’d be so excited you wouldn’t be able to sleep at all.’ Again there was a note of wistfulness when she added: ‘I know I wouldn’t if I’d just got engaged to the man I love.’

‘I probably would have slept for a while anyway,’ Lara smiled, and patted the bed. ‘Come and sit beside me while we talk. I presume you do want to talk?’

‘If you don’t mind. I was wondering ...’ Peg said hesitantly, and stopped. ‘What you said to—Vern—tonight, about marrying someone who could help him in his work.’

‘Oh yes, I meant it, too,’ Lara said confidently. ‘I’d be useless as the wife of a ranch man like Vern.’

‘And you’re just perfect for Jerry,’ said the other girl, a soft light coming into her warm brown eyes.

‘But Vern needs—well, someone like yourself, Peg. A woman who can share his life fully.’

A faint blush crept under Peg’s tanned skin and she looked away, ‘He doesn’t know I exist as a woman, Lara. He looks on me as Matt’s little sister, the fourteen-year-old brat I was when he came to the ranch.’

‘You can change that if you want to,’ Lara said gently. ‘How? By suddenly becoming a femme fatale?’ Peg laughed bitterly. ‘Even if I could become that, I doubt if he’d notice me.’ She got up and walked restlessly to the window, her pencil-slim figure in fawn slacks and close-fitting top reflected in the dark glass. ‘He admires you a lot, Lara He thinks you’re so—feminine.’ She turned to look diffidently at Lara. ‘That’s why I thought that if you’d —help me, maybe I could change myself a little.’

‘I’ll do anything I can to help, Peg,’ Lara said warmly, ‘though if Vern comes to care for you it will be because you’re you and not for any false frills you put on.’

‘I know that, Lara, but—well, maybe Mother’s been right all this time and I should dress up more than I do. Would you come into town with me and help me choose a few things?’

‘I’d love to. There’s a few things I need myself, so we could make a day of it.’

It was Matt, at dinner the next evening, who offered to take them to town the following day, Saturday. ‘I have some business to attend to, so if you want to come along with me you’re welcome to.’

‘Oh, good!’ exclaimed Peg. ‘Then we can have lunch all together. Are you coming too, Jerry?’

‘Not if it’s Saturday you’re talking about. A couple of campaign committee members are coming out to see me.’

‘And I have the Ladies’ Guild coming over,’ Beth said in a disappointed tone.

‘Well, it’s just us three, then,’ said Peg happily, looking from Lara to Matt. ‘It’ll be a fun day.’

But Lara looked on it as much less than fun when she found herself wedged between brother and sister the next morning on the front bench seat of Matt’s dark blue car. She was acutely conscious of his bronzed arm brushing hers occasionally as he drove, the hard-muscled thigh close to hers on the seat, and she was relieved when they at last drove into Williams Lake, a sizeable town busy with Saturday shoppers.

Matt dropped them off on the main street with instructions to be at the hotel for lunch at one, and continued smoothly on in the busy street traffic.

‘We haven’t that many dress shops as such,’ Peg explained as they started along the main street, ‘but I think I’ll find everything I need.’ She laughed. ‘I’d sooner go to the dentist than try on dresses, but I guess it’s for a good cause.’

They were an excellent twosome for shopping, and when the time came to make their way to the hotel Peg bought five calf-length dresses and one full-length. The dresses ranged in material from plain cotton to a wide-skirted polyester overlaid with cream-coloured lace.

When she tried the lace dress on and turned in front of the store mirror she said doubtfully: ‘This is a little fancy for me, don’t you think, Lara?’

‘You look gorgeous in it. No man could resist you in that,’ Lara teased, and Peg added the dress to her growing collection.

‘I should really get something for my birthday while I’m here,’ she mused then, eyeing a rack of long dresses nearby.

‘Peg, I don’t want to discourage you, but you’ve bought quite a lot already and it’s going to—well, cost a fair amount, so ‑’

‘It’s all right, Lara,’ the other girl laughed animatedly. ‘It’s sweet of you to worry, but Matt said I was to buy anything I wanted—his treat. He said’—she deepened her voice and scowled in fair imitation of Matt—‘ “It’s about time you took some interest in your appearance. Girls should look like girls, at least some of the time. Lara will be able to help you with that.” ’

Lara’s brows lifted disbelievingly. ‘He said that?’

‘Mmm- he’s really a sweetie under that solemn face of his, but he’d knock you flat if you as much as suggested it! I wish ‑’ Peg stopped and bit her lip, then danced over to the dress rack, her brother forgotten in her newfound fascination with dresses.

Her last purchase was a floor-length dress of white jersey, straight in style and with a softly draped neckline. The two girls struggled manfully the blessedly short distance to the hotel and were greeted in the foyer by an astounded Matt.

‘Good God, did you leave anything in the store?’ He stepped forward to relieve them of their bulky packages and said tersely: ‘I’d better put these in the car—luckily I found parking space behind the hotel.’

‘Want me to help?’ Peg asked guilelessly.

‘I think you’ve done enough damage for one day, young lady,’ he said, but a faint grin tugged at his mouth. ‘We have a table reserved in the dining room if you want to go in and claim it. I’ll be back in a minute.’

He addressed the last words to Lara, who nodded coolly and followed Peg to the dining room. True to his word, he was back in little more than a minute, threading his way between the tables and raising his hand in greeting to several people who called to him. One of three attractive girls sitting at one table caught his arm as he passed and he stopped politely to bend over and listen to the words she spoke, her pretty dark eyes sparkling up into his. He smiled briefly and shook his head, then moved over to join Peg and Lara, causing speculative and appraising looks in Lara’s direction.

‘What did Carol want?’ Peg asked disgustedly when Matt took his place next to her and opposite Lara. ‘Or need I ask?’

‘You needn’t,’ he replied pleasantly, but with an undertone of warning to her not to ask more.

They ordered, but when Lara’s salad came she found her appetite had lost its edge and she only toyed with the prawns and crisp greens. She wondered about Matt in an idle way while she plied her fork uselessly over the plate. It was obvious he was attractive to women, and even more apparent to her that he had a pronounced need for expression of his male instincts, yet he seemed not to seek the company of women for that purpose. The obvious solution was that he still cared deeply for the fiancée who had left him. She raised her eyes, made darker blue by the navy of her dress, to look speculatively at him, but found him looking quizzically at her as if he had been following the process of her thoughts.

‘If you didn’t think so much, maybe you’d eat more,’ he said drily.

‘I’m sorry—it must be the heat.’ She turned with a wry smile to Peg. ‘I was going to suggest a trip to the hairdresser this afternoon for you, but you’d bake under a drier today.’

‘Oh no,’ Peg denied eagerly. ‘Heat doesn’t bother me, and I might as well complete the new me with a hairdo.’

‘What’s the reason for this sudden change of personality?’ Matt asked, amused. ‘Yesterday you couldn’t be dragged screaming into a dress shop, yet today you’ve bought the stores out.’

‘I—er –'

Lara came to Peg’s rescue and said smoothly: ‘I think it’s just that Peg’s getting close to the most wonderful time in a girl’s life, when she becomes twenty-one.’

‘Oh? I’d have thought that time was when she became engaged to marry the man of her choice.’

Matt’s eyes looked levelly into hers and a pale rose crept under her skin. ‘Well, that, of course,’ she said stiffly. ‘But a girl’s twenty-first often comes before that.’

‘Look, I’ll have to leave you two to argue about which is the most important time in a girl’s life,’ Peg said hurriedly ‘How much time do I have, Matt?’

‘I’ll be ready to leave at four,’ he said precisely, glancing at his watch. ‘That gives you just over two hours.’

‘That’s plenty. But I’ll have to rush now—are you leaving the car here?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ll come with you, Peg,’ Lara said hastily, gathering up her purse. ‘I have a few purchases to make.’

There was a flicker of amusement in Matt’s eyes when he stood as they left the table, and Lara felt her breath coming hurriedly in her throat. Would she ever be able to forget those minutes in the office when he had kissed her cruelly savagely? Would he always seem like a time bomb to her set to explode when her nerves were stretched to their breaking point? Every word he spoke, every movement of his muscled body reminded her of his forceful lips demanding hers.

She shopped unhurriedly for the items she needed, lingering over her selection of a perfume to give Peg for her birthday, one that would complement the elegance of her white dress.

Matt was already waiting at the car when she arrived a few minutes before four, but she was saved from making polite conversation with him by the immediate appearance of a totally different Peg, her dark hair cut becomingly short and curled wispily round her face.

‘Good God! ’ Matt said again, staring in disbelief. ‘What have they done to you?’

Peg’s excited face fell and Lara hastened to reassure her.

‘Matt meant he couldn’t believe how beautifully they’ve done it, Peg. You look—perfect.’ Ignoring Matt’s indignant look she said: ‘You must wear the lace dress tonight —you’ll be a knockout.’

‘Do you really think so, Lara?’ Peg turned anxious eyes to Matt. ‘Do you really think it’s okay, Matt?’

His eyes flickered from her to Lara and back again. ‘As Lara said, it’s perfect. Now can we start out for home?’

To Lara’s relief, Peg took the centre seat on the ride home, and her excited chatter made it unnecessary for Lara to contribute much to the conversation.

The Ladies’ Guild and Jerry’s campaign members had already left by the time they reached the ranch and Peg was able to slip upstairs without being seen by Jerry or Beth, who were relaxing with drinks in the living room.

Jerry poured a drink for Lara after kissing her cheek and murmuring: ‘Missed you, honey. This place is like a mausoleum without you.’

Beth asked about Peg, arid if she had bought anything interesting.

‘Yes, I think she has,’ Lara told her noncommittally. ‘But she wants to surprise you later, so she’s gone up to' her room.’

She herself followed Peg’s example fifteen minutes later, excusing herself from going for a swim with Jerry and Matt, who had poured himself a whisky at the sideboard and paced the room in irritable preoccupation until Beth suggested the swim.

‘I don’t know why Matt bothers to go to town at all,’ Beth complained to Lara when the men had gone to change. ‘He’s always snappish when he gets back.’ Her stepson’s restlessness had obviously made her nervous.

‘It was very hot and crowded today,’ said Lara, wondering why she should be defending Matt’s ill-humour.

‘Sometimes I even wish Adrienne would come back to him,’ Beth said in a fretful voice. ‘He was so different then, happy about the building of the house and everything. He and Adrienne argued a lot at times, but Matt is the kind of man who needs a wife, and sons to hand over the ranch to.’

‘But surely Adrienne is married now to the man she— went away with?’

Beth looked harassedly up at her and away again quickly, as if regretting her impulsive burst of confidence. ‘Well, no —we’ve heard they didn’t marry after all.’

Lara was thoughtful as she went up to her room. Was the knowledge that Adrienne was still free the reason for Matt's lack of interest in other women? Perhaps he still hoped she would return to him one day and take her place in the house he had built for her.

Peg’s entrance into the living room was as striking as Lara had hoped for. The soft curl of her new hairdo above the creamy lace of her dress brought admiring gasps or stunned silence from those gathered in the room drinks in hand. Lara was more than satisfied with the dazed look on Vern’s face as he took in Peg’s new appearance She could almost see the processes of his mind as he tried to reconcile the young girl Peg with the enchantingly lovely young woman in the doorway.

Billy voiced the thoughts of them all when he said: ‘Wow, Peg- is it really you?’

Lara, who still wore the navy dress from the day’s outing to town, looked on with a pleased smile while Peg was made to turn and move around by her admit mg family.

Mart was the only member who spared a look for Lara, and she felt her cheeks grow pink under the intensity of his gaze, his black eyes seemingly glowing his thanks for her help with Peg’s transformation.

At dinner half an hour later everyone had grown more used to Peg’s appearance and cast only the occasional look of pleased approbation to that end of the table until Jerry, who had been drinking more than usual, started a jocular spate of remarks aimed at Peg.

‘Who’s the lucky man, Peg? A girl doesn’t get herself up like that for her family! And the only adult male present, apart from brothers who don’t count, is Vern ... Watch out, Vern, Peg must be on your trail!’

Peg gave a choking sob and pushed her chair back from the table, her cheeks a flaming red and tears starting in her eyes as she rushed from the room. Lara cursed inwardly at Jerry’s legally trained brain which took pleasure in eliminating possibilities until only one remained.

‘How could you be so tactless, Jerry?’ she threw across the table, two pink spots on her cheeks proclaiming her anger. Then as Matt rose with thunderous brow to go after Peg, she said sharply: ‘No, Matt! Let Vern.’

Matt’s anger with Jerry spilled over in the glare he directed at Lara, but he stalked back to his chair when Vern, his jaw set, followed Peg out to the porch.

‘Don’t look at me like that, Lara!’ Jerry said truculently. ‘I was only joking—if Peg can’t –'

Matt’s voice cut in furiously. ‘In future, save your jokes for people who won’t be hurt by them! ’

‘Now, Matt,’ Beth put in nervously, ‘Jerry didn’t mean any harm.’

Lara felt Billy’s hand touch hers in her lap as if seeking security from the adult maelstrom going on over his head, and she squeezed it reassuringly. ‘Billy was going to tell me more about the cattle camp, and I need to know as much as possible before we go. What do I need to take with me, Billy?’

Billy looked up at her adoringly. ‘You mean you’re still coming, Lara? Dad didn’t think you would, now you’re engaged to Jerry and all.’

‘Of course I’m coming. I wouldn’t miss it for the world, after all you’ve told me about it.’ Lara looked fiercely at Jerry. ‘You don’t mind if I go now, do you, Jerry?’

He shrugged, still angry with her for chiding him in front of Matt and his mother. ‘Go if you want to,’ he said ungraciously. ‘But I can tell you now you won’t enjoy it.’

Billy, his disquiet forgotten, proceeded to tell her why she would enjoy the camp, and no one seemed to notice the prolonged absence of Peg and Vern.

But later in her room Lara heard Peg’s tap at her door and listened while the entranced Peg, lovely still in her lace dress, recounted some of the details of what happened when Vern came out to her on the porch.

‘I thought I’d just die when Jerry started saying those awful things, but when Vern came out to me—oh, Lara, he was so sweet and understanding, and ‑’ Peg clasped Lara’s fingers tightly in her own. ‘Lara, he—kissed me ... said he hadn’t realised until tonight how much he—cared for me. I know now how you must feel when Jerry kisses you! It’s as if—the whole world suddenly lifted and settled back in the right place. Do you know what I mean?’ She laughed tremulously. ‘Of course you do—you’ve just become engaged to Jerry.’

‘Yes—yes, I know what you mean,’ Lara agreed, but her memory was with Matt, not Jerry, Fraser’s kiss. That had turned her world upside down, but it hadn’t settled in the right place. It had left her with a strange emptiness in the hollow of her stomach.

CHAPTER SIX

The cattle camp, centred on a cabin some two hours’ drive from the main ranch, lay at one end of a broad valley between hills more rugged than those surrounding the ranch. Here the slopes rose in places to jagged outcroppings and a sharp falling away of yellow rock to the next plateau. Grass, too, was greener in these northern pastures and provided an abundance of succulent greenery for the cattle grazing there.

The long low-roofed cabin was built of logs, weathered and closely notched at the joins against extremes of temperature. Encompassing it were other buildings and corrals, and a mixed stand of trees provided an element of shade from the hottest sun.

Lara stepped stiffly down from the pick-up, followed closely by Billy, who had kept up a constant stream of chattel between herself and Matt in the cab.

‘Come on, Lara, I’ll show you around the cabin—and that’s the bunkhouse next to it. The kitchen’s in there— Happy Day is the cook ...’

Matt, standing by the truck’s fender stretching his cramped muscles after the difficult drive over rough terrain, called our sharply: ‘Don’t forget you have work to do, Billy. Lara knows she’ll have to fend for herself here while the men are busy.’

‘Aw, I just want to show her around a bit, Matt,’ Billy stopped to say, dropping Lara’s hand while some of the eagerness died from his face. ‘It won’t take long.’

Matt’s tight-lipped nod of acquiescence earned him a furious look from Lara, and she went willingly as Billy grabbed her hand again and led her across a dusty compound to the cabin.

She had been conscious of Matt’s unwillingness to have her along on the trip, particularly since her engagement to Jerry had been announced. The heavy frown between his dark eyes had scarcely let up on the bumpy journey to the camp, but she had put that down to the concentration required to guide the pick-up between the large* ruts of what was little more than a rough trail between the hills.

She had been relieved when he curtly assigned her to the window seat when Billy made known his wish to travel with them rather than in tie other pick-up with Vern and Peg. Matt trailed his own horse, Samson behind them while Vern had his trusted chestnut Lady hitched up to his truck.

Ever since the night in Matt’s office, the memory of his kiss had seared Lara and grown even more vivid as the days passed, instead of fading into the oblivion it deserved and she had expected. Remembrance made her* acutely aware, whenever he was near, of the virile masculinity that fairly oozed from his whipcord lean frame. The blatancy of that animal power sent quivers of distaste through her, reminding her as it did of her own passionate response to it and her shamed humiliation when he had sensed her sudden submission and pushed her away, as if he had accomplished his purpose in arousing her for Jerry’s sake. She dragged her mind back to Billy’s excited treble and the sounds of Vern and Peg’s arrival in the other truck.

‘Look, Lara, there’s even a radio receiver so Matt can keep in touch with the men when they’re working up here.’

A flat black box with dials along the front was the twin of one she had seen in Matt’s office at the ranch. Could it be that his seeming desire to be alone and aloof from the family in the late evening stemmed from the need to be available to his men in this northern outpost of his territory?

When Billy at last left her, albeit reluctantly, she explored the cabin on her own, having heard or seen little while the boy led her round. The rooms were small and designed less for comfort than utility, though a sagging settee sat along one wall in the living room and several scuffed wooden chairs were placed round a plain board table under the square window overlooking the compound and valley beyond. At the other end of the cabin, four rooms had been partitioned off to form makeshift bedrooms, each containing a slatted bunk bed, two shelves and a small window high up on the wall. Lara was relieved to see that the roughly constructed bathroom held a shower stall with both hot and cold taps. The camp promised not to be as primitive as she had expected.

She wandered back to the living room where a black iron stove took up most of the end wall of the cabin, and turned as Peg opened the screen door.

‘Oh, you’re in here,’ the dark girl said. ‘What do you think of our humble home in the hills?' Her eyes held the extra sparkle of a woman who knows she is loved, and Lara felt an unaccountable spark of envy. Yet she knew Jerry loved and needed her, as she herself needed his undemanding affection which had been generous enough to let her leave him for a week so soon after their engagement.

‘I like it,’ she said in answer to Peg’s question, turning to look from the window at the expansive view before it. ‘Though there’s something—eerie about the quietness, isn’t there?’

Peg laughed. ‘Just wait till the men get back—you won’t be able to hear yourself think! ’

‘Until then, is there anything I can do, Peg? I feel so useless while everyone else is busy.’

‘W-ell,' Peg said speculatively, looking at Lara’s pale green trouser suite of cool linen, ‘there is a need for somebody to help in the kitchen. But I couldn’t ask you to do that.’

Lara’s brow wrinkled faintly. ‘Why not? I’m not all that helpless in a kitchen, you know, Peg.’

‘Well, Happy’s not used to the company of pretty girls at the best of times,’ Peg explained unhappily, ‘and now he’s not feeling well I hate to think of what he might say in front of you.’

‘Don’t worry about that,’ Lara told her drily. ‘I’ve heard a little bad language in my time. What’s wrong with him?’ Peg shrugged. ‘Oh, his appendix has been troubling him off and on for years, but every time Matt has him persuaded to have it attended to in hospital the pain goes away and Happy puts it off again.’

‘Well, perhaps I can do something to help,’ said Lara, adding with a smile: ‘I promise not to faint at his language.’

When Peg led her into the kitchen, situated at one end of the men’s bunkhouse, she thought wryly that even if the language didn’t get her the heat in the kitchen might. A monstrous black cook stove filled most of the end wall and gave out a furnace-like glow to the large room.

‘This is Happy Day, Lara,’ Peg introduced the gnomish, bow-legged man who hovered over the stove. ‘Lara Stevens is going to marry Jerry, Happy, so see that you’re polite to her. She’s going to give you a hand with supper for the boys.’

‘I don’t need no help, Peg,’ he muttered belligerently, but even as he spoke a spasm of pain twisted his features and paled the leathery tan of his deep-lined face. ‘I’ve been boss in this kitchen for forty years past, and I—

‘Lara doesn’t want to take over your kitchen, you ornery old prairie dog,’ Peg said roughly. ‘She’s offered to help you, and the least you can do is to be polite to her.’

With a wink to Lara, Peg went out and the old man stirred busily at a huge cauldron bubbling on top of the stove. Lara came over and sniffed appreciatively.

‘What is that, Mr Day?’ she asked. ‘It smells marvellous.’

He looked round at her, his eyes hard and narrowed to slits as they went over her fair-skinned face. Seemingly he was satisfied with his inspection, for he turned back to the pot with a grunt and said: ‘It’s stew, made from some of our best beef—and my name’s Happy. Nobody’s called me “Mister” for years.’

He allowed her to chop the mountain of washed and peeled vegetables in the deep sink and add them to the pot while he put two of the six large trays of perfectly risen rolls into the oven.

‘I’ve never seen so many rolls outside a bakery,’ Lara said admiringly. ‘I guess it’s better to make a week’s batch at one time.’

He snorted derisively. ‘This is just a day’s supply,’ he said. ‘The boys like them with their evening meal, and then they take a few out on the range with them when they need a midday snack.’

He pulled out a chair from the long wooden table and Lara noticed that he was wincing with pain as he sat down heavily to wait for the rolls to brown.

‘Is there anything I can get you?’ she asked solicitously. ‘You really should have that appendix seen to.’

‘If you’ll pour me a cup of coffee from that pot on the stove and hand me the bottle you’ll find on the middle shelf of that cupboard,’ he directed through tight-drawn lips, ‘I’ll cure myself as I have before without the help of doctors.’

She looked doubtfully on as he poured a generous measure of whisky into the dark brew she gave him. ‘Do you think that’s good for an inflamed appendix?’

‘It’s always done the trick before,’ the old man told her, grimacing as the fiery drink disappeared down his throat.

The colour did, indeed, seem to come back to his wizened cheeks and Lara left him shortly after she had placed a stack of metal plates and cutlery at one end of the long table.

The outside air seemed wonderfully cool against her flushed cheeks and she longed suddenly for the soft lake water at the main ranch. Her imagination conjured up the silky sensuousness of its coolness lapping her body as she went back to the cabin, but she decided against a shower in case the men returned unexpectedly from the day’s work.

No one was around at the moment, so she changed quickly into jeans a plain blue denim and added a light blue short-sleeved sweater after laying the green trouser suit flat on the narrow bunk in one of the bedrooms where she had found her case and bedroll stacked. She contented herself with a quick rinse under the stingingly cold tap at the bathroom sink and used the cracked, faded mirror above the sink to apply a light coat of make-up to her face.

Her hair was combed to shining softness on her shoulders when she heard a sudden pandemonium in front of the cabin. Startled, she threw down her comb and rushed to the screen door, watching in fascination as Matt’s ranch hands shouted out greetings while their horses’ hoofs kicked up a storm of dust in the compound.

‘Hell, Matt, what do you mean coming up here after all the hard work’s done?’ one cracked voice sounded through the haze.

Lara’s eyes moved quickly to where Matt stood, one foot nonchalantly propped on the fender of the pick-up as if he hadn’t left it since their arrival. His hat was pushed up off his brow, his teeth flashing whitely in the brown of his face. She stared disbelievingly at the relaxed muscles of his tightly drawn face as he grinned up at the men on horseback. He looked suddenly carefree, boyish, as if a great weight had been lifted from his shoulders. With a sense of wonder, she realised that in this atmosphere of male companionship Matt Fraser was like another being. This wild and beautiful country was a man’s world, a challenge to the endurance and ingenuity of these few men who were drawn closer because of it, relying as they must on each other to overcome the hardships of their environment. And Matt was instantly one with them, shaking off the puny trappings of the more civilised ranch life.

Billy’s excited voice came to her from the edge of the group of men, who had descended from their mounts to cluster round Matt at the truck.

‘Hey, fellers, I brought a girl to camp—her name’s Lara and she’s really pretty.’

A roughly masculine voice answered him teasingly: ‘Well now, Billy, you’re a little young to be bringing your young lady to camp with you. I’m surprised Matt allowed it.’

‘Aw heck, Frank,’ said Billy, his ears reddening. ‘Lara’s not that kind of a girl. She’s just a friend.’

‘That’s what they all say, son,’ another voice called from the back, bringing a roar of laughter from the dust-laden men.

‘Wait, I’ll show you.'

