High Stakes Bride Read online

  Clamping her jaw against the ache at the back of her throat, Dani gripped the worn steering wheel, and swung up into the Dinosaur’s seat. “I’ve got to go.”

  He stepped toward the tractor, as if he was going to detain her, the motion faintly awkward.

  Dani stared, arrested by the uncharacteristic clumsiness. “What’s wrong with your leg?”

  His gaze jerked to hers, and there was nothing lazy, intimate or even remotely friendly in the contact. For a moment she had the uncomfortable sensation she was looking at a complete stranger. “A gunshot wound.”

  For a blank moment she didn’t know what to say or how to react. Carter was in the Special Air Service. It was hard to miss that fact when his high-risk, high-adrenaline career had destroyed their relationship. But coming face-to-face with the reality of a gunshot wound was shocking.

  She stared at his broad back as he limped to his truck, studying the way he moved, the kinks in his posture that told her Carter was fresh out of rehab and still healing. Ever since Carter had gone into the military she had worried about the danger—whether they were involved or not, Carter’s well-being mattered. “When?”

  “Four months ago.”

  Her stomach tightened. Another piece of the puzzle fell into place. Two months ago she’d heard, courtesy of Nola McKay—the owner of Nola’s Café—that Carter hadn’t just been away on an extended tour of duty, he had been missing in action. The news, delivered with a latte and the rider that he had been rescued, had shocked her, but still disconnected and numb with the grief of Ellen’s death, it had taken her another week before she’d gotten up the energy to do a search on the Internet. Eventually she had found a report that a soldier was missing in action in Borneo. The wording had been brief and clinical and hadn’t included any details. Like the high-security classification on Carter’s career, the report closed more doors than it opened.

  She wished the fact that Carter had been shot didn’t affect her, but it did. The past year had been hard, and it had changed her. She knew she’d gotten quieter and more withdrawn, but, unlike Carter, she still couldn’t lay claim to being either cold or detached.

  Carter eased into the driver’s seat and she remembered his opening line—the reason he had stopped and spoken to her at all: she was blocking his driveway.

  Letting out a breath, she turned the key. The tractor motor turned over, coughed then caught, the rumble loud enough to preclude conversation.

  Relief loosened off the tension in the pit of her stomach. Gunshot wound or not, Carter was on his own. If he wanted female company, there were plenty of women in town who would be only too pleased to soothe his hurts and massage his sore muscles; women who were younger, prettier and a whole lot more fun than she ever planned on being.

  She released the clutch. “There is a rule,” she just had to keep reminding herself. “Three strikes, and you’re out.”

  Chapter 3

  Carter watched the retreating dust cloud, eased his leg into a more comfortable position and slammed his door closed.

  The message screen of his cell phone glowed. Two missed calls and a message. The missed calls were both from his mother. Ever since he’d gotten back into the country both of his parents, who had retired to a popular resort town further up the coast a couple of years ago, had kept in daily contact. The fact that he had been taken prisoner had shaken them. The gunshot wound came a close second, but not by much. Despite his assurances, they insisted on keeping in close touch.

  The text message was from Gabriel West, a longtime friend, ex–SAS sniper and leader of the private team that had flown into Borneo to rescue him.

  Carter read the message and pressed Delete. Lately West had been abnormally solicitous and curious about what he was up to—and with whom. Along with everything else that had gone wrong lately, Carter was beginning to feel like he was being watched over by an overlarge hen.

  Turning the key in the ignition, he manoeuvred the truck off the verge and into the entrance of his drive, barely noticing the weed-infested borders, or the fact that one of the smaller farm sheds had lost its roof in the last big storm.

  He had to wonder just what he’d let slip when he’d been semi-conscious in the hospital. West was more than curious. Now he wanted to visit.

