Secret Confessions: Down & Dusty - Frankie (Novella) by Jackie Ashenden Page A

it.
    Yep, there was nothing about him she didn’t like. Apart from the being in love with him part. That sucked.
    ‘Francesca,’ he said, calling her by her hated given name and not by the nickname she preferred. But then that was Mac. He was always doing stuff to irritate her. ‘What’s up?’
    The usual awkwardness flooded through her. She had no problems dealing with most of the guys who worked on the station, but Mac? Not so much. Whenever she was in his presence, she felt like she was still sixteen and in the throes of the biggest crush Queensland—shit, the whole of Australia—had ever seen. Embarrassing. And wrong. He was her stepbrother for Christ’s sake. Okay, so her father hadn’t actually stayed married to his mother for very long—a couple of years and the woman had ditched Milpinyani to go back to the Big Smoke. And there was the fact that Mac was much older than she was, and had always seemed less than interested in one awkward, sixteen-year-old tomboy.
    It was still wrong and reason number fifty million why she had to get Mac out and make sure he never came back.
    Frankie tipped her chin up. ‘Gidday, Mac. How’s it going?’
    ‘It’s going good.’ His long mouth quirked. She tried not to watch the curl of it. ‘You came over just to ask me that?’
    Surreptitiously, she wiped her hands on her jeans. ‘Uh. No. Actually …’ She cleared her throat. Might as well just come out and say it. ‘I need to talk to you about the property.’
    He didn’t say anything for a moment, just leaned his shoulder against the doorframe. He’d folded his arms across his impressive chest and she tried not to notice the way his black t-shirt stretched around his powerful biceps, the dark edge of his tattoo licking out from underneath it. It was a black panther among a stand of bamboo, lean and strong, prowling up his arm.
    A bit like him really. Sleek and darkly powerful and … really, really sexy ?
    Shit. No to the sexy.
    ‘The property, huh?’ With a lazy movement, he pushed himself away from the doorframe. ‘I guess you’d better come in then.’
    ***
    Mac was not happy. The very last person he wanted turning up on his doorstep tonight was Francesca bloody Woodford, the bane of his fucking existence, with the glossy river of dark brown hair she always kept firmly in a bouncy ponytail, and the sprinkling of freckles across her pretty cheeks. And those big, beautiful, dark blue eyes, the ones that kept him up at night thinking about them.
    And when he wasn’t thinking about her eyes, he was thinking about her small, high tits, perfectly packaged in the tight little t-shirts she wore. Or her long legs encased in dusty denim. Or the slender curve of her hips, the ones he kept imagining his hands running over …
    Yeah, Francesca Woodford was getting to be a real problem.
    So why he was inviting her in, when really he should be telling her to get out, was anyone’s guess. But he liked it when she came to the cottage to see him and he couldn’t bring himself to tell her to get lost.
    Frankie—he called her Francesca purely to mess with her—bent to take off her heavy boots and then moved past him into the cottage’s hallway, trailing behind her the scent of the land he loved so much, dust and dry sun-baked earth, mixed with a soft, flowery feminine scent at odds with her tomboy appearance. Not that he’d ever thought of her as a tomboy. She’d always be a woman to him.
    Well, maybe not always. But the day he’d seen her riding back to the house after an afternoon checking fences had cemented her as a woman forever in his brain. It had been raining and she was soaked through, her t-shirt sticking to her, outlining those beautiful tits, her hair a river down her back.
    Christ, she’d been beautiful. He’d felt like he’d been hit over the head by a piece of four by two and even now, four years later, his head was still ringing from the blow.
    Trying not to notice the sway of her hips, he followed