My boss and I

Episode5. THE YOUNG HEIRESS

THE YOUNG HEIRESS

No need to feel sorry for me. She tilted her chin. Nothing catastrophic happened. He’s such a maggot. He just had all these urges. Men are like that.

Indeed they’re not, he rapped back. Evil men give the rest of us ordinary decent guys a bad name. It’s utterly unfair. There’s something utterly disgusting about a predator.

That’s why I like my gay friends, she announced, wiping her hands daintily on a paper napkin before brushing back the damp curls at her temple.

How long was your hair? he asked, his eyes following the movement of her small, pretty hands.

That’s a funny question. Daniel Carson.

He gave his dimpled, lopsided smile. “Oh, I dunno. I’m trying to visualize you as the girl you were.

If you must know, I had a great mop of hair. A lot of people thought it was lovely. Say, those sandwiches were good. I think I must have been starving. I might even have another one of those little pastries. Oh, it’s yours! she observed belatedly.

Take it, he urged. You’re the one paying.

What?

Just a little joke, he said. My shout this time.

Which reminds me, she said in quite a different voice. I want you up at the house.

His eyebrows shut up. You can’t mean living there?

I can mean and I do mean. She sat back, fiddling with her thumbs.

Just forget about it, he answered flatly.

Mighty I remind you, Daniel, I’m the boss.

I want you about two steps up the hallway from me. I don’t know you very well, but I’d find having a great big guy like you around, especially one with a Swiss Army knife, reassuring.

He frowned direly. Sandra, your fears are groundless.

See you! she responded hotly, sitting up straight. Do you know how many people get killed over money?

There could only be one in a million who don’t finish up in jail, he told her in a stern voice.

A few more than that filtered through, she struck back.

He studied the flare-up of color in her cheeks. Listen, Miss Kingston, if you’re under the impression your family would agree to that, you’re very much mistaken. Both your uncle and your cousin would see me gone, only neither of them can do my job. It was your grandfather who hired me.

It was your grandfather who gave me so much authority. As you resented that fact, even if they didn’t want to take over the reins. After twelve months I’ll have no alternative but to quit.

You won’t quit while I need you. She told him imperiously. And you will shift your gear up into the house if you’d be so kind. I may have been only ten when we were kicked out but I do remember it was so big you needed a bus to get around it.

Just leave it for the time being, won’t you?

he asked in his most reasonable voice. See how the family reacts.

In that case, Daniel, you better be present, she said. “So where did you come from anyway? Are you a Territorian?

I am now, but I come from all over.

You’re worse than I am, she sighed.

Could you be a bit more specific?

Maybe not today.

She looked at him searchingly. So what about a compromise? Where precisely did you learn to manage a cattle station? You’re what? Her blue eyes ranged over him.

Do you want me to produce a birth certificate? I’m twenty-eight, okay?

Most overseers aren’t off the ground by then, she observed, impressed.

Then I must be the eighth wonder of the world. As it happened, I learned from the best. My mother and I lived like gypsies moving around Outback Queensland until we came to rest in the Channel Country when I was about eleven.

A station owner there, Harry Cunningham, offered her the job of housekeeper after his wife died and there we stayed until he died some years back. His daughter sold the station almost immediately after. Something that must have the old man still swiveling in his grave. But such is life!

There were a hundred questions she wanted to ask, but the first was easy. So where is your mother now?

His handsome face instantly turned to granite. “I’m sorry.

She saw he had no more dealt with the loss of his mother than she had the loss of her father. Orphans. Hadn’t her mother been lost to her the day she married that rich, worthless scum bag Jem?

Not as sorry as I am, he said.

What happened to her? She spoke as gently as she could, fearing she was about to be rebuffed.

I think we’ll just leave it, he said.

He took her on a journey that filled her with fascination. The landscape beneath them was so vast, so timeless Sandra found herself awestruck. The first hellish minutes, just as she expected, had been taken up with fighting down her fears. She would never be cured of them.

Not just helicopters. In a chopper one couldn’t look out on a fixed wing, causing not only in her, but in many people the sickness sensation the aircraft might simply drop out of the sky.

She feared all aircraft. She’d been battling that particular phobia since she was a child and the family Cessna had taken a nosedive into the McDonnell ranges, not far from Moondai, with her father strapped into the pilot’s seat. That was the start of it.

He did it, Sandy. Your uncle Lloyd. He caused it to happen. He’d know how. He was always jealous of your father. He couldn’t let him inherit.

Some words are scorched into the memory as were some scenes, like her mother sobbing out accusations.

He did it, Sandy. He couldn’t let your father inherit.

So where did that leave her, her

grandfather’s heiress, all these years later? No way was she sitting pretty. Just like her father, she was a target. But unlike her trusting father, she had learned the hard way to always be on red alert. It helped too to have backup.

Small wonder she’d decided, very sensibly, to shift her overseer into the homestead for a time. Daniel Carson had an aura that made a woman feel safe. She suspected there was more than a hint of Sir Galahad about him. She even liked the way he stared down at her from his towering height, though occasionally it had made her feel like toppling backward.