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Authors: Fiona Brand

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Cullen held her gaze for a moment longer; then, as if realising how intense they'd got, he gestured toward the chair. “Maybe you should sit down. There's water on the cabinet if you need a drink.”
Rachel checked her watch again. More than thirty minutes had passed now, and the last thing any of them needed was for her possessive older brother to come striding down the ward. “I should go. Cole's waiting. Besides, Dane's the one who needs the attention.”
Beneath all the bruising and bandaging, Dane looked even paler, and he was carefully refraining from meeting her gaze.
“I'll walk you to your car,” Cullen said curtly.
It was a flat statement, delivered with complete male assurance that his protection was required and she would summit. Rachel almost made a tart comment at the familiarity and the exasperation of it, but in this case she fully agreed. Trask had scared her. There had been a feral coldness to him, a lack of humanity, that had disturbed her more than she liked to admit. Cullen would walk her to her car.
On the way through the ward, he waylaid an orderly, sending him along to sit with Dane in case Trask came back while Cullen was away.
“What will you do when you can't be here?” she asked as Cullen held a swing door open for her
“The ward sister's already aware of Dane's situation ” His mouth twitched in an almost smile as he fell into step beside her. “If he gets past her again, he's a better man than I am In any case, I don't think Trask will risk anything m front of witnesses. He prefers to use his fists when he knows he won't have to answer for it.”
Rachel dragged her gaze from Cullen's mouth. It had been a near thing, that twitch at the corners, and she'd wanted to keep watching, certain that he was on the verge of smiling. But then, maybe not, she amended fiercely. All brain function had almost ground to a halt as it was. If he smiled, she would probably turn into a full-fledged idiot.
As they passed the women's surgical ward, Rachel recognised the Reeses, mother and daughter, walking toward them. No doubt visiting Edna Simms and her new hip Her stomach tightened. She was doing her best to desensitize herself to the gossip that was as much a part of Riverbend as any of the local shops, but the process was unexpectedly difficult. It was unfortunate that the Reeses carried such clout. Isobel Reese was related to half the influential people in town and liked everyone to know it. She'd made a point of informing Rachel that Richard Hayward, the local solicitor Rachel had used when purchasing the salon, was her nephew.
“Murphy's law,” she muttered in resignation.
“What
can
go wrong,
always
does,” Cullen affirmed in a soft aside, the amusement in his slanting look startling her. She had a sudden vision of him as a wild, go-to-hell boy thumbing his nose at anyone who tried to put him down.
“Mrs. Reese,” he drawled, as both ladies were about to sweep past them without any visible signs of recognition, then with an ironic tilt to his straight, dark brows. “Eleanor.”
Mrs. Reese rephed with stiff correctness, flustered colour forming on her plump cheeks. Eieanor muttered a hello, not bothering to acknowledge Rachel's greeting—her attention was all for Cullen, and she was so busy taking in the view she scarcely noticed that her mother was recovering from Cullen's full-frontal, bad-boy charm attack and was doing a rapid shift into high dudgeon mode.
It wasn't until Isobel Reese hustled her daughter into the women's surgical ward with an almost ludicrous haste that Rachel realised she'd been holding her breath. “Does she always treat you like that?”
“Don't sweat it,” Cullen murmured. “Isobel Reese is something of a character around here. Everyone knows what she's like.”
“It doesn't bother you? You don't get angry when she's...when she's—”
“Bad-mouthing me all over town?” His eyes still glittered with an unholy amusement “Why should I?”
Rachel buried the impulse to step even closer to Cullen than she was and jab an annoyed finger at his chest. If he didn't care about what Rachel considered to be outright slander, then why should she? Besides, the last time she'd tangled with Cullen physically, she'd been the one who was sorry. “Maybe I'm too sensitive,” she allowed bluntly, “but I don't like gossip. And I don't believe some of the wild stones flying around this town.”
Surprise registered in Cullen's eyes, then his expression settled back into what Rachel realised was habitual grimness. “Believe them,” he said roughly, taking her elbow in the tingling hot grip of his fingers and urging her toward the foyer as if he were suddenly in a big hurry to get nd of her.
Rachel pulled free, jolted by the simple touch and furious with herself for reacting in any way at all. “I don't believe you killed...a man.”
