Cal Jamieson had been dour, if not downright hostile, ever since he’d arrived

Not that the children seemed to find him nearly as intimidating as she did. They were still squealing with laughter as he showed them his favorite trick.

Then, unable to keep a straight face at the twins’ delight any longer, Cal smiled.

Who would have guessed that cool mouth could crease his face with such charm, that the steely look could dissolve into warmth and humor?

Juliet didn’t want him to be attractive. Somehow it was easier to think that he was always cold and hostile than to know that he was nice to children. But she couldn’t help wondering. Would he ever smile at her the way he smiled at them?

Jessica Hart had a haphazard career before she began writing to finance a degree in history. Her experiences ranged from waitress, theater production assistant and outback cook to newsdesk secretary, expedition assistant and English teacher, and she has worked in countries as different as France and Indonesia, Australia and Cameroon. She now lives in the north of England, where her hobbies are limited to eating and drinking and traveling when she can, preferably to places where she’ll find good food or desert or tropical rain.

Books by Jessica Hart

HARLEQUIN ROMANCE®

3511—BIRTHDAY BRIDE

3544—TEMPORARY ENGAGEMENT

3581—KISSING SANTA

Outback Husband
Jessica Hart

www.millsandboon.co.uk

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ONE

‘MUMMY, someone’s coming!’

Wiping her hands on her apron, Juliet came out of the kitchen and shaded her eyes against the glare as she watched the tell-tale column of red dust that signalled a vehicle speeding towards them along the dusty track.

‘Who is it?’ asked Kit, secure in a three-year-old’s belief that his mother would know everything.

Andrew looked up at that. ‘It’s a car,’ he said scornfully, and returned to the toy digger that he was pushing through the dust at the bottom of the verandah steps. Like his twin, he was a sturdy little boy, with Hugo’s angelic blond hair and her own dark blue eyes, but Juliet knew that the identical looks concealed quite different personalities. Andrew was single-minded, stubborn, happy to play the same game for hours while quicksilver Kit was easily distracted, always asking questions and much more inclined to lead his twin into trouble.

‘It is,’ Juliet agreed as Kit opened his mouth to object, ‘but there’s someone in it, so Kit’s right too.’ She watched the dust cloud moving closer, a slight frown between her brows. ‘Perhaps it’s the new manager,’ she said slowly.

‘What’s a manager?’ That was Kit again, of course, stumbling over the unfamiliar word.

‘He’s going to help us run the station.’

If there was one thing she needed, it was help, but Juliet couldn’t help wondering if she had made the right decision. On the face of it, Cal Jamieson had sounded ideal. ‘Cal?’ the owner of the neighbouring station had said, when she had rung to ask him for a reference. ‘You won’t find anyone who knows more about running a property like yours. He’s a good man.’

Cal Jamieson might know what he was doing, but whenever Juliet remembered their telephone conversation she was conscious of a faint feeling of disquiet. He had heard that she was looking for a manager, he had said, and he was looking for a job. What was there in that to make her uneasy?

He had sounded brusque, but Juliet had learned not to expect outback men to ooze charm, and in any case Hugo had made her wary of superficial charisma. No, it was something about the way he had taken charge of the conversation. Of course, she had wanted to know that he was competent, but surely it had been up to her to suggest that he came out for a trial period? And there had been something more than competence in that deep Australian voice. Looking back, Juliet couldn’t pick on any one thing, but she had been left with the uncomfortable feeling that there was a hostile undercurrent to everything he had said.

It was probably just her imagination, Juliet tried to reassure herself. She had never met the man, so what reason could he possibly have to dislike her?

Her eyes rested on the two little boys playing in the dust below her, and, as always, she was conscious of a surge of love so intense that it tightened her throat. Her boys. They were worth every aching bone, every day fighting tears of sheer exhaustion, every sleepless night spent worrying about their future. Wilparilla was their inheritance and she would fight to keep it for them. She didn’t care how hostile Cal Jamieson was as long as he helped her to do that.

Still, there was no point in letting him think he could walk all over her. Juliet had no intention of repeating the mistake she had made with the last manager. She would make sure right from the start that Cal Jamieson knew just who was boss!

Pulling off her apron as she went, Juliet went back into the homestead to splash cold water on her face and run her fingers through her dark hair. She grimaced at her reflection in the bathroom mirror. The stress of the last year and the aching exhaustion in her bones had left her looking much older than her twenty-five years and hardly capable of bossing a three-year-old around, let alone a man as tough and self-assured as Cal Jamieson had sounded on the phone. If it came to a contest of vigour, competence and sheer bravado, the much-squeezed tube of toothpaste sitting on the edge of the basin would probably put up a better show than she could at the moment!

For an incongruous moment, she allowed herself to remember the girl she had been in London, so pretty, so vivacious, so certain that everything would work out for the best. That had been before she married Hugo, of course. Now here she was, on an isolated cattle station on the other side of the world, and the only thing she was certain of was that she would do whatever it took to keep Wilparilla safe for her boys. Even if it meant dealing with the unknown Cal Jamieson.

‘Mummy, Mummy, the manager’s here!’ cried Kit, running into the bathroom and bursting to use the new word that he had learnt.

‘Well, we’d better go and say hello, then,’ said Juliet. Now that the moment had come, she felt ridiculously nervous. Wilparilla’s future rested with the man waiting outside, but she mustn’t let him realise how desperately she needed someone to help her.

Kit rushed self-importantly ahead of her onto the verandah and down the steps to find his twin. A man was hunkered down next to Andrew, apparently engaged in serious conversation. All Juliet could see of him as she followed Kit more slowly through the screen door was that he was wearing moleskins and a dark blue shirt. His face was mostly hidden by his hat, but as he turned his head to smile at Kit’s eager arrival she caught a glimpse of white teeth beneath the shadow of its brim.

It seemed like such a nice smile that her hopes lifted, but when he glanced up and saw her watching him, it switched off so abruptly that Juliet felt as if she had been slapped. He straightened and took off his hat. ‘Mrs Laing?’

Her first impression was of a rangy, quiet-looking man, with a lean face, a cool mouth and cool grey eyes. No, not cool, Juliet corrected herself. Those eyes were cold, icy even, and something in their expression made her want to turn on her heel and bolt back into the homestead.

Mustering a smile from somewhere, she walked down the steps towards him instead. He was even taller than she had thought when she got close to him, and she was conscious of being at a disadvantage as she looked up at him. ‘Juliet, please,’ she said, and held out her hand. ‘You must be Cal Jamieson.’

‘Juliet, please,’ Cal mimicked her crystal-clear English voice to himself. It sounded just as it had on the telephone, so composed, so self-assured, with that nerve-grating suggestion of superiority, but otherwise she wasn’t at all as he had imagined her. That voice didn’t seem to belong to the girl who stood before him.

He hadn’t realised that she would be so young. She couldn’t be much more than twenty-five, Cal thought, eyeing her unsympathetically. Much too young to own a property like this. A station needed someone who knew the outback, not this girl with her brittle smile and her careful manners.

She was prettier than he had expected, too, Cal admitted grudgingly to himself. Very slender, almost thin, she had dark hair, exquisite cheekbones and wide eyes of so dark a blue they seemed almost purple. He might even have described her as beautiful if it hadn’t been for the bruised look about her. There were shadows under her eyes and she held herself warily. She reminded him of a racehorse, skittish and trembling with nerves before a big race. Cal didn’t have anything against racehorses, but they didn’t belong in the outback. This was brumby country, a place for tough, half-broken horses that could work. They might not be beautiful, but at least they were useful.