Lara shrank back from the doorway as Billy, his chubby face redly determined, ran towards it. Nothing in the world would induce her to go out and face the battery of appraising eyes she knew awaited her. Nothing, that is, except Billy’s pleading eyes that became puzzled as she resisted going with him.

‘Come on, Lara, they just want to see you—they don’t believe I really brought you at all.’

Reluctantly, she allowed herself to be pulled through the doorway and on to the raised wooden porch in front of the cabin.

‘Here she is,’ Billy announced triumphantly, looking proudly up at her as if she was his own creation. ‘This is Lara.’

The men turned laughing to see Billy’s young girl-friend, and silence fell by degrees as their smiles faded when they saw Lara’s slim figure, trim and long-legged in the blue jeans, her eyes going nervously from one face to the other. The sun, low in a wide sky, sent its rays to catch the silver in her hair and turn it into a shimmering cascade round, her head."

Her eyes at last met Matt’s, and she saw that his lips were drawn into a tight smile, his expression unfathomable as his look travelled slowly from her eyes to the tips of her blue casual shoes barely visible under the jeans.

Then one of the younger men at the rear gave a low appreciative whistle and said reverently: ‘Wow! My prayers must have been answered!’

When other awestruck comments began as a murmur among the men, Matt took his foot from the fender and stood up straight, tall even among the well-built ranch hands.

‘That’ll be enough of that, boys,’ he snapped, his eyes fiery flints under lowered black brows. ‘Miss Stevens is engaged to my brother Jerry, so she’s not in the market for anybody here. Let’s get these horses rubbed down and fed now.’

There were groans from some of the younger men, but they followed Matt’s terse order at once, after tipping their fingers to dusty hats in Lara’s direction. As they led their sweat-flecked mounts away, Lara walked over with flashing eyes to where Matt still stood by the pick-up.

‘Why did you do that?’ she demanded frigidly as she drew near him. ‘They were just trying to be friendly.’ She resented the fact that she had to look so far upwards into his face.

His black eyes glinted with a faint mocking light as he looked down to the ice in her eyes. ‘They’re friendly, yes,’ he said evenly. ‘But unless it’s nipped in the bud they’re apt to become too friendly. And you wouldn’t care for that’ —his voice lowered knowingly—‘or would you?’

The sarcastic innuendo of his last words flicked rawly on her nerves, sending a flashing message to her hand, which lifted high in the air to strike him. Swift as lightning, moving so fast she saw only a blur, his long fingers imprisoned her wrist in a steely grasp.

‘Never try that with me, honey,’ Matt gritted through his teeth. ‘I’m a rough rancher who doesn’t know the meaning of civilised conduct, remember? If I’m struck I strike back, regardless of sex. Think about that before you raise your hand to me again.’

He threw her arm contemptuously away from him and strode off in the direction of the corrals. Lara looked after the broad confident swing of his shoulders, her breath coming in short gasps, and knew that she could cheerfully wring his arrogant neck.

The men turned up for supper more subdued than their arrival into camp had been. Their appearance reflected a careful removal of dust and whiskers from their bronzed faces, their hair slicked wetly back from the showers they had taken in the bunkhouse.

They lined up in turn at the kitchen door, each receiving a generous portion of the thick-bodied stew and several warm rolls on their tin plates. A few stayed on the bunkhouse steps to eat, but most of them sauntered over to sit on tree stumps or on the ground in the cooling evening air.

Lara and Peg had been served first for, as Happy told them gloomily: ‘Once the boys get around here, you’ll be lucky to have a lick at the pot.’

The two girls went to sit against a pine trunk, its needles providing a soft blanket beneath them as they ate hungrily. Lara forgot her contretemps with Matt earlier as her sharpened appetite dealt with Happy’s rich-tasting stew and feather-light crusty rolls.

‘Whoo!’ Peg breathed when her plate was empty. ‘I wish I could cook like Happy—look at Vern over there.’

Lara’s eyes followed hers to a fallen trunk at the other side of the clearing where Vern and Matt were sitting, Billy between them. She had noticed that they were the last to be served, but their plates held generous portions nevertheless. Vern was obviously enjoying his food, the fair head he bent over his plate rising only briefly to look across Billy’s head while Matt spoke earnestly. Matt’s plate was balanced in one hand above his blue-clad knees, and he seemed more interested in the conversation than in plying his fork.

‘I think Vern will be a very satisfying man to feed,’ Lara said in a teasing voice that brought a blushing smile from Peg. ‘Nothing would be worse than pandering to a finicky appetite.’

The girls lay back against the trunk in sated satisfaction, drowsily content not to talk but to dream their separate dreams. Through lowered eyelids Lara saw Matt put his half-finished dinner on the ground beside him and grope for his cigarette makings in the breast pocket of his shirt.

Matt’s command to the men to leave her alone had been taken literally, and they had steered a path away from where she and Peg sat under the tree. Curious sidelong glances had been cast her way, but not one of the men spoke to her and she felt a renewed spark of anger against Matt’s high-handed order.

She was to be here for a week, living in close proximity to these tough range man—even sleeping near them if Billy had his way—and the barrier Matt had put up between herself and them seemed a ridiculous imposition. She gave a friendly smile to a curly-haired young hand who passed by at that moment on his way to the kitchen for a refill.

He stopped, hesitated, and then came to stand near her, an answering grin on his good-looking face. ‘Can I get something more for you from the kitchen?’ he asked, his bright blue eyes going over her trim figure admiringly.

‘No—no, thanks,’ she said hurriedly in a low voice as Peg seemed to have fallen asleep, her dark head bent uncomfortably to her shoulder. The irritated movement of Matt’s arm as he threw the spent match away from his cigarette drew her eyes to him, and she saw the dark scowl that clouded his face.

‘But if you’d care to join us when you have yours, you’re welcome to come and talk for a while,’ she smiled into the daring blue eyes, and revelled in the stony stare Matt sent across the space between them when the young hand came back to sit close to her feet.

His name was Drew Peters, he told her, and he was learning all he could about ranching from Matt and the older men at the Fraser Ranch.

‘I mean to have my own place one day,’ he said with an eagerness akin to Billy’s. ‘Not as big as the Fraser spread, of course, but at least it’ll be mine.’

They talked companionably until it was half-dark and a fire was lit in the centre of the compound where a circle of blackened stones proclaimed many previous campfires. Men drifted over from the bunkhouse to sit cross-legged or lie in its glowing orbit, and Drew disappeared to come back a few moments later with a guitar. He settled himself close to Lara, resting the instrument across his folded knees as he sang ballad after ballad in his pleasantly light voice, his eyes turning often in Lara’s direction when the haunting melodies included words of love.

Lara was so lost in the magic of the starlit night and the lulling quality of Drew’s voice that she scarcely noticed when Peg slipped away to the other side of the fire to sit close to Vern, his arm encircling her shoulders. Matt and Billy had disappeared shortly after Drew began to sing, and Lara thought she heard Billy’s giggles from the kitchen some time later. A game of some sort was obviously going on, and she decided to investigate after Drew’s next song.

The words were strangely stirring and she listened dreamily, her eyes on the leaping flames from the fire as Drew sang:

‘Open your arms and take his love,

Don’t be afraid to need him;

Perfect love casts out fear;

Don’t be afraid to love him.’

Perfect love! Was there such a thing, or did it exist only in the mind of the song’s composer? Was it what she and Jerry had, that comfortable acceptance of each other as compatible life mates? Her eyes fell on Peg nestled closely to Vern’s chest and she saw the soft wonder and longing in each pair of eyes as the fire blazed its light round the circle.

Driven by sudden panic, she scrambled to her feet and rushed headlong into a shadowy figure standing out of the firelight’s range behind the tree. The impact winded her, and she succumbed momentarily to the security of strong arms holding her closely against a broad muscled chest.

‘Missing your “perfect love”?’ a mocking voice came from above her head, and she jerked away with a gasp of horrified recognition.

‘You!’

She saw Matt’s teeth gleam whitely in the pale moonlight shafting through the branches.

‘You sound disappointed. Were you hoping your fiancé had decided to pursue you, after all? It couldn’t be Drew —he’s still singing love songs to you over there’—he leaned to one side and his eyes gleamed yellow in the firelight for a second—‘and wondering where you’ve gone to.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ she snapped, the dreamy mood created by Drew’s songs shattered. ‘Drew knows I’m engaged to Jerry.’

‘Does he?’ Matt picked up her left hand and ran a rough thumb over the third finger. ‘You’re not wearing your ring.’

She looked dazedly down at her hand. ‘No, I—I thought it might get lost up here.’ She raised her eyes defiantly to his. ‘Anyway, you made it abundantly clear that I was to be left strictly alone.’

‘Drew obviously didn’t get my message,’ he said drily, and moved to place his hands on the tree trunk behind her, pinioning her to it with his long arms. ‘If you’re in need of —male companionship, why not keep it in the family?’ he said huskily, his head already bending to her trembling lips. ‘You look beautiful in the moonlight ... it goes with your hair ...’

She was afraid to cry out and attract the attention of the others, but her lips closed with a determined snap just before his came down on them and her fists pummelled fiercely against the front of his denim shirt when the rough bristles round his mouth rasped against her skin. More than his kiss, she feared her own reaction to it, the treachery of her body’s response to the overpowering masculinity of his.

Her mouth quivered but remained closed under the forceful, yet sensuous, movement of his lips against it, and his hands left the tree to draw her stiff form to meet the fiery heat of his body. She felt the warm pressure of his hands on her back, the lifting and shaping of her form to the bent contour of his muscular frame so that she was startlingly aware of the urgency of his mounting passion. A moan that was partly fear broke from her throat as his lips at last parted hers and his arms pinioned her softness to the granite of his wide chest.

The sounds of music and voices from the campfire dimmed as the air her lungs craved continued to be cut off by the same iron-clad arms which threatened to snap the brittleness of her ribs. His heartbeats thudded against her breast and merged with the wild hammering of her own and far above, stars in the black velvet of the sky joined the pine branches over her head in a crazily whirling dance of dizziness. Her knees sagged against the powerful columns of his thighs.

As if sensing the blackness descending on her brain, he lowered her feet to the ground and relaxed the suffocating grip across her shoulders, but his mouth stayed firmly on hers with a growing demand for her submission and response. Submission to his superior strength came when she felt the last fragment of her resistance drain away under the relentless pressure of his mouth, the lips that ground harshly and persistently against the soft flesh of hers until she tasted the warm blood as her lower lip slit against her teeth.

Response started more slowly when, her brain emptied of every thought except the primitive awareness of his raging need and her own urgent desire to satisfy it, his hands pushed roughly under the looseness of her shirt to sweep abrasively over the silken smoothness of her skin. While her lips succumbed to the burning pressure of his, her hands slid up round his neck and her fingers fanned out in the thickness of his black hair, pressing against the outline of his head to bring his mouth even closer.

His ardour increased for the space of several seconds and then, as when he had brought her to the point of eager participation before, he put her from him abruptly. She staggered backwards against the rough bark of the tree and leaned weakly there, her eyes widely luminous as she gazed uncomprehendingly up at him. She had wanted him to go on kissing her for ever, sweeping her into realms she had barely guessed at, and her woman’s instinct told her that he had felt something similar. But now, looking at the white flare of his* nostrils as his breath rushed through them, she saw that he was regaining the control he had almost lost, collecting his senses much more quickly than she.

Thought> flitted through her mind like the frantic beating of butterfly wings. It was impossible now to think of marrying Jerry, whose kisses had never stirred her to the tumultuous passion Matt had discerned and brought out in her. And Matt, his shadowed face suddenly dear to her as he stared back into her eyes, would find the same fulfilment in her.

She expected his arms to reach for her again, but instead he straightened and stood apart from her, his eyes hidden behind the shadow cast by the moon through a branch. She saw the bright flash of his white teeth, however, as his lips curved into a thin smile of mockery, and her heart turned over sickeningly in her breast. It wasn’t possible that he had not been as moved as she by the passion that had flared briefly between them, yet his words following the smile indicated just that.

‘Yes, I think you’ll make a reasonable wife for a man like Jerry,’ he said with a lightness that insulted the emotion-filled moments he had inspired, his voice betraying only a trace of the frenzy he had displayed a few moments earlier. ‘As I’ve said before, you’re an apt pupil!’

All the heartfelt fervour he had aroused and rejected was in the hand she raised flashingly to strike the cruel mockery from his face. She felt the lean hardness of his jaw under her fingers and gloried in the resounding crack the contact made, not caring that he would fulfil his threat to return physical violence in kind. He had hurt and humiliated her spirit far more than any body blow could accomplish.

But he made no move to retaliate. The smile had faded from his lips, leaving the sharp outline of jaw and chin clenched to rocky hardness, the expression in his eyes obscured by the darkness covering them.

‘Neither Jerry nor I have requested your services as my teacher in the art of lovemaking,’ Lara said in a low, furious tone. ‘And it may shock you to know that I infinitely prefer Jerry’s brand to yours, which disgusts me.’ She heard the sharp intake of his breath and, carried away by the power she had found to hurt him, went recklessly on: ‘It doesn’t surprise me in the least that Adrienne couldn’t take your—your animalistic appetites any longer! ’

Now he moved, so quickly that his arm was a faint blur as it shot out to fasten bruising fingers round her wrist. ‘It’s your privilege to say what you like about my actions towards you,’ he said grittily through clenched teeth, ‘but leave Adrienne and her reasons for going away out of it.’ He dropped her wrist with a contemptuous gesture and turned away, only to wheel back a second later. ‘And it may shock you to know,’ he sneered, mimicking her own words, ‘that none of the women I’ve known have objected to me on the grounds you give! But then they were women who weren’t afraid of their “animal” feelings, as you call them.’ With a last withering look he turned and stalked off in the direction of the corrals, his broadly confident shoulders swallowed up in the darkness.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The midnight dome of a star-studded sky had begun to show streaks of light in the east when Lara finally dropped off to sleep.

Her ribs ached intolerably from the pressure of Matt’s hard arms round them, and she tossed restlessly in the sleeping bag provided for her at the ranch. Night sounds disturbed her, too—the occasional cough or groan from one of the men lying at the other side of the clearing, the eerie loneliness of a coyote’s howl from the distant hills making her shiver with its penetrating plaintiveness so that she hoped fervently he would confine his search for a mate to the wilder terrain further north.

Matt’s sleeping bag was diagonally across from hers, and she had seen no movement from him since his last cigarette had described an arc in the air as he tossed it into the dying fire. He had returned to camp long after the others had settled down, and Lara wondered what his thoughts were while he lay smoking the cigarette, one arm behind his head.

They would be nothing akin to her own, she thought with unusual bitterness. It would be impossible for her to marry Jerry now, knowing that another man could stir her senses to the point of madness as Jerry could never do. The twinkling, turning stars and faint silken rustle of aspen leaves around the compound seemed to clarify her thoughts and bring into focus the circumstances of her engagement to Jerry.

The unpalatable truth that she had used Jerry as a shield against the frightening arousal of Matt’s first kiss made her swallow hard and wish that she could shed relief-giving tears. But she had never been able to cry since her early childhood, her hurts seeming to go too deep to be assuaged so easily, and her throat ached dryly instead.

She would have to tell Jerry that their engagement was off as soon as she returned to the ranch, explaining that she’d had time to think at the cattle camp, and ... Her thoughts veered off on a tangent. Yes, she'd had time to think, and she had also had time to fall in love with his half-brother, a man who cared for no woman but the one who had let him down so badly The woman he had built the house for, the woman who still haunted his thoughts with the hope that one day she would come back to him ...

When Peg woke her at seven, a steaming mug of coffee in her hand, Lara blinked sleepily round the clearing, amazed to find that the other sleeping bags had been cleared away and that there was already an air of desolation about the camp.

‘Fresh air must agree with you,’ Peg teased, crisp in red plaid cotton shirt and slim dark red slacks, her hair still holding the shape of its cut and curling perkily round her cheeks. ‘I thought I’d better wake you, though, before I leave.’

‘Leave?’ Lara looked stupidly up at the other girl, her eyes even more almond-shaped than usual because of the sleep clinging to them. ‘Oh, are you going out to help the men?’

Peg’s face twisted into a grimace. ‘No, but I wish I was. Happy got worse during the night, and Matt’s determined he’ll go into hospital this time, so I’m driving him in.’

‘Oh, poor Happy,’ Lara exclaimed with genuine sympathy ‘How long will you be gone?’

‘A day or two, I’m afraid. Matt wants me to stay with Happy till he’s had the operation— the old man won’t admit it, but he’s scared to death, and he has nobody but us to worry about him.’ She looked down quizzically at Lara’s dishevelled hair and the wrinkled shirt she had slept in.

‘Would you rather come back with me? Matt thinks you should, that you won’t like being the only woman up here.’

‘Oh, does he?’ Immediate fire sparked in the blue of Lara’s eyes, although she had been about to say she would certainly go with Peg. ‘No, I don’t think I will, Peg. You’ll only be away for a few days at most, and maybe there’s something I can do to help.’

Peg hesitated, then shrugged. ‘Just as you like,’ she said, but she obviously doubted, as Matt did, Lara’s ability to be anything other than decorative in the scheme of life.

Lara drank the hot liquid quickly, relishing the strong brew that was like ambrosia in the cold early morning air. The pale sun had barely risen beyond the distant mountains and there was no heat in it as yet. She rolled up her sleeping bag and took it and the empty cup into the cabin, hearing the voices of Peg and Matt from the living room.

‘Who’ll cook for everybody while Happy’s away?’ Peg was asking worriedly, and Matt swore softly.

‘It will have to be one of the men, but it’s a job none of them relishes and there’s no one I care to spare. We need every hand we have these next two or three days.'

Lara opened the screen door and its creak brought both pairs of eyes to her. She wished she had been able to at least comb her hair before meeting Matt, especially as he appeared freshly showered, his hair slicked damply back from his grim face as he looked at her without really seeing her, concerned as he was about the kitchen crisis precipitated by Happy’s illness.

‘I can cook,’ she said quietly, her eyes on Peg, but it was Matt who spoke.

‘You!’

There was a world of contempt and disbelief in his one word and a faint tinge of pink crept into Lara’s pale cheeks.

‘Yes, me. Our housekeeper taught me most of what she knows, and she’s an excellent cook.’

Peg opened her mouth to say something, but Matt’s voice came cuttingly across her. ‘Cooking for a crew of hungry men isn’t the same thing as whipping up a gourmet meal for two! No, you’ll go back to the ranch with Peg.’ He turned away dismissingly and Peg stepped towards the door.

‘Coming, Lara?’

To Peg, Matt’s word was law and her jaw dropped in amazement when Lara replied coolly ‘No, I don’t think so, Peg. I came up here because Billy wanted me to, and I won’t let him down now.’

The dark girl’s puzzled brown ₉ eyes went from her brother’s angrily turned shoulders to Lara’s cool eyes and at last she shrugged. ‘Well, I won’t be leaving for another five minutes or so if you change your mind.’ With that, she passed Lara’s stiffly held body and went out.

Matt turned back immediately and Lara felt an inner tremor at the white anger in his face. ‘I’ve told you to go back with Peg,’ he snapped through thinned lips. ‘A cattle camp isn’t the place for a lone woman, especially ‑’ He broke off and took a rolled cigarette from the breast pocket of his beige shirt and lit it, shaking the match out with an irritable hand and snapping it across the middle.

‘The men haven’t bothered me so far,' she said sharply, satisfied when he caught her emphasis and had the grace to redden under his tan. ‘Are you afraid you won’t be able to resist the opportunity to give me a few more lessons?’

His jawline tightened visibly, making a ridge along the smooth leanness of his cheek. ‘There won’t be a repeat of what happened last night,’ he told her quietly. ‘You made your feelings very clear then.’

‘Good!’ she said with a confidence she was far from feeling What would he say if she told him she wanted him to go on kissing her, just as he had last night, for the rest of their lives? From his references to other women he had known, he would probably just add her scalp to the others on his sizeable belt! Only Adrienne appealed to him as a lifelong lover. ‘Then there’s no reason why I can’t stay, is there?’

‘Please yourself,’ he shrugged, going to the door and picking up his hat as he passed the table. ‘Do you want somebody to help you in the kitchen?’

‘No, thanks. I presume there’s something I can make a meal from?’

‘The freezer outside the kitchen is well stocked, and Happy keeps a good supply, of staples.’

‘Fine,’ she said crisply, turning towards the small passage leading to the bathroom. ‘I’ll get started as soon as I’ve showered and changed.’ She turned back with haughtily raised brows. ‘I suppose it’s all right if I use the hot water?’ For the first time, a smile appeared far back in his eyes. ‘There is no hot water.’ The smile reached down to tug at the corners of his mouth as her expression reflected first disbelief and then dismay. ‘You told me you didn’t expect the Hilton up here.’

‘I didn’t, but when I see a tap labelled “Hot” I presume ‑’

‘Ah, presumptions are dangerous things, Lara,’ he said with mocking softness. ‘They can be very misleading.’

‘Thank you for the early morning philosophy,’ she said acidly, turning back to the passage. ‘I’ll enjoy a cold shower, as a matter of fact.’

She was not quite so brave as her words when she stood in the shower stall a few minutes later, her hand hesitating on the cold tap. She was already shivering without the icy needles piercing her nakedness, but she had told Matt Fraser she would enjoy it and enjoy it she would! Her hand jerked at the tap and a deluge of water that felt as if it had come straight from the snowy mountain peaks fell on her, bringing a sharp squeal of indrawn breath.

To her mortification she heard Matt’s voice raised above the quietly falling water. ‘I forgot to tell you—the water comes from two hundred feet down in the ground. It’s always nice and cold like that.’

She hugged her body as if his dark eyes could penetrate the rough wood of the door, but she heard him chuckle and move away, and then the slam of the screen door as if he wanted to make sure she knew he had gone. At least she had brought a little levity to his morning, she told herself sourly, and began to enjoy the refreshing sting of the cold water on her skin.

Peg had left with Happy when she emerged from the cabin, dressed in a sleeveless white top and matching shorts. If she was to spend the day in the furnace-like heat of the kitchen she would be prepared for it.

The camp seemed deserted as she made her way to the kitchen. Even Billy appeared to have abandoned her and gone with the men. She gazed in consternation at the monstrous stove, seeing that its glowing flames had died down to barely warm embers in its yawning cavity.

She decided to leave the fire until she had made the dough for the rolls, although she had no idea how much of the various ingredients she would need for a large batch such as Happy had made the day before.

‘And I don’t suppose for one minute I’ll find a cookbook labelled “Cooking for a Crowd” in this kitchen,’ she muttered darkly to herself as she rooted among flour bins and cupboards. She found the freezer Matt had mentioned, a huge casket containing enough supplies to feed an army marching on its stomach, and decided to give the men fried chicken as a change from stew. She thought she had noticed a vegetable garden at the far side of the bunkhouse, and she would stroll along there later to see if it held anything that could be used in salads.

Even without the stove’s heat, she had to stop and mop her brow several times as she kneaded the vast mound of dough on a pastry board at one end of the long dining table. She had managed to work out approximate quantities from the recipes on a large tin of granulated yeast, and the texture seemed right under her prodding fingers. At last she was able to set the dough to rise in a huge metal bowl, and turned her attention reluctantly to the fire.

At noon, after more than an hour of making abortive attempts to coax a continuing flame under the piled wood, she sank to her knees before the black monster and gave a dry sob of frustration. Without the fire she had no way of cooking a meal for the men, whose disappointment would be topped only by Matt’s insufferable air of ‘I told you so.’

She was so busy telling the recalcitrant stove what she thought of it that she failed to hear the arrival of Matt’s horse until he said chidingly from the doorway: ‘My, my! —such language from a lady! ’

Whirling round, her dread of his mockery vanished, she ran across to him and even put a hand on his sun-warmed forearm. ‘Oh, Matt, I’m so glad you’ve come back!’ she cried. ‘The stove won’t light, and I won’t be able to cook the meal for the men. Can you light it for me?’

There was a gentleness she hadn’t expected about his face when he looked down at her, his eyes faintly smiling as they wandered over her soot-smeared cheeks. The smile disappeared when his gaze went down and lingered on the unnatural swell of her lower lip where his had touched it.

‘I haven’t had a welcome like that for—a long time,’ he said softly, unnerving her by the tenderness of his tone so that her eyes dropped from his face.

If only he could show this side of himself to her more often, instead of the hard demanding quality that had dominated their encounters! But he was saying his tenderness for Adrienne, his only love. Thinking of this, she flinched and drew back when he raised a hand to brush with his thumb against a smudge near her mouth.

His hand dropped to his side, and when she stole a glance upwards at his face she saw that his jaw had hardened and drawn his mouth into two tight lines, his eyes stony as they stared over her head. Then without a word he turned and strode over’ to the fire.