  It was a fact that he did feel different. He still hadn’t figured out exactly what had changed except that for months he’d felt unsettled—in the psychologist’s jargon, “disengaged.” Even when he’d finally been declared fit enough to resume light duties—translate that as pushing paper in an office—he’d felt like a square peg trying to fit into a round hole. The psychologist had diagnosed post-traumatic shock syndrome—maybe even an early mid-life crisis.

  Carter frowned as he slowed for a bend. He liked things cut-and-dried, the idea that he was suffering from something as woolly and amorphous as some kind of mental and emotional breakdown ticked him off.

  It was a fact that the months spent in captivity hadn’t been a picnic. From beginning to end, what had happened had been a prime example of bad timing and bad luck.

  The assignment to escort an Indonesian government official to the small village of Tengai hadn’t been high-risk, or even particularly interesting. Carter had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Two rival rebel factions had chosen that particular village to clash. When the shooting started, Carter had kept to task and protected the official, but when they had finally made it out of the building, their transport and backup were gone.

  If they’d stayed inside and kept out of sight, in all probability they would have been in the clear, but one of the village children had been cut up by a ricochet and Carter had started to treat him. Two of the rebels who were still holed up in the village had accosted Carter at gunpoint, ignored the government official and demanded Carter leave with them.

  They didn’t want to kidnap a bureaucrat. What they needed was a trained medic.

  After stripping the official of his suit, his watch and all of his cash, the men had herded Carter into the jungle, his weaponry, communications equipment and medical kit confiscated along with his boots.

  Apart from the restricted diet—crazily enough, stolen army rations—and the hours spent kicking his heels under armed guard, nothing horrific had happened. He had been too useful. He’d treated two of the rebels for gunshot wounds, delivered a baby and dealt with a minor outbreak of dysentery. When he’d finally managed to slip away at night, four months after capture, all he’d had were his clothes, a knife he’d managed to steal and the remnants of his medical kit.

  Without a compass—and travelling beneath a canopy that blocked both the sun and stars, burying him in either a soupy half light or impenetrable darkness—he had ended up travelling in a circle and had practically walked back into the rebel camp. A sentry had spotted him and fired, but the fact that he’d been hit at all was a miracle, and the sentry himself didn’t register the hit. The rebels as a force were canny and elusive, but they weren’t trained soldiers. They relied on surprise and the threat of their weapons—not accuracy.

  A brief search was conducted, then abandoned, and Carter was able to put some distance between himself and the camp. After that, things had gotten a little hazy. He’d injected himself with morphine, lain up for a day, strapped his leg with his shirt then started to walk. The next day he’d found a small settlement and managed to get some food and water. With the help of the village midwife he’d extracted the bullet then had spent the next three days on his back in a small tin shack fighting off a fever.

  With his leg heavily bandaged and seeping, Carter had been escorted by one of the villagers to the next village further down the valley, on the verge of the Kalimantan Lowlands. It was there he’d gotten the news that a private team was looking for him—not the army rescue squad he’d expected.

  Apparently, after political pressure exerted by the government official who had been left kicking his heels in Tengai, the peacekeeping unit had been forced to withdraw from Borneo.
The irony that the official he had been commissioned to protect from the rebels had left him hanging out to dry wasn’t lost on Carter. Lately, with his luck, crossing the road had become dangerous.

  Carter brought the truck to a halt in front of the sprawling, one-storied house, perched on a bluff above the bay. The house, which he’d bought from his parents along with the farm, was old and comfortable, hemmed by verandas and large sweeping lawns. A cooling breeze rustled through a clump of oleanders, the scent of the jasmine that grew wild in the garden filled his nostrils and over all was the fresh tang of the ocean. From where he was sitting, he could see the water, a broad sweep of blue stretching to the horizon.

  Grabbing his suitcase from the back seat of the truck, he limped toward the porch, slid the key in the lock and pushed the door wide. The late-afternoon sun sent his shadow sliding over the faded hall carpet. The house was silent and deserted.