Looking at Juliet Laing, Cal doubted if she had ever been of use to anyone other than herself.

‘Yes, I’m Cal,’ he said in his deep, slow voice, and, because he had little choice, he took her outstretched hand. He had had plenty of time on the long drive from Brisbane to wonder if he was making a terrible mistake coming back to Wilparilla, but now that he had met Juliet for himself he was sure that he had done the right thing after all. This nervy, fragile-looking woman would never last out here. She would run back to England as soon as things got difficult and he would be back where he belonged at long last.

Her handshake was surprisingly firm, though. Cal looked down into her eyes and then wished he hadn’t. They were extraordinary eyes, the kind of eyes that could seriously interfere with a man’s breathing, and they held besides an expression that gave him pause. There was nothing weak or nervous about the look in Juliet’s eyes. It was steady and stubborn.

For a long moment they measured each other, and it seemed to Juliet that an unspoken challenge was issued between them. Quite what the challenge was, she couldn’t have said, but she knew that Cal Jamieson thought she didn’t belong here. Well, if he thought she was going to turn tail and run, he had another think coming!

‘Shall we talk on the verandah?’ she asked coolly.

Cal raised his brows. ‘Talk?’ He made it sound as if she had made an indecent proposal.

‘It wasn’t much of an interview on the phone,’ said Juliet, trying to keep the defensiveness from her voice.

‘It’s a little late for an interview, isn’t it?’ said Cal. ‘We agreed that I should come for a trial period as manager.’

What did he mean, we agreed? thought Juliet crossly. She had agreed to employ him on a trial basis.

‘I’ve been driving for the last four days to get here and do just that,’ he was saying, unaware of her mental interruption. ‘What happens if I don’t pass this “interview”? Do you expect me to turn round and go straight back to Brisbane?’

‘Of course not.’ Juliet set her teeth. This was going to be worse than she had thought. She hadn’t been imagining that undercurrent of hostility when she’d spoken to him on the phone. Not that he was aggressive. No, he just stood there looking calm and quiet and utterly implacable.

‘Look,’ she said, making a big effort to sound reasonable, ‘Pete Robbins has vouched for you, but all I know is that you’ve come from Brisbane and that you need a job. All you know about me is that I need a manager. Given that we’re going to be working so closely together, I think we should find out a little more about each other.’

He knew a lot more about her than that, Cal thought grimly. He knew that she and her husband had come out from England and bought this place on a whim. He knew that they’d alienated their neighbours, sacked the experienced stockmen and neglected the property he had worked so hard to build up, and that now, when her husband was dead and she had no reason to stay, she was stubbornly refusing all offers to buy the station from her. Holding out for more money, he decided in disgust, as if she didn’t have more than enough already. She was a spoilt, silly woman, and she was in his way.

Cal didn’t need to know any more about Juliet than that, just as she didn’t need to know exactly what he was doing here.

He would humour her for now, Cal thought as he shrugged an acceptance and followed Juliet up the steps to the verandah. Let her think that he was desperate for a job if that was what she wanted.

He sat down in one of the cane chairs and laid his hat on the floor, glad that Pete Robbins had warned him about the changes the Laings had made to the old homestead. Hugo Laing’s mad scheme had apparently been the talk of the district. Instead of pouring badly needed money into the property, he had squandered thousands on rebuilding the homestead from scratch. The idea had been to create the kind of luxurious accommodation that would attract a higher class of tourist, but as far as Cal knew no visitor had ever stayed in it.

The stark contrast between the pretentious style of the homestead and the state of the station, crumbling with neglect around it, made Cal angry, but in other ways he was glad. Seeing someone else living in the simple homestead he had shared with Sara would have been hard, and at least now he wouldn’t be confronted with the ghosts of the past whenever he came to the house—which wouldn’t, he hoped, be that often.

Now Cal looked at Juliet, who had sat on the other side of the cane table. There was an unstudied elegance about her that made her look as if she were posing for a lifestyle spread, in spite of her jeans and simple sand-coloured shirt.

‘What kind of things do you want to know?’ he asked her.

The bored resignation in his voice grated on Juliet’s nerves. He wasn’t even trying to be pleasant! She had envisaged a casual chat so that they could sum each other up, but Cal made it sound as if she was preparing an interrogation, and, of course, now that they were sitting down, she couldn’t think how to begin. She was so tired the whole time that even a simple conversation was beyond her.

‘Well, how long have you been in Brisbane, for instance?’ she asked at last, horribly conscious of how inane the question sounded.

Cal made no effort to disguise the fact that he thought so too. ‘Nearly four years.’

About the same time that she had been out here, Juliet thought. A lifetime. ‘What have you been doing there?’ she persevered, forcing herself to sound pleasant and relaxed, although something about the way Cal sat there looking completely at home was making her tense. This was her home, and he had no right to make it look as if he belonged there and she was the stranger.

Cal hesitated. ‘I had my own company,’ he said eventually, hoping that she wouldn’t ask any more. If she found out how successful it had been, she would wonder what he was doing looking for a job as a manager.

Juliet misinterpreted his hesitation. The company couldn’t have been very successful if he was so desperate for a job that he was prepared to come out here and work for her. He obviously didn’t want to talk about it, anyway.

‘Peter Robbins said that you were originally from this area,’ she said instead. ‘What made you go to Brisbane in the first place?’

‘Personal reasons,’ said Cal, taciturn.

‘So…er…how do you feel about coming back?’

He stared at her. ‘What do you mean, how do I feel?’

‘I mean, how do you feel?’ snapped Juliet. ‘Are you happy to be back? Are you sad to leave friends behind in the city? Are you worried about working for a woman?’ She sighed. ‘You’re not very forthcoming, are you?’

What did she think this was, a cocktail party? ‘I don’t see that it matters,’ said Cal, equally exasperated. ‘If I were looking for a station manager, I wouldn’t waste my time asking him how he felt, I’d want to know what he could do. If we have to go through this farce, why don’t you try asking me something relevant?’

‘I’ve been trying to find out something about your experience,’ said Juliet angrily.

‘Experience of what?’ he asked with an impatient shrug. ‘A station manager’s got to be able to do more than sit in an office and manage.’

‘OK,’ she said, tight-lipped. ‘What would you ask, since you seem to know so much about it?’

‘If I was employing a manager? I’d want to know if he could fly a plane and drive a road-train. Could he build a dam and fix a generator and sink a bore? Did he understand accounts? And that’s before all the obvious stuff like mustering, roping cattle, catching bulls, castrating, branding, dehorning, building fences—’

‘All right, all right!’ Juliet interrupted him. ‘You’ve made your point. Do I take it you can do all that?’ she went on, not without some sarcasm, and he looked her straight in the eye.

‘You’ll find that out over the next three months, won’t you?’

Juliet’s dark blue eyes kindled dangerously, and her chin went up as she glared back at him. ‘I don’t see any point in having a trial at all if your attitude doesn’t change,’ she said sharply. ‘You have made absolutely no effort to be co-operative, or even courteous, since you arrived. Instead you’ve made it plain that you think I know nothing about running a station.’

