Page 21 of Cinderella and the Outback Billionaire

Gert was no one’s fool, no matter how wide and innocent Ari made her eyes. ‘Kind of intense, isn’t he?’ she replied. ‘Is he always so...helpful?’

‘Reid always helps if he can, that’s just his way. Noblesse oblige. He was born to it.’ Gert filled an electric hot-water urn sitting on the counter with bottled water from a thirty-litre container. ‘This has to go to the green drawing room on the ground floor.’

‘Got it. Have you seen the paddocks?’ Anything to avoid talking about her unsettling encounter with Reid. Or admitting to herself how much she’d wanted to reach out and take his hand and say something utterly ridiculous like hi, it’s me. ‘All those planes nose to tail in neat little rows. And there’s a campground full of fancy tents with sisal carpets and solar fairy lights mixing it with farm four-wheel drives and campfires and swags. And the portable toilet blocks and the first-aid tent. It’s like a festival.’

‘It’s grown over the years, just like everything the Blake brothers touch.’ Gert studied her with a frown. ‘Reid just offered you the kind of opportunity you’ve always dreamed of doing and you turned him down flat.’

‘Didn’t feel right.’ Ari wrapped the cord around the urn and positioned the unwieldy cylinder for pickup. She’d barely wrapped her arms around the body, taps to the outside, when her aunt spoke again.

‘They say he died on the way to the hospital.’

‘What?’ She had no air left in her lungs and the urn was far heavier than it looked. She’d convinced herself in the days that followed the accident that no one who talked and flirted and had shown up for her the way Reid had in the tent could be that badly injured. That thought had soothed her to sleep some nights. And she’d been wrong?

‘Bridie told me. It’s not general knowledge but his heart stopped three times while they were in the air. They got him back, obviously.’

Obviously.

‘Reid’s always been one for a laugh—even when the going got tough. Especially then,’ Gert mused. ‘He had a lot of responsibility laid on him at a young age, didn’t have a choice, and I believe it was the making of him. But he was strong to begin with. I think he sees the same kind of strength in you.’

Ari slid the urn back on the counter. It was heavy. She wasn’t ready for a Gert interrogation. ‘He doesn’t even know me.’

But that wasn’t strictly true given their time together during the storm.

Reid had been having a whole different conversation with her from the one Gert had heard.

‘Those eco lodges were his first business win. They still matter to him. You have two weeks until your exams and almost a month before you have to start that nursery job. You could do up garden plans for all those lodges before you go. At least take a look at them and submit something for his consideration. What if you wow him, and all those other fancy people who stay in them learn your name? You couldn’t ask for a better start to your career.’

‘He didn’t mean it.’ He’d been digging for a confession or maybe dangling a reward for services rendered. His ‘investing’ in her had nothing to do with her potential and everything to do with gratitude.

‘Yes, he did. He meant every word. You should at least consider it.’

CHAPTER SIX

IT WAS HER. The angel with the tent and the bandages and the painkillers that had saved his life and sanity. His rescuer who’d touched him when he’d needed it and spoken on demand, laying out pieces of her life for him to pick over, even as he’d offered up his most treasured moments for viewing. She’d left him to go get help, he knew that. But then Judah had arrived, and she’d returned to an empty tent.

There’d been no tent, no trace of anyone at all when a field team had returned to clean up the crash site. It was as if she’d never been there at all.

In the six months since the accident no one had ever come forward.

‘I found her,’ he told his brother when Judah rounded him up for speech time.

‘Our missing sister?’

Judah was apparently not a mind-reader. ‘No, the woman from the tent.’

Judah eyed him warily and not without good cause. He’d sat through Reid’s delirious ramblings about the voice. He’d sat vigil in hospital, baffled when Reid had finally roused and demanded the hand, only to be told Not that hand...the other hand!

Later, at Reid’s insistence, Judah had given an interview to the local paper expressing the family’s gratitude to the unnamed person who’d tended Reid during the dust storm.

‘I’ve found her. The woman who saved my life. It’s Gert’s niece. Ari.’

‘She told you this?’

‘No. Well, not exactly, but everything fits. If I could just get her in a dark room and touch her and make her talk to me, I could be absolutely sure.’

‘There’s a winning plan—if you want to go up on assault charges.’ Judah laughed, short and sharp, and then caught his eye. ‘Oh, hell. You mean it.’

‘It’s the only way to know.’

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