Cullen stopped abruptly. His expression held none of the fragile rapport they'd shared before, he looked big and dangerous, more wild than tamed. And fall-down tired, as if he hadn't slept in days and didn't anticipate getting any sleep in the near future.
“I work for the military,” he said in a low, flat voice.
Rachel was certain Cullen had deliberately misunderstood her statement, just as, on a purely instinctual level, she was suddenly certain he hadn't killed his father. “That's different.”
“There are degrees of killing?”
“You know what I'm talking about,” she said calmly. “If you want to keep the bad-boy image up, you're going to have to stop saving people.”
A muscle flexed along his jaw. “I don't foster any kind of image at all. And I may not have done everything they accuse me of, but I sure as hell did some of it. I'll leave you to figure out which crimes I'm guilty of committing.”
Rachel drew a breath at the bleak acceptance inherent in his statement. Most people looked for excuses for any wrongdoing She got the feeling that Cullen judged himself more harshly than anyone. “I don't believe you're capable of committing murder.”
Emotion flickered in his eyes, surprise again, and a dark throb of despair quickly cloaked in shades of grey. Then, before she could speak, before she could do something as revealing as reach out and touch him, Cullen spun on his heel and pushed open the main foyer doors.
Cole loped up the steps just as Cullen held the door to allow her through. The door closed behind Rachel with the hushed sound of compressed air. She could feel the tension in Cole's silence, see the fury in his expression.
“Logan,” Cole offered grimly.
“Sinclair,” Cullen acknowledged.
Her brother eased up another step and laid his hand on her arm, and Rachel kissed any claim on adulthood goodbye. The past twenty-four hours had been too disturbing, too disruptive, for any kind of logical reaction now. If her brother thought the tantrums she used to throw when she was three years old were wild and memorable, then he had a thing or two to learn. She was way more imtated now than she'd ever been at the tender age of three.
“Get your hand off my arm,” she warned. “I'm not a juicy bone to be guarded”
“Rachel—”
“Don't talk. If you talk, you'll make it worse. I'll scream.” She wasn't actually about to throw a screaming fit, but Cole, like every other member of her all-male family, was as thick as a plank when it came to women. He would believe her.
Cole froze. Rachel stepped away from both men. They watched her warily, then looked at each other. It was a male look of cormplete understanding, a look that said all women were crazy, and men were crazier to even try to understand them.
“See that taxi over there?” Rachel nodded in the direction of the rank. “I'm going to get in it, and I hope the driver is a woman, or I may just decide to walk ”
She strode down the steps. The silence behind her was audible. As she bent to look in the car window, she heard footsteps Her head shot up, and she glared at Cole. He swivelled abruptly and walked to his car. Rachel knew what he was up to; he was going to follow the taxi if she got in it
Unable to deny the compulsion, she glanced at Cullen. He was standing at the top of the steps, and his gaze hadn't left her. She'd felt the force of it leveled between her shoulder blades as she'd marched toward the taxi. Even through the encroaching darkness she could discern the slitted heat in his eyes—the same heat that had burned her so badly this afternoon—and her stomach muscles jerked with the impact of all that hot, hungry approval.
The now familiar response shimmered through her, along with the tightening knot of panic that was equally familiar. It frightened her that she had so little control over her reaction to Cullen, that she was so open and vulnerable to a man who hadn't given her the slightest sign that he wanted even the most superficial of friendships.
Rachel bent down to the taxi window again. “Are you a woman?” she demanded.
A laid back, definitely feminine voice replied, “Some men might dispute that fact, honey, but last time I looked, I was.”
Rachel let out a relieved sigh. “Well, good.” Opining the front passenger door, she slid into the seat and dumped her holdall on the floor between her feet. “I wasn't going to let you drive me home unless you were a woman,” she explained.
“I'm not about to complain about discrimination.” The woman chuckled. “I wish I had more customers like you.”
 
Cullen waited until Rachel had left before he started checking the carpark to make sure Trask's rusted-out Ute wasn't still in evidence.
He'd barely been able to trust himself not to go after Rachel while she was still there. When her eyes had flared and she'd stood both him and Cole back on their heels, he'd wanted her with a fierceness, a longing, that stunned him.