Cal opened his mouth, but she swept on before he had a chance to speak. ‘Well, that may be true, but one thing I do know is that I’m not prepared to pay good money for a manager who’s going to talk to me as if I’m stupid! I’m an intelligent woman trying to deal with an extremely difficult situation. I want a manager who can build this station up, run it efficiently and take the time to explain to me what he’s doing and why, so that I can learn eventually to run it myself.

‘Now, the last manager here couldn’t be bothered to do that. He made the mistake of thinking that my opinion didn’t count,’ Juliet went on grimly, ‘so I sacked him.’ She fixed Cal with a look, and he was annoyed to find himself noticing how the temper flashing in her eyes had banished that wary, nervous look, leaving her suddenly vivid. Roused out of her brittle poise, she was a force to be reckoned with—and more attractive than he had realised.

‘And I’ll sack you,’ she was saying, ‘if you forget for one minute that I’m the boss round here. This is my property. I’m prepared to pay whatever it takes for someone to help me, but I’m sure as hell not going to pay to be patronised!’

The expression in Cal’s grey eyes was hard to read. If he felt embarrassed or ashamed or intimidated by her outburst, he was certainly giving no sign of it. He wasn’t the kind of man she could imagine being intimidated by anything, Juliet thought with an inward sigh.

‘I just thought we should know where we stood,’ she finished lamely, when Cal didn’t say anything. ‘It’s better to be clear about things from the beginning.’

Cal looked at her. ‘The only thing that’s clear to me is that you want a manager, a miracle-worker, a slave and a teacher all rolled into one,’ he said sardonically. ‘I could tell just driving along the track how much work needs to be done here. If I’m going to run this place properly, I won’t have time to explain everything to you.’

‘I’m not asking for a minute by minute account,’ said Juliet. ’I won’t be able to spend much time with you with two small children to look after. But I want to know what’s going on, and I want to learn what I can.’

‘And when you’ve learnt what you can?’

‘Then you’ll be out of a job,’ she said with a direct look. ‘But I’m not a fool. I know how long that will take me, so the job is secure for a while yet, if that’s what’s worrying you.’

It wasn’t security that was worrying Cal, it was the realisation that Juliet Laing was going to be trickier to deal with than he had anticipated. He had expected a spoilt, helpless widow, all ready to be persuaded—in the nicest possible way—that her only option was to sell up and go back to England where she belonged, but the more he looked at Juliet, the less persuadable she seemed. There was a wilful set to that lovely mouth, a stubborn tilt to her chin, a steadiness in the deep blue eyes that was almost unsettling.

Well, he didn’t have a reputation for handling difficult horses for nothing, Cal thought. At least he was here, in the best position to influence her to give up and to step forward with the money to buy his station back when she finally accepted the inevitable. He would have to be careful not to antagonise her too much at this stage. It might go against the grain to kow-tow to a woman like Juliet Laing, but she had already sacked one manager, and he wouldn’t put it past her to replace him with another man who might be quick to spot the advantages of the situation. Attractive, single women with half a million acres at their disposal weren’t that easy to come by. Who was to say some other manager might not decide that he might as well make his position permanent by marrying Juliet and getting a cattle station thrown in as part of the bargain?

Cal’s mouth set into a hard line at the thought. He would never get Wilparilla back if that happened. No, he would have to grit his teeth and take Juliet’s orders for now, but he would make sure she understood how hopeless her situation was, and with any luck she would soon be gone.

‘All right,’ he said at last. ‘As long as you don’t want a detailed report in triplicate every day, I’ll let you know what’s going on.’

Anyone would think he was doing her a favour! Juliet suppressed a sigh. It was hardly the most gracious acceptance of her terms, but she suspected that it was all she was going to get. ‘OK,’ she said.

‘So, have I passed the interview?’ Cal asked, and she stiffened at the sarcastic edge to his voice. She would have loved to have told him to go back to Brisbane, but she was desperate for a manager, and Cal knew it. It could take weeks to find another manager, and she couldn’t afford to wait any longer. The station was already falling apart before her eyes as it was. And although he might rub her up the wrong way, there was no denying that he looked reassuringly capable and competent. Now he would have to prove it.

‘You’ve passed the interview, yes,’ she told him with a cool look. ‘We’ll see how things work out over the next three months. Needless to say, the trial period we agreed works both ways. If you don’t like working for me, you’re free to leave whenever you like.’

So she didn’t think he’d last the course, did she? Cal smiled grimly to himself as he picked up his hat and got to his feet. Juliet Laing might be tougher than she looked, but they would see who left Wilparilla first!

‘Whatever you say,’ he drawled, and then added after a pause that made the word sound somehow insulting, ‘boss.’

Cal had evidently decided to put an end to the discussion, thought Juliet, vaguely resentful, but as she could hardly order him to sit down again, she stood up too and forced a smile.

‘Now we’ve got over the formalities, would you like a beer?’

He settled his hat on his head. ‘I think we’d better go and settle in first.’

‘We?’ said Juliet idly, thinking that he must have brought his dog with him.

Cal nodded over to the dusty four-wheel drive parked in the shade of a huge gum tree. ‘My daughter’s with me,’ he said.

For a moment Juliet wondered if she had heard right. ‘Your daughter? You didn’t say anything about bringing a daughter!’

‘I didn’t see what difference it would make to you,’ Cal told her, quite unperturbed. He gestured out at the distant horizon. ‘It’s not as if you don’t have the room.’

‘But…how old is she?’

‘Nine.’

Juliet stared at him. ‘You can’t bring a nine year-old girl out to a place like this! What about her mother?’

‘My wife died six years ago.’

‘I’m very sorry,’ said Juliet, thrown by the bald statement, ‘but it still doesn’t seem a very suitable arrangement. Wouldn’t she have been better off staying in Brisbane?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Natalie stays with me.’

Juliet refrained from pointing out that in that case he should have stayed in Brisbane too. ‘What were you planning to do with her while you were out during the day?’ she asked instead.

‘You said yourself that this is just a trial. She can come with me to begin with, and if it works out I’ll arrange for my own housekeeper to keep an eye on her while she does her schoolwork. Natalie’s a sensible child, she knows what life is like out here.’

‘And am I expected to accommodate all these extra people?’ Juliet demanded angrily.

If rumour was correct, there were enough rooms in the homestead for three times as many people, but Cal had no intention of staying with her. ‘There’s a perfectly adequate manager’s house,’ he said. ‘Or so Pete Robbins told me when he said you were looking for a manager,’ he added quickly, before Juliet could wonder how he was so well-informed about the accommodation.

‘There is a house used by managers in the past,’ Juliet agreed, ‘but it’s in no fit state for a child, and I doubt if you’d get a housekeeper anywhere near it!’

Cal frowned. ‘What do you mean? You didn’t mention a problem about the house on the phone.’

‘That’s when I thought you would be on your own. I’m afraid the last manager left it in a terrible state, and I haven’t had a chance to go and clear it up. I didn’t think you’d mind sleeping in the stockmen’s quarters until then, but you can’t take a little girl there. Go and see for yourself if you don’t believe me,’ she said, when Cal looked unconvinced.

‘I will,’ he said grimly. It had never occurred to him that there would be a problem with the manager’s house. It was small, just two bedrooms, and not what Natalie was used to, but he had only ever thought of it as a temporary measure until Juliet sold him the station and they could move back into the homestead. Now what was he going to do?