  Stepping inside, he set the suitcase down and limped through to the empty kitchen, checking that the hot water was on. The couple he employed to mow the lawns and clean the house had been in. His gaze swept the clean lines of the kitchen counter and snagged on the blinking light of the answering machine. With resignation, he picked up the receiver and hit the play button.

  One hang-up, two messages from an old girlfriend, Mia, wanting to know how he was after his “accident,” and a call from his C.O. wanting to set up an appointment for his next round of assessments.

  Carter hit the delete button. Six weeks after being airlifted to a hospital in Darwin, Australia, he’d been put on a routine flight into Auckland and had reported to his C.O.

  The debrief hadn’t been pleasant. Naturally, he had failed his medical exam. His psychological report had been even worse. His commander had been impressed by the fact that he would be able to walk without the aid of a stick, eventually, but the prognosis for resuming active service was grim.

  The slug had entered at the rear of his upper thigh, ploughing south through the complex interweaving of muscles and ligaments to lodge just above his knee. It hadn’t broken his femur or nicked an artery, but it had damaged practically everything else. He had extensive soft-tissue damage to all the main muscles, which had meant fun and games for the surgeon who’d done the reconstructive surgery, and the patella ligament, which supported his knee, had been damaged.

  He had been lucky. If the bullet had travelled another two inches it would have shattered his knee.

  Several weeks later, after further surgery to release adhesions and nerves caught in scar tissue, he had been able to straighten his leg, and for the first time since he’d been shot he had been able to walk without the aid of a stick, albeit painfully. From then on, his progress had been rapid. He didn’t just want to walk. If he couldn’t run, he couldn’t pass the service medical exam—which meant he was finished for active duty. The bullet had missed vital organs, but it now looked as though it had taken out his career.

  He could still serve in the regiment as an instructor if he wanted, but the offer hadn’t made Carter happy.

  He had lost months of his life in captivity and almost as much again in and out of hospitals. Now he’d been given six weeks to improve his mobility and his attitude.

  His jaw tightened as he walked out onto the veranda and stared down the winding shell path that led to the beach. He hadn’t been through months of pain and frustration to keep losing: he liked the life he’d had before and he wanted it back—and that included Dani.

  If she would let him in.

  She’d always been ultra independent and elusive. He’d had her door slammed in his face more than once—and always with justification. It was a fact that Special Forces was hard on relationships; his job took him away for months at a time. With the length of this last absence, he couldn’t blame her for wanting out, but that didn’t mean he was going to give up. He would bring her around—eventually.

  She loved him.

  All he had to do was convince her of that fact.

  Dani drove the Dinosaur into the implement shed, turned off the ignition and climbed out of the bony metal seat. The silence after the loud rumbling of the engine was momentarily deafening.

  She stared out into the soft early-evening light.

  Carter was back. Finally.

  Letting out a breath, she lowered herself onto an upturned bucket, for the moment comfortable with the dimness and the quiet.

  She’d known he’d had to come back some time—she had expected him sooner than this—but still, seeing him had knocked her sideways, and finding out he had been injured had been a shock. Ever since he’d joined the army she’d nursed the fear that he’d get hurt, and now it had happened.

  She shifted position and the faint twinge of stiffness in her own leg registered, and other even more unwelcome memories flooded back.

  Six years ago she had been involved in a car accident that had killed both her mother and Robert Galbraith, and injured her. She had been home from Mason, taking a break from her first full year in physiotherapy practice. She had volunteered to drive Susan and Robert into town and drop them at the golf club for their weekly golf date before continuing on to pick up David, who had spent the night at a friend’s place. Out of sheer practicality they had taken Robert’s car, since he had had a trunk large enough to hold both sets of golf clubs. She could remember trying to avoid a large truck, the wheels of the car sliding in the layer of gravel on the verge. The car had fishtailed and the truck had slammed into the side of the vehicle. They’d rolled, ending upside-down in the ditch.

