He made a show of patting his pockets. ‘You know, I’m sure I had a glass slipper somewhere…’

‘I’ve already found my Prince Charming,’ said Lucy crushingly, and looked pointedly across the ring to where Kevin was watching a snorting stallion being coaxed into the chute. ‘You just get to be an ugly sister,’ she said.

To her annoyance, Guy’s good humour wasn’t even dented, let alone crushed by her dismissive comment. He just laughed, and she sucked her teeth in irritation. Prince Charming indeed! Of course, he would think that was his role. The man was unbelievably conceited. Yes, he was remarkably handsome-even she couldn’t deny that-but that smooth, blond, blue-eyed look didn’t do it for her. She preferred her men rather more rugged.

Like Kevin, in fact.

‘I didn’t realise that you were coming today,’ she said frostily as she turned back to the arena.

‘Hey, the ugly sisters always get to have a good time,’ he reminded her. ‘And rodeos are always fun-to watch, anyway,’ he added as the stallion made short work of bucking the latest rider off his back. Guy winced as he hit the ground with a thud. ‘Ouch,’ he said. ‘It’s something different, too,’ he went on. ‘We don’t get a lot of rodeos at home, do we?’

Lucy hated the way he said ‘we’ like that, as if they had something in common. He was always doing that, reminding her-and everyone else-that she was English too and didn’t really belong out here any more than he did.

She had been having such a lovely time at Wirrindago. Employed as a cook-cum-housekeeper, she had been thrilled by the isolation and the fact that the men still found horses the easiest way to move around the wild country. It was all so different from the way she had grown up in England, and she had been quite carried away by the romance of it all.