‘You’d better bring…Natalie, is it?…over,’ said Juliet, as if answering his unspoken question. ‘She can stay with me while you go and look at the house.’

Cal hesitated, then nodded briefly. ‘All right,’ he said.

Natalie had short curly brown hair, brown eyes and a shy, solemn face. Juliet smiled at her. ‘Hello, Natalie. Welcome to Wilparilla.’

Natalie murmured a shy greeting, and Juliet took her over to meet the twins. ‘The grubby one on the left is Kit,’ she told the little girl, ‘and the even grubbier one beside him is Andrew. They’re nearly three.’

‘How do you tell them apart?’ whispered Natalie, eyes wide as she looked from one to the other, and Juliet smiled.

‘I always know which one is which, but it’s difficult for everybody else. I make sure they’re wearing different clothes, so that makes it easier. Kit’s got the blue top on and Andrew’s is yellow.’ She glanced down at Natalie. ‘You must be thirsty after your long drive. Would you like a drink while Dad goes to look at the house?’

Kit scrambled up at that. ‘Mummy, my want a drink!’

‘Please may I have a drink,’ Juliet corrected him automatically.

‘Please my want a drink,’ said Kit obediently, and Natalie giggled behind her hand as Juliet sighed and settled for that.

‘Come on, Andrew, you can have a drink too,’ she said and turned to tell Cal how to find the manager’s house. But he had ruffled Natalie’s hair in farewell and was already striding away. She watched him for a moment, puzzled by the way he seemed to know exactly where he was going, but then shrugged and forgot about it as she ushered the three children through the screen door.

Natalie had lost her shyness entirely with the twins by the time Cal came back. She was sitting at the kitchen table showing them how to blow bubbles in their drinks when he walked into the kitchen. Juliet, leaning by the sink and watching the children indulgently, straightened abruptly as he appeared and her heart gave an odd jump.

Cal was tight-lipped with anger. ‘The house is disgusting,’ he said furiously, without any preliminaries. ‘I wouldn’t ask a dog to live in there! How was it allowed to get into that kind of state?’

‘I never even went there until last week.’ Juliet was immediately on the defensive. ‘Hugo—my husband—always dealt with the men.’ Not that he had been around to do much dealing, she remembered bitterly, and when he had been there all he had done was set the men’s backs up, until all the good ones had left and only the men who didn’t care were left at Wilparilla.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said helplessly, ashamed but tired, too, of apologising for Hugo’s mistakes.

Cal took an angry turn around the kitchen. ‘Natalie can’t stay there,’ he said. ‘And the men’s quarters aren’t much better. I checked.’

‘That’s what I tried to tell you before,’ Juliet pointed out. She paused, desperately trying to think of an alternative, but there simply wasn’t anywhere else for a child to go. ‘Look, I think the best thing you can do is to stay here at the homestead,’ she said eventually. ‘There are plenty of spare rooms.’

Cal hesitated, raking his fingers through his brown hair in frustration. The last thing he wanted was to be beholden to Juliet Laing, and if it had been just him he would have slept in his swag under the stars, but Natalie couldn’t do that. He didn’t have any choice, he realised heavily.

‘Thank you,’ he said with evident reluctance, adding quickly, ‘It will just be until we can fix up the house. We’ll go as soon as we can.’

CHAPTER TWO

‘THERE’S beer in the fridge if you’d like one,’ Juliet said rather hesitantly as Cal came in from unloading the car. She knew that the offer sounded rather ungracious, but Cal hadn’t been particularly gracious about staying in the homestead. It didn’t seem to have occurred to him that she might not be that thrilled at the thought of sharing her home with him either.

If Cal resented her lukewarm tone, he gave no sign of it. Nodding his thanks, he took a bottle from the fridge and pulled off the top. Juliet, preparing vegetables in the sink for the children’s supper, tried not to watch him, but her eyes kept sliding sideways to where he stood, leaning casually against the worktop, his head tipped back as he drank thirstily.

She hadn’t thought to ask him how old he was, but she guessed that he was in his thirties. He had the toughness and solidity of maturity, but his face wore a guarded expression that made it hard to be sure of anything about him. He could hardly have been more different from Hugo, Juliet reflected. Hugo had been volatile, swinging from breezy charm to sullen rage with bewildering speed. Cal was, by contrast, coolly self-contained. It was impossible to imagine him shouting or waving his arms around wildly. Even the way he stood there and drank his beer suggested an economy of movement, a sort of controlled competence that was at once reassuring and faintly intimidating.

His presence seemed to fill the kitchen, and Juliet was suddenly, overwhelmingly aware of him as a man: of the muscles working in his throat, of the brown fingers gripped around the bottle, of the dust on his boots and the creases round his eyes and the coiled, quiet strength of his lean body. She couldn’t tear her eyes off him. It was as if she had never seen a man before, had never been struck by the sheer physicality of a male body before that moment.

Cal was unaware of her gaze at first. The beer was very cold. To Cal, hot, frustrated and tired after a long day, it tasted like the best beer he had ever had. He lowered the bottle to thank Juliet properly, only to find that she was watching him with a dark, disturbingly blue gaze, and as their eyes met he was conscious of a strange tightening of the air between them, of an unexpected tingling at the base of his spine.

Juliet felt it too. He saw her eyes widen, and a faint flush rose in her cheeks before she turned away and concentrated almost fiercely on peeling a potato.

Oddly shaken by that tiny exchange of glances, Cal levered himself away from the units and, a faint frown between his brows, took his beer over to the table where Natalie was entertaining the twins. She was normally a shy, quiet child, more comfortable with animals than people, but she had obviously taken to the twins immediately, and her face was lit up in a way that he hadn’t seen for years now.

Not since they had left Wilparilla, in fact. Cal shook off the unsettling effect Juliet’s eyes had had on him and sat down next to his daughter, remembering how she had wept into her pillow and begged to be taken home. He had done the right thing bringing her back, even if things weren’t working out quite as he had planned.

‘Dad!’ Natalie tugged at his sleeve. ‘Show Kit and Andrew that trick you do.’

At the sink, Juliet could hear the noise behind her, and she turned, potato in one hand, peeler in the other, to see the twins convulsed with laughter, Natalie giggling and Cal, straight-faced, turning his hand back and forth as if looking for something. ‘Again!’ shouted Kit, clambering excitedly over Cal as if he had known him all his life.

Juliet’s smile was rather twisted as she watched them. At times like these it hurt to realise how much the boys missed in not having a father. Did Cal ache this way when he saw his daughter without a mother?

Natalie seemed a nice little girl. She obviously adored her father, but from what Juliet had seen of him so far she thought he must be a formidable figure for her. He had been dour, if not downright hostile, ever since he had arrived. Not that the children seemed to find him nearly as intimidating as she did, Juliet had to admit. They were still squealing with laughter as he confounded them each time with whatever he was concealing in his hands.

It was then that Cal, unable to keep a straight face any longer, gave in and smiled at the twins’ delight, and Juliet nearly dropped her potato. Who would have thought that he could smile like that? Who could have guessed that cool mouth could crease his face with such charm, that the steely look could dissolve into warmth and humour, that the cold grey eyes could crinkle so fascinatingly?

Juliet was disturbed to discover how attractive Cal was when he smiled. She didn’t want him to be attractive. Somehow it was easier to think that he was always cold and hostile than to know that he was nice to children, and to wonder why it was that he would never smile at her the way he smiled at them.

