In Her Husband's Image. Vivienne Wallington

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СКАЧАТЬ let alone for three nights. He hated the outback, and besides, he was always far too busy running Barrington’s.

      Her frown deepened. Had he flown up here expressly to try again to talk her into selling and coming back to Sydney? Hedley Barrington never gave up!

      She could hear him already. “This is no place for a woman without a husband, or a boy without a father. You can’t possibly run this huge, isolated place on your own, Rachel, now that Adrian’s gone. Nobody would expect you to.”

      She kept telling him that she intended to try, that Yarrah Downs was her home, and Mikey’s, too. But she never got through.

      “And what about Barrington’s? You’re my only child, Rachel. Running our chain of department stores is what you trained for and what I’ve always counted on. I won’t live forever—you lost your mother last year and I’m five years older than she was. I want you to come back and help me run Barrington’s so you’ll be ready to take over when I retire…or shuffle off altogether.”

      “Dad, I belong here. I love it here. I feel free and at peace. I never felt like that back in Sydney. I felt stifled…suffocated…trapped in a life I didn’t want.”

      “Rot! You always had everything you could possibly want and all the freedom you could need. I even let you go off and travel the world, on the understanding you’d come back when I needed you. I even let you marry that hick Queensland cattleman of yours against my better judgment. But he’s dead now. There’s no need for you to stay here any longer. I’m the one who needs you now.”

      “But I want to stay. I’m going to stay. Out here in the bush I can breathe. I feel alive.”

      “How can anyone breathe or feel alive in this heat? In these harsh conditions, without a husband to help you, how can you possibly survive? It won’t get any easier, taking on the sole responsibility yourself—it’ll get harder, the longer you stay. Don’t expect any help from me. I want you back home!”

      Rachel kicked up the dust at her feet, shutting her mind to her father’s endless arguments. Was she about to hear them all over again?

      “I’ll just go and see who it is,” she called out to Mikey. “You stay with Buster. You can start gathering eggs, but be careful with them!”

      The sealed airstrip that Adrian had put in a year or so after Mikey was born and the light plane that had just arrived were out of sight from here. Maybe it wasn’t her father. Come to think of it, it hadn’t sounded like his Citation jet. Or any kind of jet. One of her neighbors, maybe? Or someone from the bank, heaven forbid! They’d already clamped down on her credit. What next? As if she didn’t have enough problems!

      She cut across the yard, skirting around the sprawling ranch-style homestead with its shady, vine-covered veranda that still held humiliating memories she hadn’t been able to shake, even after all this time.

      Her visitor should have had time by now to trudge up from the airstrip. She quickened her steps, weaving through the thick shrubbery and gum trees overhanging the garden path.

      A man appeared. She stopped, her eyes drawn to his face. A whooshing sensation swept through her, as if the lifeblood was draining from her.

      For a disorienting second, she felt as if she’d come face-to-face with the ghost of her dead husband!

      Only, it was no ghost. It was solid, flesh-and-blood male. A male with the same handsome, square-jawed face, the same piercing gray eyes, the same whip-hard, broad-shouldered frame, the same unruly dark hair and deeply bronzed skin.

      The same man, she realized in shock, who’d fooled her five years ago, to her eternal shame, who’d made her feel things she’d never felt before or since, who’d haunted her dreams and tormented her waking hours for the past five years, even as she’d tried to despise him, to blot out the shameful memory of him.

      Zac Hammond, her late husband’s identical twin brother. The brother she’d met only that one time, on that one fateful night, and saw again every time she looked at her son, Mikey.

      She began to tremble. “You’re a little late.” Her voice cracked, but attack seemed the only way to deal with this latest, totally unexpected bolt from the blue. “Your brother’s funeral was a month ago.”

      Adrian’s lawyer had notified his absent twin brother of the tragedy, sending Zac word in plenty of time to attend the funeral if he’d wanted to come. When Zac had failed to turn up, she’d assumed he wasn’t coming back at all. And she’d been relieved. Relieved and irked and bitter and angry, all at the same time.

      But mostly she’d been relieved. It was one less problem she would have to deal with. Facing him again, dealing with what his return home would mean…

      “I was stuck in a remote part of Zaire, out of contact.” His impassive tone gave nothing away. “I headed home as soon as I heard.”

      But too late…

      She drew in her lips. It was so like the excuse he’d used five years ago when he’d finally made the effort to come home after missing his brother’s wedding, not by a day or two, but five months. Zac, Adrian had complained on the rare occasions he’d mentioned his estranged, footloose brother, always put his work and his own needs first. He always had and always would.

      Zac’s priorities, she’d come to realize, were himself first, family last, morals nonexistent. Well, she knew all about Zac Hammond’s morals. And she’d do well to remember the kind of man he was. She felt her cheeks heating. Had her own morals been so squeaky-clean?

      But she’d had an excuse. Not knowing Adrian had an identical twin, she’d mistaken the man on her veranda that night for her husband of five months, thinking he’d come home early from his two-week cattle-buying trip down south. The darkness, the hot steamy night and her own foolish romantic yearnings and frustrations had done the rest.

      “I wasn’t sure I’d find you still here.” Zac’s sun-sharpened eyes narrowed, raking over her in a way that made her feel he was undressing her, just as he had on that highly charged moonlit night. She took an unsteady step back, another rash of tremors quivering through her. She willed them away, maddened that a mere look could still spark a reaction.

      “Oh, you thought I’d have bolted back to the city by now, did you?” Just like everyone else, she thought, eyeing him coldly. Not a word of sympathy on the loss of her husband, his own twin brother. Did he think that after the shameful way she’d thrown herself at him the last time he was here, she didn’t deserve his sympathy? Did he still believe she’d known all along who he was?

      She clenched her hands in suppressed fury, offering him no sympathy, either. He didn’t deserve it. He and Adrian might have been identical twins, but they’d never been close, never had time for each other, never had a single thing in common.

      “If you thought I’d already gone back to Sydney, why did you come back to Yarrah Downs?” The second the words were out of her mouth, the answer struck her. He wanted to see what he could salvage from his twin brother’s estate. From his old family home.

      Maybe he even had thoughts of buying the property himself if it came up for sale.

      Not to live here permanently, of course. Zac, with his remote work in the wilds, wasn’t the settling-down type. But having lived here in the past, he might still have some sentimental attachment to Yarrah Downs and want to keep it in the Hammond СКАЧАТЬ