Fiona Brand - High-Stakes Bride

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 eventually 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.