As if to prove her point, Cal looked up, and his smile faded as he saw the peculiar look on Juliet’s face. Probably waiting to point out that she had employed him as a manager, not a children’s entertainer, he thought with an edge of bitterness.

He drained his beer and pushed back his chair. ‘When do the men finish for the day?’ he asked Juliet, ignoring the children’s disappointment. If she wanted an efficient manager, that was what he would be.

‘About now.’ As if suddenly realising that she was still clutching a potato and peeler, Juliet turned back to the sink. Why should she care if he wouldn’t smile at her? she asked herself, refusing to admit that she was hurt by the way his attitude changed so completely whenever he looked at her.

‘I think I heard the ute go by a few minutes ago,’ she added, glad to hear that her own voice sounded just as cool as his. ‘They should be back in their quarters by now.’

‘How many men are down there?’

‘Four at the last count.’ Juliet dropped the last potato in the saucepan and filled it with water. ‘I haven’t had much to do with them. The last manager brought them in when he’d succeeded in getting rid of all the experienced stockmen who were here when we arrived. His wife used to cook for them. I offered to give them meals up here when she left, but they obviously didn’t want to sit down with me every evening, so they take it in turns to do their own cooking.’

Juliet tried hard to keep the loneliness and rejection out of her voice. It had been so long since she had had anyone to talk to that she would have welcomed the company of even the dour and taciturn men who so clearly disliked her. ‘I only ever see them when one of them comes up to ask for more flour or sugar or whatever. They don’t seem to require much in the way of fresh vegetables,’ she added with a would-be careless shrug.

Cal frowned as he set the empty bottle on the side. ‘Then who tells them what to do every day?’

‘No one,’ said Juliet bitterly. ‘I didn’t have much choice but to tell them to carry on with whatever they would normally be doing until the new manager arrived, but I know they thought I was stupid to have sacked the last man in the first place. For all I know they’ve just been lying around for the last couple of weeks.’

She set the pan on the cooker and turned on the element, then wiped her hands on her apron, trying to make Cal understand. ‘I’m pretty much tied to the house with the twins,’ she said. ‘I can’t leave them here on their own, and it’s too far to take them with me if I wanted to go and check up on the men—even if I knew where they were and what they were supposed to be doing in the first place.’

‘You’ve been here over three years,’ Cal pointed out. What he had seen of Wilparilla so far hadn’t left him in any mood for sympathy. He had sold a thriving property and had come back to find that all his hard work had been thrown away and the station left to crumble into disrepair. ‘You must have had some idea.’

‘My husband never involved me in the station side of things.’ Hugo had never involved her in anything, thought Juliet dully. She looked down at her hands, unable to meet Cal’s eyes directly. ‘When we first came here, he was taken up with the idea of turning Wilparilla into a place that would attract the kind of tourists who want to see the outback but who want a bit of luxury too. There was a nice little homestead here before, but Hugo said it wouldn’t be big enough or smart enough, so he knocked it down and built this one.’

Juliet looked around her at the state-of-the-art kitchen, with its view out onto the wide, shady verandah that ran completely round the house. Everything had been done with a designer’s style, but it still made her angry to think of how much money Hugo had poured into the house when the station around it was neglected and falling inexorably apart. She had tried to remonstrate with Hugo, but he had brushed her objections aside. It was his money, he had said, and he knew what he was doing.

‘I went to Darwin to have the twins in hospital, and I ended up staying there nearly a year while the homestead was being rebuilt. I wanted to come back earlier, but Hugo said I would find it impossible with two babies.’

Juliet stopped as she realised that the bitterness in her voice was telling Cal a little too much about the state of her marriage. ‘The point is that I haven’t been able to spend the last three years learning about Wilparilla,’ she told him. ‘Even after I came back, I had my hands full with the twins. They were only just two when Hugo was killed last year. Looking after two toddlers doesn’t leave you much time to learn how to run a cattle station.

‘Everything’s so far away out here,’ she sighed. ‘It takes so long to get anywhere. There’s no toddler group when it takes two hours to get to the nearest town, and no handy babysitter when your neighbours live eighty miles away. I haven’t even had the time to make the most basic of social contacts.’ The blue eyes were defensive as she looked back at Cal. ‘I had no choice but to rely on the manager Hugo had appointed.’

Cal’s mouth turned disapprovingly down at the corners. ‘Judging by what I’ve seen so far, he wasn’t much of a manager,’ he said.

‘I know,’ snapped Juliet. ‘I’ve got eyes. I only see a tiny fraction of the property, but even that looks run down. But I couldn’t do anything about it when Hugo was alive, and when he died…’ She trailed off. How could she explain what a terrible financial and emotional mess Hugo had left behind him? ‘Well, it wasn’t a very good year,’ she went on after a moment. ‘It was all I could do just to keep things as they were.’

It was the first time Cal had thought what it might have been like for Juliet since her husband’s death, and he was conscious of a stirring of shame that he had never considered the matter from her point of view. It couldn’t have been easy for her, isolated, and far from home, bringing up two small children alone.

She could have sold, though, he reminded himself. He had offered a good price for the station. She could have gone back to England a rich woman and made things easy on herself, but she hadn’t. She had chosen the hard way.

‘I’ll go and have a word with the men now,’ he said, exasperated by the momentary sympathy he had felt for Juliet. ‘They’re going to start work tomorrow, and they’d better be ready for it.’

‘Should I come and introduce you?’ Juliet asked doubtfully

‘There’s no need for that,’ said Cal, a grim look about his mouth as he thought about the men who had let his property fall into disrepair. ‘I’ll introduce myself.’

He didn’t say anything about Natalie, so when he had gone Juliet gave her something to eat with the boys. She could hardly leave the child just sitting there, and judging by the way Natalie gobbled it all up she was starving. Afterwards, Natalie helped her wash up, drying each plate with painstaking care.

‘You’re very well trained, Natalie!’ said Juliet, keeping a wary eye on a glass.

‘Dad always makes me do chores,’ Natalie admitted with something of a sigh. ‘I have to dry up and sweep the floor and tidy my bedroom every day.’

‘Oh? Is he very strict?’

‘Sometimes,’ said Natalie. ‘And sometimes he’s funny. We do good things together.’

Hugo had never wanted to do anything with his sons. ‘Does he look after you all by himself?’ asked Juliet, uneasily aware that she shouldn’t be pumping the child, but, given Cal’s uncooperative attitude, it seemed to be the only way she would ever find out anything about him.

‘Most of the time,’ said Natalie, untroubled by any fine sense of ethics. ‘We used to have housekeepers, but they all fell in love with Dad so we don’t have them any more. Dad doesn’t like it when they do that.’

‘I can imagine,’ said Juliet dryly. All those housekeepers must have been brave women to fall in love with a man like Cal Jamieson. He wasn’t exactly encouraging. But perhaps he had smiled at them…

She pulled herself up short. Was that why Cal was so hostile? she wondered. Was he afraid she was going to be tiresome and fall in love with him as well? Juliet felt quite ruffled at the very idea. She had no intention of falling in love again, least of all with a man who patently disliked her and was one of her employees to boot! Love had hurt too much the first time round. Juliet had learnt the hard way how fragile her heart was, and she wasn’t going to let it be broken again.

