Against All Odds (Outback Hearts) Page 15

  Like hell he was letting her go without a fight. He’d spent a lifetime risking his life for causes he didn’t fully understand and for people he didn’t know, and once he’d signed on for a mission he’d never backed down no matter what the risk. A day ago his mission had been to get to know the cheeky siren who’d invaded his world and get her to groan out his name over and over again. But as of five minutes ago, his mission had changed and nothing was fucking stopping him from making her dreams come true.

  He tried shaking her hands free so he could tell her exactly what she could do with her ultimatum, but she tightened her hold and wrenched his head down until their foreheads touched. “Promise me!”

  Her words cut through his panic like thunder. The order seemed to shock her almost as much as him, but she recovered before he could get his damned mouth working. “Swear to me, Ryder, otherwise…otherwise I’ll leave right now.”

  She tried hiding her fear behind more anger, but the hitch in her voice, her trembling lips, and the tears pooling in her eyes gave her away. She was scared, but it wasn’t just the darkness lurking on her horizon that terrified her, it was what was happening between them. Good, that made two of them. Somewhere deep within the tactical part of his brain he’d known no matter how hard he pleaded, demanded, manipulated, or guilted her into spending more time together, the ultimate decision would be hers.

  He’d never believed in fate. Fate was an excuse other people used for failing or for not chasing the things they wanted. And he wanted this woman so much his teeth ached. He wanted her beneath him, straddling him, and wrapped around him, but he wanted to find out just how tough this crazy bond they shared was even more. He couldn’t give a shit about odds and obstacles. If he’d believed in probability, he should’ve died way more than three times, and as far as obstacles went, he’d made a career of crossing oceans and defeating monsters. He hadn’t a clue where they were headed, but one thing was fucking sure—he wasn’t letting doubt or fear take the wheel.

  Five weeks, it was bugger-all time, but look what he’d accomplished in a little over twenty-four hours. He’d make it work. He had no idea how, but he’d make it work. His gut clenched and his skin prickled, but despite every part of him screaming at him not to do it, he found himself nodding.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Brisbane’s leafy suburbs gave way to the emerald pastures of Queensland’s hinterland as Abi sank deeper into the plush leather seats of Jarrah’s brand-spanking-new blood-red Aston Martin Vanquish.

  In addition to his sense of humor, obvious wealth, and impressive talent for interior design, Ryder’s brother also had a passion for cars, something Ryder seemed to have missed out on. While she’d practically stripped and rubbed herself all over the shimmering bodywork and unicorn leather, he’d simply dumped their luggage into the trunk and waited for her to dress and wipe the drool from her chin. He’d even offered her the keys, and in a moment of pure, unadulterated insanity she could only put down to way too much sex, she’d fessed up to not being allowed to drive.

  Scorching wind whistled through the open window and buffeted her face as the V12 masterpiece of precision engineering groaned in frustration. The man lounging in the driver’s seat with one hand cupping her knee and the other hanging off the Formula One–inspired steering wheel may have been a hero on the battlefield and in the sack, but he should’ve been driving Miss Daisy around in the old girl’s 1949 Hudson instead of putt-putting along a deserted highway in a five hundred and sixty horsepower piece of automotive porn.

  She unclenched her jaw and readjusted her scarf to make sure it didn’t get sucked out the window if Speed Racer finally found his nuts and stomped the go pedal. “So, it’s true what they say.”

  His brow furrowed, and the skin surrounding the scar above his left eye puckered. She loved the way his face tightened whenever he tried figuring her out. It made up for the rest of the time when she felt like his bumbling sidekick. “You know, about flashy cars and the size of a man’s penis.”

  He huffed. “This isn’t even my damned car, and I heard no complaints last night or this morning.”

  Hell no, she’d been too busy clawing her fingers into his back and moaning like a nymphomaniac. She shrugged and patted his knee before turning back to the lush beauty of the Queensland countryside ambling by. He mumbled something else, but she was too busy reveling in the peace and warmth rippling through her to continue her assault and waved him away.