He exclaimed irritably when he bent over the wood-packed cavity and one long arm reached inside to remove the chunks she had stacked into it.

‘Didn’t you ever go to camp as a child?’ he asked shortly without turning round.

‘I—no, I never did,’ she confessed hesitantly. ‘Summer was the only time when my parents were both at home, and we spent holidays together.’

He grunted and went outside, reappearing a minute later with an armful of kindling which he proceeded to lay lightly in the hole. He resumed the conversation then as if there had been no interruption, his voice impersonal.

‘And that’s the life you’ll be giving your own children if Jerry’s a success in politics?’

Her eyes jumped to his back as he crouched over the stove, seeing abstractedly the damp sweat patches across his shoulders. ‘No! ’ Her negative was so emphatic that he swung round to look keenly at her.

‘Does that mean you don’t mean to have children, or that you won’t be leaving them to the tender mercies of a housekeeper?’

‘It means that I won’t be leaving any—children we might have,’ she said in a low voice, turning her head away from his close scrutiny. ‘Jerry wants to open an office here in the riding if he’s successful, and I would run that as I’ve done with my father’s for some time.’

‘So you’ll be bringing up my nieces and nephews close to the ranch,’ he remarked conversationally, and turned back to the stove. He set a match to the fire and when it had roared into flame, adjusted a lever on the thick black smokestack reaching up through the roof and dropped pieces of wood one at a time on to the flaring kindling. ‘It’s a strange thing,’ he said then in a musing tone as he brushed off his hands and went to wash them at the sink. ‘One of your sons may inherit the ranch one day—they’ll bear the Fraser name.’

‘No! ’ she exclaimed quickly. ‘I mean—you’ll have sons of your own to hand the ranch on to,’ she added when his eyebrows rose.

‘Oh, I doubt it,’ he said as casually as if she had made a remark about the weather. ‘The only woman I’d care to make the mother of my sons is—out of my reach.’

Yes, she was out of his reach now, Lara thought wistfully, but surely the woman who had inspired so much devotion in Matt’s heart would realise her mistake and come back to him.

She went to the sink with the coffee pot, averting her eyes from the bronzed forearms he was towelling dry, and set it on the stove after she had measured coffee into it. ‘Have you time for coffee?’ she asked, turning quickly and surprising a curious look in his eyes. It was as if a curtain had been drawn from them to reveal the innermost part of him. Her breath caught in her throat when she glimpsed the deep pain there, a kind of inarticulate longing for something he could never have.

But it was a momentary thing, and when he spoke in a harsh voice a moment later she wondered if she had imagined the vulnerability in his eyes.

‘No. I’ll have coffee out with the boys. I have to get back with the branding equipment.’ He threw down the towel and turned to the door, saying over his shoulder: ‘I’ve decided to get some of it done where we’re working today.’

‘Oh. I thought I might see something of it while I’m here —won’t you be working in the corrals down the valley?’ She had noticed a series of fenced-off areas half a mile or so from the cabin.

He smiled thinly. ‘Don’t worry. You’ll see—and hear— plenty when we bring the balance of the cows and calves down in a couple of days.’ He put a hand on the screen door and paused again to ask: ‘Think you’ll manage the stove now?’

‘Yes, I think so,’ she said, glancing over at the red glow behind the thick front bars. ‘I’ll take care it doesn’t go out again. Thanks, Matt.’

He nodded and his eyes went over her dirt-streaked face and clothes, taking in the well-shaped length of her legs revealed under the brief shorts she was wearing.

‘You won’t be disturbed if you want to clean up in the men’s shower next door.’ The ghost of a smile played at the back of his eyes. ‘There’s hot water from the stove in there. And you’d better wear something a little less revealing for when the boys come back. We’re all inclined to be— animalistic up here when an attractive woman is around to tempt us! ’

He had gone even before she had time to gasp, and at the same time the coffee boiled over, and hissed viciously on the stove.

There was a welcome lifting of the loneliness Lara had felt all day when the men rode in just after six, their faces seamed with weariness after the long day.

She stood at the kitchen door, freshly showered, her hair a silver halo round her face and her body covered to Matt’s specifications in navy slacks and high-necked, though sleeveless, paler blue nylon top.

Without exception, the men tipped their fingers politely to the broad brims of their hats when they saw her, and she smiled when she interpreted their slightly anxious looks to the kitchen beyond her. Obviously, they expected little from this slip of a girl in the way of a meal to satisfy work-sharpened appetites, and she thought smugly of the huge bowls of fried chicken keeping warm on the stove. Each piece had been generously coated with Anna’s special mixture of breadcrumbs and spices and fried to golden crispness in the big stewpot.

On the long table she had laid out green salads garnered from the small vegetable garden, hearty potato salad and a variety of pickles she had found in Happy’s store cupboards. The rolls were beside the chicken to keep warm, and had baked to a light brownness after a disastrous first batch before she had learned how to regulate the heat from fire to temperamental oven.

She was proud of what she had accomplished under difficult conditions, pleased that the appetites of fourteen hungry men would be satisfied by her own efforts. But it was Matt’s approbation she craved, she realised, as she watched the last of the men disappear towards the corral without seeing his tall figure astride Samson, his sleekly muscled horse.

Billy followed her into the kitchen as she turned away dejectedly, his voice breathless after his run from the corral. ‘Hi, Lara—what’s for supper? Sure smells good.’

He came to a halt before the table and his eyes widened in dismay when they had swept the length of the table.

‘There’s only salad?’ he asked accusingly. ‘Matt said we weren’t to expect much because you’re not used to camp cooking, but ‑’

Matt’s lack of faith in her sent a stab of pain through her, but she said facetiously to Billy: ‘Well, you can’t expect a city-girl like me to know about cooking fried chicken and rolls on an old camp stove, can you?’

He caught the twinkle in her eye and ran to the stove with a whoop of joy. 'That's what I could smell—oh boy, Lara, can I try just one little piece?’

‘No way! ’ she told him firmly, putting her hands on his shoulders to propel him to the door. ‘You go and wash like the other men before you eat.’

‘Gosh, Lara, you’re worse than a mother,’ Billy grumbled.

‘Then it’s just as well I didn’t take you up on your offer to marry your dad,’ she retorted.

‘Aw, Lara, that was before you got engaged to Jerry— and I didn’t even know you could cook then! If you ever change your mind about Jerry ‑’

‘Out!’

She was backing against the door to open it when it gave suddenly and she staggered against a hard body whose arms came round her front to support her. Even before Billy wriggled free and shouted: ‘Matt! Did you find the calf?’ she knew they were Matt’s arms just above her waist and that he seemed in no hurry to let her go. The temptation to lean back and stay there was strong, but like Billy she struggled free and turned flushed cheeks to look at him.

‘Yes, I found him,’ he was saying, his eyes half-smiling down at the boy. ‘He wasn’t far away. But what do you mean by pestering Lara when she’s getting supper?’

‘She’s not—everything’s all ready. And Matt, we’re having fried chicken and rolls and ‑’

He faltered, and Lara supplied: ‘And salad, Billy. You can’t stay healthy for long on just chicken and rolls.’

‘Go and clean up,’ Matt ordered brusquely, ‘or there won’t be any left for you.’ He stepped into the kitchen as Billy ran off, Lara backing away before his bulk. ‘You are quite the little mother, aren’t you?’ he asked, the glint in his eyes telling her that he had heard the rest of her conversation with Billy.

He looked then at the colourful dishes on the table, the tin plates stacked neatly at one end with cutlery beside them, then went over to inspect the chicken and rolls. He picked up a drumstick and bit into its crusty surface, his brows shooting up in surprise when its flavour reached his taste buds.

‘Well, do you like it?’

‘Not bad,’ he conceded, and took another bite. ‘I’m sure you’ll have quite a few more requests to forget Jerry when the meal’s over—especially from Drew. Like Billy, he was taken with your charms even before he knew you could cook.’

‘Oooh ...! ’ she fumed impotently, all the joy in her accomplishment dissipated. ‘Go away—go and wash! ’

She thought she detected anger in his eyes for a moment, then he shrugged and said: ‘You’re the kitchen boss—but save some of that chicken for me. Don’t give it all away to your admirers.’

The comments of the hands as they came minutes later to pile their plates high did a little to restore her good humour, and she smiled when one of the older men said: ‘You’d never know Happy wasn’t here!’

Drew, behind him, laughingly put in: ‘Well, I sure know Happy isn’t that dream standing over there—and things never look as pretty as this when he does it.’

Billy and Vern arrived just as the last hand filed out, and Lara helped herself and went to sit with them on a fallen trunk at the-edge of the compound. Matt could help himself to the chicken she had replaced on the stove to keep warm.

The air was already cooler outside, and she was hungry, although she had remembered early that afternoon that she had had no breakfast and had made a sandwich for herself. There was silence between the three of them until Vern at last put his empty plate on the ground between his feet and sighed with satisfaction.

‘Lara, you wouldn’t consider coming to our place and be cook for Billy and me, would you?’ To Matt, who came up just then with his plate and sat at Lara’s other side, he added: ‘I’m just trying to entice Lara away from Jerry, but ‑’

‘She won’t, Dad. I’ve already asked her,’ Billy put in impulsively, then reddened and looked down at his plate when Vern’s eyes narrowed in suspicion.

‘You asked Lara to come and cook for us?’

‘Well, kind of ...’ Billy mumbled, and scraped the toe of his boot in the dusty earth.

Vern turned despairingly to Lara. ‘Did he ask you to marry me, Lara?’

She nodded, her eyes dancing with laughter.

‘Please excuse him,’ Vern apologised. ‘He does that all the time with every new woman who comes near the ranch. He even tried to marry me off to Mrs Carter, a very nice widow lady, but she’s fifty if she’s a day.’

They all laughed, and Matt said lightly: ‘You can’t blame a fellow for trying!’ More seriously he went on: ‘But why don’t you let your dad find his own wife, Billy? That’s something a man has to do for himself.’

‘I know that, Matt,’ Billy answered in a small voice, of such longing that Lara’s heart went out to him. ‘It’s just that Dad’s taking an awful long time finding one.’

All at once Lara knew that Billy’s search for a wife for Vern had little to do with his dislike of going away to school in Vancouver. He wanted—needed—the security of a complete family as he had known it when he was a small boy. A mother-figure to supply the tenderness only a woman can offer. It was strange that Billy seemed not to have considered Peg in the role of wife and mother, but perhaps he regarded her in the same light as Vern himself had until a few days ago—she was Peg, part of the ranch, a young girl who never grew any more mature as the years passed. In short, an older sister.

Vern broke the silence by getting to his feet and putting a ruffling hand on Billy’s blond head. ‘Well, let’s get moving, son. We’ll organize a dishwashing detail, Lara.’

‘Oh no,’ she protested quickly, beginning to rise. ‘You men have been working hard all day.’

‘So have you,’ Matt said quietly, putting a long brown hand on her arm to pull her back to a sitting position, and when Vern and Billy moved off added: ‘You didn’t get much sleep last night either, did you? That’s why I told Peg to let you sleep on this morning when I saw you were dead to the world.’

A hot wave of embarrassment went from her throat to cover her cheeks in fluctuating pink, and he chuckled drily, having read her thoughts accurately.

‘Don’t worry, you look very charming, very innocent, when you’re asleep—in fact, you looked about twelve years old.’ His black eyes were so close to hers that she saw the serious veil fall away from them to reveal a gleam of mocking laughter in their depths. ‘But then you are very innocent in some ways, aren’t you? It’s unusual these days for a girl of your age.’

‘Maybe—for the kind of girl you know,’ she said waspishly, rising to her feet and smoothing the blue top over her slender hips. Two of the older men close by looked curiously at them and she lowered her voice to continue, glad that for once she could look down on Matt. ‘I happen to believe, though it’s probably an idea out of the dark ages to you, that it’s worth waiting for marriage to a man you love.’

Her pleasure in being in a commanding position over him dissipated rapidly when he stood up, the mocking light gone from his eyes.

‘And Jerry’s the man you’ve waited for?’

Her eyes wavered and fell from his piercing look, but her voice was defiantly confident when she answered: ‘Yes, of course. Why else would I be marrying him?’

He shrugged, his eyes noncommittal again. ‘Women have many different reasons for becoming engaged. But yours seems to be the right one.’

‘I’m so glad you approve,’ she mocked. ‘Jerry will be happy to know that Big Brother has put his seal of approval on our marriage! ’

His jaw tightened and he seemed about to say something, then paused for several seconds before bringing out a polite: ‘If you’ll excuse me, I have some things to see to before Peg calls at ten.’

He wheeled away from her and she stared after him, her eyes filled with an anguish which would probably have raised his black eyebrows had he seen it.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Sleep came quickly that night to Lara, claiming her almost at once when she slid into her sleeping bag beside Billy. Even the lonely howling of a coyote nearby, which she heard later when she turned over, sent no tremors through her. There was security in the knowledge that Matt and the other men were close by.

She crept from her warm bag as dawn streaked the sky, knowing that she would have to tackle the stove before the men rose for breakfast. An early mist obscured the smoke curling up from the black smokestack of the kitchen, and her nose twitched as she stepped quietly up to the small porch, thinking she must be imagining the tantalising aroma of freshly brewed coffee drifting past her nostrils.

But when she peered through the screen door she saw Matt with a coffee mug in his hand, sitting with his feet propped up on the wall beside a blazing fire. There was an aura of vulnerable sadness about the way his’ chin was tucked close to his chest, his eyes staring sightlessly into the red flames, and Lara tiptoed backwards and made noises of arrival on the resounding wood of the porch floor.

His feet had been drawn from the wall when she came into the kitchen and she assumed surprise at seeing him there.

‘Matt! You’re an early riser. I came to start the fire and make coffee.’

‘I thought you might have trouble with the stove again,’ he said, poker-faced. ‘You’re up early yourself.’

‘I slept much better last night,’ she said brightly, and saw his frown as he turned to the coffee pot on the stove. ‘Do you always get up this early?’ she asked curiously, watching the economy of his movements as he took down a cup from the row hanging under a cupboard and poured coffee for her.

‘I never sleep late. Vern tells me I need a wife to keep me under the covers.’ He handed the cup to her, evidently aware that she took neither-cream nor sugar, and seemed amused by the wave of colour sweeping over her face. He pulled a chair closer to the fire and she sank into it, averting her eyes from the wicked gleam in his while she sipped the strong, hot brew.

‘I would have thought there were any number of girls willing to fill that bill,’ she said at last, her voice tart as she visualised the faceless woman who would one day share his bed and all that that implied.

‘There’s a few,’ he admitted with a wry smile. ‘But I prefer to be the hunter, not the hunted.’

‘You make it sound like a cat and mouse game!’

‘I guess that’s more or less what it is with me,’ he admitted after a thoughtful pause. ‘I seem to want what’s unavailable to me.’

As if regretting his confidence, he rose and said: ‘I want to get an early start today. I’ll shower and then call the men—can you cope with breakfast?’

‘I think so. It can’t be any worse than preparing their supper.’

But she found that frying up dozens of eggs and endless slices of ham was a far more rushed affair than the leisurely preparation of supper while the men were away working. The only consolation was that they seemed to have accepted her as one of themselves now, an essential part in the scheme of things, and there was a glow of accomplishment and camaraderie in the waves she gave as the men set off on their horses for the day’s work up in the far pastures.

Matt, on Samson, was the last to leave, and she saw his quick frown of disapproval when Drew turned to call: ‘See you tonight, Lara.’

The hand she raised to wave included Matt, but he made no gesture of farewell as he dug his heels into the horse’s sides and took off in pursuit of the other riders far ahead.

‘It wouldn’t have killed him to nod goodbye to me,’ she muttered to herself, going back into the kitchen to start on the mountain of dishes piled in the sink. ‘He acts as if it’s no more than I should do to clean up after everyone and cook their meals.’

In fairness to him, though, she admitted that she had volunteered for the job and that Matt had wanted her to return to the ranch with Peg. Still...

The day was a repetition of the one before, except that there was no visit from Matt at noon so that the hours stretched into interminable loneliness as the day wore on. Lara almost wished she had accepted Billy’s half-hearted offer to stay with her instead of going with the men.

However, she forgot her loneliness as the time approached for their return and she busied herself preparing vegetables and beef slices in rich gravy as well as supervising the baking of rolls.

The meal was received with as much enthusiasm as the previous night’s, and the men emerged from their shy exteriors to cluster round her as they ate and tease her with their dry humour. Each time she looked up towards where Matt sat on the cabin steps with Frank, the crew’s foreman, his eyes were on her, but he seemed not to be annoyed as he had been with Drew earlier.

She went for a walk alone when the meal was over, the men having insisted on doing the dishes again. The sun was casting horizontal rays of orange and gold from atop the far mountains as she rounded the hill close to the cabin. Before her spread the broad plateau ringed by gentle slopes and jagged outcroppings, narrowing at the far end to an almost invisible gorge through twin buttes. Halfway between there and where she stood were two large corrals and a smaller one in between. That was where the branding would take place when the men brought the cows and calves down from the higher ranges the next day.

Wild flowers in vividly contrasting shades of orange and blue, purple and pink, clung to the hill slope she climbed and she decided to pick some for the cabin on her return journey.

Part way round the hill a yellow faced rock jutted out from the earth and gave her a panoramic view of the valley when she perched on it. Even the greenness of the plateau showed signs of drying to yellow patches here and there. Strange, when the purple-smudged mountains in the distance were topped thickly with snow, enough moisture to flood this valley and many others.

It was all so peaceful now. And though its vastness still intimidated her slightly, the wild country held little of the eeriness she had sensed on her arrival at the camp—perhaps because of the fact that she had a job to do now, a worthwhile challenge to her ingenuity as well as a fulfilment of her basic female instinct to care for the male of the species.

Her attention was caught by a movement to her right and she saw Samson, his sleek coat turned to burnt orange in the slanting rays of the setting sun, carry Matt at a canter towards the corrals. How exactly right man and beast were in this setting, she thought, shading her eyes from the sun while watching them approach the corrals and begin a slow ride round their perimeter.

Now and then Matt would jump down from the horse to inspect the fences more closely, sometimes lifting a fallen log to notch it into its correct place in the simple but effective criss-cross Cariboo fencing.

Lara rose and moved away, not wanting Matt to see that she had been watching him. The wild flowers had folded their petals for the night when she picked them, but she hoped they would open in their beauty for at least one day in the cabin.

It was late afternoon of the next day when Lara heard a distant rumble as of thunder and ran out to the clearing to look down the length of the valley. At first, all she could discern were hazy clouds of dust on the farthest point of the plateau, and then animals and riders came into view. Calves first, the men riding herd unidentifiable as they kept their assigned positions. Then followed the cows, reluctant to occupy the pen reserved for them apart from the calves, but driven and cajoled by the cowboys riding close on their heels.

The excitement of the spectacle gripped and exhilarated Lara. Here, away in the wild cattle country, was the beginning, the root of all life. And what noisy life it was! Mothers bellowed in anguish for their calves, and the plaintive replies of their offspring melded with theirs to produce a crescendo of sound that rolled vigorously round the hills.

It was a sound which accompanied the meal the men ate that night, and the radio receiver news from Peg that Happy’s operation had gone well and that the camp cook was already fretting to be back in charge of his kitchen. Lara, standing by at Matt’s request, thrilled with pride when he said: ‘Well, don’t tell Happy, but the men have never been so well fed. You can tell him that we’re managing, but we need him back here as soon as he can get out of bed.’

‘Will do,’ Peg’s voice came cheerfully. ‘Good for Lara! I knew she wouldn’t let us down. By the way, Jerry’s still in town, so I can’t get him to speak to her. But I’d like a word with Vern, Matt, if he’s around.’

‘I'll get him for you, honey—oh, Lara’s gone to get him. Remember this is an open line, Peg. Don’t say anything you don’t want the whole country to know.’

Peg’s voice came over in a breathless laugh. ‘I won’t. Thanks, Matt.’

He relinquished the mouthpiece and followed Lara down the porch steps and across to where Billy was already settled under the tree he shared with Lara at night. To her surprise, Matt sat when she did, at the other side of Billy’s sleeping bag, his long legs stretched out in front of him, his back against the tree.

Billy, his cheeks flushed from the heat of the flaring campfire, looked up at him and said: ‘Is Dad talking to Peg again?’ And when Matt nodded briefly, he looked puzzled. ‘What do they have to talk about all of a sudden? They never did before.’

Drew, who had stopped playing his guitar a short while before, now strummed gently on the strings at the other side of the circle, and Matt looked down soberly at Billy’s small form tucked into the bag.

‘Sometimes a man and woman have important things to say to each other, son.’

‘But it’s not a woman—it’s Peg!' Billy objected, confirming Lara’s guess that he looked on Peg as a sexless older sister.

‘Peg’s a woman,’ Matt stated simply. ‘And your dad likes to talk to her.’

‘You mean ‑?’

‘I mean just that, no more,’ Matt said emphatically, but the glow that had lit up the blue of Billy’s eyes remained as he turned them thoughtfully to the fire.

Matt and Lara exchanged looks above his head, and she hoped hers conveyed the admiration she felt for his handling of a ticklish situation. He had certainly paved the way for Vern to introduce the possibility of Peg as a future wife if such an occasion arose.

It was pleasant to sit peacefully with the boy between them listening to Drew’s music in the firelight. Tonight Drew looked over at her only occasionally, and Lara wondered if that was because the boss was sitting so close to her—or, a much less pleasant thought, that Matt had told Drew to keep away from his brother’s fiancée again.

Drew went into his ‘Perfect Love’ song, and Matt rose abruptly from beside the sleeping Billy, colliding with Vern who had come to check on his son.

‘I want to get an early start on the branding tomorrow,' Matt told him, his voice low in deference to Billy. ‘Tell the men to get some sleep now, will you?’ He looked down impersonally and said: ‘Goodnight, Lara. Sleep well.’

But the fretful lowing of the cows and the answering cries of their calves made sleep difficult that night, and Lara was up before dawn had broken over the misty valley. It was she who surprised Matt this time with a blazing fire and strong, hot coffee. His eyebrows shot up when she handed a steaming mug to him, and she saw that there was no trace of sleep in his eyes although he had just arisen. She asked if he had slept well.

‘I had enough,’ he replied laconically, carrying his coffee over to the stove and hooking a chair forward with the toe of his boot. ‘How about you? You’re up very early.’

‘The crying of the animals got to me,’ she admitted. ‘Poor things …'

‘You can’t afford sentimentality in this business, Lara— and that’s what it is. Business. So many cattle into the market, so much cash for their sale, and you say a prayer or two that prices will hold till yours get there.’

She pulled a chair over for herself and said diffidently: ‘Matt?'

‘Mmm?’

‘Will you tell me something about ranching?' Wild colour flooded her cheeks when his eyes swivelled round to look disbelievingly into hers. ‘It was so—exciting yesterday when the cattle were driven into the valley, and it made me realise how little I know about it. For instance, what happens to them after they’re branded? And why do they have to be branded in the first place? Surely there aren’t any rustlers around any more.’

He chuckled drily. ‘You’d be surprised, with beef the price it is in the stores today! But we have more trouble down at the ranch where they can drive their trucks in and help themselves.’

He was surprisingly articulate once he was launched on his favourite topic of conversation, and Lara listened enthralled while he touched on the fall round-up which would take these animals to winter pasture south of the ranch.

‘Some of the beef will be sold off, of course, but the big year will be next year’s sales,’ he explained, accepting a second cup of coffee from her.

An hour flew by while he talked about the fattening of livestock, the difficulties of winter feeding, and the financial gamble every rancher took in raising beef for market.

She was so absorbed that she started when Billy’s high-pitched voice cut in from the doorway. ‘Have you two been talking all night?’

‘Not quite all night, Billy,’ she said, feeling oddly flustered as she got up and went to draw him to the fire. ‘Come and get warm—would you like some hot chocolate before the other fellows get up?’

He assented sleepily, and made no objection when Matt pulled him on to his knee and settled his head on his shoulder. His eyes stared hypnotically into the fire’s red glow, and when Lara turned round with his drink he was fast asleep, his head of bright gold fallen on Matt’s broad chest. She signalled to Matt that she would take her shower now and went quietly from the warm room.

Later, when the flurry of breakfast was over, Billy followed Vern and Matt to the door as usual and Matt turned to him.

‘How would you like to bring Lara down to the corral a bit later, Billy? You can show her a little of what goes on at a ranch.’ The smile he tossed across at Lara could have meant anything or nothing.

‘How would it be if I walk down myself in a while?’ she suggested, seeing Billy’s face fall in disappointment. ‘It’ll take me some time to get the bread rolls on the go, and you’d just be in my way, Billy.’