Natalie helped her bathe the twins and put them to bed, and then, when there was still no sign of Cal, Juliet let her choose where she would like to sleep. Puzzled, she watched as Natalie looked in every room, as if expecting to find something. ‘Why not have this room next to the twins?’ she suggested, when Natalie only looked disappointed. She pointed at the door opposite. ‘Dad can sleep across the hall there.’

‘OK.’

Juliet made up the bed, and helped her unpack her suitcase. Natalie took out a framed photograph of Cal and a pretty blonde girl holding a toddler on her knee. ‘That’s Dad, and that’s me when I was a baby, and that’s Mum,’ she said, showing Juliet the picture.

‘She was very pretty, wasn’t she?’ said Juliet, and, when Natalie nodded, added gently, ‘Do you miss her?’

Natalie considered. ‘I don’t remember her very well,’ she said honestly. ‘But Dad says she was very nice so I think I do.’

She could only have been three when her mother had died—the same age as the twins. Poor Natalie, thought Juliet. Poor Cal.

She wondered again about him as she made up the bed. She didn’t know what to make of him. He had seemed so taciturn and hostile at first, but he was so different when he played with the children, and Natalie had made him sound like a different man again. It was odd, Juliet thought idly, how clearly she could picture him already, almost as if she had always known those cool, quiet eyes and that cool, cool mouth.

Smoothing down the bottom sheet, Juliet found herself imagining him lying there, lean and brown and tautly muscled. Her palm tingled, as if she were running her hand over his skin instead, and she swallowed. When Natalie cried ‘Dad!’ she spun round as if she had been caught in the act itself.

‘Dad, look, we’re making a bed for you!’

‘So I see,’ said Cal, but his grey eyes rested on Juliet’s flushed face, and he raised one eyebrow at her guilty expression. She was sure that he could see exactly what she had been thinking about.

‘We…I just thought…since you weren’t here…’ Juliet realised that she was floundering and forced herself to stop. This was her house and she had a perfect right to be here. She didn’t have to explain anything to anyone, least of all to Cal, who was (a) her employee, and (b) late.

‘It’s very kind of you,’ said Cal coldly, ‘but there was no need. I’ll finish it off.’

Juliet felt dismissed. ‘I’ve…er, I wasn’t sure what you wanted to do about eating, but I’ve made supper if you’d like to eat later,’ she said awkwardly.

‘Thank you.’

He didn’t say ‘you may go’, but that was what it felt like. He stepped out of the doorway and Juliet sidled past him and slunk back down to the kitchen. Behind her, she could hear Natalie excitedly telling him about Kit’s bedtime story, and how Andrew had splashed in the bath, and she felt a great wash of loneliness sweep through her. She had no one to tell about her day. How long was it since she had had anyone to talk to in the evenings?

A long time.

She had hoped that she would have been able to make some friends amongst her neighbours after Hugo had died, but everyone lived so far away, and she soon discovered that he had left her a legacy of distrust and disapproval. On the few occasions she had made the laborious journey to the nearest town, her attempts to be friendly had been met with politeness but no warmth, and she had been too tired and depressed to persevere. Rebuffed, she had retreated into herself, and relied on letters and phone calls to friends in England for support instead. She had told herself that she wasn’t lonely as long as she had the twins, but she had been.

In an effort to cheer herself up, Juliet showered and changed into a cool cotton dress. She had bought it in London years ago, and the deep turquoise colour always made her feel more positive. Kit and Andrew were happy and healthy, she reminded herself, and with Cal as manager she had taken the first step towards saving Wilparilla. That was what mattered.

Her equilibrium restored, she made her way back to the kitchen, where she found Cal looking out through the windows towards the creek. He swung round at the sound of her footsteps and stared at her. Juliet had the oddest feeling that he had forgotten her existence until that moment.

Cal was, in fact, thrown more than he wanted to admit by the sight of Juliet standing in the doorway. The kitchen had been very quiet when he had come in, and he had been standing there, remembering the simple room it been before all the polished wood and gleaming chrome. He had spent long, long evenings alone in here after Sara had died, while Natalie slept down the corridor, torn between his instinct to stay at Wilparilla and the promise he had made to his dead wife.

Now, suddenly, he was no longer alone, and Juliet was there, warm and vibrant in a blue dress, but with that wary look on her face. Irrelevantly, he found himself wondering what she would look like if she relaxed and smiled for a change.

He lifted his hand to show the bottle. ‘I helped myself to a beer. I hope you don’t mind.’ He thought his voice sounded odd, but Juliet didn’t seem to notice anything wrong.

‘Of course not,’ she said, very formal.

There was a pause. ‘Is Natalie in bed?’ she asked at last, and Cal nodded.

‘She’s tired. It’s been a long journey for her.’ He hesitated. ‘Thank you for looking after her. She seems to have had a good time.’

’She was very helpful,’ said Juliet. ‘She’s a nice little girl.’ She would have liked to ask about Natalie’s schooling. Presumably she would do her lessons with the School of the Air. But Juliet suspected that Cal would interpret any questions as criticism, and, since they seemed to be being polite to each other for now, it was a shame to spoil it.

Instead, she went over to the oven and took out the supper. ‘How did you get on with the men?’ she asked as she set it on the table.

Cal pulled out a chair and sat down. ‘I think they know who’s boss now,’ he said, grimly remembering the scene in the stockmen’s quarters. He had been down to the stockyards before he went to see them, and had been so angry at the way everything had been neglected and allowed to fall into disrepair that he had been in no mood to make allowances.

‘And who is boss?’ enquired Juliet in a frosty voice as she took a seat opposite him.

‘As far as they’re concerned, I am. As far as I’m concerned, you are.’ Cal met her look evenly. ‘Is that a problem?’

‘Why is it so hard for them to accept that this is my property?’ she asked, disgruntled. ‘Is it because I’m a woman? Because I’m English?’

‘It’s because you don’t know anything about running a cattle station,’ said Cal flatly. ‘You admitted as much yourself. Yes, you’ve got a bit of paper that says you own Wilparilla, but these men aren’t interested in that.’

He nodded his head in the direction of the stockmen’s quarters. ‘They’re only going to work if they know that the person giving them orders understands what they’re doing, and in this case that’s me. Now, you can go down and give them a little lecture on property rights if you like, but you’re paying me to get them organised and get some work done on this station again, and I’ll only be able to do that if they think of me as boss for the time being. If you’re not happy with that, you’d better say so now.’

‘I don’t have very much choice but to be happy with it, do I?’ said Juliet a little bitterly.

Cal just shook his head in exasperation and applied himself to his meal. In a way, he was glad she was being unreasonable. It was much easier to find her irritating, to remember how perversely she was standing in way of all he wanted, than to notice how smooth and warm her skin looked, how her dark hair gleamed in light, how even when her lips were pressed together in a cross line, like now, her mouth hinted at a fiery, passionate nature beneath that brittle cool.

Why was she so obsessed about being boss anyway? She had no idea about Wilparilla. She didn’t know the land. She didn’t know the creeks and gullies the way he did. She had never ridden all day through the heat and the dust, or slept out under the stars while the cattle shifted their feet restlessly in the darkness.

She would never be the boss of Wilparilla, Cal vowed to himself. She didn’t belong on a cattle station. All she knew was this homestead. She probably wouldn’t even recognise a cow if she saw one, he thought contemptuously. Look at her! Sitting there like some exotic bird that had lost its way and found itself in the desert instead of the hot-house environment where it belonged. What was the point of wearing a dress that curved over her breast like that? A dress that let him glimpse the hollows at the base of her throat and made him wonder about the soft material whispering over her skin as she moved?

