Australian Outback Kings / The Cattle King's Mistress / The Playboy King's Wife / The Pleasure King's Bride Read Free

doesn’t look like changing.”
    He alighted from the Jeep, quickly striding around it to open Miranda’s door for her. She had little time to digest this new information. The invitation to dine with the family at the old homestead tonight had seemed to encompass more than the actual reality of one man. Two, counting Tommy.
    â€œI thought Mrs King lived here, too,” she said as she stepped out of the Jeep.
    â€œNot on any regular basis. Mum’s fairly tied up in Broome, managing the pearl farm…”
    Pearls …
    He grinned. “…but she flew in yesterday to be on hand to greet you and make sure everything is to your satisfaction.”
    Her inner tension eased. She wouldn’t be the only woman at the dinner table. Elizabeth King would undoubtedly direct the conversation tonight and provide a comfort zone. Miranda smiled. “How kind of her!”
    Tommy laughed. “Mum is a diplomat from way back.”
    They proceeded up the steps, Miranda wondering just how different the two brothers were and how much their mother had to work at welding their separate interests into a reasonably harmonious unit. “Isn’t there a third son?” she asked tentatively, her mind seeing three names listed in print—Nathan, Thomas, Jared.
    But the book on King’s Eden had been written some years ago. She had assumed marriages would have taken place since then. Having been wrong on that score with Tommy and Nathan, and with no mention being made of a younger brother from Tommy, she wondered if something had happened to the third son.
    â€œOh, Jared flits around the mining operations and oversees what’s done with the pearls. He’s hardly ever here,” came the offhand reply. “You’ll probably meet him some time or other but not tonight. I think he’s in Hong Kong at the moment.”
    Mining operations …
    Miranda did a very quick mental readjustment about the King family. What she was meeting here was very serious wealth, on a similar scale, if not higher, than the Hewson family. All three of the King brothers would be used to getting what they wanted, just as Bobby was. When they married, it would undoubtedly be into a family who had connections to their business interests and could probably broaden and enhance them. That was the way their kind of world worked.
    She was an outsider, an employee who had her uses. Miranda resolved to keep those uses strictly defined. No blurred lines. However attractive any of the King men were, they were out of bounds in any personal sense.
    She would never allow herself to be flattered by Tommy’s show of interest. If Nathan had a brick wall around him, it could stay totally intact, as far as she was concerned. Jared was more or less out of the picture so she didn’t have the problem of proximity with him.
    Best to concentrate completely on Elizabeth King tonight.
    With this decision firmly settled in her mind, Miranda’s attention turned to observing features of the house she was entering. Leadlight windows surrounded the solid cedar door Tommy opened for her. As she stepped into the main entrance hall, she realised it ran right through to the back of the house and actually formed a gallery of framed photographs. A collection of King’s Eden history, she wondered, but didn’t have the opportunity to look.
    Tommy walked straight to the first door off the hallway and ushered her into a sitting room so full of riches, she was momentarily dazed by all there was to see. Much of the decor had an Asian influence, yet there seemed be an eclectic range of styles that somehow melded together into a fascinating collection.
    Her skating gaze was halted—joltingly—by the man rising from a large leather armchair, a man whose length seemed to climb up like a mountain, blocking everything else out. He had to be well over six foot, broad-shouldered, broad-chested, one of the biggest men Miranda had ever