About the Author

Bestselling romance author LILIAN DARCY has written over seventy novels. She currently lives in Australia’s capital city, Canberra, with her historian husband and their four children. When she is not writing or supporting her children’s varied interests, Lilian likes to quilt, garden or cook. She also loves winter sports and travel.

Lilian’s career highlights include numerous appearances on the Waldenbooks romance bestsellers list, three nominations in the Romance Writers of America’s prestigious RITA® Award, and translation into twenty different languages. Find out more about Lilian and her books or contact her at www.liliandarcy.com

The Australians’ Brides

The Runaway and

the Cattleman

Princess in Disguise

Outback Baby

Lilian Darcy

www.millsandboon.co.uk

MILLS & BOON

Before you start reading, why not sign up?

Thank you for downloading this Mills & Boon book. If you want to hear about exclusive discounts, special offers and competitions, sign up to our email newsletter today!

SIGN ME UP!

Or simply visit

signup.millsandboon.co.uk

Mills & Boon emails are completely free to receive and you can unsubscribe at any time via the link in any email we send you.

The Runaway and

the Cattleman

Lilian Darcy

Chapter One

He looked like a cowboy, against the backdrop of rust-red outback dirt and endless blue sky.

Or to be more accurate, like every woman’s fantasy of a cowboy.

An ancient, broad-brimmed hat tilted low over his forehead. It shaded his face so that the color of his eyes was impossible to read, but one look at his profile would tell a red-blooded woman all she needed to know. Strong jaw, firm mouth, an intensity in the way he watched the world … even when he looked as if he wasn’t really seeing it.

His body was even stronger than his jaw, but he wasn’t the type who needed to wear his T-shirts too tight to emphasize washboard abs and bulging biceps. The muscles were just there, hard and motionless beneath faded denim and stretch cotton. He’d learned to conserve his energy for when he really needed it—for a long day of boundary riding, cattle branding or herding his animals to fresh pasture. Right now, since he didn’t need it, he leaned his tanned forearms on the wooden rail in front of him, the way he would have leaned them on a stockyard gate.

Yes, any woman who’d picked him as a cowboy would have been close. He was a cattleman, an Australian outback farmer, owner of his own huge spread of acreage. He was no one’s wage slave, but answered only to his land, his animals and his family.

Nine out of ten women took a good look at him as they walked past. Eight out of ten were impressed with what they saw, and would have liked to find out more. Just what color were those eyes? Did he have tan lines around those solid upper arms? What did he have to say for himself? Did he like dressy blondes or down-to-earth brunettes? Was he available? Was he as good as he looked?

But if the cattleman noticed any of the female attention he was getting, it didn’t show. You would have said that Callan Woods’s thoughts were at least two hundred miles away, and you wouldn’t have been wrong.

“Look at him, Brant! What are we going to do?”

Branton Smith felt helpless at his friend Dusty Tanner’s question. Like Callan himself, they both lived most of their waking hours out of doors. They worked with their hands. When they struck trouble, it was something physical—drought or flood or fire or an injured beast—and the solution to it was physical, also.

They just worked harder. They climbed on a horse and herded cattle or sheep to higher ground. They got out of bed two hours earlier in the morning and fed their animals by hand, dropping feed bales off the back of a truck until their hands were callused like leather and every muscle burned. They were big, strong, capable men, and they had brains. They looked for active, assertive answers.

But what could they do about Callan?

“Just be there for him, I guess,” Brant said in answer to Dusty’s question.

He wasn’t surprised at Dusty’s bark of derisory laughter. “You sound like an advice column in a teenage magazine, mate!”

True.

Had to be cruddy advice, too, because they’d both “been there” for Callan since his wife Liz’s death four years ago, and he only seemed to have folded in on himself even more this year.

He stood, as they did, with his forearms propped on the rail that kept spectators back from the racetrack, while around him swirled the color and noise of Australia’s best-known outback racing carnival. Judging by Callan’s thousand-yard stare, his slumped shoulders, his tight mouth and his silence, however, he barely knew that he was here.

The three men had been best mates for years, since attending Cliffside school in Sydney more than seventeen years ago. Then, they had been three strong, shy outback boys, boarding away from home for the first time, in the company of the sons of stockbrokers and car dealers and property tycoons.

Now they owned racehorses together, five sleek beautiful animals at the present time, of which two were racing at today’s carnival. Three of their horses were trained at a place near Brant’s extensive sheep-farming property west of the Snowy Mountains, while the two running today were with a trainer in Queensland, near Dusty.

As a hobby, the racing syndicate just about paid its way. As an exercise in mateship, it was solid gold.

Their spirited two-year-old mare Surprise Bouquet had put in a reasonable performance in her maiden event this morning. She’d placed fifth in a field of sixteen after a poor jump from the barrier, and she should do better next time around. Saltbush Bachelor was the horse they had real hopes for today.

Callan, Brant and Dusty couldn’t meet face-to-face all that often, given the distance between their properties, but this race carnival was a tradition they kept to whenever they could. Callan had missed a couple of years when Liz had been ill. She’d died at around this time of year. A couple of weeks along in the calendar—end of September. Maybe that was part of Callan’s problem. The Birdsville Races and September and Liz’s death were all wrapped up together in his heart.

“He’s thirty-three,” Dusty muttered. “We can’t let him go on thinking his life is over, Brant.”

Standing beside his two mates, Callan wasn’t thinking that.

Not exactly.

But yeah. He knew Brant and Dusty were concerned about him. They weren’t all that subtle on the issue. Those frequent anxious looks, the muttered comments he didn’t always hear but could guess the gist of, the over-hearty suggestions about going for a beer, the occasional comment about a woman—nothing too crude, just “nice legs” and that kind of thing—after which they’d both nudge him for an agreement, which he would dutifully give.

