enhancing lips she found enthralling. Need mushroomed inside her with a speed that made her hands clench.
He inserted a disc into the CD player and the strains of something soft and classical filled the room. Verity, Dee and Harry all puffed out blissful sighs and closed their eyes. He beckoned to her and she rose and followed him out of the room.
He took her now-empty glass and set it on the sink. ‘I thought if you wanted...if you’d like it...we could go for a ride.’
All her tiredness fled. ‘I’d love that!’
‘Good. Go change and then meet me down at the stables.’
She changed into jeans and pulled on the riding boots Jack had dug out for her use, and was down at the stables in double-quick time. Cade already had Scarlett and his steed—a beautiful big bay called Ben Hur—saddled.
‘Need a leg up?’
She stuck her nose in the air. ‘Most certainly not.’ It had taken her a while to master the skill of mounting, but in the two and a bit weeks she’d been here her legs had strengthened and grown more flexible.
When she mounted, not only without mishap but with credible grace, she could only grin down at Cade and thank the powers that be. Falling flat on her face would not have instilled in him much confidence in her riding ability and she didn’t want to give him any reason whatsoever to cancel their ride. She gathered the reins in the way Jack had taught her and watched as Cade leapt up into the saddle.
Ooh, nice! She wanted to make it look that smooth and effortless. Of course, he had the advantage of long legs.
And a nice tight butt that—
Scarlett danced as Nicola’s hands unconsciously tightened on the reins and she immediately relaxed them and forced her gaze from Cade’s drool-inducing physique to stroke her steed’s neck and murmur soothing nonsense.
Cade surveyed her and nodded in evident satisfaction. It made her warm all over. Not that she should dwell on that for too long either. ‘Where are we going?’ She blamed her breathlessness on the exertion of mounting and controlling her steed. Which, she admitted to herself, was too pathetic to believe, but she held tight to it all the same.
‘Has Jack taken you to the canyon yet?’
Canyon? She shook her head, intrigued.
‘Then that sounds as good a destination as any. C’mon.’ With a jerk of his head, he headed towards the gate that led out of the home paddock.
‘Let me,’ she said. ‘I’ve been practising this.’
Manoeuvring Scarlett into position as Jack had shown her, she opened the latch and swung the gate open without needing to dismount.
‘Nice,’ Cade remarked, closing it again once they’d passed though. He stared at her. ‘Jack’s right, you look as if you were born to the saddle.’
‘Would you laugh at me if I told you that’s how I feel too?’
‘No, I’d ask you why it’s taken so long for you to learn to ride when it’s obviously such a passion and something you’ve always wanted to do.’
She pursed her lips, shrugged. ‘My mother always refused to keep a horse.’
‘Why?’
‘She said that if I was that clumsy in ballet shoes I’d be an absolute nightmare on a horse.’
His mouth tightened. ‘I get the distinct impression I wouldn’t like your mother.’
Nicola gave a short laugh. ‘She’d love you. You tick all the right boxes—broad shoulders, good-looking...own your own cattle station.’
‘Hmph!’
They rode in silence for a while and Nicola revelled in the swaying motion of her horse and the stark beauty of the landscape and the dry dusty air.
‘Why didn’t you learn to ride later? Once you became an adult?’
‘I...’ She frowned. ‘It didn’t seem very practical in the city. I just kept putting it off.’
As soon as the words left her mouth she realised they were a lie. She recalled all the resolutions she’d come out here with and hitched up her chin. ‘Actually, that’s not true.’ She thought about it. ‘I didn’t bother to learn because none of my friends were interested in learning with me.’ Horses made Diane shudder. ‘I was too spineless to learn on my own.’
He didn’t say anything for a long moment. He shifted in his saddle. ‘And now?’
‘Oh, now I’m hooked. And now that I know what an idiot I’ve been...’ She frowned. ‘People do keep horses in the city, don’t they?’
‘Sure they do.’
‘I’m going to join a riding club.’ There’d be one in Melbourne somewhere. ‘I’m going to get my own horse.’ Excitement surged through her. ‘It’s going to be fabulous!’
He grinned at her enthusiasm and life seemed suddenly so full of possibility she wanted to fly. ‘Can we canter?’ she breathed.
In answer he tossed her a grin that made her heart thud against her ribs, before he urged Ben Hur into a canter. At the touch of Nicola’s heels, Scarlett surged after him, and Nicola gave herself up to the feel of the wind in her face and the exhilaration of the ride. Riding like this quietened all the voices in her head that told her she wasn’t good enough, that she’d never be good enough. It allowed her to concentrate instead on feeling at one with her horse. It flooded her with strength and peace and harmony.
When Cade brought his horse to a halt, she pulled Scarlett to a halt beside him. ‘Magic,’ she breathed.
And then her jaw dropped.
Cade’s mouth kicked up at the corners. ‘This is the canyon.’ He shrugged. ‘In all honesty, it’s more a gorge, but we have delusions of grandeur so we call it the canyon.’
‘Wow!’
‘It’s something, isn’t it?’
Something? Majestic, eternal, imposing were the words that came to mind.
The land in front of them dropped away in a series of dramatic rock shelves. The rock was baked red but deep cream and yellow veins striped through it. Water glinted in the base of the canyon. Its other side rose in a sheer cliff. Three-quarters of the way up, it curved inwards as if eroded by thousands of years of wind and sand. It looked like a giant curling wave waiting to break on a stretch of deserted beach.
The blue sky and the red rock formed a contrast that sang to her soul, though she couldn’t have said why. On the other side of the canyon, the land was dotted with saltbush and the dry brown grass that the cattle roamed far and wide to graze upon. From beneath the brim of her hat, she couldn’t see any cattle, but she did see a mob of kangaroo. There had to be at least twenty of them, most of them sprawled out in whatever shade they could find. A big buck stared across at them for a moment and then went back to grazing.
‘It’s beautiful.’ The words didn’t seem enough to capture the eternal grandeur of the landscape, but it was all she had to offer.
He nodded. ‘In times of flood the water roars through here. There’s a place to ford further downriver, which is handy when we’re mustering.’
‘Does it flood often?’ It’d be hard being stranded out here so far from civilisation in a flood.
‘There’ve been two decent ones in living memory, but the homestead is built on higher ground. We’ve never had to evacuate.’
Still...it took a special kind of person to live out here, battling drought and flood and bushfire. Cade had a grit that she admired. A grit she was determined to cultivate for herself.
‘I owe you an apology.’
She