Read Online A Wish and a Wedding by Margaret Way - Free Book Online Page A

he. Gorgeous, and such a gentleman. He treated her as if she was one of Vicki’s real friends, instead of someone Vicki had been kind enough to rescue from a women’s shelter.
    Everyone at the shelter thought of Vicki as their guardian angel. Vicki had blushed when she had first heard it, and held up protesting hands.
    â€œListen up, ladies! You haven’t got enough; I’ve got too much. It balances out.”
    Be that as it may, no other heiresses had ever stopped by. Vicki had heart.
    They all knew her. Some had formed not terribly complimentary opinions—beautiful, an heiress, little asked of her, less expected, and so forth. They had seen the photographs in the newspapers and magazines. Photographers never seemed to get tired of her. And why not? She was amazingly beautiful,even when she came into the shelter dressed up in the Goth stuff and gave them all a good laugh. Nevertheless, it was just the most unlikely thing that the Victoria Rushford had turned up on the doorstep of the shelter wanting to help. Vicki and all of her friends were seriously rich, whereas for most of Chrissy’s life she had had to struggle just to stay alive. It gave her an enormous feeling of security to know that just being a visitor on Mallarinka meant she was free of Zack’s intimidation, and the periodic beltings when he was drunk. Easy for Zack to belt her; she would love to see him try to swing a punch at Haddo. That was if he could even reach Haddo’s chin.
    They had been flying over Mallarinka for some time. Now they were on their descent, which gave Chrissy a fresh burst of pleasure. For the first time she could see the homestead and all the outbuildings. It looked so exciting, yet bizarre. Who would expect what looked like a small town to be set down smack in the middle of absolutely nowhere? Chrissy had been born on a dairy farm near the lush Queensland/New South Wales border, and it was a fantastic experience to see the real Outback—especially from the air.
    She was stunned by the vastness, the emptiness, and most of all the riot of dry ochre colours, that flared all over the landscape: the umbers, the yellows and purples, the orange and the dominant red. No wonder this was called the Red Centre. She had never thought of the Outback as full of colour, but more usually as arid, with wide brown land stricken by drought, but there it was beneath her, awe-inspiring. She was glorying in it. The fiery red of the plains that stretched to the horizon contrasted brilliantly with the cobalt blue of the sky and the big golden bushes like giant pincushions. She supposed it was spinifex, yet it made such a gilded splash.
    Mallarinka—she loved the name—meant five lagoons. Haddo had told her. To her further astonishment, the station itself looked like a miraculous green sanctuary in a million square miles of shimmering red sand. She could feel the bloodtingling in her veins. It was truly breathtaking—and she had to admit frightening too. It would be perilously easy to get lost down there. She knew—every city dweller did—that the Outback was a dangerous place, especially the desert. Poorly schooled, she had nevertheless learned about the early explorers who had perished there on their ill-fated expeditions. And Mallarinka was on the great desert fringe, the legendary Channel Country—a riverine desert and the stronghold of the nation’s cattle kings.
    It was just so glamorous! Like Haddo and Vicki. They were glamorous people. Their life was so very far removed from hers they might have existed on a different planet. Yet they couldn’t have been nicer. Glamour in abundance they might have, but they completely lacked what she thought of as airs and graces. It gave her a warm feeling to know she had such friends.
    To the west lay a huge area of hilly country that rose from the extraordinary flatness of the plains, making them appear much higher than they were. The peaks had eroded