  He hadn’t been happy with her ultimatum. In fact, it’d been the closest she’d come to getting him truly pissed, but she’d had to do it. Leaving him after however long this crazy adventure lasted was going to be hard enough without having to endure drawn-out good-byes or even worse, well-intentioned but completely misguided promises of keeping in touch despite having an ocean and God knew what else keeping them apart. Better to establish the ground rules up front and let whatever happened happen.

  The desiccating air dried her mouth with each breath. It was barely ten o’clock, and the display set into the dash was already showing thirty-four degrees, which if she believed her chauffeur, tour guide, and lover, was ninety-three in good ole ’Merican.

  “Lover.” The word seemed so grown-up and sophisticated, everything she wasn’t, but boyfriend was pushing the envelope and hookup just didn’t quite fit. The teeth of his zipper rasped her fingers as he shifted in his seat and grunted. She retrieved her hand from where it had innocently crept between his legs and placed it back onto his thigh, where she’d been possessively caressing his firm muscles for the last two hours.

  He glanced at her with a fake frown creasing his face. “Pleased with yourself?”

  She turned and offered a dreamy smile before patting the swollen mass straining against the crotch of his jeans. “Very.”

  “You’re going to be limping the rest of your holiday if you keep that up.”

  Equal amounts of excitement and dread shot through her ravaged, exhausted, and tender body as he chuckled and cupped her through her jeans. She allowed his hand to linger between her thighs a few ragged breaths more before slapping him away. “Hands on the wheel, Sergeant.”

  He gave her aching groin one more gentle squeeze before trailing his knuckles up her belly and over her taut right nipple on the round trip back to her knee. It had taken a cup of coffee, half a dozen donuts, Danishes, and muffins, and a good fifteen minutes of teasing and annoying to drag him out of the mood he’d been in after agreeing to her ultimatum, but not a minute had gone by since then without one of them using some pathetic, lame-ass excuse to touch, pinch, poke, grope, or dry-hump the other. And she’d thought feeding him from her fork on the plane had been insanely intimate.

  He fished out his commando phone from his pocket and placed it on the Vanquish’s center console before trying to connect it to the Aston’s computer. While fumbling with the Bluetooth settings on the touch screen and cursing everyone from Bill Gates to Steve Jobs, he raised and lowered her window, turned the stereo on and off, and shifted his seat forward and back but was no closer to syncing his phone. She shouldn’t have taken so much pleasure from watching him mash the screen with his giant paw, but he did everything else with such effortless grace she cut herself some slack and enjoyed the slapstick. God only knew how he’d coped with all the latest secret-squirrel military hardware he’d had to use in combat, then again they probably just handed him a giant club and let him have at it.

  She shoved his hand away and hooked up his cell by the time he’d finished growling at her. “Who do you want to call?”

  He glared at her for what felt like miles before muttering something about geeks. “My mum.”

  Hearing something that big and rugged ask to speak to their mom tightened her throat. Christ, he was so cute, in just the same way as a fifteen-hundred-pound polar bear was cute right up until they ripped open your truck like a tin can and ate you.

  She cranked up the air conditioner, raised the windows, and brought up his contacts list. “Mum”
came up as speed-dial one, which tightened her throat even more. If she hadn’t been so nosy, she’d have stopped there, but she scrolled right along. Mum , Jarrah, Jeddah, Ethan, Kira, Madison, and that was it. The man had even fewer contacts than she did, which put them both smack-bang in the middle of Loserville.

  She gestured to the steering wheel. “Just hit call and you’re good.”

  The look on his face confirmed she may as well have asked him to defuse a nuclear bomb. She backhanded his arm and bit her lip. The muscles encasing his shoulder were so hard she nearly dislocated her wrist, but she’d be damned before showing him how much it hurt as she hit call. “Freaking jocks.”

  He glared at her as the call thrummed through the car’s stereo before a throaty female voice answered, “Wingarra cattle station, this is Naya.”

  “Hey, beautiful, I hear you’re being a diva again.”

  A shocked gasp cut through the speakers before the line fell silent. Abi turned to him, but he just grinned and shook his head.

