Page 9 of Return of the Outback Billionaire

‘Done.’ How he squeezed the word out he’d never know. But it took the last of his air.

‘Yes,’ said Bridie quickly. ‘We’ll be in touch. So sorry, excuse us, we forgot the ring.’

She led him to the veranda and then to the left, around the corner, trying the handle on every door. He’d never noticed before how evenly spaced they were and how much they reminded him of institutional corridors.

At last she found an unlocked door and pulled him in, shutting the door behind them and pushing him against the wall with a surprisingly firm hand. They were in the old stone laundry and the only light came from the slatted shutters high above the door, and with the dark, enclosed space came a fresh panic that had nothing and everything to do with being a fool.

‘Breathe,’ she demanded, and he would. Soon.

Just as soon as he got out of this cell.

‘You’re having a panic attack.’

This time it was his turn to lead her through an interior door and into a long lit hallway. Was he blue yet from all the breathing he wasn’t doing?

He needed space.

Space and quiet and no people tracking his weakness and waiting for a chance to come at him.

The formal sitting room was at the end of the hall, with its dark jarrah wainscoting and parquetry floor, its pressed tin ceiling and deep blue walls and expanse enough to swing a cow. It also housed several of the most uncomfortable Jacobean needlepoint armchairs in the world, a couple of ancestral portraits and a dusty collection of stuffed hawks.

It was still better than the little concrete laundry.

This time Bridie had the forethought to switch on the light beside the door. Her action lit a naked globe hanging from a long cord in the far corner of the room. There were other switches, other light sources in the room. That one had been left in place to please historians.

‘Shall I shut the door or leave it open?’ she asked.

‘Leave it.’ He didn’t close doors these days, not one in all the time he’d been home.

‘Still not breathing,’ she reminded him, and he vowed to get right on that. Might as well hang onto the back of a chair while he was at it, in the interest of staying upright.

Breathe, you scum.

Can’t you even do that right?

Breathe.

Bridie walked around the edges of the room, turning table lamps and feature lights on until it was lit up like some kind of mad night at the museum, and he tracked her every step.

There’d been no stuffed birds in prison. Heaven knew it was an odd thought to be having, but he held to it and somehow it reassured him. Breathing resumed. Bridie kept paying him no attention.

‘Who’s the stuffed hawk collector?’ she wanted to know.

‘My great-grandfather. The one in the portrait over the fireplace.’ The one who’d come to Australia but had never ever managed to call Jeddah Creek station home. A failure, they’d called him. Too pampered for the outback. Soft in the head.

But he had stayed the course and built the family wealth for the next generation of Blakes to inherit. Only with his burial back in England had he finally returned home.

Bridie continued her leisurely lap of the room and stopped in front of the portrait. ‘It says here his name was Edward. Very noble.’

‘It wasn’t a panic attack.’

She stood there looking like an angel in the glow of a butter-yellow lamp as she turned to study a John Constable painting of the English countryside. ‘I used to get them a lot,’ she said quietly. ‘Panic attacks. I thought I recognised the signs. Not that it matters—I needed to get away from the crowd before I had a meltdown too.’

‘It wasn’t a meltdown.’

‘’Course not.’ She slanted him a look from beneath impossibly long lashes and he promptly lost what little breath he’d managed to scrape together. ‘I needed to leave the ballroom. I thought I was serving your needs as well.’

His need was blindingly clear.

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