And his body had responded with a hair-trigger lack of control that alarmed him. If he could lose control, shed fifteen years of hard-won discipline, because Rachel Sinclair traded a bold look with him, then he could lose control in other areas. The thought made him break out in a cold sweat. He'd never tested his resolve to remain outside of the normal man-woman relationships, mostly because he'd never been tempted. Well, God in heaven, he was tempted now.
It had been bad enough that he'd given in to the compulsion to comfort Rachel after Trask had done his low-life act on the ward. The second he'd wrapped his hands around her bare arms, he'd known he was going to have trouble letting her go. Her skin had felt like silk. The texture had instantly reminded him of an exquisite silk velvet he'd once handled in an Asian warehouse his assault team had searched while trying to locate an illegal arms cache. According to one of the guys, the bale of cloth had been French and worth a fortune. But it had been the way the silk had clung and warmed against his skin that had entranced Cullen, not its monetary value.
His eyes closed on a sudden vision of Rachel clinging to him as softly, as sweetly, as the silk velvet had, and he swore beneath his breath at his stubborn arousal. The heavy ache throbbed with a low-level intensity that was both distracting and kept him constantly on edge. He could control it if he kept away from Rachel. If she kept away from him.
The only real question was, how long would it take for her to realise that this town, the whole roughness of country living, just wasn't for her? Not long, he decided, with an odd mixture of fury and relief. Despite that surprising temper and her ideals, she was a city creature, too sensitive and delicate to survive for longer than a few months in Riverbend.
He just hoped he would survive until she left.
Chapter 4
R
achel would have dropped the tray of prime steaks she was ferrying to the barbecue if a strong, tanned hand hadn't reached out and steadied it for her.
She knew who her saviour was without looking, even though she hadn't seen Cullen since the hospital incident over two weeks ago. Ever since she'd arrived at the Hansons' barbecue, which was an annual event and as much a business meeting for the various farmers and stock buyers as a social get-together, she'd been aware of Cullen.
“Thank you,” she muttered, jerking at the heel of her shoe, which had gotten wedged between two pavers She'd been so surprised and distracted to find Cullen all but blocking her route to the trestle tables that she hadn't watched where she was stepping. She should have remembered how uneven the Hansons' patio was. She should have remembered she was back in the country, where dressing for a barbecue meant jeans or cutoffs and sturdy footwear, not a silky dress and barely-there Italian shoes.
Of course the shoe wouldn't budge. Cullen took the tray from her and set it aside, and before she could protest, he went down on his haunches and wrapped one big calloused hand around her ankle as he eased her foot from the shoe. The heat from his palm seared her skin.
He looked up, straight into her eyes, his gaze faintly sardonic, cold and light against his olive skin and the midnight-sleek hair he'd pulled into a ponytail at his nape. “Are you going to take the other one off, City Girl ? Or are you going to risk a broken ankle?”
Flushing, Rachel jerked her ankle from his hands. Why hadn't she done that before? She slipped out of her other shoe while Cullen prised the stuck heel from the paver. He straightened, handing both shoes to her.
Rachel accepted them, resisting the urge to snatch them back. “Saved again,” she said coolly. “This is getting to be a habit.”
His mouth curled at one corner, but she sensed that this time the mockery was directed inward. “Only with you.”
“And Dane Trask. I hear he's staying out at your place.”
Cullen shrugged, the movement straining the light shirt he was wearing. “He's moved into the old shearers' quarters. It's hardly the Ritz.”
She stared down at the shoes she still held in her hand, then, without compunction, tossed them into a corner. “You gave him a break when no one else would.”
“He doesn't need another beating, that's for sure.”
She looked him squarely in the eye. “You're a nice man, Cullen Logan, no matter how hard you try to convince people otherwise.”
“Nice doesn't come into it I need a hand, and I've had trouble getting casual labour. Dane's going to work harder than he's ever done in his life, first painting the shearers' quarters, then fencing.”
“And then the horses.”
“And then the horses,” he agreed. “He's read every one of those magazines you dropped off to him twice over.”
Rachel couldn't help but smile. Dane had been embarrassed when she'd walked onto the ward, but as soon as he'd spied the magazines, he'd lost all awkwardness and talked nonstop about quarter horses and thoroughbreds until she'd had to leave a half hour later. According to Dane, he was more than happy to fix fences as long as he got to work with the prime horseflesh that had been left to run wild on Cullen's land. “Will you be able to keep him off...whatever he was on?”