  What sounded like soft sobbing broke the silence, which only widened his smile. “Stop carrying on and trying to make me feel guilty. I called you only a few days ago. You’re making me look bad in front of my…” He paused and flashed her a devious grin that had her stomach flip-flopping. “My fiancée.”

  Abi spluttered out a whispered curse and launched another attack on his shoulder as his mother sniffed and cleared her throat. “I should have beaten you harder when you were a kid.” She sniffed again. “And stop lying to me. No woman on Earth would be desperate enough to marry you.”

  Abi was still too shocked to close her mouth let alone speak, but he simply chuckled and squeezed her knee. “Mum, this is Abigail Marie Williams. Abi, I’d like you to meet the woman responsible for my bad manners and potty mouth, Naya Harper.”

  “Abigail, what a beautiful name.”

  Abi scowled at him before straightening in her seat and smoothing down her T-shirt. He looked at her like she was an idiot before shaking his head. She ignored her stupidity and continued to smooth down her T-shirt as she blew out the breath she’d been holding. “Th-thank you, Mrs. Harper, it’s a pleasure to meet you. Please, call me Abi.”

  “Oh, honey, call me Naya. Mrs. Harper makes me feel way too damned old. I hope my no-good deadbeat son has treated you with the respect you deserve.”

  The teasing in Naya’s voice and the frown on Ryder’s face had her grinning and easing back into her seat. “Well, to be perfectly honest, Naya, he’s been nothing but trouble. I’m so sorry for imposing, but he made such a scene begging and pleading for me to come home with him that I didn’t have the heart to turn him down.”

  “Yeah, he’s a pretty pathetic excuse for a man.” Naya sighed. “But he is adorable, isn’t he?”

  Ryder cringed but held his tongue. Adorable? Only a mother could get away with calling a giant warrior with the body of a Greek god adorable, but she had to admit, he was.

  “My eldest son mentioned you’re visiting us from the States. I hope my middle son welcomed you properly to our wide brown land?”

  Christ, if every female tourist got the same welcome as she had, Australia would be overflowing with dreamy eyed women gingerly walking around with huge smiles on their faces and glorious aches in their lady parts. “Yes…yes he did.”

  She tried thinking of something to divert the blood surging up her neck and over her cheeks, but it was impossible not to relive the sensations crashing through her as he’d stared into her eyes and emptied himself inside her. Sneaking a glance his way, she found him leering at her with a raised eyebrow that only pumped more blood into her cheeks.

  “Well that’s a relief, dear, because if he hadn’t taken care of you, I’d have to slap him senseless.”

  His eyebrow rose higher and his grin grew even more lecherous as more lewd images of just how well he’d taken care of her flooded her mind. She snapped around and stared out the windshield at the vastness floating by while trying to rein in her galloping libido.

  She’d be meeting his mom in just a few hours, and the last thing she wanted was to look like the mindless nympho who’d just spent most of the night and morning doing the wild thing all over the poor woman’s son. But by the smile on the smug asshole’s pie hole, he wasn’t going to be any help concealing what remained of her virtue.

  ...

  Ryder couldn’t figure out if he should be relieved or scared by how quickly Abi and his mother had hit it off. Within minutes, they’d been cackling and plotting his downfall. That was all the Harper boys needed, another witch joining the coven that ruled their lives. All he’d wanted to do was warn his obsessive-compulsive mother that he was bringing home a guest and that she wouldn’t need to set up another room, because there was no way in hell he was giving Abi the option of sleeping anywhere except in his arms. Her incredible body aside, having her curled around him somehow scared off the demons that crawled out of the shadows whenever he closed his eyes.

  The light radiating from her wasn’t just reserved for darkness. It was already pushing thirty-nine, but the sunlight streaming through the Aston Martin’s windscreen was nothing compared to the life exploding out of the woman sitting behind the steering wheel of his big brother’s prized possession.