‘You don’t like me, do you?’ His face didn’t give much away, but Juliet could feel his dislike as clearly as if he had stood up and shouted it.

Cal took a pull of his beer and looked across the table at her. He might have known she would prove to be one of those women who wanted to be up front about their feelings. No, he didn’t like her, but he was damned if he was going to indulge her by admitting it. She would only start asking ‘why not?’ and before they knew what had happened they would be picking over emotions as if any of it mattered.

On the other hand, why should he make things easy for her by denying it? ‘I don’t think this is the right place for you,’ he temporised at last.

‘Why not?’

He had known that was coming! ‘I would have thought it was obvious,’ he said, irritated at having fallen into the same old trap. Why did women always have to know the reason? Why couldn’t they just accept things for what they were?

‘Not to me,’ said Juliet, who had hoped to put Cal out of countenance and was annoyed to find that he didn’t even have the grace to look embarrassed at being confronted with his hostility.

Cal sighed. Well, if she was so anxious to know what he thought, he would tell her. ‘This is a working cattle station. Life out here is rough and dirty. It’s not a place where you put on a pretty dress and pretend you’ll never have to get mud under your fingernails.’

‘You’ve had a shower and changed your clothes,’ Juliet pointed out, dangerously sweet.

‘Yes, but not into the kind of clothes I’d wear to a smart restaurant.’

‘So I’m not allowed to wear anything but torn jeans and a checked shirt, is that it?’

Cal looked impatient. ‘It’s not a question of allowing,’ he said irritably. ‘I’m just saying that you’re not wearing the right clothes if you want to belong.’

‘But I do belong,’ said Juliet, pushing her plate aside. ‘This is my house,’ she told him deliberately, ‘and I can wear whatever I like in it. I advise you not to forget that.’

The haughty note in her voice made Cal’s lips tighten. It was almost as if she knew how much he hated her reminding him that Wilparilla belonged to her, and was taunting him deliberately. Yes, it had been his choice to sell, but the Laings hadn’t cared for the land. He was the one who had built Wilparilla up into a successful station, and in Cal’s heart it was still his.

Across the table, his eyes met Juliet’s challenging gaze. ‘I don’t think there’s much chance of me forgetting that,’ he said, and his voice was very cold.

They finished the meal in silence, constrained on Juliet’s part, apparently unconcerned on his. Afterwards, she had half expected him to make his excuses and leave, but instead he found a tea-towel and without being asked began to dry the dishes as she washed up.

It was strange for Juliet to have someone to help. She wasn’t used to anyone else being with her in the kitchen. Few people came out to the station, and anyone with business on the station had eaten with the manager and stayed in the stockmen’s quarters. It was certainly quicker with Cal there, but Juliet half wished that he had left her to do it on her own. She was very aware of him standing beside her, not saying anything, looking through the window at the darkness, absorbed in his own thoughts, not caring if she was there or not. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see his hands moving, unhurried and competent, and she found herself watching them as if fascinated. They were brown and strong, and there were fine golden hairs at his wrist.

He wasn’t handsome, Juliet told herself. Not handsome in the way Hugo had been, anyway. Really, he was quite ordinary. Brown hair, grey eyes, nothing special.

There was something implacable about him, though. Something hard and strong and steady. A quiet coldness that mesmerised and unnerved her at the same time. Beneath her lashes, Juliet’s eyes rested on his mouth. That wasn’t the mouth of a cold man, she found herself thinking, and she remembered how he had smiled at the twins. The memory snaked down her spine, and something shifted deep inside her so that she jerked her gaze away.

She tried to concentrate on how obvious he had made his distaste, but all she could think about was him lying in the bed she had made, his long brown body bare against the cool sheet. She could imagine it so clearly that she sucked in her breath, and the tiny sound made Cal turn his head to find her eyes wide and dark and startled, as if she had just thought of something shocking.

‘What is it?’ he asked.

‘Nothing.’ Juliet’s fingers trembled as she pulled out the plug and made a big deal of rinsing out the sink. She had to get a grip of herself! ‘That is…’ She stopped. No, that wasn’t a good idea.

‘What?’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

Cal frowned irritably. If she had something to say, why didn’t she get on with it? ‘What doesn’t?’

Driven into a corner, Juliet wiped her hands on a tea-towel and wished she had never opened her mouth. But Cal obviously wasn’t going to let it drop, and maybe it needed saying after all.

‘I was just thinking that it might be a good idea if we established a few ground rules.’ She pushed her hair behind her ears, absurdly nervous for some reason.

He looked at her with that infuriatingly unreadable expression. ‘Ground rules?’

‘Yes. I mean, we’re going to be living together until we can get the manager’s house cleaned up, so perhaps we should agree a few things now.’

‘What sort of things?’

‘Well,’ she said, ‘I presume you don’t want to cook separately, so we need to decide about meals, that kind of thing and…well, you know…how we ensure that we both have some privacy,’ she finished lamely. It had seemed so sensible when she started, but under Cal’s dispassionate gaze she found herself faltering for some reason.

‘You’re very keen on rules, aren’t you?’ he said sardonically, and she flushed and lifted her chin.

‘Sometimes they save awkwardness.’

‘I don’t see what’s awkward about sharing a few meals.’

‘I didn’t just mean that,’ said Juliet. ‘I meant the situation generally.’

‘What situation?’ asked Cal, exasperated.

‘You know what I mean!’ she flared. He was being deliberately obtuse! ‘The fact is that the two of us will be alone together here for much of the time.’

‘Ah!’ he exclaimed, suddenly enlightened—as if he hadn’t known all along exactly what she was talking about, Juliet thought sourly. ‘You want some rules to make sure I don’t take advantage of you, is that it?’

‘Yes…no!’ she corrected herself frantically as Cal raised an eyebrow. ‘Of course not,’ she said more calmly. ‘All I’m trying to say is that we’re both adults, both single. If we don’t acknowledge that now, I can see a situation arising where we might…might…’ She could feel herself floundering again and wished she’d never opened her mouth. ‘Well, we might…might wonder…’

‘Might wonder what it would be like if I kissed you?’ Cal suggested in a hatefully calm voice, but she was too relieved to have the sentence completed for her to resent him.

‘That kind of thing, yes.’

She was standing by the cooker in her turquoise dress, hugging her arms together self-consciously and wearing a defensive expression that made her look very young. Cal looked at her thoughtfully for a moment, then laid his tea-towel over the back of a chair.

‘Let’s find out now,’ he said, coming over to Juliet.

She looked at him blankly. ‘Find what out?’

‘What it would be like if I kissed you.’ He took her hands and unfolded her arms so impersonally that he had taken hold of her waist before Juliet had quite realised what was happening. ‘Then we won’t need to wonder,’ he explained briskly, drawing her towards him, ‘and we won’t need any rules.’

And with that he bent his head and kissed her.

Juliet’s hands came up quite instinctively to clutch at the sleeves above his elbows for support as his mouth came down on hers and the floor seemed to drop away beneath her feet.

It was a hard, punishing kiss, a kiss meant to teach her a lesson. Juliet knew that, but she was unprepared for the searing response that shot through her at the feel of his lips and his hands hard against her. It seemed to leap into life, jolting between them like electricity, at once shocking and dangerously exciting, so that the kiss which Cal had intended to be so brief somehow took on a life of its own and he tightened his arms around Juliet, moulding her against him as her lips parted beneath his.