So a little after ten she walked alone across the plateau towards the corrals, seeing the swift-moving figures of the men in the smaller central one as she approached. Dust was already rising in clouds from the sparsely grassed interiors of the pens as the animals moved restlessly round them. Billy was sitting watching the proceedings from the top rail of the branding pen fence and she joined him there, holding on to a crossed section as she swung herself nimbly into a sitting position. Conversation was impossible because of the ear-splitting noise from the animals. Calves bawled loudly when they were separated from their peers and submitted to the indignity of being prodded along a chute into their torture chamber where they were quickly brought to the ground to lie helplessly under the weight of two brawny men while a third applied the searing iron to their exposed side. Adding to the bedlam were the deepchested bellows of the mothers from their compound nearby.

All the men wore the scarves normally knotted round their necks as a mask over their mouths and noses, showing only a narrow strip of skin between scarf and hat. The yellowish particles of dust blew over to where Lara and Billy sat, infiltrating her throat and nose until she could scarcely breathe. She signalled to Billy to tie his scarf round his face as the men did, and wished she had brought one herself.

Matt was distinguishable because of the brown polka dot in his scarf. He went quickly from fire to calf with the hot iron, looking up impatiently if there was a delay in delivery of the next animal. Vern, syringe in hand, crouched beside him injecting each rump at the same time.

Lara felt sick when the glowing hot instrument was pressed to the brown hide and the acrid smoke, heavy with the odour of charred skin, drifted across the corral to her unprotected nostrils. The terrified roll of the calves’ eyes when they were brought down would haunt her dreams, she knew, for a long time to come. Surely there was a more humane way of doing it if it must be done at all! Something about the firm sureness of Matt’s economical movements as he applied the iron suggested pleasure for him in the knowledge that it was his brand he laid on the helpless animals, proof of his domination and possession.

In an odd way, she could sympathise with the calves. Matt had made love to her in the same confident way, his searing kiss replacing the hot iron but branding her as his nevertheless. Unlike the calves, however, there was no outward sign of his possession on her, and she would take care he never found out.

‘You didn’t stay long at the corrals this morning,' Matt remarked after supper when he took a seat beside her on the cabin steps, his long brown fingers busy rolling a cigarette.

‘I—I didn’t think you saw me there,’ she said, averting her eyes from his questioning look.

'I saw you,’ he told her quietly, and put the finished cigarette in his mouth. ‘You looked pretty green when you left, though. What upset you about it?’

‘It—just seemed so cruel, somehow. Oh, Matt, isn’t there a more humane way to do it these days?’

A match flared and he drew in a lungful of smoke before turning to look quizzically down at her. ‘We’ve tried other ways,’ he said then with a shrug. ‘But the old way turned out to be the best for us.’

‘But not for the calves! They were terrified—I don’t know how you can look into their eyes and then deliberately burn them! ’

He gave her a dry smile. ‘That’s simple enough. I don’t look at their eyes. All I see is the spot I put my mark on.’

‘But can’t you give them a tranquilliser of some sort?’ she asked, and was disconcerted at his white-toothed laugh.

‘Sure—I could also give them feather beds and go round tucking them in at night. Hold up there, Lara.’ He pulled her back down beside him when she rose angrily, and the amusement was gone from his voice when he went on: ‘I explained to you this morning that ranching is a precarious business at best. The cost of tranquillising drugs on top of the regular vaccines they get would most likely tip the balance between success and failure of the ranch. Besides which, they’re not necessary. If you’d stayed longer this morning you would have seen that the whole operation is forgotten as soon as they’re back in the pen.’

‘I suppose you’re right,’ she sighed tremulously. ‘It all seemed so barbaric to me ...’

A young hand walked by just then and Matt called out to him.

‘Jack, I want you and Phil to camp out down by the corrals tonight.’ He got up and took a few steps towards the younger man. ‘I’m worried about that lead cow—she’s crazier than ever to get to her calf and she just might break the fence during the night.’

They moved off still talking, and Lara knew she had been dismissed from his mind.

It was just after ten when she saw him again. Vern, who had been waiting in the cabin for Peg’s call-in from the ranch, came out to the steps just as Matt came from the direction of the corral. His tall figure was a shadowy silhouette against the soft yellow light cast by the kerosene lamp through the window.

‘Jerry’s on the radio,’ Vern said in a carrying voice, his disappointment at not hearing Peg’s voice giving a sharp edge to his. ‘He wants to talk to you, Matt.’

Lara, from her spot under the tree beside Billy, couldn’t hear Matt’s words, but she detected a note of surprise in his reply. He added a few more words to Vern before stepping inside the cabin, and Vern crossed to where she sat.

‘Jerry’s on, Lara. Matt says to go over in a minute, that it’s probably you he wants to talk to.’

She got up and Vern took her place beside Billy, who was already asleep. ‘I’ll call you when Peg comes on,’ she promised, and wished she could feel some of his eagerness at the prospect of talking to Jerry.

But she didn’t. A feeling of unreality descended on her as she walked with dragging feet to the cabin. Jerry and the outside world were a million miles from the orbit she had spun in for the past few days. For the first time in her life, she had been truly needed—not as a charmer to win votes for her father or Jerry, but in a way basic to women since time began. Her friends in faraway Vancouver would most likely be amused to know that she had found such deep satisfaction in feeding a crew of hungry men in a rough cattle camp away in the wilderness, but she knew that, whatever the future held for her, she would never again know such a deep sense of accomplishment.

The sound of Jerry’s voice coming through the screen as she settled on the steps to wait did no more than confirm her alienation from him. She had become so used to the quiet, slow drawl of Matt and the other men that Jerry’s excited ‘city’ tone elicited a sudden revulsion at her own agreement to marry him.

She had been listening only to the quality of his voice, not the words, but now she stiffened when she heard ‘Adrienne.’ She rose and went quietly to the door, although the words would have been clear to her from the steps. But she had to see Matt’s face, his reaction to hearing the name of the woman he still loved. The woman who had evidently come back into his life as he had hoped for so long that she would.

‘I.. I had to bring her out to the ranch, Matt. She— wants to see you ... knows she made a big mistake ... what should I do?’

Lara could see, in the tight clenching of his jaw and the stony set of his eyes as they stared unseeingly at the dials before him, that Matt was fighting to control the strong surge of emotion in him. His voice, too, reflected his inner turmoil when he spoke harshly into the mouthpiece.

‘Do? Keep here there until I get back tomorrow afternoon. I’ll bring Lara with me—we’ll be there around six.’ His voice was less tense when he added: ‘Put Peg on now —Vern wants to speak to her.’

He put the mouthpiece down with a sudden movement, and Lara’s heart turned over when his head, the thick hair showing blue-black lights, dropped between his hands. For the first time, she saw his broad shoulders slump forward as if the tension he had lived under since Adrienne’s defection had suddenly snapped his sinewy muscles.

He rose so suddenly from the chair that Lara had no time to go back further than one step from the doorway when his violent push against it sent her reeling. His long arm flashed out in an automatic gesture to catch her to him, and he looked at her as if he had never seen her before.

‘Lara?’ The turmoil clouding his eyes cleared slightly when he looked down at her, his arm making no attempt to release her. But she knew that the softness of her curves against his body meant nothing to him now. There was a faraway look in his eyes, a look that said he had no need now for the physical release another woman’s body could give him. It might have been a bale of hay his arm encircled.

‘I’m sorry ... I forgot you wanted to speak to Jerry,’ he said, half-dazed. ‘But you’ll see him tomorrow. I’ve told him you and I will be going back to the ranch.’

‘Yes, I—I heard.’ Gently, she disengaged herself from his arm and he seemed not to notice when it fell lifelessly to his side. ‘You’d better get Vern—I can hear Peg’s voice now.’

But Vern had already realised the radio was free and he was standing at the bottom of the porch steps.

Matt stirred himself to say: ‘Tell Peg she’s to come back up here tomorrow. Lara and I will have to return to the ranch, so Peg will be needed for the men’s meals.’

‘Anything wrong at the ranch, Matt?’ Vern asked quietly.

‘No—no, nothing wrong. I just have to get back there for personal reasons, and Lara might as well come too. She’s had a hard few days.’

Matt seemed to have mastered the emotion he had displayed earlier, and his face was a closed mask as he turned without a word to Lara and strode off into the night. A few minutes later, when she had moved woodenly down the steps and towards the fire, she heard hoofbeats, sharp and hurried, leaving the corral and fading to nothingness across the plateau.

No doubt he needed time to himself to digest the earth-shaking news that his love had returned and wanted to see him. Not only that, she had realised her mistake in leaving him and was evidently anxious to take up again with him where she had left off. Lara wondered if Adrienne knew how easy it would be to do just that, if she would know when they met that his heart was open to no other woman but her. Lara wished with a shiver that she herself would never have to meet Adrienne, but knew it was inevitable that she do so the next day.

The flames from the campfire suddenly blurred before her eyes as if a mirage hovered in front of them, and she put up a hand to rub them clear. She felt wetness there, on her eyes and on her cheeks, and looked wonderingly at the glistening moisture on her fingers when she brought the hand away from her face. Tears! Tears that had hardened to an icy block deep inside her, the core Matt had melted with his kisses that burned and drew away the frozen veil over her feelings ...

CHAPTER NINE

The sun caught and held in shimmering folds the yellow dress of a girl who rose from a porch chair at the ranch the next afternoon.

Matt had been correct in his estimate of their arrival time, and it was a few minutes before six when he drove into the parking shed close to the house. He had been moodily preoccupied on the journey, and Lara had put it down to a rekindled tension in the prospect of seeing Adrienne again.

She was breathtakingly lovely, Lara admitted to herself, going up the steps just behind Matt. There was the dark beauty of warmer climes in her cloud of almost black hair and deep brown, sultry eyes. The yellow dress, with its tight bodice and full skirt to the knee, enveloped a stunningly perfect figure, ripe yet slender. And as the girl threw herself into Matt’s arms, which opened automatically to embrace her, Lara knew what he had meant when he told her he liked a woman who was not afraid to be a woman. Adrienne, from the way she pressed the fullness of her red lips to his, was in no doubt about her femininity!

Painfully, Lara saw the way Matt’s eyes roved over the dark girl's face as if searching for any minute changes in the beloved countenance.

Neither of them noticed her departure when she crossed to the screen door and went into the house. Adrienne’s voice, faintly husky, followed her in.

‘Darling Matt! I'd forgotten how ‑’

The quick tap of Lara’s heels on the tiled floor cut off the rest, but she could well imagine what they might be.

‘Lara!’

Jerry’s voice came from behind her just as she set one foot on the staircase, and she turned to face him. She had been dreading the moment when she would see him again, knowing she must tell him that their engagement was off.

‘Hello, Jerry.’

She hardly had time to take in his well-groomed appearance in dark blazer and grey slacks before he took a few swift strides towards her and swept her into his arms.

'I've missed you, honey,’ he whispered into her ear. ‘Everything goes wrong for me when you’re not around.’

She drew sharply away from him. ‘Has something gone wrong with the campaign?’ she asked worriedly, force of habit putting politics before personal feelings.

‘Nothing your being here won’t fix.’ His arms tightened round her waist, and suddenly his lips were on hers and he was kissing her with a hungry sort of desperation. She put her hands on his shoulders to push him away, and to the couple who came in through the screen door at that moment it looked as if she was participating wholeheartedly in Jerry’s kiss.

‘My, my,’ came a huskily mocking voice behind them. ‘Such scenes of passion in this hallowed hall!’

Jerry moved abruptly away from Lara and she saw Adrienne, her mouth curved into a provocative smile, look up into Matt’s face as if inviting him to follow Jerry’s example. His eyes were on Lara and Jerry, however, and he missed the innuendo in Adrienne’s smile. Lara, familiar now with every line on the weathered bronze of his face, saw the telltale whiteness under his tan and knew that his meeting with Adrienne had stirred him more deeply than he would ever admit.

‘I’ll leave you to make the introductions, Jerry,’ he said tersely, moving away from Adrienne. ‘I’m going to shower and change.’

He went with long strides then to the back of the hall and Adrienne moved closer to Jerry and Lara, wafting with her a faintly musky perfume.

‘I don’t think there’s any need for introductions, Jerry,’ she said with a lazy smile which nevertheless encompassed Lara’s blue denim slacks and shirt and the silvery fair hair pulled back into a ponytail. ‘This must be the Larraine your mother raves about, and I’m sure she knows who I am.’

‘Yes, I believe I do,’ Lara said stiffly. ‘Weren’t you engaged to Matt at one time?’

The heavy-lidded eyes lost their lazy look, sharpening as they met the icy flecks in Lara’s. ‘You make it sound so final, my dear,’ she said intently, then gave an amused laugh. ‘Nothing in this world is final except death.’

‘I suppose that must be true,’ Lara returned coolly. ‘If you’ll excuse me. I’ll go and change for dinner.’

‘Yes, you must feel a mess in those old clothes,’ Adrienne said snidely, adding: ‘Still, I suppose all those men at the camp didn’t mind the only female being dressed sloppily—I believe they get so woman-crazy it doesn’t matter what she wears as long as she’s got curves in the right places.’

Jerry, who had stood by silently while these exchanges were going on, now said: ‘Come on, Adrienne, I’ll pour you a drink while Lara gets changed. Don’t be long, honey,’ he added, looking up to where Lara stood on the landing.

Adrienne finked her arm with his and gave Lara a smile over her shoulder. ‘Yes, let’s do that, and we can plan a little homecoming celebration for the wanderers.’

Lara was still fuming when she sat at the dressing table in her room after her shower. Adrienne’s heavy perfume still seemed to linger in her nostrils, a constant reminder of the dark girl’s earthy attractiveness.

On impulse, Lara went to inspect her wardrobe and finally selected a filmy short dress of midnight blue. The light chiffon was swathed low over her breasts, leaving bare a sweep of white skin to the graceful column of her slender neck.

A skilful blending of make-up brought out the wild rose colour of her cheeks and elongated the almond shape of her eyes still further. Her lips she outlined in pale rose lipstick, and then swept her hair, shining clean from the shower, round her head to form a silver roll at the back, a tendril over each ear teased into curl with her hairbrush. Stones of sapphire round her neck and on her ears emphasised the blue of her dress and darkened her eyes to match their rich shade. She stood back to look critically at herself in the full-length mirror beside the dressing table.

She had hardly expected to dress so elaborately for an evening at the ranch, but then she hadn’t expected to meet anyone like Adrienne there either!

Jerry’s eyes lit up when they met by chance in the lower hall a few minutes later. ‘I’d almost forgotten how beautiful you are, darling,’ he said huskily, his arms sliding round her waist as they walked to the living room.

Pain struck a lightning blow to her middle when she saw Matt, glass in hand and strikingly attractive in a white, silk-like shirt, looking down intently into Adrienne’s eyes while he said something to her. Adrienne’s low, throaty laugh floated across the room and her hand lifted to caress the back of his neck.

‘Larraine! How lovely to see you again, my dear!’

Beth, dressed in her usual flyaway panels—this time attached to a dress of pale pink—fluttered over, a genuine smile of welcome lighting her round face. Lara, surprised at the older woman’s evident pleasure, leaned forward to hug her. Over Beth’s shoulder she saw Adrienne’s eyes widened in shocked surprise at her changed appearance, but it was Matt who caught her attention when she straightened away from Beth. His shirt glimmered whitely against the darkness of his face in the gathering shadows near the fireplace where he stood, and his eyes glittered fiercely at her across the room. It was as if he was annoyed at something she had done, and her puzzled gaze locked with his for a few brief seconds before he frowned and looked down into the glass in his hand.

When Jerry said: ‘The usual drink, darling?’ she nodded and smiled abstractedly, then followed Beth to the sofa nearest the long windows.

‘My dear, I’m so sorry you had such an uncomfortable time at the cabin,’ Beth said worriedly. ‘I thought from the first it wasn’t a suitable place for a girl like you—but to think of you having to cook for all those men! ’

‘But I enjoyed it,’ said Lara, smiling at her shocked expression. ‘I didn’t have to do it, I wanted to.’

Adrienne’s low laugh put her teeth on edge. ‘Who can blame you, sweetie? All those rough tough he-men, and only you there to reach their hearts through their stomachs! I wouldn’t have minded that job myself.’

‘Considering you can’t tell one end of a skillet from the other, you’d have a hard time reaching any man’s heart that way! ’ Matt commented drily.

‘I didn’t say it was the only way, darling,’ she said, her voice loaded with husky meaning as she looked up into his face and slipped one hand into the crook of his arm. ‘Let’s go out on the porch for a while—there’s so much we have to catch up on.’

‘I’ll follow you when I’ve freshened my drink,’ he told her, moving away so that her arm fell from his. The yellow dress rustled faintly as she moved to the open doors and passed on to the veranda, and Lara again caught the musky odour of her perfume.

Jerry came back with her drink and took a seat next to her on the sofa, covering her free hand with his. Her fingers tightened on the frosty glass when Matt, his own drink topped up, went by without a glance and closed the porch doors behind him. It was obvious that he intended to have privacy while he and Adrienne ‘caught up’.

The conversation of Beth and Jerry flowed round and over her head, as it did later that evening at the dinner table when Matt sat with Adrienne on his right, listening with a half-smile to her throaty reminiscences.

‘Do you remember that time we got lost for hours when the truck broke down and we had to hike to the highway and hitch a ride? We must have walked miles.’

‘I remember your complaints about blisters and telling me how stupid I was to run out of gas miles from nowhere! ’ he told her caustically, but there was indulgence in the look he gave her.

Lara was in the middle of thinking how blissful she herself would be to find herself stranded with Matt anywhere, when she heard Jerry call her name across the table, evidently not for the first time.

‘Where are you, honey?’ he asked, one eyebrow raised in whimsical question. ‘You’ve been very quiet since you got back from the cabin—did you leave your heart up there?’

She forced a smile and said lightly: ‘Maybe. I liked it up there, it was peaceful and quiet, very beautiful.’ She had a sudden longing to be up there again in the wild ruggedness of the hills, sleeping under the vast canopy of a star-studded sky; to feel again the satisfaction of feeding work-weary men at the end of a long day; but most of all, the close contact with Matt. Even now, when she glanced at his face, she could see again the soft glow in his eyes while he explained ranching to her in the early morning hours ...

‘You must be joking!’ Adrienne exclaimed, twisting in her chair to look down the table’s length at Lara. ‘You mean the ranch itself isn’t quiet enough for you? It would drive me whacky to be stuck away up there with nothing but cows for company!’

‘It’s as well the pioneer women didn’t think the same,’ Matt said, his voice a cynical drawl, ‘or very few of us would be here today.' He looked at Lara and added gently: ‘When you and Jerry are married, he can take you back to the cabin now and then if you really liked being up there.'

Jerry put in emphatically: ‘Count me out!' then looked across at Lara with an apologetic grin. ‘Sorry, honey, but I had too much of that as a boy.'

‘I hope Peg is all right up there on her own,' Beth worried.

‘She’s not quite alone, Beth,' Matt said with a wry. smile. ‘There are fourteen men up there, including Billy. Vern will take care of her—and anyway, I’m a lot more concerned about the men than Peg! Lara fixed most of tonight’s meal before we left, but they’ll be lucky to have canned meat and beans tomorrow.'

His dark eyes smiled directly into Lara’s, and she was absurdly pleased with his half-compliment, and the fact that there was at least a trace of their former communication. Beside him, Adrienne looked thoughtfully from his smiling eyes to Lara’s suddenly flushed cheeks, and pushed her chair back with a decisive movement. Stepping round the corner of the table, she laid a possessive arm round his shoulders.

‘Jerry and I planned a little celebration dance for your homecoming,' she said brightly.

The smile disappeared from Matt’s eyes and he looked up at her with an incredulous frown. ‘A dance for four people?’

‘Oh, don’t be so stuffy, darling,’ she said, ruffling his hair at the back. ‘If you men move some of the porch furniture we can dance out there. Just think how romantic it will be for the reunion of the lovebirds. Moonlight on water, dreamy music—everything! ’

Lara wasn’t sure which ‘lovebirds’ Adrienne meant, but she too pushed back her chair and stood up. ‘I’m really not in a mood for dancing tonight, Adrienne. It’s been a long day, and I think I’ll go on up to bed.’

‘Oh, come now,’ said the other girl, exasperation evident in her voice. ‘You didn’t change into that gorgeous dress just for dinner, did you? Jerry’s been looking forward to dancing with you tonight.’

‘Just stay for a couple, honey,’ Jerry added his urging to Adrienne’s. ‘I promise not to keep you up late if you’re tired.’

Lara sensed rather than saw Matt’s figure suddenly behind her, his bulk somehow reassuring. ‘If she wants to go to bed, let her go,’ he said tersely. ‘She was up before dawn this morning after an uncomfortable night in a sleeping bag.’

An angry frown began to form between Jerry’s brows and Lara said quickly: ‘No—no, it’s all right, Matt. I’ll stay for a while. I want to talk to you anyway, Jerry.’ Her left hand came up to brush a wisp of hair from her cheek and Adrienne’s languid eyes sharpened.

‘Tut tut, Jerry! Haven’t you made your arrangement with Lara official yet?’

Jerry looked puzzled. ‘I’m not with you—what are you talking about?’

‘No ring, darling.’ Adrienne’s small white teeth were visible behind the mocking curve of her full lips. ‘The symbol of possession that says “Hands off” to other men.’ The words were for Jerry, but her taunting look was directed at Matt.

‘Lara needs no reminding of her loyalty by an outward symbol,’ Matt said, his voice strained, and Adrienne had the grace to blush under her olive skin. He had presumably placed his ring on her finger, but it had been no guarantee of her faithfulness!

‘Why aren’t you wearing your ring?’ Jerry asked Lara, the expressive brown of his eyes displaying hurt embarrassment.

‘I—I left it here when I went up to the cabin, in case it got lost there,’ Lara explained weakly, her right hand coming over to cover the incriminating bareness of her ring finger. ‘And I—just didn’t think of it when I was dressing tonight.’

She avoided Jerry’s pained expression, feeling hypocritical in knowing that there had been no intention on her part to touch his ring again, apart from giving it back to him. But she could hardly tell him in front of Matt and Adrienne that their engagement was at an end. That would compound the guilt she already felt for having used him as a safety valve against the shattering effects of Matt’s first kiss. He deserved not to be humiliated any more than she sensed he was going to be when she told him of her decision.

‘Well, let’s get the furniture moved,’ Matt said abruptly, mercifully terminating the conversation. Jerry stared uncertainly at Lara a fraction longer before following his brother to the hall, and Adrienne swept after him saying she would select the records for playing on the living room stereo set.

Beth, who had listened to the exchange with a vaguely worried look, rose and laid a solicitous hand on Lara’s arm. ‘I know you’re tired, Larraine dear, but Jerry has been looking. forward to your return and he would be disappointed if you ran off to bed right away.’ She sighed with comfortable bliss. ‘How wonderful it will be to see both my sons dancing with the girls they love. Oh yes,’ she smiled conspiratorially in answer to Lara’s questioning look, Tm sure Matt’s as much in love with Adrienne as he ever was. Already I can see a difference in him, although it’s not always easy to know what Matt’s feelings are. Even as a child it was hard to tell what he was thinking at times—so different from Jerry.’ She laughed indulgently. ‘I always knew exactly what Jerry thought of everything.’

She seemed not to notice Lara’s preoccupation as she linked arms with her and walked to the door relating one of Jerry’s childish misdemeanours. Had Matt never been understood as a child because no one had taken the trouble to delve under the surface of his nature which was, as Beth said, so different from the sunny, open quality of Jerry’s? How much easier it must have been for Beth to respond to her own lovable child than the deep-channelled personality of Matt! Yet she would have been kind to him in her vague way, and Matt himself seemed to regard her with an amused affection.

The scraping of chair and table legs outside was drowned suddenly in the strains of a tune popular two or three years before, and Adrienne’s voice floated across the hall.

‘You’ve kept our favourite record, Matt darling. I thought you’d have ...’

Her exultant voice faded when she went out through the living room doors to the porch, but Lara could imagine the last part of her sentence. Adrienne had expected that Matt would destroy all evidence of their love after her defection, but here was proof positive that she was enshrined in his heart for all time!

Further proof was heartstoppingly evident to Lara when she stepped on to the porch a moment later with Jerry. Matt, one arm round Adrienne’s waist, the other hanging loosely at his side, offered no resistance as Adrienne’s hands brought his head down to meet the inviting moistness of her lips. Pain such as she had never known before knifed through Lara, and she drew back involuntarily against Jerry. *

‘We can dance at the other end, honey,’ he whispered in her ear, fortunately misinterpreting her motive as his arms encircled her from behind. ‘Then we won’t bother them and they won’t bother us.’