  She whooped and downshifted before pointing the nose of Jarrah’s substitute dick into a sweeping left-hander and stomping the accelerator. The engine roared, the tires squealed, AC/DC belted out another chorus of “Thunderstruck” from her iPhone’s playlist, and she burst out laughing as she caressed the fire-breathing monster they were buckled into with her magical fingers. He shifted in his seat and tried relieving the pressure on his groin, but it did no good. Holy mother of God she was sexy.

  She screamed with delight and threw them into a sharp right-hander that had him pressed against the passenger door. The pure, unadulterated joy on her face almost made up for the arse-kicking she’d handed him when they’d stopped to refuel and grab lunch. After almost coming to blows in front of the poor old guy running the register, he’d surrendered and allowed her to pay, but that hadn’t even come close to calming her down. Between overloaded mouthfuls of meat pie, potato cake, dim sim, chips, and chocolate milkshake, she’d systematically pointed out every single thing wrong with his driving and that it was a heinous crime to drive such an amazing car like an old biddy. He’d been too stunned watching her work her way through the grease-soaked menu hanging over the roadhouse’s deep fryer to mount much of an argument.

  After returning from the big boy’s room, he’d found her leaning against the driver’s door and holding out her hand. He’d very calmly and rationally reminded her she wasn’t allowed to drive. And she’d very politely and demurely told him that there was absolutely nothing they could hit out here even if she had a seizure and to stop being a giant wuss. He’d pointed out that he’d survived six tours of duty relatively intact and wasn’t about to kill himself in a car accident on the way home. Five minutes later, his balls were safely tucked into the pocket of her jeans, and he was strapped into the passenger seat as she power-slid them back onto the highway.

  He nodded to the dash that looked even more complicated than the Blackhawks that had dropped him into the shit just as often as pulled him out. “Jarrah’s going to be mighty pissed you changed the driver settings.”

  He’d thought she’d been playing with the stereo, but it was only after she’d cursed something about throttle response and rebound control that he’d realized she’d been tinkering with the car’s power train and suspension settings. He had no idea what the hell she was doing—he was used to diesel Humvees and armor-plated trucks, and he couldn’t give a shit about Jarrah or his stupidly over-specced and overpriced toy—but he was growing mighty fond of sparring with her. Their fights were starting to rank right up there on his list of favorite things, like making love to her, holding her, admiring her, and just being with her.

  “Jesus, I thought you Special Forces guys weren’t happy unless you were h
anging on to the ragged edge by your teeth.”

  The problem with living on ragged edges was that half the time you slipped off, which was fine when you were young, stupid, and bulletproof. But after more than a decade spent learning he was far from bulletproof, pottering around a cattle station in the middle of nowhere was about as much excitement as he was after. He chuckled and inched his fingers up her thigh.

  She grabbed his hand and plonked it back into his lap before staring at him. “We passed through Baroona an hour ago. How far before we get to your family’s station?”

  He waited until she shot him another frustrated glare before unleashing the smile he’d been holding back. “We’ve been driving through it for the last half hour.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Abi glanced down at the speedometer, then back at the man grinning at her from the passenger seat while she crunched the math. A half hour at a hundred and ten kilometers an hour…well maybe a touch more when Sergeant Killjoy hadn’t been grumbling at her to slow down brought the distance they’d covered across his family’s cattle station to almost fifty miles. “But that’s—”

  He chuckled and squeezed her knee. “Yeah, it’s tiny, but that’s the way Mum likes it.”

  He pointed to a lone eucalyptus standing watch like a ghostly sentinel over the graveyard of scrub, rock, and dust they’d been traveling through for the last four hours. “Right at the Wishing Tree.”

  A chill ran up her thigh without the reassuring weight of his hand, but before she could mentally order herself to grow the hell up, he absently returned his paw to her leg like it belonged there. The eight hours since they’d left the claustrophobic streets of the city had flashed by as quickly as the seven-thousand-mile flight across the Pacific. Time, like reality, seemed to have shifted into an alternate dimension since he’d knelt beside her and captured her hand on the plane. Hours hurtled by like minutes, yet as she studied him out of the corner of her eye, she had to remind herself she’d known him less than two days.