Cal slid one hand up to the nape of her neck, tangling his fingers in the silky hair. He had forgotten how she exasperated him, forgotten her stupid rules, forgotten everything but how warm and soft and pliant she felt in his arms. Caught off-guard by the piercing sweetness of her response, Cal was in the middle of gathering her closer and deepening his kiss when the realisation of just how close they both were to losing control stopped him in his tracks as effectively as a bucket of cold water.

Literally dropping Juliet back to earth, he stepped away from her and took a deep, steadying breath. Juliet was left to collapse back against the cooker, dazed and trembling. They stared at each other for a long, long moment.

‘Well, now we know,’ said Cal, when he could speak. ‘We won’t need to waste any more time wondering about it, will we?’ He could see Juliet’s mouth shaking, and the temptation to pull her back into his arms and forget everything else once more was so strong that he had to make himself turn away.

Juliet was still leaning against the cooker when he reached the door. ‘Thanks for the meal’, he said, and then he was gone.

CHAPTER THREE

‘DAD’S gone to have breakfast with the stockmen,’ Natalie announced when Juliet found her in the kitchen the next morning. ‘He said to tell you he won’t be back until this evening.’

‘When did he tell you this?’ asked Juliet, put out to discover that all the effort spent on steeling herself to face Cal with cool composure this morning had been completely wasted.

It had taken her ages dithering around in the corridor before she had got up the nerve to even open the kitchen door, and now he had just swanned off for the day without so much as a by-your-leave, leaving a casual message that he would be back later. No doubt she would be expected to have a meal waiting for him when he deigned to turn up, too!

‘Just now,’ said Natalie. ‘He only left a minute ago.’ She was anxious to help. ‘Shall I go and find him for you?’ she offered, halfway off her chair.

‘No!’ said Juliet quickly. She wasn’t up to a confrontation with Cal just yet. ‘I mean, no, it doesn’t matter, thanks,’ she added more gently.

Running her fingers through her hair in a weary gesture, she put on the kettle to make herself some tea. The twins were still asleep. Typical that the one morning she could have had a lie-in she had woken early, feeling hot and cross after a restless night.

It was Cal’s fault, of course. Why had he kissed her like that? How could she have let herself be kissed like that? Juliet had lain awake for hours, tossing fretfully from side to side, her heart still pumping at the feel of Cal’s hands on her bare arms, her lips still tingling with the touch of his mouth. She’d wanted to be angry with Cal—she was angry with him—but deep in her heart she’d known that he wasn’t entirely to blame. She hadn’t even tried to push him away.

It hadn’t even been that much of a kiss, she’d tried telling herself. Cal had been making a point, no more than that, but her own electric response had alarmed and shamed her.

She had been alone too long, that was all, Juliet had decided at last in the small hours. It was the only thing that could explain her own bizarre reaction to the way he had kissed her. If it hadn’t been for those long months of rejection by Hugo she would never have kissed Cal back as she had. She wouldn’t have wanted the kiss to go on and on, and she wouldn’t have felt so bereft when he’d let her go.

And she wouldn’t have been lying there, squirming with frustration, unable to stop wondering what would have happened if Cal hadn’t dropped her when he had. He would have been lying in bed, his body where her hand smoothed over the sheet. Juliet’s palms had twitched at the thought. She’d felt as if her nerves were jumping just beneath her skin. She’d wished she could stop thinking about what it would be like to touch him, to taste him, to shiver at his hands drifting over her, at his hardness covering her…

She had to stop this!

If Cal thought she was going to make a big deal out of one crummy kiss, he would be disappointed. Juliet had spent too long coping with Hugo’s sudden whims and changes of mood. She was in charge now, she reminded herself, and she wasn’t going to go to pieces just because some man had kissed her.

No, she had hired Cal to manage the station. He would just have to accept that she was his employer, not a convenient diversion for the empty outback evenings.

‘Sorry?’ Juliet suddenly realised that Natalie was talking to her and that she hadn’t heard a word. ‘What did you say?’

‘I said, the kettle’s boiled,’ said Natalie, evidently puzzled by Juliet’s abstracted air.

As she drank her tea, Juliet wondered whether Natalie was upset at being abandoned by her father for the day, but she seemed to take it in her stride. She was happy to stay with Juliet and the twins, she told Juliet, adding conscientiously, ‘If you don’t mind.’

The only thing Juliet minded was the way Cal had simply assumed she would be there to look after his daughter, but she could hardly say that to Natalie, and anyway, the little girl turned out to be very useful. It was much easier to get things done knowing that she was keeping an eye on the twins, who were liable to get into all sorts of mischief if they weren’t watched like a hawk.

And Juliet had to admit that it was nice to have someone to talk to. It was just a pity that Cal wasn’t as open and friendly as his daughter.

Later that afternoon, when the heat of the day began to cool, Juliet took Natalie and the boys down to the paddock to see the horses that were corralled there, waiting their turn to be taken out on a muster, or ridden through the scrub and termite hills where even four-wheel drives couldn’t go.

Natalie’s eyes shone as she hung over the rail. ‘Dad’s going to get me a horse of my own, so I can go riding with him,’ she told Juliet proudly.

Juliet patted the neck of a roan that had come in search of a titbit. ‘I’d like to get a couple of small ponies for the boys to learn on,’ she said.

The twins had always loved watching the horses. They were standing on the rail next to Natalie, not at all afraid of the big mare tossing her head up and down. ‘The trouble is that I can’t leave one while I teach the other to ride, and I can’t control two ponies at once,’ she went on, half to herself. She had tried to work out a way round the difficulty many times since the boys had been old enough to walk, but the fact remained that she couldn’t teach two small boys to ride at the same time with only one pair of hands.

‘Dad could help you,’ Natalie offered, and Juliet smiled wryly.

‘I think Dad’s got more important things to do at the moment.’

‘He certainly has.’ Cal had come up behind them so quietly that when he spoke, Juliet jumped a mile. The man must move like a cat!

‘Where did you come from?’ she demanded, heart hammering. It was the shock, she told herself. Nothing to do with the sight of him, lean and strong and somehow immediate in the sharp outback light. Beneath his hat, his eyes were as cool and as impersonal as ever and his mouth—that mouth that she remembered so well from last night—was compressed in an angry line.

‘The stockyards,’ he said with an edge of impatience. What did it matter where he had come from? It wasn’t his fault she had nothing better to do than spend the afternoon leaning on the paddock rail and was so busy looking elegant in khaki trousers and a cream shirt that she hadn’t heard him coming.

He turned to Natalie. ‘Nat, why don’t you take the twins back to the homestead?’ he said. ‘I need a word with Mrs Laing.’

‘I call her Juliet,’ said Natalie, but she climbed off the rail.

Juliet bridled at the way Cal was ordering her sons around, but she didn’t want to start arguing in front of the children. ‘Yes, would you mind getting them a drink, Natalie?’ she said tightly. ‘I want to talk to your father.’

She watched Natalie lead Kit and Andrew out of earshot, holding carefully onto two sticky hands, before rounding on Cal. ‘I’d be grateful if you’d let me decide where and when we talk!’ she hissed. ‘You’re here to manage the station and nothing else. You can leave my children to me!’

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