She let herself be drawn to the darker end of the porch, where the gaily covered chairs and lounges had been stacked away to make room for one couple to dance in comfort. Only the moonlight illuminated the shadows there, its pale silver light touching and glancing off the round white columns of the porch pillars. Lara was so shaken by the unfamiliar spasms of acute jealousy that her feet began to move automatically in time to the music when Jerry took her in his arms and placed his smoothly warm cheek against hers. The far end of the porch, where Matt and Adrienne were, was illuminated by the light streaming through the living room doors and windows, and Lara closed her eyes against the pain and the possibility of seeing the deepening of that kiss which Matt had accepted with such willingness.

How easy it had been for Adrienne to resume relations where she had left off with Matt! Beneath Lara’s numbed senses an insistent thought beat its way up to the surface of her mind. Anger. Anger and a kind of contempt for Matt’s spineless acceptance of his ex-fiancée's return to him without a demand for an accounting of where she had been, what she had been doing, in the interim. It was as if nothing mattered to him except the fact that the woman he loved had come back.

Lara was jerked back to reality when Jerry’s lips moved against her ear and she realised he had been whispering words she had been too far away in her mind to hear.

She drew her face sharply away from his. ‘Jerry, I— there’s something we have to talk about. I ‑’

‘I know, honey, you want to hear how the campaign is going.’ He smiled wryly into her worried eyes. ‘You’re all business, aren’t you? But that’s just as well—the truth is that it’s not going too well.’

‘But why, Jerry?’ From habit, she was all business when she looked up into his face, her eyes becoming alert as she pushed thoughts of Matt away. ‘Everything was going well before I left.’

‘That’s just it, darling. You left—and I was lost without you.’ His arm tightened on her waist. ‘I didn’t realise how much of a boost you give me, how much confidence I have in your level-headed approach to everything. Politics is second nature to you now, and you always seem to know the right thing to do at the right time.’ His sober look was exchanged quickly then for his more normal bantering expression. ‘So don’t run off and leave me, will you?’

She was numbed into miserable silence, and scarcely noticed when his cheek descended on hers again. Had he by some uncanny thought transference guessed that she had been about to terminate their engagement? It seemed that way, yet she knew that perception was a surface thing with him—he rarely saw beneath the outer layers of a person’s character, or attempted to gauge the depths of their feelings. Guilt stirred again in her when she remembered her own use of that very quality in him. Another man might have questioned the suddenness of her decision to marry him, but to Jerry it was merely a fulfilment of something he had desired.

Of one thing their conversation had made her sure. There could be no question of her backing away from him when he needed her to carry out the obligation she had undertaken when she agreed to come to the Cariboo—to help him in his campaign. To break their engagement now, when the election was less than two weeks away, would shatter the already shaky state of his confidence.

It would be a mixture of heaven and hell—mostly hell, she suspected, to stay near the man she loved while watching him renew his relationship with Adrienne. But she had made a commitment, and must stand by it. Whatever her own feelings were, Jerry believed that she was essential to his success, and she owed him that much at least.

CHAPTER TEN

Peg, Vern and Billy arrived back from the cattle camp the following Tuesday, and most of the men rode back to the ranch that day too, leaving two up at the cabin to take care of things there until the fall round-up, when the cattle would be brought down to lower pastures.

The ranch hands would be going into town on Friday for a few days’ break—the married ones to reunite with their families there or further afield and bring them home after their extended holiday, the’ single men preparing to have a lively time after the weeks spent in mostly masculine company.

Lara appreciated the sudden activity around the ranch buildings after the almost deathly hush since she had arrived, and there were many willing hands to saddle up for her when she took her early morning ride. The bunkhouse now blazed with lights after dark, and Lara would sit close to that end of the porch when Drew brought out his guitar to sit on the bunkhouse steps and sing his heart-plucking melodies as the moon rose high over the lake.

Matt seemed suddenly to have more time to stay close to the main house—whether it was because the men could now go out on the range in his place, or because of Adrienne’s vibrant presence, Lara wasn’t sure, but suspected the latter cause. He no longer incarcerated himself in the office after dinner; instead, he was never far from her side, falling in equably with her plans whether they were for an impromptu dance or a moonlight swim. It was as if he feared to let her out of his sight for long and, strangely, he appeared to suspect even Jerry’s motives where Adrienne was concerned. If they exchanged more than a few words together, he would stride over to come between them and remove Adrienne to the porch or garden.

Not that Jerry was comfortable with Adrienne in the house, Lara reflected, remembering his avoidance of the subject whenever it was brought up in the car as they drove to the outflung areas of the electoral district. He seemed, in fact, to actually dislike the girl who had almost become his sister-in-law, and who now showed every sign of fulfilling her earlier promise to Matt.

Peg, too, made clear her aversion to the sultry beauty when she came to chat in Lara’s room the night of her return. Her head pillowed on her arms and her slim slacks- clad knees pulled up as she lay on the unused bed in Lara’s room, she remarked thoughtfully: ‘I just can’t understand Matt. I expected him to show Adrienne the door, and maybe break a couple of arms and legs when she passed by, after what she did to him before. But he’s acting as if she’s just been away for a holiday or something. It isn’t like him.’

Lara’s stomach muscles had tensed, as they always did when Matt’s name was mentioned, but her voice was carefully controlled when she said: ‘Love does strange things to people sometimes, Peg. It can make them behave in ways that are completely out of character. It’s a form of madness in a way,’ she added with such soft intensity that Peg raised herself on one elbow to look curiously at the delicately fair girl who lay in her flowered robe staring at the ceiling.

‘But you're not like that, even when Jerry’s around! I mean. I’ve never known such a—a cool person as you. You never seem to show your feelings, even when your fiancé puts his arm round you.' It was merciful for Lara when Peg sighed deeply and lay back again. ‘I’m sure everybody must see the goosebumps I get when Vern just touches me!’

‘We all react differently,' Lara returned quietly, and they spoke of other things then, but her heart had begun to throb painfully. If Peg had noticed her coolness towards Jerry, perhaps others would too. Matt particularly, with the uncanny perception he was capable of displaying, might guess the truth of her feelings for him, even though Adrienne filled his time and thoughts these days.

It would be too agonising if he discovered that the few kisses he had given her, which had meant no more to him than a slight physical release in his womanless world, had shaken her to her innermost core and left her with the painful knowledge that no other man would ever satisfy the flame of desire he had roused.

Hot waves of humiliation washed over her each time she remembered the occasion of the second dance session Adrienne had organised. Someone—not Matt—suggested a change of partners half way through the evening, and Matt seemed reluctant to leave Adrienne, who looked particularly ravishing. Her hair was a mistily dark cloud above a white dress which left the tan of her shoulders bare apart from the narrow covering of a halter strap.

Lara’s bones melted to water when Matt took her in his arms at the darker end of the porch and her senses were assailed by the mingled familiar odours of the shaving lotion he used and pungent tobacco. Not so pleasant was the faint trace of Adrienne’s perfume on his shirt front. Her spine stiffened involuntarily, and she felt his close grip on her waist relax.

‘Don’t worry, Lara,' he said quietly, his voice edged with coolness. ‘I’ve no intention of ravishing you out here on the porch. I’m—sorry now that I’ve given you cause to think I might do just that.’

A swift glance upwards to his face revealed the tight line of his jaw, scarcely softened by the gentle rays of the moon. He was sorry now that he had kissed her! What he was really saying was that he would never have bothered with her ‘innocent’ reaction to his lovemaking if he had known that Adrienne would be returning to him so soon. Adrienne, the girl who invited his display of passionate longing, the girl who would never object however much his arms bruised her ribs or how swollen her lips became under his.

Lara’s eyes dropped again to the blue outline of his shirt where it covered the breadth of muscled shoulder. ‘I wasn’t afraid you’d do that,’ she said in a small, reserved voice. ‘There’s no need—now you have Adrienne back, is there?’ There was a pause while their feet moved slowly to the music, then he said tensely: ‘No. No need at all.’

She spoke past a lump in her throat, keeping her lashes well down over her eyes to hide the shimmer of tears there. ‘I’m—glad for you that everything—turned out the way you wanted.’

‘Do things ever turn out just the way we want them?’ he asked enigmatically, then there was a glint of strong white teeth as his mouth formed a half-smile. ‘That’s as far as a rough rancher can go in the line of philosophical thought! ’ She bent her head back to look up at him, her eyes still luminous with tears, every nerve in her body conscious of his nearness, the hard contours of his muscled frame against hers, the glow that flickered like a candle flame in the depths of his eyes locked to hers. As if hypnotised, she leaned further into his arms and felt herself held tightly against him for a brief moment while their feet scarcely moved. When she touched the smooth skin of her temple to the dark stubble of his chin she felt him stiffen suddenly and put her roughly from him a second before Adrienne’s mocking voice came from behind.

‘In case you two hadn’t noticed, the dance is over!*

‘Good,’ he said, relieved, as he took Adrienne’s hand in his and drew her towards the living room. ‘Let’s have a drink and forget dancing for a while.’

Lara stood where they left her, biting back the tears threatening to engulf her. Lately it had seemed as if her tear ducts were making up for all the years of idleness by pouring moisture to her eyes at the slightest happening— and Matt’s rejection of her open longing for his touch tonight cut more than slightly into the precarious fabric of her defences against him.

She would refuse any offers of his to dance with, him in future, knowing how vulnerable she was in his arms. But he didn’t ask her to dance again.

Jerry grew more and more edgy as election day approached, stepping up the constituency visits until both his and Lara’s nerves were stretched to breaking point. It hadn’t been necessary, after all, for her to show more warmth towards him, for they scarcely touched during the pressured time they were together.

His irritability reached out to flick everyone’s sensitivity, and on Thursday at the dinner table Lara lashed out at him with unaccustomed sharpness.

‘For heaven’s sake, Jerry, it’s not the end of the world if you don’t succeed next Thursday! Most politicians, especially ones as young as you are, don’t expect to get in on the first or even the second time around.’

‘Your father did, didn’t he?’ he demanded truculently.

‘Yes, but that was an entirely different situation,’ she returned hotly. ‘An urban district is a long way from this area, where the constituents are scattered and ‑’ She faltered and came to a stop, biting her lip.

‘And they know,’ he finished jeeringly, ‘as you so astutely told me, that I don’t give a damn for their prize bulls or the number of cattle they have roaming their pastures! ’

‘Jerry!' She stared at him, appalled by his lack of dedication to the ranch people he intended to serve. Dedication to the constituents in his riding had brought her father back to office time after time, and her brain refused to admit any other reason for seeking public office.

‘Oh, hell!’ Jerry rose violently from the table and strode rapidly from the room, leaving an awkward silence behind him. Lara felt like following him to run to the haven of her bedroom, but the shocked eyes of Peg and Beth kept her in her chair. Oddly, it was Adrienne who broke the silence, her voice huskily compassionate.

‘Poor Jerry,’ she said. ‘It’s hard to try to be something you’re not.’

‘Jerry’s capable of being a very fine politician,’ Lara defended bravely, but her eyes fell when they met Matt’s level gaze. ‘He—he’s just nervy at the moment because of the pressure he’s under.’

‘Yes, of course he is,’ said Beth, relief showing in her voice. ‘He was always like this just before school exams, and he nearly always passed, for all his worry beforehand.’

‘Well, next Thursday will show whether he passes this exam too with flying colours,’ Adrienne remarked drily, then turned to Matt with a coaxing smile. ‘Why don’t you take me into town tomorrow, darling? I have some things to pick up at home, and we could see something of the big wide world out there.’

‘Sorry, Adrienne, I can’t tomorrow,’ he said with tightlipped firmness. ‘I have to start breaking in a couple of horses the boys brought back wild.’

She pouted with expert attractiveness. ‘Surely the men can do that for you? What’s so important about breaking in wild horses anyway?’

‘They’re important because they both promise to make excellent cutting horses,’ he explained patiently, then gave her a whimsical half-smile. ‘I happen to like starting off the breaking in process myself.’.

‘Matt’s the best horse handler for miles around,’ Peg put in tartly, giving Adrienne the look she reserved for those who thought anything in the world more essential than ranching matters. ‘Ask any of the men.’

‘Thanks for the advice, sweetie, I might just do that. Maybe one of them won’t be too busy to take me into town.’ Adrienne got to her feet and swept angrily out, Matt following after a moment, his jaw tensed and his eyes bleak. Why does she do this to him, Lara wondered, when she must know that her taunts about other men would lacerate him with the memory of another man she had run off with?

‘She’s a ‑’ Peg began, and was immediately cut off by her mother.

‘Peg!’ she said with unwonted sharpness. ‘Adrienne’s a guest in this house, and I won’t have you name-calling her. She may have her faults, but if she’s the one Matt has chosen for his wife it’s your duty to be more sisterly towards her.’

‘Sisterly?’ Peg snorted derisively. ‘The last thing that female’s looking for is a sister—all she cares about is the male of the species, any or all of them!’ She pushed her chair back with an impatient movement and came to stand close to her mother and Lara. ‘Why can’t Matt see the kind of person she is? Why couldn’t he have found somebody like—like Lara? She’s much more his type than Adrienne could ever be.’ Her tone was aggressive, but Lara sensed the tears close to the surface.

‘Now you’re just being foolish,’ Beth said worriedly. ‘Lara is going to marry Jerry, so how could she possibly marry Matt?’

‘Oh, Mother,’ Peg almost wailed. ‘I said somebody like Lara! ’

‘Well, I can’t think of anyone he knows who’s at all like Lara, so you may have to settle for Adrienne.’

Peg muttered something about having promised to see Vern and Billy before the boy went to bed and went almost at a half-run to the hall door, banging it behind her.

Beth sighed, ‘Sometimes I wish all the children were happily settled, and then I’d ‑’

‘What will you do, Beth?’ Lara prompted gently when the older woman stopped.

‘Oh, I’ve often thought I’d travel a little—visit with my brother and his family in New York, and I have a cousin about my own age, a widow like me, in Florida. She’s always asking me to come down and live with her.’

Lara leaned forward to squeeze her arm and say: ‘You may be doing that sooner than you think,’ her mind on Peg and Vern.

‘Yes,’ Beth smiled a trifle wistfully. ‘When you and Jerry marry, and Matt and Adrienne, if I read the signs correctly, there will be only Peg to worry about.’ She frowned and played with her unused dessert fork on the table. ‘Larraine, what do you think of Vern?’

‘I think he’s a very fine man,’ said Lara, slowly thoughtful, ‘and that any girl would be lucky to have him for a husband. He’d never let her down if he could help it, I’m sure, and he’d take good care of her,’ she ended quietly, and Beth nodded as if Lara had simply confirmed her own opinion.

Carrie came in then to clear the table and Beth said no more as they went together to the living room. She had, for all her vagueness, noticed the way her daughter’s eyes lit up whenever Vern came near, and it would have taken a much harder woman than Beth Fraser to deny her daughter’s obvious happiness.

Jerry decided the next day to stay and work in the office drafting the speech he would be giving two days later at a campaign dinner at Williams Lake. He had apologised the night before to Beth and Lara for his hasty departure from the dinner table, but there was a disquieting restlessness about him as he paced from fireplace to windows and back again. And when Adrienne put her head in from the porch, where she and Matt had been sitting, he irritably declined her invitation to a late swim.

‘What’s wrong with you Fraser men tonight?’ she grumbled, a petulant frown marring the smoothness of her brow. ‘The look on Matt’s face would curdle a gallon of milk, and you’re pacing the floor like an expectant father! ’

Pleasure curled like a gentle hand in Lara’s stomach when she realised that Matt evidently hadn’t sought the privacy of the porch in order to make up the argument he and Adrienne had had in the dining room.

But perhaps it was Adrienne who had refused to kiss and make up, Lara thought the next morning when the other girl swept into the office trailing a stream of her heavy perfume behind her.

‘Jerry, sweetie, I’d like you to drive me into town. I want to pick up some things at home.’

Lara had learned that Adrienne’s father was a Jim Rostack, a lumber yard owner well known in the area, and that her mother was dead. Adrienne didn’t care for her new stepmother, and this was the reason she gave for staying on at the ranch. That, and loud protestations that she wouldn’t miss Peg’s birthday party for worlds.

‘I’m busy right now, Adrienne,’ Jerry told her sharply. ‘Why didn’t you ever learn to drive? There’s plenty of cars around the place that you could have taken.’

Adrienne’s eyes flashed down into his. ‘Because I prefer to be driven! Are you going to take me, or’—her gaze narrowed mockingly as she turned it on Lara at the far side of the desk—‘should I ask your fiancée? I’m sure she drives as angelically as she cooks, and we could chat on' the way.’

Jerry threw down his pen, his brows like thunder but his voice wearily controlled as he said: ‘All right, I’ll take you, but I have work to do first.’

‘I’ll be ready in half an hour,’ she said over her shoulder as she went to the door. ‘Don’t be late.'

Lara had looked at him in shocked disbelief when he gave in so readily to Adrienne’s pressure, and now she said wonderingly: ‘Why did you do it, Jerry?'

‘Do what?’

‘Give in to Adrienne like that. She’s just trying to get back at Matt because he refused to take her, and—you know how possessive he is about her now.'

He shrugged and picked up his pen. ‘He should have taken her himself, then. As it happens, I need to go into town myself—that’s why I “gave in”, as you call it.’ He gave her a wry smile, but his eyes remained sober. ‘We’ll be back around mid-afternoon.'

Lara walked to the front door with him half an hour later, and Adrienne, cool in lime green trouser suit, was waiting on the porch.

‘See what you can do with that speech, Lara, will you?’ Jerry said, bending to kiss her cheek in hurried fashion. ‘I’ll get the rest of the information I need from Henry.'

She watched them go, Jerry putting a hand under Adrienne’s elbow to help her over the gravel in her high-heeled sandals, and sighed. Jerry looked so handsome in his dark blazer and grey slacks she could almost wish she was in love with him, that their marriage would take place. But when she raised a hand from the porch steps to wave as the car’s wheels crunched backwards on the gravel, it was Matt’s less conventionally good-looking face that hovered before her eyes.

Mostly when she thought of him it was as he had looked that morning in the cabin when he talked about ranching, but now in her mind’s eye \vas the picture of his leanly powerful figure on Samson, his white hat tipped forward against the golden sun going down beyond the far mountains. There had been an aura of lonely majesty about him then, a solitariness that made her ache even in retrospect.

Her lips drew into a tight line and she turned back into the house. That was before he knew Adrienne was back. Lara had no need to feel sorry for his aloneness now.

She met Beth coming from the kitchen regions and stopped when the older woman asked anxiously: ‘Did I hear a car leave a few minutes ago?’

‘Yes,’ Lara nodded. ‘Adrienne and Jerry have ‑’

‘Adrienne and ‑? Oh dear. Matt’s not going to like that one bit! ’

For a moment it looked as if Beth might faint and Lara grasped her arm to give it a slight shake. ‘Beth, that’s foolish. If Matt means to make Adrienne his wife, he’ll have to learn to trust her—especially with his own brother!’ Beth looked up at her, her brown eyes abstracted. ‘Yes. Yes, I’m sure you’re right, Larraine.’ She excused herself, and then hurried away to her beloved garden, which seemed to -settle her nerves more than any other activity. Lara looked after her with an affectionately puzzled smile, shaking her head as she went back to the office.

She became absorbed in sorting Jerry’s notes for his speech and making a few additional ones of her own and started when the office door opened with a familiarly confident thrust and she looked up to see Matt framed in the doorway. Hatless, his black hair was damp with the same perspiration that stained his beige shirt and streaked the dust on his dark-skinned face. _v A satisfied glow burned deep in his eyes, and Lara asked instantly:

‘How did the horse breaking go, Matt?’

There was a white flash of teeth as he came further into the room, running a hand through the thickest part of his hair and leaving it attractively ruffled. ‘They’ll do,’ he conceded. ‘They’ll need a lot more handling yet, of course, but they’ll make fine cutting horses. You should have come down to see them.’

‘I’d have loved that, but ‑’ Her eyes fell to the desk top, aware of the air of easy familiarity flowing between them and suddenly shy about it, and her eyes fell on her left hand where Jerry’s ring sparkled on her slim finger. ‘Jerry wanted me to work on his speech for Saturday night till he gets back.'

When she glanced up at him through her lashes a moment later she saw that his face had lost its boyish glow of enthusiasm, the lines round his mouth and eyes etched more clearly in his bronzed skin.

‘Oh yes, that's more important to you, of course.' His voice sharpened. ‘What do you mean “when he gets back''? —where is he?'

Her heart began to hammer uncomfortably. Obviously he had no idea that Adrienne had gone with Jerry, and Lara trembled at the thought of telling him that news herself. ‘He—he went into town. He has to get some more information for his speech, and when Adrienne ‑'

His breath drew in harshly. ‘Adrienne's with him?'

‘Well, yes—she wanted to pick up some things at home while Jerry’s seeing the man he wants to talk to. It was just convenient for them to go together.’

‘Oh yes, I’ve no doubt it was convenient,' he said, his tone dryly mocking. ‘Why didn't you go with them, or stop them, or—something?'

'Stop them?’ she echoed blankly. ‘Why in the world would I want to do that?'

His eyes were marble hard as they raked over her fairskinned face and eyes made bluer by the dark blue blouse she wore. ‘Doesn’t it bother you at all that your fiancé will be spending quite a few hours alone with a very attractive woman?'

‘Of course it doesn’t bother me!’ she flared, standing up so that there would be a little less disparity in their height. It helped that he was half-sitting on the back of one of the armchairs. ‘I trust Jerry.’

‘Then you’re a damn fool!’ he rapped out, his mouth clamped so tightly his lips looked white.

An angry retort sprang to her lips, but found no voice when she saw the almost tangible pain in his eyes. She shook her head and said quietly instead: ‘No, Matt, it’s you who are the fool if you think you can shackle someone you love in chains of jealous possession.’ Her chin tilted so that her eyes met his. ‘To be honest, I think you’ve become just a bit paranoid about Adrienne after—what happened before. It’s understandable, I suppose, but to suspect even your own brother’s motives is ‑’

‘Thanks for the instant psychology,’ he cut in dryly, and straightened his long form to walk to his bedroom door, pausing with his hand on the doorknob. ‘I hope your faith is justified.’

‘It will be,' she said confidently, but when he had gone and closed the door firmly behind him, she found herself trembling. She had been unfair in her argument, she knew. It was easy to trust where there was no love, and she didn’t love Jerry. Would she be as trusting if it was Matt she was engaged to and he went off with Adrienne for the day? Honesty made her admit that she would feel the same savage jealousy Matt had just displayed.

*

Lunch that day was a strained affair, with Beth eyeing Matt’s stonily abstracted face nervously and even Peg’s lighthearted voice faltering into silence, so that Lara was glad to escape to the office as soon as the meal was over.

It was difficult to pick up the work where she had left off, and her eyes kept straying to the window behind the desk to stare unseeingly at the chokecherry bushes spilling down the hillside immediately behind the house. If she had had any doubts at all about Matt’s obsession with Adrienne, they would have been swept away by the brooding intensity of his dark features as he presided over the silent table, where he had made only a slight pretence of eating the food Carrie placed before him. Even the rough-tongued housekeeper held her silence when her sharp eyes noted his almost untouched plate, and she put his coffee beside him with unaccustomed gentleness.

What must it be like to be loved so desperately by a man like Matt Fraser?—a man who controlled a sizeable cattle empire singlehandedly, yet was so vulnerable to the charms of one woman. It was obvious even to Lara that Adrienne was totally unsuited to the role of rancher’s wife, chafing as she did at the bonds of isolation inherent in a property this size. But Matt seemed blind to any drawbacks in making her his wife, perhaps, Lara thought bleakly, because he felt physical passion would* make up for any deficiency in other departments. And she had to admit that Adrienne was amply endowed with the qualities Matt required of a woman.

Her thoughts had become suddenly distasteful to her, and she pushed them resolutely away, forcing herself to concentrate on Jerry’s campaign speech. She was so successful at this that she scarcely noticed the passage of time until movements in the next room made her glance at her watch. Five-thirty! Maybe she had been so absorbed she hadn’t heard Jerry’s return, but as the thought formed in her mind she knew that he would have come directly to the office.

She heard the shower in Matt’s bathroom hissing water, and felt a sudden dread at the thought of facing him again before Jerry and Adrienne came back. Damn Jerry anyway, she stormed to herself as she began to put the papers in order. Why did he have to aggravate matters this way, knowing how Matt felt about Adrienne being with him or any man?