“It won't be easy. I can't control what's in his mind. He has to do that.”
The breeze lifted, blowing hair across Rachel's face and making the skirt of her dress float, then catch in a drifting shimmer of apricot silk as it snagged on Cullen's thigh. His long brown fingers closed on the silk, detaching it from the coarser, rougher denim, then he opened his hand, dropping the silk as if it had burned him.
With a curt nod of dismissal, he returned to his lounging position against a shady pergola and continued his discussion with a local stock buyer
Rachel retrieved the tray of steaks from the chair Cullen had set it on. Her pulse was too rapid, and after being reasonably content and looking forward to a relaxing evening of socialising, she now felt brittle and tense, overwhelmed by a heightened awareness. The party was suddenly too loud, the laughter too brash, and the sharp scent of the charcoal barbecue ruined what little appetite she'd had. Despite her bewilderment and panic at her response to Cullen, she hadn't realised how badly she'd wanted him to follow up on the attraction she'd been sure was mutual.
He'd just made it as clear as ice he wasn't going to
 
“Nice,” Russ Jones drawled as he handed Cullen a beer. “Thinking of trying your luck?”
The beer frothed, ice-cold where Cullen tore the tab away. He regarded Russ narrowly. “Not my type,” he said, resettling his shoulder against the pergola and watching as Rachel placed the tray on a trestle table near the barbecue.
The wind pressed the fabric of her halter-neck dress against her feminine curves, reminding Cullen of exactly why she wasn't his type. A man could grow addicted to a body like that and forget everything that mattered—including who he was and, most especially, who he could never be.
Russ lifted one blond brow in disbelief. “Mate, you're still breathing, aren't you? Judging from the conversation, every single man here who still has a pulse reckons she's exactly his type.
And
some who aren't single.” He took a long pull at his beer and grinned. “Think I might get my hair cut next Friday ”
Cullen's jaw tightened. He wished with a sudden impatient savagery that Russ would go back to talking about beef prices and look the hell away from Rachel. That dress was worse than her being naked. She looked lush and fragile at the same time, the kind of combination that drove most men wild with lust—especially country boys who'd been staring at the ass-end of cows all day.
He swallowed a mouthful of beer, willing his muscles to unlock, willing the ache in his groin to dissipate. When he'd arrived tonight, it had taken just one look at Rachel's silky hair and that beautiful stubborn mouth and the expected heat had slammed into him, putting paid to any plans he might have had of smoothing the restless edge off his mood. When he'd wrapped his fingers around her slim ankle, he'd wanted to do a lot more than just take her shoe off.
Somebody started some dance music going. Cullen scanned the gathering of farmers, work hands and their families, all gathered to celebrate the successful end to Riverbend's annual stock sale Rachel was at the centre of a lively group—most of them men—and one of them was Richard Hayward, a walking, talking advertisement for
Gentleman's Quarterly
. Hayward was senior partner in the law firm that did the lion's share of the legal work for several small country towns, including Riverbend. Just the thought of him putting his elegant, manicured hands on Rachel's pale skin filled Cullen with an irrational fury.
He didn't trust Hayward. Fifteen years ago, the lawyer had offered to represent Cullen free of charge when Cullen had been pulled in for questioning about his father's death. But something about the smoothness of the offer, the casual assertion that Cullen needed representation, when he knew damn well there was no case the police could bring against him, had made Cullen instantly wary. The subsequent offer to dispose of Cullen's land for him had grated, too, even though at that point in time—in the cold anonymity of the police interview room—he'd had no desire to retain the land, no desire to do anything but get out of Riverbend and never come back.
Hayward had changed Cullen's mind just by being nice.
Nice hadn't sat easily with the coldness m Hayward's eyes. Especially when he'd never offered anything other than contempt or indifference before.
A woman insinuated herself into the group, and Cullen recognised Hayward's wife, Caroline. She was no less elegant than her husband—her silk blouse and matching pants moulding a body that was as expensively well looked after as her carefully tended face and blond hair.
Cullen's jaw tightened. He wondered what the couple were doing at a simple country gathering like this. The Haywards had moved out of Riverbend years ago, when Richard had taken his father's place in his practice in Fairley, and from all he'd heard, city lights and city vices were more to their taste than a farm barbecue.