  Dani had broken a leg and received cuts on her face and arms from the shattered windshield. Her mother, who was seated in the rear, had received the brunt of the impact from the truck and had died instantly. Robert Galbraith hadn’t lasted much longer. The ambulance medics had tried to resuscitate him on the way to the hospital, but without success. When the car had rolled, he’d sustained head injuries that meant that even if they had managed to generate a pulse, it was unlikely he would regain consciousness.

  Dani hadn’t been judged to be at fault. The accident had happened on a narrow dirt road that was closer to one lane than two. There had been little room to manoeuvre, but even so, she had never been able to accept the verdict.

  She had been an experienced enough driver, but most of her driving had been done on city roads, and in her own small sedan—not Robert Galbraith’s large automatic. At the time she had been feeling her way with the unfamiliar car and the road, which had recently had a new load of gravel spread on it. She had always believed that if either Robert or Susan had been behind the wheel, they would have managed the car and the slippery conditions better and so survived the crash. She wouldn’t have lost her mother and Robert—who had been the closest thing to a father she had ever known—and her much younger half-brother, David, wouldn’t have lost both his parents.

  To compound her guilt, she knew that if Robert Galbraith and her mother were still alive, Galbraith Station wouldn’t be in such a shaky financial position.

  With the help of a hired hand, Bill Harris, and Aunt Ellen, who had moved out of her townhouse in Mason and into Galbraith, Dani had quit her physiotherapist’s job and taken over the running of the farm while she sorted out the financial tangle of Robert Galbraith’s affairs.

  Despite an outward appearance of wealth, neither Susan nor Robert had had a lot of money to spare, nor had ever imagined dying before their time—certainly not in a car accident on one of Jackson’s Ridge’s sleepiest country roads. They’d had insurance but only enough to cover the short-term debt owing on the property. Although it had been in the Galbraith family for generations, it had become heavily mortgaged through Robert’s various business ventures.

  The investment structure, which had been solid while Robert was alive, had collapsed like a house of cards when he died. A kiwifruit orchard he’d had shares in had proved successful, but fluctuations in the market had eaten away the slim profits, and without Robert at the helm, the operation had eventual
ly been sold at a small loss. The largest loss had occurred in the most lucrative of Robert’s enterprises and his pet project: his horse breaking and training business.

  A renowned horse breaker, Robert had had a lengthy client list and had commanded high fees. The business, which had started out on a shoestring budget, had expanded rapidly. To cope with the demand, Susan had begun working full-time with the horses, and a large amount of investment capital had been sunk into building a set of stables and a covered training facility. While Robert had been alive the income had been steady and substantial, more than enough to cover the mortgage, but, within days of his death, the horses had been removed and the income had dried up.

  The final nail in the coffin was an ostrich contract Robert had bought into just before he’d died—a deal which required the purchase of a bird a year for a further period of five years at an exorbitant fixed price. So far the venture had failed to make anything but a loss. The ostrich industry had folded, and prices for the birds and the products had plummeted, leaving investors with a financial lemon that continued to squeeze them dry. The contracts were cleverly executed and legally binding, creating a financial drag that tied investors into paying for birds that were more use in a zoo than on a farm. For years Dani and the group of investors had waited for the syndicate that had set up the farm to fold, so freeing them, but against the odds the ostrich facility continued.

  The easy option would have been to sell off a parcel of land to cover the debts, but over the past few years Robert Galbraith had already sold off the maximum amount of land allowed under the local authority rules to help fund the costs of the new businesses—the farm could no longer be subdivided. Any debts now had to be met out of farm capital.

  During Dani’s first interview with the bank, the possibility of bankruptcy and a mortgagee sale had been suggested, but she had refused to give in to that option. Her reaction had been knee-jerk and fierce. In his will, Robert Galbraith had entrusted her not only with David’s care, but with Galbraith Station, which had been left jointly to both her and David. If Robert and Susan had still been alive, Galbraith Station would have prospered not only in a business sense but as the warm hub of their family.