The speech notes were stacked neatly and she was swiftly clearing off the rest of the desk top, hoping to escape to her room before Matt appeared, when the door to his bedroom opened abruptly, and he was there, his hair brushed back but still heavily damp from the shower. Her eyes fell away from the impassive screen across his to the white longsleeved sweater he wore over dark grey slacks, and her heart raced with a longing to reach out and be enfolded in the muscular length of his arms, to feel again the softness of her body crushed to the hardness of his.

‘Still working?’ he asked quietly.

‘No, I—I’ve just finished.’

‘Jerry should be writing his own speech.’ He came further into the room as $he walked round the desk. ‘I suppose you know they’re not back yet?’

From somewhere inside her she summoned a calculated lightness of voice. Glancing at her watch, she said: ‘Heavens, it’s not even six yet, Matt. Any number of things could have delayed them.’

‘Such as?’

‘Oh’—she shrugged, —‘maybe Jerry couldn’t get to see the man he wanted to right away, or Adrienne’s family could have persuaded her to stay longer, or—they could even have had an accident, I suppose.’

He shook his head negatively and half-sat on 'die edge of the desk, frowning moodily as he crossed his arms on his chest. ‘We can rule out the last possibility—Phil’s just got back from town, and he’d have known if there’d been an accident. The second one can be eliminated too. Adrienne wouldn’t stay at her father’s place any longer than she had to—I understand her stepmother doesn’t welcome her there.’

‘So she told me,’ Lara said, faintly waspish. ‘Well, I still have one option! Jerry must have had to wait to see ‑’

‘Henry Farrer?’

‘Yes, he mentioned' a Henry who would give him some information he needs for the speech.’

‘He must have known he wouldn’t get it from Henry,’ Matt said drily. ‘He’s in Vancouver at some convention or other.’

She stared uncomprehendingly into the dark pools of his eyes, shadowy against the square of light coming from the window behind him. ‘But Jerry said ...’ Her voice trailed away when he gave a hollow laugh, and crossed the space between them to place his hands on her arms just below the edge of her sleeveless blouse.

‘I told you earlier you'd be a fool to trust anyone too much; he said, oddly gentle as his eyes probed hers. ‘I learned that the hard way, and I wouldn’t want—well, never mind.’ His touch was warm and firm and sent shivers of electric current through her. Why, oh why, when the merest touch of his skin on hers affected her this way, was he in love with Adrienne?

As if seeking an answer in his face, she tilted hers upwards until the wide blue of her eyes met the glittering black of his and she felt his fingers tighten until they dug deeply into her flesh. With an almost palpable tug her eyes left his and wandered over the strongly shaped nose to the outline of his firm lips and for a fraction of a second she sensed a downward movement of his head towards hers. Then with a savage motion he pushed her away and swung his back to her.

‘Do you want me to go and find them?’

The sudden harshness in his voice brought back her tottering senses. ‘No! Please don’t do that, Matt. It would be—humiliating for Jerry, and that’s the last thing he needs right now:’ Her voice dropped to a softer, lower note in an appeal for his understanding. ‘Jerry’s really high-strung at the moment. It’s a difficult time for politicians just before the voters make their choice—all the work he’s put into the campaign, the care he’s put into finding out what the people want and need, could go down the drain for him next Thursday.’

‘Didn’t I hear him say he didn’t give a damn about the people in this area?’ His voice was dry as he turned again to face her and thrust his hands deep into his pockets.

Lara’s silver hair glinted softly as she shook her head. ‘Jerry didn’t mean that, Matt. In a way, he’s preparing for the worst. He isn’t the kind of man who’d want to be a rancher himself, but he cares a lot about the land and the problems facing the people here.’

His eyes became unfathomable depths while he stared at her in silence for a moment before saying quietly: ‘And he’s a lucky man to have such a champion for his case.’

She shrugged lightly, embarrassed for some reason. ‘I suppose I know him better than most people—lately, anyway, because we’ve spent so much time together.’

Unexpectedly, he changed the conversation. ‘What do your parents think of your engagement?’

‘My ‑? Oh, I haven’t told them yet.’ She rushed on when he raised an astonished eyebrow. ‘They’ve been away on holiday in Europe since just after I came here. I—I could have written them there, but I thought it would be better to tell them in person.’

‘They won’t have any objections to having Jerry as a son-in-law?’

‘No, I—don’t think so,' she answered hesitantly, wondering at the odd feelings she had that Matt was keeping her engaged in idle conversation for some reason of his own. ‘Dad thinks highly of him as a lawyer. In fact,’ she laughed, ‘I think he’d rather have Jerry stay in the firm than sit beside him in Parliament! ’

Matt smiled, but pulled back the sleeve of his sweater to look at his watch and she knew his mind was still on Adrienne’s late return. She excused herself, saying she must get ready for dinner, and he made no further effort to detain her.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

When Lara came downstairs just before seven, dressed simply in white lace blouse and straight blue skirt, Matt was pacing the lower hall restlessly and from the dark scowl above his eyes she gathered that Jerry and Adrienne had not yet put in an appearance. Her heart sank, but she injected a light note of cajolery into her voice as she crossed the few steps into the living room.

‘As Jerry isn’t here, Matt, will you pour my drink for me?’

The scowl deepened and he hesitated momentarily, but then she felt the coiled energy of his big frame following her into the room. She settled in an armchair close to the open window and revelled in the coolness coming across the lawns from the lake.

‘Where is everybody tonight?’ she asked, and he turned away from the sideboard for a moment to answer her.

‘Beth’s in the kitchen telling Carrie we’ll eat at the normal time after all,* he said grimly.

‘Even if Adrienne and Jerry aren’t back by then?’

‘They know what time we eat meals here.’ He came across and handed her a tall frosty glass, going then with his own drink to look moodily from the window, allowing himself a dry smile when she asked then about Peg. ‘She’s testing her culinary skills on Vern and Billy tonight.’

‘Oh, I’m glad,’ she said softly.

‘Knowing Peg’s abilities as a cook, I doubt if Vern will be glad!’

‘Now you’re being unkind,’ she protested, smiling to take the sting of accusation from her words. ‘You’d be surprised at how much love can change a woman.’

‘Oh? I wouldn’t have thought it had changed you much.’ His eyes went consideringly over the picture of cool composure she presented. Her fair hair was coiled neatly at the back of her head as it usually was in the evening, and brought into prominence the delicacy of her facial structure and wild rose complexion. Embarrassment brought a deeper colour to her cheeks when his gaze went impersonally over the rest of her, ending at the slender sweep of her legs beneath the short skirt. ‘In fact, if I didn’t know better I’d say ‑’ He broke off abruptly when Beth bustled into the room, and Lara was left wondering what he would have said if he hadn’t known better.

‘Well, we can have dinner as soon as you’ve finished your drinks,’ Beth said with enforced brightness, and Matt turned back to the window, his frown restored.

Lara sipped at her drink while Beth settled herself in the chair opposite, and was surprised to find it mixed perfectly to her taste. The drink was one only Jerry had made for her, and she realised that Matt must have watched him do so at one time or another.

The evening meal was a repetition of lunch, made worse by the absence of Peg, and even Beth seemed disinclined to talk in the face of Matt’s brooding silence. Her appetite gone, Lara’s fingers trembled as she pushed food around her plate with her fork, straining with her ears to hear the sound of Jerry’s car. The atmosphere in the dining room was explosive, and she wasn’t sure her stretched nerves could stand the scene that was bound to follow Jerry and Adrienne’s return. Nothing in her tranquil upbringing had prepared her for open quarrels between family members, and on the rare occasions when she had witnessed them at a friend’s home the muscles of her stomach tightened until she felt sick.

It was almost an anticlimax when she heard the car coming at a fast clip down the hill and slide to a noisy halt on the gravelled parking area. She glanced nervously at Matt’s stormy brow when sounds of laughter came from the porch and then into the house.

Then Adrienne and Jerry, their faces reflecting a sparkling gaiety, stood together in the dining room doorway beaming at the three diners. Irritation stabbed through Lara when she saw that their high spirits had come mainly from a bottle.

A strangled cry escaped from her when Matt’s chair crashed backwards suddenly and she saw him stride furiously towards the smiling pair.

‘Where the hell have you been?’ he demanded aggressively, and then his voice dropped to a tone of quiet contempt. ‘Though that’s pretty obvious, isn’t it?’

Adrienne gave a gurgling laugh and came to slide her arms round his neck. ‘Oh, Matt, sweetie, don’t be so stuffy! We had to go into town to pick up some things at the house, and ‑’ She interrupted herself to look over her shoulder to Jerry with a silly grin. ‘Jerry, we never did pick them up, did we?’

Matt threw her arms away from him with a disdainful gesture. ‘I can guess where you went instead!’ he said coldly, and to Jerry: ‘You must be crazy to drive home in that condition.’

Jerry, considerably sobered under his brother’s wrathful eyes, said placatingly: ‘We really meant to go to Addie’s house, Matt, but we met ‑’

‘I don’t give a damn who you met,’ Matt snapped. ‘I’ll talk to you in the morning, but I’ll tell you this now. If you’re serious about this political business, you’re going about it the wrong way. People don’t find much to trust in a man who drinks more than he should. They don’t all have your fiancée's blind faith, you’ll find!’ He turned then to Adrienne, his face a sick white under the darkness of his tan. ‘As for you, I want a few words with you right now!’ He took her roughly by the arm and propelled her towards the front door.

‘Oh, don’t be such a stuffed shirt, Matt,’ she spat at him, twisting her arm vainly in his strong grip. ‘You never want to have any fun, and you hate to see anybody else have any! You haven’t changed one bit, have you?’

Her voice faded away after the door slammed behind them and there was silence in the dining room for several seconds. Lara stared at the tablecloth, her eyes reflecting the turmoil churning inside her. Uppermost was a feeling of anger towards Jerry. She was sure there was nothing more between him and Adrienne than a sharing of high spirits, but Matt, in his supersensitive state, would never see that.

Beth said anxiously: ‘Larraine ‑’ just as Jerry took a step forward and said: ‘Lara ‑’ and they both stopped when Lara stood up shakily.

‘I don’t want to talk about it tonight, Jerry. I can understand why you felt the need to get away from things for a while, but not caring about someone else’s feelings is another thing again.’

‘Well, at least give me a chance to explain! ’ he exploded.

‘Not tonight, Jerry, I’m going up to my room now. Goodnight, Beth.’ Lara touched the older woman’s shoulder briefly and went steadily enough to the door, but stopped just outside to still the trembling of her knees.

‘Damn!’ she heard Jerry say. ‘Anybody would think I’d committed a crime!’

Beth’s answer came in a voice Lara had never heard her use to Jerry before. ‘For all anyone here knows you might have! Larraine is a sweet girl, and you’ve asked her to be your wife, so it isn’t right for you to go traipsing off with another girl for hours on end—especially when the girl is Adrienne. You know what happened before, Jerry. I won’t have Matt hurt like that again.’

Lara, realising that she was eavesdropping on a mother - son conversation, found strength then to walk across the hall and upstairs to her room, missing any reply Jerry might have made. Evidently Beth, like Matt, distrusted even her own son where Adrienne was concerned!

She went to sit at her bedroom window without switching on the light and saw that twilight was beginning to fall over the lake and gardens in front of the house, its misty half-light strangely soothing to her confused mind. The view from this window seemed to have brought comfort to her so often in the everchanging yet constant beauty stretching out to infinity over water and pastures and treed hills. She sighed. She would miss it when she left it for Vancouver’s concrete towers.

Time passed as she watched the shadows gather, and she had no idea of how long she had been sitting there when a flash of white from under the trees at the lawn’s edge caught her eye. Two figures, indistinguishable apart from the fact that they were a man and a woman, stood immobile gazing at each other as if they were performing a tableau under the trees, and then the woman’s arms lifted to slide round the man’s neck, showing dark against the white of his—sweater! Matt’s sweater, the one she had admired on him earlier! The woman with him must be Adrienne. There was something sickeningly familiar in the way her hands urged Matt’s head towards hers. His arms rose slowly and hesitated, as if he were reluctant to make up their quarrel so quickly, but when the pale blur of their faces came together his arms reached out instantly to draw her body to his and hold it there while they kissed with desperate intensity.

Lara turned away from the window, closing her eyes against the pain rolling over her in waves, and a few moments later went to huddle on her bed in the dimly lit room. If this was love, this piercing agony of exposed nerve ends, then it was a quality she could well do without in her life. Nothing could have demonstrated the uselessness of her love for Matt more clearly than the sight of those two figures melded together in the twilight, their rightness for each other undeniable. Yet Lara knew that however many men might come into her future life, not one would ever come close to touching the centre of her being as Matt had.

The air was still crisp the next morning when Lara, paler than usual from lack of sleep, cantered away from the ranch on Dainty, their destination the hills over to the left where they could move through the trees with comfort.

She was glad that it had been too early even for Billy this morning. Much as she enjoyed his eager chatter, in which Peg figured more and more, she wanted to be alone with the thoughts that had plagued her sleep and the wakeful hours she had spent watching the stars fade as the new day rose behind the house.

A party of white-tailed deer raised startled brown eyes from the lake’s edge when they heard her invasion of their early morning privacy, and in a twinkling they had bounded away as one body to the shelter of thick tree cover on the hillside. Fish rose from the water to snap their jaws on unsuspecting flies and fall back with a resounding plop. She would never go fishing with Matt now, she thought wistfully, her eyes clouding.

When they had rounded the lake she dug a heel into Dainty’s side and they took off across the pasture land, horse’s mane and girl’s hair flowing backwards in the wind of their movement.

The cobwebs of despair had been partially blown away from her brain and her cheeks whipped to glowing colour when she at last led Dainty into the stable yard.

‘You’re an early bird,’ Old Dan said as he hobbled out from the stable, a grin splitting his grey-whiskered face. 'I’ll see to her for you.’

‘Thanks, Dan,’ she said, handing the reins to him gratefully. ‘How’s the rheumatiz this morning?’

‘No more’n fair, Lara, but I guess I can’t expect any more at my age.’

The dining room was empty when she went into the house, but Carrie came in from the kitchen when she heard Lara at the buffet serving herself coffee.

‘You’re back, eh? Well, you just hold on for two shakes and I’ll make you some breakfast.’

‘No, thanks, Carrie,’ Lara said quickly. ‘I’m not hungry, toast will do.’

‘Now listen to me, young lady,’ the housekeeper said firmly, putting her hands on her hips and glaring at her, ‘you had practically nothing to eat yesterday, and I’m bound and determined you’ll put something in your stomach this morning.’

She kept a close eye on Lara’s plate while she ate, coming into the room on several fictitious errands until she was able to grunt with satisfaction.

‘There now, isn’t that better?’

Lara smiled and looked down at her empty plate. ‘I guess I was hungrier than I thought.’

A combination of the food and ride in the fresh air had put her in a more philosophical state of mind, and she planned for her future, which during the long night hours had seemed to stretch bleakly before her. She would go back and finish her university courses, she thought as she made her bed and tidied her room, and prepare herself for social work of some kind. That was something she had always wanted to do, but she had been sidetracked by her father’s seeming need of her in his political life. But now the thought of politics almost sickened her.

Her hard-won peace of mind was shattered again when she went along to the office, intending to do some more work on the speech before Jerry came down. Angry voices were coming from the partly open office door and she found herself rooted to the spot, unable to move backward or forward.

‘For God’s sake, Matt, when are you going to stop treating me like a teenager?’ Jerry shouted. ‘I’m twenty-eight years old! ’

‘Maybe if you’d stop behaving like a teenager I’d start treating you like a man,’ Matt whipped back. ‘You can’t go through life thinking of your own pleasure—not when you have other people to consider.’

‘Here we go on the old merry-go-round! Now we get the lecture on how you had to be responsible for all of us when you were just twenty. Go on, Matt, I haven’t heard that particular spiel for years.’

‘You never did hear it from me,’ Matt said quietly. ‘But that’s beside the point. I’m talking about your responsibility to the girl you’re engaged to marry—the girl who’s taken over the mollycoddling where your mother left off.’

‘Leave her out of this,’ Jerry fumed. ‘Your kind knows nothing about a girl like Lara.’

‘Maybe not. But my kind doesn’t let a woman do his work for him.’

Jerry laughed sarcastically. ‘You don’t let a woman do much for you at all, do you, Matt? Adrienne tells me ‑’

‘I don’t give a damn what Adrienne tells you.’ Matt interrupted harshly. ‘Just keep away from her! ’

His cold fury sent a shiver through Lara and she turned away, her feet taking her swiftly and noiselessly along the passage so that she couldn’t distinguish the rest of Matt’s words. Pain that was by now sickeningly familiar washed over her, and she knew that some measure of it would always remain, whatever the future held for her. Her longing to be away from the ranch was a sharp ache inside her. To be away from the constant torment of seeing the man she loved torn in his turn by his abiding passion for Adrienne. Writers of romantic tales had no conception of the reality of love, she thought miserably, this tearing division of heart and mind that left no peace in the unfortunate sufferer.

The, office door slammed and Matt’s boot heels rang angrily on the tiled floor as he came into the hall and brushed past her. His face was a carved mask of anger as he strode to the screen door and let that, too, bang behind him. Slowly, Lara retraced her steps to the office, where Jerry looked up irritably from behind the desk. The clean-cut look of his cream-coloured knit shirt did little to detract from the sullen frown marring his forehead, and it was evident the scene with Matt had left him in an ugly mood.

‘Oh, it’s you, Lara. Have you come to get your two cents’ worth in at me too?’

‘No,’ she returned quietly, coming over to the desk. ‘I just came to ask if you need me, or if you’d rather finish the speech yourself.’

‘I’ll do it myself,’ he snapped. ‘There’s a small point I have to prove to Big Brother—he seems to think I’m incapable of doing anything on my own.’ He pushed the chair back and turned moodily to stare from the window. ‘God, this place stifles me! I’ll be glad to get away from it after the election.’

‘Aren’t we staying on for Peg’s birthday?’

He shrugged. ‘Maybe. If the election goes the wrong way, I won’t want to hang around here, especially when people who didn’t vote for me will be swarming all over the place.’

‘Isn’t that a little like running away, Jerry?’

‘“He who fights and runs away, lives to fight another day”,’ he quoted dryly, turning to give her a tight smile.

Her eyes met his unsmilingly for a moment, then dropped to the desk. ‘I’ll tell you how far I’ve gone with the notes, and leave you to work on the speech. These are the ones I ‑’ She broke off with -a startled gasp when his well-kept hand came out to grasp her wrist as she went to pick up the papers.

‘Aren’t you going to demand an explanation about yesterday first?’

She pulled her hand away hurriedly. ‘You don’t have to account to me for everything you do, Jerry.’

‘Don’t I? Isn’t that usual when two people are in love? Tell me, Lara,’ he said consideringly, coming round the desk and leaning against it negligently, ‘—are you in love?’

Confused colour came and went in her cheeks. ‘Of course I’m in love!’

‘But not with me, I think.’ Brown eyes regarded her quizzically. ‘Any other girl I know would have hit the roof if I’d spent several unaccounted-for hours with another woman, especially one as attractive as Adrienne, and arrived home with a very happy glow on.’

‘Just because I understood your need to—blow off steam doesn’t mean I don’t—care for you.’

He shook his head, saying dryly: ‘Mothers have that kind of understanding, not girls passionately in love with the man they’re going to marry.’ He cocked his head to one side. ‘You’ve been different since you came back from the cattle camp. What happened up there?’

Her heart began to beat in an erratic rhythm, and she felt stifled suddenly. Turning away from his searching gaze, she clasped the upholstered chair back, feeling its rough texture under her taut fingers. ‘Don’t be foolish, Jerry. What could possibly happen at a primitive camp like that?’

‘Suppose you tell me.’ He pulled her round to face him and lifted her chin so that she was forced to look at him. ‘You fell for somebody up there, didn’t you? Who was it?’

‘Jerry, please don’t ‑’ Tears filled her eyes as she bit her lip and he looked at her in amazement.

‘My God! I’ve never seen you cry before. Whoever he is, he’s really got to you, hasn’t he?’ He let her go then and went to pace slowly round the room, thinking aloud as he went. ‘If you won’t tell me, I’ll have to guess. But it shouldn’t be too hard. Let’s see now. Who was up there with you? Most of the ranch hands were there, but I can’t see you falling for one of them, though I’ve seen Drew Peters cast a few lovelorn glances your way since he got back.’ His head shook decisively. ‘No, he’s too callow for you. Vern? He's a possibility, and you get on well with Billy, but... no, you’ve been encouraging Peg too much in that direction. So who’s left? There’s only ‑’

‘I won’t stay and listen to this nonsense! ’ Lara made a dash for the door, but found her wrist imprisoned again.

‘Matt! ’ he finished as if she hadn’t spoken. Awe widened his eyes as he stared at her. ‘Good God, it’s Matt, isn’t it?’

‘Jerry, let me go, please,’ she whispered brokenly.

‘Not until we’ve cleared this thing up. Come and sit down over here, Lara. I think it’s about time we had a talk.’ He pulled her unresisting body to the corner seating arrangement and she collapsed on the sofa while he took the armchair opposite. ‘Now, tell me what went on up there. What did Matt do to get you to fall for him?’

‘Nothing! Nothing at all,’ she cried softly. ‘He—he doesn’t know.’

‘Come on, Lara, I know you well enough to be aware that you wouldn’t fall for any man without good reason. Did he make love to you—kiss you?’

Suddenly Jerry was a stranger to her, probing her heart with the relentless cruelty he might have used to a hostile witness in court. But she wasn’t in a court, she thought, and her chin lifted defiantly. ‘Yes, he kissed me—but it meant nothing to him.’

A strange light came into his eyes as they narrowed thoughtfully, and there was an almost exultant note in his voice. ‘I think you could be very wrong about that. I suspect it meant a great deal to Matt, getting you to fall for him.’

‘I’ve told you, he doesn’t know. And it wouldn’t matter to him if he did. He’s still in love with Adrienne.’

‘Yes, it seems that way,’ he conceded abstractedly, not seeing the pain his agreement brought to her eyes. ‘That’s what makes me so sure he deliberately set out to lure you away from me.’

She stared at him, bewildered. ‘You’re talking in riddles, Jerry. I don’t see the connection.’

‘Hmm?’ He rose and put his hands in his pockets while he paced to the desk. ‘Revenge, honey—revenge. Who’d have thought my self-righteous brother would ‑’

‘Jerry, you’re being melodramatic now!’ she said with irritated sharpness,’ her tears forgotten. ‘Why in the world would Matt want to take revenge on you?' But even as she spoke, some kind of sixth sense prepared her for his answer.

‘Oh, hell, Lara, you must have had a suspicion that it was me Adrienne left him for two years ago! ’

She stared at his averted head with wide stricken eyes, realising with a tug of surprise that she had known of Jerry’s involvement without acknowledging it in her conscious mind.

‘Oh, Jerry,’ she whispered. ‘How could you do that to your own brother?’ As they formed, the words had a strangely familiar ring and she suddenly recalled saying something similar to Matt after he had kissed her the first time, here in this office. How ironic he must have thought her effort to stir his conscience by bringing Jerry into it!

But the pain slicing most sharply into her breast was caused by knowing that Matt had used her to get even with Jerry. It had been humiliating enough to think that he had regarded her as an outlet for his masculine urgings, but at least then she had felt desirable as a woman. Now she saw that she had been nothing more than a sexless object, useful to him only as an instrument for calculated, ruthless revenge. How satisfied he must have been with her eager response! Sickness rose in her, and she missed Jerry’s first quietly spoken words of explanation.

'... got out of hand. Adrienne likes the same things as I do—bright lights, people, excitement—all the things Matt couldn’t provide for her here. They quarrelled a lot about things like that. That’s why I didn’t think it would hit Matt so hard, but I guess I was wrong, the way things have worked out. He’s more possessive about her now than he ever was when they were engaged.’

‘That’s hardly surprising, considering what happened the last time you were here with her!’ Lara said acidly, adding with flat curiosity: ‘Why did she come back to Matt if she likes all the trappings he can’t give her? She must have known he would still be the same man she left before.’

His shoulders lifted in a slight shrug. ‘She’s been around a lot since then, and met a lot of men who didn’t stack up against Matt—said she realised she’d made a mistake.’ He looked soberly over at her. ‘She and I broke up as soon as we got to Vancouver. I guess we both felt guilty about Matt, and we were on edge with each other. I hadn’t seen her again until I met her that day at Williams Lake.’

Lara shook her' head as if to clear it, and said dully: ‘It doesn’t matter now, Jerry. I intended telling you as soon as I got back from the camp that I couldn’t marry you, because ‑’ She got up abruptly and came to lean against the armchair, facing him. ‘But you seemed to need me for the campaign, so I decided to wait... however, there’s not much point in carrying on the masquerade any longer.’ Slipping his ring from her finger, she held it out to him and looked up in surprise when his hand came out to clasp the ring and her fingers.