As if the intensity of his scrutiny had pulled at her, Caroline Hayward paused in her disinterested perusal of the crowd. Her eyes flew wide when she finally spotted him She jerked her gaze away just as her husband handed her a glass of some clear liquid. Lifting the glass, she took a long swallow. From the hectic colour that spread across her cheeks, Cullen deduced it wasn't water she was knocking back.
Hayward looked at him then, and something about the bland lack of reaction in his glance sent cold warning snaking down Cullen's spine Beside him, Russ crumpled his now empty beer can. The sound was preternaturally loud, even against the considerable background noise of the party.
“Here comes the cavalry,” Russ murmured.
Cullen barely acknowledged Russ's comment, but a cold smile touched his mouth as Cole Sinclair, six-foot-two of mean, hard muscle, insinuated himself into Hayward's group and slid an arm around Rachel's waist The man might as well have hung a Don't Touch sign around his sister's neck.
It was crazy. Cullen hardly knew her, and she wouldn't tolerate it, but he'd wanted to do the same thing himself. “They'll have to get past Cole and maybe even some of those other big brothers of hers,” he commented. “Now I'd
really
like to see that.”
 
“What were you doing with Logan?” Cole asked in clipped tones as he walked Rachel far enough away from the socialising groups to ensure privacy.
“It's none of your business,” she retorted, “but my shoe got stuck in a paver. Cullen caught the meat tray before I dropped it and ruined everybody's dinner.”
“It didn't look like the tray he was holding to me.”
Rachel stepped away from Cole's hold, perversely wishing she had her two-inch heels back. Closer to eye-level contact might just remind Cole she was out of school. “He was giving me a lecture, not a come-on.”
The grim set to Cole's mouth told her that he didn't believe a word she'd said. “Stay away from him, Sis You've had enough grief. Cullen's a hard man. The only thing I've ever heard of him doing with a woman is taking her to bed.”
Rachel didn't bother to disguise her incredulity. “Isn't that a bit like the pot calling the kettle black? And how can you possibly know how Cullen treats women? He hasn't been in Riverbend for years.”
Cole had the grace to flush, but his eyes were hard. “Cullen's old man was a violent drunk, and for a while it looked like Cullen was headed down the same road. I'm not saying Cullen's the same, but the history's there. I just don't want you building him up in your mind. He saved you from being hurt, but he's trained for combat Cullen's spent the last fifteen years in the army, most of that in the Special Air Service. He could probably have killed the guy who attacked you without breaking sweat”
His words dropped like stones into her mind, blocking out all the good-natured revelry, the too loud music. For a few seconds she was back in the alley, smelling the acrid scent of Dane Trask's sweat, along with something else sharper, more disturbing—glue or another potentially lethal substance. Then Cullen had been there. In contrast to the corruption and ruin of the boy, he'd been clean and strong.
And that was what she couldn't forget. Cole could tell her how “wrong” Cullen was, but nothing could change the clarity of that first impression. Rachel might be as dumb as a post where relationships were concerned, but she knew gallantry and honest care when she saw it. When she'd needed it to be, everything about Cullen had been “right.”
 
Rachel talked and danced her way through most of the evening, but she felt as if she were playing a part. No matter how hard she tried, her mind remained attuned to the tall, broad-shouldered figure propping up the pergola beside another shorter man. She knew exactly when Cullen filled his plate with steak and salad, and that he preferred plain rolls to garlic bread, ice-cold beer to hard spirits, and not too much of it.
He spoke, he socialised, but there was an aloofness to turn that repelled any but the most determined overtures. In such a physically powerful and attractive male, his intense aloneness was riveting. If he'd so much as smiled, women would have been all over him.
Rachel tossed the paper plate with her barely touched meal into one of the conveniently placed rubbish sacks, and when she glanced up, she found herself staring at Cullen's profile. The now familiar jolt that just seeing him sent through her was replaced by an inexplicable wave of hurt There's no reason to feel like this, she told herself fiercely. You don't know him. And he's made it plain he doesn't want to know you. Just when she was about to look away, Cullen turned his head. His eyes locked with hers. The movement and the glance were precise and deliberate. He'd been aware that she'd been watching him, and this was his way of telling her so.
BOOK: Cullen's Bride
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