‘Keep it, Lara, at least for the rest of the time we’re here,’ he urged. ‘I guessed you wouldn’t be too happy about marrying me if you found out about Adrienne and me—I brought her out to the ranch only because she threatened to tell you about it, and I didn’t want to lose you. But making it known that we’ve broken things off would cause a lot of complications we can both do without right now.’

Puzzled, she looked at him with frowning eyes. ‘What complications, Jerry? It isn’t anyone else’s business if we decide to call off the engagement—that happens every day.’

‘It’s happened once too often in this family!’ he said grimly. ‘I don’t want my mother going through that kind of hassle again if I can help it. It won’t be so bad if I tell her after we’ve been gone a while. Anyway,’ he squeezed her fingers, ‘you might change your mind when you’ve had a chance to think things through.’

She shook her head. ‘No, Jerry. I know now that the feeling I had for you wasn’t the right one for marriage. Matt taught me that, at least! ’

‘Good grief, Lara, you still think you’re in love with him, knowing why he ‑?’

‘I don’t know, Jerry. Right now I feel I never want to see him again.’ She gave him a twisted smile. ‘I suppose we should be grateful to him in a way. Our marriage would have been a mistake.’

Her hand dropped from his as he moved restlessly away. ‘I think we could have been happy enough together. But I guess that’s beside the point now.’ He swung back to look thoughtfully at her. ‘You know we’d be playing right into Matt’s hands if we tell him we’re finished, don’t you? You say he doesn’t know you fell for him, but I’d bet everything I have that he knows exactly the minute he accomplished his purpose. He’s far from stupid, Lara.’

Searing memories rushed into her mind of Matt’s rejection each time he had brought her to the point of surrender, to a willingness to return his ardour, and nausea gripped her throat.

‘All right, Jerry,’ she choked out. ‘I’ll—wear the ring until we leave.’

She left him then and went frozenly up to her room, where she sat on her bed and looked with vacant eyes through the window, too miserable even for tears.

CHAPTER TWELVE

‘Why don’t you come with us?’ Drew called from the back of Phil’s dusty car later that afternoon when the men were leaving for town. ‘There’s lots of room, and we could have a real good time.’

Matt, coming up the porch steps, stopped to frown in disapproval and Lara injected laughing regret into her voice as she called back: ‘Not this time, Drew. Enjoy yourselves!’

‘My, aren’t we popular?’ Adrienne drawled over her sunglasses from, the lounge chair she lay on, half-thumbed magazines scattered round her. ‘As I’ve said before, there’s something to be said for being the only woman at a cattle camp! ’

‘You’re right,' agreed Lara, her brittle smile including Matt, who was pouring lemonade into a glass from the jug on the table. ‘They’re almost pathetically vulnerable, I found.’ Her reward was in seeing the clenching of Matt’s jaw as he turned to her with an odd look.

‘Matt darling, pour me a proper drink, will you?’ Adrienne asked sweetly. ‘I have lemonade coming out of my ears! ’

‘I hadn’t noticed,’ he said drily, and his eyes swept over the warm olive of her body, covered scantily in brief top and shorts. ‘What about you, Lara?’

‘No, thanks, I’ll wait for Jerry. He must be almost finished with the speech, and he’ll want to relax.'

His lips were compressed into a tight line when he went past her into the house, and she felt another surge of triumph. If she could keep this up, she would soon convince Matt that his lovemaking had meant as little to her as it had to him. Idly, she wondered what his next move would be in the game of retaliation against Jerry.

She found out that night when the four of them were swimming under the silvery shafts of moonlight glinting off the lake. Adrienne and Jerry had gone to find a beach ball in the boathouse, leaving Lara and Matt on the raft side by side.

Lara’s heartbeat quickened when Matt raised himself on one elbow to look down at her, his expression barely visible in the shadowed light.

‘What’s with you, Lara? You’ve been acting mighty strange today.’

‘Have I?’ she asked lightly, steeling herself against the attraction his hard-muscled body still had for her. ‘In what way, Matt?’ She smiled up at him in a deliberately provocative way, and felt rather than saw his eyes fall to the inviting parting of her lips.

Her name came as a muffled groan from his throat as his head dipped and his mouth fastened hungrily on hers, his body coming to half lie over her own softness so that she felt the rough coils of his chest hair against her skin. Her senses began to reel under the pressure of his consuming mouth, and she stifled a moan when his hand came up to caress her neck and shoulder with a rhythmic motion before sliding down to cup her breast. Almost too late, she remembered that he was demonstrating nothing more than a wonderful acting ability. If she hadn’t know better, she would have been totally convinced of his sincerity. Summoning every shred of strength she had left, she pushed him from her and leapt to her feet, laughing with only a small tremor in her voice.

‘Not bad, Matt,’ she mocked, ‘but I still prefer Jerry.’

As her slim body left the raft and knifed into the water, she caught a fleeting glimpse of his face, and knew that she had pierced his masculine pride where it hurt the most. But she felt little satisfaction in her triumph as the soft lake water rippled over her shoulders. Whether he knew it or not, Matt had still won.

A second sleepless night left Lara with a pallor which even a brisk trot on Dainty failed to dispel the next morning. She decided that when she had finished typing Jerry’s speech she would lie down and prepare herself for the campaign dinner that night.

It was a relief to hear from Carrie at breakfast that Matt had left very early on Samson to make an inspection of the southern pastures and the fences surrounding them before the big cattle drive in the fall. He wasn’t expected back until late afternoon, so with any luck she and Jerry would have left for the dinner without seeing much of him.

‘How about coming out for a ride this afternoon, Lara?’ Jerry asked at lunch, where the big table seemed empty without both Matt and Peg, who had gone with Vern and Billy to visit Happy. The old cook, because of his age, had been kept in hospital longer than would have been usual, much to his disgust.

‘I’d love to, Jerry,’ Lara said regretfully, ‘but I think I’d better try to get some rest before the dinner tonight.'

‘Good idea, Larraine,’ Beth supported her. ‘You’ve been looking a little peaky these past few days.’

Adrienne said nothing at the time, but when Lara went up to her room shortly after she saw her, her hair tied back with a scarlet ribbon, gallop off in the direction Jerry had taken a little while before, her beige-clad legs hugging a black-coated stallion.

Lara lay on her bed, hoping to drift into the oblivion of sleep, but finding it increasingly difficult as her thoughts sent her tossing restlessly from side to side. Suppose Matt came back earlier than expected and found Adrienne off with Jerry again? Jerry hadn’t invited her company, but no doubt Matt would think otherwise, as she had the day before. She knew that her frayed nerves couldn’t take another scene such as there had been then.

An hour went by and she was no nearer sleep than when she had lain down, so she rose and rinsed her face with cold water and changed from her slacks and blouse into a sleeveless pale blue dress. A light touch of make-up did little to alleviate the dark shadows under her hollow eyes, and she sighed as she took from the clothes closet the dress she intended wearing to the dinner. It was a dreamy moonlit creation of silver lame which she had never worn, and would be perfect for the occasion. She hung it outside the closet before going from her room and wandering downstairs.

The house seemed deserted, steeped in the heavy stillness of the afternoon except for the deep regular tick of the hall clock and muted sounds of activity from the kitchen. Her feet led her there, and Carrie looked up from the big formica-topped table occupying most of the room’s centre space.

‘Well,' the housekeeper said in her gruff voice. ‘I thought you were resting up for tonight.’

Lara smiled wanly. ‘I never could sleep during the day.’

‘How about joining me for a cup of tea? I was just about to make one for myself—no more trouble to make it for two.’

‘I’d love that, Carrie, thanks. Can I do anything to help?’ Lara glanced round the immaculate kitchen, sunny even at this shady side of the house with its modern gold-coloured appliances and light counter tops.

‘Not right now,’ Carrie refused firmly, binding a pot roast with string and placing it in a waiting enamelled roaster, and Lara remembered Beth’s warning that the cook didn’t like interference in her domain. ‘Though I hear you’re handy enough in a kitchen, so you can make the tea if you feel inclined.’ The last was added with an air of bestowing a royal concession, and Lara happily went to fill the kettle and plug it into an electric outlet by the stove.

‘Where’s Beth?’ she asked a few minutes later when they were sitting companionably at the table drinking the hot brew and eating the home-made cookies Carrie produced. ‘She’s not working outside in this heat, is she?’

‘No, she went upstairs to take a rest. She often does in the afternoon.’ Carrie gave her a dry smile. ‘Old bones take more kindly to rest than young ones.’ Giving Lara a sharp look from under her greying eyebrows, she added: ‘Did young Jerry and that Adrienne go out together again?’

Lara was startled into saying: ‘Yes, I think they’re out riding somewhere.’

‘Hmph! Matt won’t be pleased about that after what happened the other day. I’ve never seen him so mad.’

‘Oh, I'm sure they’ll be back long before he is today. Jerry hadn’t planned on taking Adrienne with him—she left after he did.’

Carrie shook her head and pursed her lips. ‘I can’t for the life of me understand what Matt sees in her. She was no good for him before, and she’ll be less so now. Still, men never seem to know these things till it’s too late.’ She got up painfully and sighed, holding her back. ‘This dratted arthritis gets me seized up if I sit too long.’

‘Let me do something to help, Carrie, please.’ Lara longed to have something worthwhile to occupy her hands. Anything would be better than being alone in her room with her thoughts.

The housekeeper, kindly under her rough exterior, seemed to sense Lara’s need and set her to chopping vegetables to go round the pot roast while she busied herself making pastry at the other side of the table.

Lara’s thoughts were far from the kitchen as the gleaming paring knife sliced cleanly into the vegetables, and she jumped when the outside door was thrown open suddenly, knowing before she looked up that the big figure in the doorway was Matt’s. In one hand he carried two plump, plucked chickens, and the other went up to push his hat back from his forehead as his brows rose in surprise at seeing Lara busy in the kitchen.

She hadn’t seen him since leaving him on the raft the night before, and her eyes dropped before the hard scrutiny in his. He said nothing to her, however, but crossed the floor to Carrie’s side.

‘Dan sent these over for dinner tomorrow—where do you want them?’

‘Put them in the cool room for now, Matt, will you? I’ll see to them when I’m finished with this pastry.’

When he came back from the large pantry adjoining the kitchen Matt stood beside Carrie again and Lara was conscious of his dark gaze on her bent head.

‘Lara’s just passing time till Jerry gets back,’ Carrie told him, and Lara was relieved that the housekeeper hadn’t mentioned that Adrienne was with Jerry.

Matt sauntered over to the sink, laying his hat on the counter beside it, and began to wash his hands. ‘Where is Jerry, by the way? I think I’ve drummed up another vote for him today.’

The paring knife, poised over a carrot, jerked nervously in Lara’s hand and came down sharply between the thumb and first finger of her left hand, slicing at an angle into her flesh. For a moment she stared numbly at the blood welling up from the wound, then gave a faint moan that brought Matt’s head round with a jerk from the towel between his hands.

‘What’s the matter, Lara? What have you done?’

He was at her side before he had finished speaking, the towel still in his hand, and he cursed softly when he saw the dark stain spreading under the wound. His fingers were gentle on her wrist when he lifted it to inspect the injury more closely, using the towel to clear it.

Carrie, who had been bent over the oven, came hurrying over. ‘Mercy, child, what’s happened?’ She clucked with distress when she saw the stained towel, and Matt threw her an impatient glance.

‘It’s not as bad as it looks,’ he said shortly. ‘Come along to my room, Lara, and I’ll fix it up for you.’

‘Please don’t bother.’ Her voice was stiff as she tried to draw her hand away from his. ‘It’s just a little cut, I can see to it myself.’

Ignoring her show of independence, he half led, half dragged her along the corridor to his room and across the thick carpet to the spacious bathroom.

The white oval sink was immediately splashed with red when Matt removed the towel, throwing it into the bathtub behind them, and a wave of nausea brought her eyes up to his face, set in concentration as he held her hand under the flowing tap. As if committing his every feature to memory, her eyes went over the sharp furrow between his brows, the deeply etched lines radiating from his eyes— lines that would grow deeper as he aged, but do little to take away his rugged good looks and air of vitality. She had never noticed before how very black his lashes were, or how they curved slightly at the ends, bringing a softer touch to his carved features.

So absorbed was she in her inspection that she had almost forgotten her reason to be standing there with him, and she jumped nervously when he grunted with satisfaction. ‘The bleeding’s stopped now.’ His eyes came up to meet the unguarded look in hers and lingered there for long moments before going like a caress over her face to the soft parting of her lips and back again to the deep blue orbs of her eyes.

If he kisses me now, she thought dizzily, I won’t be able to resist him, to pretend he means nothing. But he made no move towards her, straightening instead and saying with controlled evenness: ‘I’ll get the antiseptic and tape.’ He turned away to a well-stocked medicine cabinet on the far wall, and seemed to take an inordinately long time to find what he wanted on the shelves. When he did return, his face was a composed dark mask.

‘This is going to sting for a minute,’ he told her as he unscrewed the cap of a small dark brown bottle, ‘but it’s better than getting the hand infected.’

She gasped when he painted the burning liquid over the wound and would have pulled her hand away but for the strong clasp of his fingers round her wrist. Then he was taping the edges of the cut firmly together, and though she felt no pain, waves of faintness began to sweep over her. His absorbed profile, bent over her hand, seemed to come disconcertingly close and then recede with alarming speed. His head turned towards her in slow motion, and she heard the blurred distortion of his voice say: ‘Lara? Are you all right?’

‘Matt, I ‑’ She felt herself sway towards him, her hands touching the hardness of his chest before sliding nervelessly down over his beige shirt. Then his arms went round her, lifting her as the white haze in her brain was blotted out with darkness ...

‘Lara? Lara!’

Consciousness returned slowly, the sound of her name being repeated over and over in Matt’s voice helping to dispel the blackness of her faint. Feebly she pushed at a hard coolness against her lips, only to find it coming back to press more insistently. Her eyes fluttered open in irritation, and remembrance flooded back when she saw Matt’s strained face above her and felt the rocky warmth of his shoulder beneath her ear. Brandy fumes assailed her nostrils and she shook her head, turning it away from the glass at her lips to rest against the skin warmth of his neck. Her eyes closed again, a deep contentment stealing drowsily over her when she felt his arm tighten round her shoulders, the rough growth of bristles against her cheek. Disquiet rose at the back of her mind and grew more persistent until memory flooded back and made her jerk suddenly away from him. She heard him give a heavy sigh as if of anger, and looked up at him with frightened eyes.

‘Drink this,’ he said in a voice that commanded obedience, and she swallowed meekly from the glass he raised to her lips, choking a little on the first mouthful but feeling the spirit’s gentle heat seep through her as he tipped the glass again and again until it was empty.

He turned to put the glass down on a table behind him, and she realised suddenly that she was stretched out on a bed—his bed. The door to his bathroom was still open, and all around her was evidence of his masculine occupation. She became acutely conscious, too, that her dress had ridden upwards to reveal a startling length of leg.

Behind her, she felt him pull back the bedspread from the pillows, and then he was pressing her shoulders back against them. ‘I can’t stay here,’ she said, panicked. ‘I’m all right now. It was stupid to faint because of a little cut.'

He had been standing by the bed, but now he sat on its edge, his thigh pressing warmly against her hip, making it impossible for her to move.

‘You lost quite a lot of blood, but I doubt if that’s all that caused it. How much sleep have you had lately?’

‘Not much,’ she admitted, avoiding the penetrating inquiry in his black eyes, and wondering how he knew she hadn’t been sleeping well. ‘It’s—hotter here than I’m used to.’

‘That’s all? The heat?'

‘Of course. What other reason could there be?'

His eyes closed slightly while he regarded her for another minute, then he rose and went to a cupboard near the door, coming back with a padded quilt which he arranged over her, taking care to lift her injured hand and place it outside the cover.

‘You’ll find it’s a lot cooler at this side of the house. You won’t be disturbed here, so sleep as long as you need to.’

She wanted to protest, but her eyelids had grown heavy with an irrefutable lethargy produced by the brandy and the comforting cosiness of the quilt. Matt’s soft footfalls receded from the bed and there was a sound of curtains being drawn. Her lids forced upwards to watch him cross to the door with his cougar-like grace, and then the door clicked behind him.

Her eyes wandered sleepily round the room, shadowed now because of the closed curtains, and she saw a set of silver-backed brushes scattered indiscriminately across the black oak dresser. The top drawer had been carelessly shut, leaving a triangle of dotted neck scarf wedged into one corner. On her right, the closet door was half open, revealing an array of coloured shirts, neatly pressed jackets and trousers hanging in inanimate order.

Soon his clothes would be joined by Adrienne’s frothy dresses and tailored suits; her potions and lotions would vie for space on the dresser with his brushes; the heavy musk of her perfume would eliminate the faint but pervasive odour of tobacco and cologne which now clung even to the pillow she lay on. Matt’s pillow ...

Lara woke and lay without opening her eyes for some time, trying to identify the source of a light buzzing sound coming from nearby. Just as she had pinned it down to an electric razor in action, the noise stopped. Why was someone shaving in her bathroom?

Her lids came up with a jerk when a door opened, letting a shaft of light fall across the darkened room to the bed she lay on. She gave a stifled gasp and sat up when the light was blocked suddenly by a man’s broad figure.

‘Did I wake you?’ Matt’s voice said, and she sank back on the pillows, her heart pounding with relief. He moved easily across the room to switch on a lamp beside the bed, its rosy glow reflecting a similar fight in his eyes as he looked down at her with a half smile.

Lara noticed that his shirt was unbuttoned and hung loosely from his shoulders, exposing the brown leanness of stomach and chest with its cloud of black hair. The pale blue checked shirt was crisply clean, as were his dark grey slacks, and she realised that he must have entered the room while she slept to take them from the rack.

‘I—I'm sorry,’ she said, her voice sleepily husky. ‘I didn't mean to tie up your room for such a long time. What time is it, Matt?’

‘Nearly seven,’ His eyes went over her face in minute detail. ‘You look a lot better now—how’s the hand?’

She raised it from the quilt and grimaced. ‘Throbbing like crazy, but I think I’ll survive:.’ Suddenly she gasped : "What time did you say? The campaign dinner! Jerry ‑’

‘Jerry’s gone. I told him you weren’t fit to go anywhere tonight.’ He sat beside her and looked at her with watchful eyes. ‘He took Adrienne with him instead.’

‘Adrienne? Oh, no! ’ She turned her head away from him and gave a trembling sigh. What was Jerry playing at? It seemed as if he was deliberately provoking Matt, first by staying out riding with Adrienne all afternoon, and now taking her to the dinner. How provoked Matt had been was evident in the dry harshness of his tone.

‘I’d have stopped them if I’d known, but I was elsewhere when they left.’ His weight lifting from the bed brought her eyes back to look at his face where the glow had faded from his eyes. ‘There’s one consolation—they can’t get up to much mischief at a political dinner! ’

‘No, I suppose not.’

She pushed back the quilt and swung her legs to the floor, noticing for the first time that her feet were bare. Matt walked away from the bed and watched moodily from the middle of the room as she folded the quilt and plumped up the pillows before smoothing the spread back over them. Her shoes were under the bed where he had placed them, and she bent to slip them on before turning to face him.

‘Thanks, Matt, for letting me use your be—room.’

He shrugged off her gratitude with an almost annoyed lift of his shoulders. ‘Do you want a tray upstairs, or will you come down to eat?’

‘I’ll come down. I feel much better now.’

Glancing back from the corridor, she saw that his head was turned to the side of the bed she had lain on. His eyes held a strangely fierce kind of longing, and she wondered if he was thinking of the day when Adrienne, not Lara, would he there—as his wife.

A longing just as fierce shook Lara, stifling the tears gathering in her eyes as she went to her own room. The few days remaining until the election would seem interminable to her, but at least then, whatever the outcome for Jerry, she would be able to leave the Fraser Ranch and its owner far behind her.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Tears glinted in Lara’s eyes when she looked across the gaily decorated campaign headquarters to where Jerry was conceding the election to his opponent. It had been a close race, Jerry losing by only thirty-two votes, and she knew his disappointment must be more acute because of that. But she was proud of his quiet acceptance of defeat, his generous remarks to the winner, and his ability to lift the spirits of his own campaign supporters in spite of his own feelings.

She blinked the tears away and forced a tremulous smile as Jerry came towards her to take her arm and lead her through the commiserating backslaps from his helpers.

‘We’ll take it next time around, Jerry,’ Henry Farrer, the campaign manager, told him emotionally, and similar remarks surrounded them until they were well away from the building.

‘It's true, Jerry,’ Lara told him gently as he guided the car from its parking space. ‘There’s not much doubt you’ll win next time. This was just a by-election, but national elections are less than two years away.’

He shook his head and gave her a swift, tight smile. ‘No, Lara, there won’t be another time for me. Thanks for your faith, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned from the campaign it’s that the political scene isn’t for me. I’d have done my best if I’d been elected, of course, but—I miss practising law. I’ve realised over the past couple of months that the challenge for me is there, not in politics—for the next few years, anyway.’

‘Really, Jerry? It’s not because of the disappointment tonight? Believe me, you came out far better than I’d expected for a first try.’

He smiled again and put a fleeting hand over hers. ‘No, honey, it’s not sour grapes on my part. Law will be enough for me until I’ve found my feet there.' He switched on the car’s brighter lights as they left the illuminated streets and plunged into country darkness, and they fell into silent thought.

Lara’s feelings were mixed as she stared from the side window at the shadowy trees flashing past. Jerry had said that if he lost the election he would not stay on for Peg’s birthday, and that meant they would be leaving tomorrow if he was still of the same mind. There was still an ache in her heart at the thought of never seeing Matt again, but above that was a sense of relief that her torment would soon be over.

Although there had been no argument when Adrienne and Jerry returned from the campaign dinner, Matt had since then contrived to have his ex-fiancée with him as much as possible. He had come into the dining room the morning after the dinner when the rest of the household was finishing a late Sunday breakfast and said to Adrienne, his eyes flickering over her low-cut peach nylon negligee:

'I'm going down to the Jeffreys’ place to look at a prize bull they have for sale. I’d like you to come with me.’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, Matt,’ she had frowned, ‘I’m not particularly fired up about bulls, prize or otherwise. Why don’t you take Peg?’

‘Because I want to take you,’ he returned evenly. ‘Be ready at eleven.’

Adrienne had glared rebelliously after him, but was nevertheless waiting on the porch at eleven, stunningly attractive in an off-white trouser suit that contrasted vividly with her dark beauty. That day had set the pattern for the days following, with Matt insisting on Adrienne’s company whether it was to town on business or to a far corner of the property to check feed and fences. She complained sulkily, but never refused outright to go with him, as if she feared goading him too far.

To Lara, Matt spoke scarcely at all except to inquire politely about her hand. He appeared to avoid being alone with her, and there were no more attempts to lure her affections from Jerry. That was just as well, she thought unhappily, because she would have had no more ability to resist him than of stopping a snowflake melting in summer sun.

Beth and Peg had been absorbed in plans for the barbecue on Saturday, and noticed nothing odd in Matt’s attitude, but Jerry’s eyes occasionally strayed speculatively between his brother’s closed expression and Lara’s cool composure.

The men’s return on Wednesday considerably lightened the atmosphere at the ranch, and an ecstatic Billy spent every daylight hour with the other ranch children. Their excited shouts echoed from the lake as they dived and swam under the supervision of Phil’s wife, a fair-haired motherly woman who took Billy under her wing as well as her own son and daughter.

‘We’re almost there,’ Jerry interrupted her thoughts, his voice loud after the silence. ‘Now I guess I have to face Matt’s smug disapproval, and Mother’s ‑’

‘Jerry, how can you say that?’ Lara broke in indignantly. ‘You know Matt isn’t that way.’

‘Do I?’ he asked cynically. ‘You don’t understand, Lara. It’s the same kind of feeling I used to have when I came home after failing an exam. Matt’s never failed anything in his life, and he has no patience with anybody who does.’

‘I think you’re being unfair to him in this case, Jerry,’ she told him quietly. ‘He probably feels almost as badly as you do about it.’

Jerry said no more until he had pulled up beside the house. Then he turned to her, his hands still gripping the wheel. ‘You’re still in love with him, aren’t you, Lara?’

She looked across at his tense face, a sharp denial rising to her lips, then said simply: ‘Yes. But I’ll get over it.’

‘Will you?’

Lara looked away from his questioning eyes and said briefly: ‘In time.’

He looked at her profile for a moment longer, then got out of the car and came round to open her door, taking her arm to lead her along the path to the house as he had when they first arrived at the ranch. How long ago that seemed now, Lara thought, glancing across to the moonlit lake between the trees. A lifetime of experience had flowed through and over her since then, leaving her mutely unhappy at the thought of never seeing it again.

Beth came to embrace Jerry in the hall, tears running from her eyes. ‘We heard on the radio, darling, and ‑’

‘It’s all right, Mother,’ he said gruffly, hugging her quickly and putting her away from him. ‘I’m just as happy it’s turned out this way.’

Peg brushed a kiss on his cheek and whispered something in his ear, and then Matt came to shake his hand and grip his shoulder.

‘You came very near,’ he said with husky warmth, justifying Lara’s defence of his reaction. ‘You’ll make it next time.’

In the living room, Vern came to offer his condolences, and Adrienne rose lightly from her chair to put her arms round Jerry and kiss him on the lips, clinging there for so long that Lara said to Matt, who had come to stand beside her: ‘I think Jerry could do with a drink.’

He pulled his frowning eyes away from the closely blended figures of Adrienne and Jerry and looked at Lara as if he was about to say something, but then turned without a word to the sideboard.

It was after midnight when Lara excused herself and went upstairs to her room. She had wanted to ask Jerry about leaving the next day, but there was no opportunity with so many others around, and Jerry made no effort to come to the bottom of the stairs with her to say goodnight.

Sleep came tardily, after the sounds of the household settling down were long past. Once, on the verge of dropping off, she thought she could hear surreptitious movements outside her door, but sleep had claimed her before she could wonder more about them.

In spite of the late night, Lara was awake just after six the next morning, and lay wondering if this would be the last time she would lie in this bed, look out to the misty awakening of the lake, hear the early morning motions as Matt left the house for the corrals. She jumped out of bed and caught a glimpse of his tall figure, shoulders slightly hunched against the cool dampness of the air, and decided she would take a last ride on Dainty.

Dressing quickly in blue jeans, plaid top and light cotton jacket, she hurried downstairs and out across the dewy lawns. There was no sign of Matt around the stable or corrals, and she pushed away the lurch of disappointment, not realising until then how much she had wanted to see him just once more as he left on Samson.

Ten minutes later she was skirting the lake on Dainty’s back, feeling the gossamer silk of spiders’ webs gild her hair as they passed through overhanging branches and came out to the open grassland. She stayed out longer than normal, savouring the heavy odour of pines, the still-wrapped wild flowers dotting the hillsides Dainty picked her way across.

Pulling the mare to a standstill on their way back, she viewed the ranch from the far end of the lake. Her heart drew an outline of the imposing white house nestled sleepily under the back hills, the barns and corrals leading to the employees’ bungalows, the heart-wrenching beauty of dark green pines mingled with the early autumn hues of orange and gold on the aspens. She would never see the ranch when feathery snow came to dust the pines and carpet the ground, or when late spring came to touch the aspens with new green life. Her lips tightened against threatening tears, and Dainty responded instantly to the sharp dig of her rider’s heel, happy to be headed back to her breakfast and a day of quiet dozing.

An icy calm controlled Lara’s movements as she ate the breakfast Carrie insisted on putting before her, then went to her room to shower and change. She chose a pale coral trouser suit to wear for the long trip to Vancouver, and took her suitcases from the closet. Would they be leaving today? It was possible Jerry had changed his mind and she would be packing unnecessarily early. After hesitating for a minute, she went from her room and crossed to Jerry’s, knocking louder when there was no reply to her first taps.

When there was still no sound of movement from inside, she turned away thinking Jerry must have already gone down to breakfast, and was running lightly down the stairs when the screen door was thrown open with Matt’s customary violence. Lara paused on the lower landing while he strode towards her, followed closely by a wide-eyed Peg. A tremor of unease went through Lara when she saw the tight-jawed anger on Matt’s face.

‘Where’s Jerry?’ he demanded harshly.

‘Jerry? I—I’m not sure. He isn’t in his room. I was just going to check in ‑’ Sudden foreboding brought a sharpness to her voice. ‘Why? What’s happened?’

‘That’s what I mean to find out,’ Matt said grimly, and turned to Peg. ‘Go up and see if Adrienne’s in her room.’

Peg went at once to do his bidding, giving Lara a look that was part fear, part sympathy, as she passed her on the stairs. Lara came slowly down to stand beside Matt, her eyes searching his impassive face.

‘What’s going on, Matt? Why are you checking on Adrienne? Where is Jerry?’

Compassion struggled with rage in the look he gave her, but before he had time to answer, Peg had reappeared in the upper hall and called down softly: ‘Nothing, Matt. Everything’s gone.’

He cursed softly under his breath, then expelled it in a long sigh as he turned again to Lara.

‘I’m afraid I have bad news for you, Lara. You’d better come along to the office and we’ll talk there.’ He raised his voice to say to Peg, halfway down the stairs: ‘Can you cope with Beth if she comes down?’

Peg nodded, and Lara felt Matt’s fingers on her elbow, gentle as they led her to the wood-lined office. Once there, he let her go and went to lean against the desk, running his hand through the blue-black of his hair.

‘There’s no way to put this that would be easy for you to hear, Lara,’ he began. ‘The fact is, I believe Jerry and —Adrienne have taken off together. Jerry’s car is nowhere on the property, and neither of them can be found, as you know. It won’t be of much help to you, but—I’m sorry this has happened. I guessed it might, that’s why I ‑’

‘But Jerry wouldn’t do that again! ’ Lara burst out, her brain flying in different directions as she tried to assimilate the awful truth that Jerry had, once again, disappeared with Adrienne.

Matt’s head came up with a jerk. ‘You knew this had happened before?*

She ran her tongue over the sudden dryness of her lips and nodded. ‘Yes. Jerry told me last week when ‑’ Her voice broke off when she realised she had been about to tell him of the broken engagement. But did that matter now? Confused thoughts raced through her mind. ‘It just isn’t possible! ’ she said dazedly. ‘Jerry couldn’t—wouldn’t ‑’

‘I’m afraid Jerry could and did,’ he said with harsh dryness. ‘But this time he won’t get away with it. I mean to teach him a lesson he’ll never forget.’ His hands were pulled into fists, leaving little doubt as to his intentions.

‘Oh, Matt!’ Lara dropped into an armchair and buried her face in her hands, trying to fathom Jerry’s reasons for going off with Adrienne. She was sure he wasn’t madly in love with the girl, and that would be the only plausible explanation. Why, then? Her mind went back to the night before and Jerry’s bitterness about Matt’s never having failed anything in his life. Was this Jerry’s way of providing his superiority in at least one area? Yet she couldn’t believe his rancour ran so deep that he would take away the woman Matt loved just to prove a point.

She went over the rest of their conversation in the car and recalled Jerry’s quiet tenseness when he had asked her if she was still in love with Matt, and her own admission that she was. Had he persuaded the malleable Adrienne to go away with him in order to leave the field clear for herself? And would he really have been so naive as to think the physical removal of Adrienne would change Matt’s obsession with her?

Lara took her hands away from her face and looked at him with anguished eyes as he stood against the desk, arms crossed over his chest, his eyes staring rigidly at the carpet, and her heart contracted at the thought that she might be indirectly responsible for his misery.

Yet what could she do? Explain to him that she had fallen in love with him, and that Jerry had generously, if mistakenly, taken on the role of matchmaker? The idea made her shudder. No, she would have to find the runaway pair and somehow persuade Adrienne to come back to Matt. She rose and came to stand behind the chair, her knuckles showing white against the dark fabric they clutched.

‘I think I can persuade Jerry to give Adrienne up,’ she said without looking directly at him, her voice tremulously low. ‘They’re probably in the city—can I get transportation from Williams Lake?’

His eyes rose from the carpet and settled with angry incredulity on her face. ‘That’s what you want?—to chase after them?’

‘It’s all a mistake, Matt. Please don’t blame Jerry. His intentions were good, but they were—misguided.’

‘Good God!’ Matt stared at her, stunned. ‘What would he have to do to get you to lose faith in him—murder somebody? Or would you find excuses for him in that, too?’ He straightened and added contemptuously: ‘You’ll find a ready ally in Beth, I’m sure. Between the two of you, he’ll come up smelling of roses by nightfall! ’

‘Matt, it isn’t how you think—I just need to talk to him. Please tell me how I can get back to the city.’

‘I’ll drive you there myself on Sunday,’ he said curtly, moving to the door. ‘I have a few words to say to him myself, but it can wait until after Peg’s birthday, which has been marred enough by this business.’

Lara stared at the door long after he had closed it sharply behind him. How could Jerry have imagined for a minute that Matt would turn to her when Adrienne had been removed?

Music was already floating up to Lara’s window when she left her room the following evening. From six o’clock onwards, there had been a steady stream of arrivals for Peg’s birthday party, and Peg, radiant in her white jersey dress, circulated among them on the lawns before the house, Vern close behind her.

She had come into Lara’s room before going down, tears studding her eyes as she hugged the fair girl’s slim figure.

'I'm so sorry about Jerry, Lara,’ she whispered. ‘Especially since Vern and I are announcing our engagement tonight. Will you mind too much?’

‘Oh, Peg darling, of course I don’t mind! I think it’s wonderful that you’ll be celebrating your engagement as well as your twenty-first.’ Lara smiled with a touch of sadness in her eyes. ‘You and Vern have what I call “perfect love”—and that’s the only kind that matters.’

‘That isn’t the kind you and Jerry had?’ Peg asked softly.

‘No. I don’t think it comes around too frequently, so make the most of it!’ In a lighter tone, Lara added: ‘I can guess that your news will make somebody very happy—what does Billy think about getting his new mother at long last?’

‘We haven’t dared to tell him yet,’ Peg smiled. ‘He’d have told everybody within a hundred-mile radius! All he knows is that he doesn’t have to go back to school in the city, and he’s thrilled to pieces about that.’

‘I can imagine. You’d better go, Peg, I can hear people arriving.’

‘You’ll be coming down soon?’

Lara nodded, but made no effort to hurry when Peg had whirled out. Facing the gathered guests, many of whom she had met when making campaign calls with Jerry, was an ordeal she wanted to put off as long as possible.

To give herself confidence, she had selected the silver lame dress which she had intended to wear to the political dinner with Jerry. She knew that the swirling dress, with its sweep across one shoulder leaving the other whitely bare, enhanced the silvery fairness of her hair and fair complexion. Her make-up was applied with a heavier hand than usual, dark pencilling elongating further the almond shape of her eyes and emphasising the blue. The severe effect of a smoothly rolled chignon was offset by tendrils curling at either ear and the soft brilliance of sapphire stud earrings. A bit much for a barbecue, she thought as she surveyed herself in the full-length mirror, but she had noticed several of the women guests were dressed quite elegantly.

The house seemed deserted when she went down to the lower hall, though laughter and talk floated in through open doors and windows. In the living room, a stack of records was poised over the stereo turntable, which Matt had linked up with a speaker over the temporary dance floor erected on the gravelled parking area beside the house.

Her eyes fell on the sideboard and its array of bottles. Never had she been more in need of false courage than she was at that moment! Her feet carried her with automatic precision to the sideboard, and she looked along the bottle labels, finally selecting the whisky she had seen Matt use. Splashing a generous amount into a squat glass, she tossed it off as she had seen him do on occasion. Her breath drew in on a strangled gasp as an agonising explosion of searing heat gripped her chest and throat and stung her eyes to tears.

The glass was taken roughly from her hand and she heard Matt’s voice, strained with anger, say: ‘What the hell are you trying to do?’

She turned, her eyes clearing as the spirit’s warmth began to seep through her limbs. Matt was darkly attractive in an off-white casual suit and pale yellow shirt, and Lara swallowed again before saying coolly: 'I'm—having a drink. Is there something wrong with that?’

‘There is when you gulp straight whisky down as if it’s going out of style,’ he snapped. ‘Go and sit down. If you need a drink, I’ll pour one for you.’

He brought her a long drink, flavoured only slightly with alcohol, and whisky over ice for himself. ‘Look, Lara,’ he told her tersely, a frown between his eyes, ‘I know you’re going through a bad time right now, but getting high won’t solve anything for you.’

‘Won’t it?’ she asked with a mocking recklessness inspired by the permeating glow of whisky circulating in her veins. ‘I’ve never been high, but I think now might be the time to put your theory to the test.’ She rose and put the glass down on the table, then looked up at him challengingly. ‘Should we make a deal, Matt? You stay sober and I’ll enjoy all the party has to offer, and we’ll see who’s happier at the end of the evening.’

His lips clamped down tightly, but she gave him no time to put up an argument. Running to the door and across the hall, she emerged on the porch and halted suddenly as a roar of conversation and laughter assailed her ears. Everywhere she looked there were faces—happy, smiling, welcoming faces. Within five minutes she had been absorbed into the crowd, warmed by their friendly acceptance and the drinks pressed into her hand by well-meaning ranchers. It was much later when she saw Matt moving affably among the guests, a bevy of young girls seeming to follow him from group to group.

Drew and four older men were providing Western music for dancing between record sessions on the stereo, but whenever he was free Drew asked her to dance.

There was something sweet to Lara in the trembling of his arms as he held her, but she drew away from him when he said at one point: ‘I hear Jerry went back to the city without you, Lara, and I see you’re not wearing his ring tonight. Is there a chance for somebody else now?’

‘No, Drew, there isn’t,’ she told him quietly. ‘I’m leaving the ranch tomorrow for good.’

There was a general exodus to the food table on the side lawn as dusk fell and the coloured lights strung between the trees were switched on. Carrie had outdone herself in the provision of salads, hams and pastries to accompany the whole barbecued calves and chickens which had been roasting most of the day in two long pits near the house.

Beth, still pale from the previous day’s upheaval, hovered anxiously as the guests helped themselves from the giant buffet. She had been thrown into a state of prostration by Jerry’s midnight flight with Adrienne, and was only partly consoled by Lara’s assurances that she and Matt would set things right on Sunday.

‘Matt won’t forgive her a second time,’ she moaned. ‘And you, Larraine—what must you think of my son? Oh, dear, how could Jerry have done this?’

‘Jerry thought he was doing the right thing,’ Lara soothed her. ‘He thought it was best for me.’

‘Oh, Larraine, you’re a sweet girl to want to spare me, but I know Jerry can be very wilful—even selfish at times. Maybe I should have been stricter with him as a child, but ‑’

Now she seemed to have temporarily put aside anguished thoughts of Jerry, bolstered by the neighbourly good wishes showered on Peg when she blew out the candles on a huge cake Carrie had made and decorated for the occasion.

Lara had little appetite, and went gladly to dance with a tall, thin man of about thirty whom she hadn’t met, but whose eyes she had felt on her most of the evening. His name was Chris Bradshaw, she discovered, a distant cousin of Matt’s from the southern part of the Province.

‘Too bad about Jerry,’ he commented as they circled the dance floor, and Lara looked at him warily before realising that he was speaking about the election. ‘I thought he’d make it for sure. How come you didn't go back with him?’

‘I—wanted to stay for Peg's birthday. Jerry had to go back sooner.’

His arm tightened round her waist and he breathed into her ear: ‘I'm very glad of that—that you stayed, I mean.’

Matt passed close by, smiling as his head bent to listen to what the redhead in his arms had to say, and a stab of pique ran through Lara. She hadn’t been able to sleep for thinking about his misery, but at this moment he certainly didn’t look too heartbroken after losing the love of his life to Jerry! If Chris Bradshaw was surprised at her sudden nestling into his arms he made no comment, but his face came down to lie against her cheek as they danced in silence. When Matt and the redhead came by again, Lara saw his eyes sharpen in surprise as they raked over Chris and herself, following them while he moved on with his partner.

Between dances Chris kept her well supplied with drinks from the temporary bar which had been set up on the lawn with an efficient Phil as bartender. Lara swallowed the drinks with no other thought than to prove to Matt that she would finish the evening happier than he was. That she was winning was evident from the occasional glances they exchanged, when his brows were drawn down into a dark frown of sober disapproval.

Chris taught her the Western dances Drew and the other men played, and her eyes were shining with excitement when Matt cleared the platform to announce Vern and Peg’s. engagement. They were pushed up to stand beside Matt, and a lump came to Lara’s throat when she saw the look that passed between them as their friends and neighbours shouted their congratulations.

‘Let’s take a walk,’ Chris bent to whisper in her ear a few minutes later, and she was unresisting when his arm went round her waist to propel her between the smiling guests and across the lawn to the far trees near the lake.

The moon had risen, a heavy orange globe of a harvest moon that sent solid streaks of gold across the lake and touched the sleeping trees with fire. In the distance Lara thought she heard the sound of a coyote crying mournfully for his love, and her own heart echoed the plaintive plea. Wistfully, she hoped that the coyote would have more luck than she had known in her quest for love.

Music drifted across the garden again as Chris turned her towards him and pulled her into his arms. ‘You’re beautiful, Lara,’ he murmured, burying his face in her neck.

For a moment she was still, her brain fogged by the rapturous beauty of the night and the drinks she had taken so freely, but when his lips began to move insinuatingly across her bared shoulders she cried out: ‘No! Let me go.’

Chris lifted his head, but refused to be pushed off, and panic gripped Lara when he bent his head with the obvious intention of kissing her mouth. All at once she felt herself being wrenched away from his stranglehold and heard Matt’s curt voice.

‘Didn’t you hear, Chris? The lady said no.’ The face he turned to Lara was stony. ‘This is our dance, isn’t it, Lara?’

‘Hell, Matt, I didn’t know she was your girl,’ Chris muttered, throwing Lara a dark scowl.

‘No harm done,’ Matt said evenly, and put his arm round Lara. ‘Come on, honey, we’ll miss the dance.’

His words were less loverlike when they reached the dance floor and he jerked her into his arms. ‘You’ve been asking for that all night,’ he said furiously, keeping his voice lowered in deference to the other couples dancing close to them. ‘Maybe you’ll admit now that drinking solves nothing! It sure as hell won’t bring Jerry back to you.’

Her lower lip quivered and he stared into her brimming eyes for a moment and muttered an exclamation under his breath before bringing her closer so that her head came to rest naturally on his shoulder. In another few minutes his body relaxed as they moved slowly together in time to the music, and she felt the hard line of his jaw come down to lie against her head. It was bliss to lie in the circle of his arms, to feel the steady rhythm of his heart under her ear, the warmth of his breath stirring her hair.

Conscience rose up to smite her when he brought her hand against his chest and covered it closely with his own. She wasn’t the woman he wanted in his arms. He was being kind because he thought his brother had jilted her.

‘Matt, I must tell you something,’ she said urgently against his neck.

‘Mmm?’

He made no attempt to raise his chin from her head, and she wasn’t sure he heard the muffled words she spoke until he stiffened and pulled away from her, his hand coming to jerk her chin up so that her eyes looked directly into the fierce glitter of his.

‘What did you say?’

‘Th-that Jerry shouldn’t be blamed too much because ‑’

‘No—the bit before that.'

‘Oh.’ She stumbled over his feet and dropped her eyes to his shirt-front so that her lashes curved darkly against her cheeks. Why would he want her to repeat that, unless he wanted to savour her humiliation to the fullest? Still, he deserved that small satisfaction. She took a deep breath and said quietly: ‘I said that Jerry found out I was in love with you, and he sh ‑’

‘That’s what I thought you said! Now there’s something I want to say to you’—his head swivelled round the dancers—‘but not here.’ Grasping her by the wrist, he pulled her unceremoniously off the platform, and curious eyes followed their progress along the front of the house and up the porch steps, Lara half running to keep up with his long strides.

‘Matt, you’re hurting my arm!’ she cried in protest as they crossed the hall, and he loosened his grip slightly but continued his relentless pace until they were inside the office. Kicking the door shut with his heel, he drew her roughly to him, his eyes burning with such dark intensity that she felt a sudden weakness in her knees.

‘I said I wanted to say something, but I’m not much with words, Lara,’ he said huskily. ‘I express myself a lot better in action.’

His mouth came down to touch hers with a tender sweetness it had never shown to her before and, strangely, its gentleness roused her to immediate response. Her hands went up to caress the back of his neck with delicate fingers while her body arched upwards to his. Her eagerness brought an answering pressure from his lips, the lifting of his hand to stroke the smooth bareness of her shoulder, the quickening of his heartbeat to a dull thud against her breast. His fingers tugged impatiently at the pins holding her hair until it fell in a shining cloud to her shoulders, leaving it free for his hand to run through its softness.

This time there was no drawing away until at last Matt dragged his lips from hers with a groan and kissed hotly along her cheekbone to her ear, where he murmured unsteadily: ‘How could I ever have called you an ice maiden?’

‘Because that’s what I was, Matt,’ she whispered, ‘until you kissed me the first time. I never knew it could be like that.’

He pulled his head back to look questioningly into her love-filled eyes. ‘Yet you went right out of here and engaged yourself to Jerry—and put me through hell thinking I’d disgusted you!’

She put her fingers to his mouth and ran them lingeringly over his lips. ‘You could never do that, Matt. I thought you were—amusing yourself with me. But mostly I was afraid of the feelings you stirred up in me.’

‘You’re not afraid now?’

She shook her head. ‘No. The only thing I’ve been afraid of lately is that I’d have to go away from here and never see you again.’

He drew his breath in with a sharp catch and his hands tangled in her hair as he drew her face up to meet his. There was silence in the room except for the hurried tempo of their breathing until Matt lifted his head to say hoarsely: ‘You don’t know how afraid I was of the same thing. That you’d go away and marry Jerry and become my sister-in-law!’

‘I thought you wanted to marry Adrienne,' she said in a whisper against his cheek, and felt the decisive shake of his head.

‘Never that. Jerry did me a big favour when he took her away the first time—but an even bigger one yesterday! ’

Her hair brushed his face when she drew her head back to look wonderingly at him. ‘But you seemed—so much in love with her. I thought you still ‑’

‘No. We were on the point of breaking up anyway when she went off with Jerry the first time. The engagement was a mistake from the start, Lara. It wasn’t long until nothing was right with the ranch, or the people—and finally me. Towards the end, we did little else but argue when we were together.’

She shook her head uncomprehendingly. ‘Still, you’ve seemed to want her with you all the time, as if you couldn’t bear to be parted from her.’

His teeth glinted in a smile. ‘I couldn’t—but not for the reason you think. I had to keep an eye on her in case she and Jerry got up to their old tricks. That wouldn’t have bothered me, but I didn’t want you to be hurt. You did a pretty good job of convincing me that Jerry was the man you wanted. You’re even better at acting than I am!’

Her mouth echoed his smile, but her eyes still held a puzzled look. ‘You didn’t appear to be—acting when you kissed her under the trees that night.’

‘When I what?''

‘The night J-Jerry and Adrienne came back from town and you were so angry with her. I—saw you making it up later from my room.’ The tight line his mouth had taken on sent a tremor through her and she murmured: ‘It doesn’t matter, Matt.’

‘Of course it matters! I don’t want any more misunderstandings between us, Lara. It seems to me there’s been enough of them already.’ He let her go then and went to lean with his back to the desk. ‘I haven’t touched Adrienne that way since she’s been back—apart from the first night when she kissed me, but that was none of my doing. I don’t know who it was you saw her with, it certainly wasn’t me.’

‘But you were wearing your white sweater that night, that’s how I knew it was you,’ she persisted faintly, hugging her arms that were already missing his warm closeness.

He ran an exasperated hand through his hair. ‘What do I have to do to prove it wasn’t me? Bring Adrienne back?’ His eyes narrowed suddenly. ‘What was Jerry wearing that night, can you remember?’

‘A—dark blazer, I think, and a’—she stared at him with stricken eyes and whispered the last two words—‘white shirt! Oh, Matt, I’m sorry. I took it for granted it was you.’ In two strides he was beside her, a hand at either side of her face, his eyes blazing fiercely into hers. ‘I want to marry you, Lara, and spend the rest of my life with you. I want to father your children, and take care of you and them the best way I can. Marriage is pretty well what two people make of it, I’ve noticed, and it can’t have a basis of mistrust. I’ll never lie to you, and I’ll expect the same from you.’

‘Oh, Matt—darling Matt,’ she cried softly, tears like jewelled stars shining in her eyes. ‘I love you.’

For answer, he scooped her up in his arms and carried her halfway to the bedroom door before wheeling away from it and sitting instead in an armchair with her on his knee.

‘No, that would be too easy,’ he murmured against her lips. ‘The next time you’re in my bed, it will be as my wife—and I won’t be tucking you up to go to sleep! But I can’t wait too long, honey.’

‘You won’t have to, Matt,’ she told him softly, her breath feathering his mouth. ‘I don’t want to miss one day—or night—with you.’

Was it her imagination, or could she hear Drew in the distance singing her favourite song? It wasn’t important, she decided, lifting her lips for Matt’s kiss. She knew she had found her ‘Perfect Love’.