Yes, she had nice legs, the blonde or the brunette or the farmer’s daughter with her hair hidden beneath her hat.

Brant and Dusty both thought it was time he moved on, found a new mother for his boys.

Callan had thought so, too, once.

Three years ago, to be exact, here at this same annual racing carnival.

To him, it felt like yesterday.

He could still remember the panic, the loneliness, the physical hunger, the ache for his own loss and the even harder ache for what his boys would miss without a mother, after that first endless year without Liz.

But, sheesh! What the hell had he been thinking that day? Had he really thought that a party-going, city-bred twentysomething with “nice legs,” carrying a glass of champagne in one hand and in the other a race guide she wasn’t interested in, could possess the slightest power to help him move on?

There had been a nightmarish wrongness about that woman’s body. The freckles across her nose weren’t Liz’s freckles. Her hair wasn’t Liz’s shade of blonde. Her curves weren’t right, or her voice. He’d been looking for all the wrong things, and he hadn’t even found those.

“They’re in the barrier,” Brant reported, his voice rising to cut across Callan’s thoughts. “He looked lively but not too wound up.”

“And Garrett is hungry for this win,” Dusty added. “He’ll ride him just right.”

Both men had binoculars pressed to their eyes, now. They didn’t want to miss a second of the race, or of their horse’s ride. They wanted Callan to care that Saltbush Bachelor was running with a good period of training and some successful starts behind him, and actually had a shot at a win.

The silk shirts of the jockeys shimmered with color in the bright sun, the way the desert air shimmered on the horizon. The nearby airfield had light planes lined up like minivans in a shopping mall’s parking garage, and the population of the tiny outback town had temporarily swelled from a few hundred to several thousand. Callan could smell beer and barbecued sausages, sunscreen and horse feed and dust.

He roused himself enough to answer his two friends. “Yeah, Mick Garrett’s a good jockey.” But he didn’t lift his own binoculars and barely noticed the anticipation that knotted their bodies and their voices as the race got underway.

Instead he thought about his boys back on Arakeela Creek with their grandmother, thought about what he’d need to do with the cattle next week when he was home, thought again about three years ago here in Birdsville and that disaster of a nice-legged woman who could never in a million years have looked—or felt—or sounded—enough like Liz.

He thought about the other woman, too, a few months later—a blond and freckled Scandinavian backpacker whom he’d permitted to camp down by the Arakeela Gorge water hole, and who had been happy to make all the moves in what had soon turned out to be a limp disaster of a one-night stand.

Lord, he hated remembering! He’d been so crazed with grief and loneliness, but how could he have thought that hooking up with some stranger would do anything to heal him, let alone anything to provide him or his boys with a better future?

Watching Callan’s mental distance and his thinned mouth, Brant and Dusty looked at each other again. Didn’t need to speak about it, but spoke anyway.

“Does he even know it’s started?” Dusty muttered.

“Knows,” Brant theorized. “Doesn’t care.”

“If Salty wins—”

“Won’t make a blind bit of difference to him. Hell, Dusty, what are we going to do? Being there is just bull. You’re right. We both know it. He needs action.”

“Action? We’re doing everything we can. When he wanted to pull out of our racehorse syndicate, we basically told him he couldn’t.”

“And his mother talked him round on that, too.”

The race wheeled around the far curve of the track and the jockeys’ colors blurred. From this angle, it was impossible to see how Saltbush Bachelor was running. As long as he wasn’t hemmed in at the rail. As long as Garrett didn’t leave his run too late.

Beside Brant, two would-be Paris Hiltons were screaming for the horse they wrongly thought they’d bet on. Van Der Kamp wasn’t running until the next race, but neither Brant, Dusty nor Callan troubled to give the two overexcited young women this information.

“Kerry’s worried,” Brant went on, still talking about Callan’s mother. “She phoned me last week and asked us to look out for him this weekend.”

“Like we wouldn’t anyway.”

The momentum of the race picked up as the horses came around into the home straight. The Paris Hilton girls had realized their mistake over Van Der Kamp and were cheering for the correct horse, now—Salty himself.

“He’s going to do it!” Brant yelled. “He’s up there. It’s going to be close. Can you see, Dusty? Callan?”

Callan didn’t answer.

The horses thundered past, their legs a blur of pistonlike movements, their jockeys’ colors once more tangled together. Just twenty meters to go, then ten.

“He’s there, he’s … no, he’s not going to win, but second. He’s—hell, he’s losing ground, but he’s going to get—” Brant stopped.

Second place? It was too close to call. They’d have to wait for the official result. Brant listened to the distorted sound of the PA system for several seconds and managed to catch winner and place-getters’ names. Even allowing for the distortion, none of them sounded remotely like Saltbush Bachelor. Their horse had lost out for third place by a nose.

“So much for omens,” said one of the Hilton types to the other.

“Guess we’re not scoring ourselves an outback bachelor today,” the other one replied.

Beside them, Callan didn’t even react—despite their nice legs—and Brant and Dusty could only look at each other helplessly once again.

“Talk to your sister, Brant,” Dusty suggested. A small, irritating bush fly buzzed near his lips. Like most outback-bred people, he’d learned not to open his mouth too wide when he spoke, which was an advantage in confidential conversation. “Maybe this needs a woman’s touch. Nuala has a good head on her shoulders.”

“A good head full of crazy ideas,” Brant said.

“Maybe a crazy idea is just what we need.”

“Yeah, because the plain, ordinary ones haven’t worked, have they? Okay, I’ll talk to her about it when I get back. But I’m warning you, it might not be an idea we want to hear.”

Dusty got a stubborn look on his face. “If there’s a chance of it helping Callan, mate, at this point I’ll listen to anything.”

Chapter Two

“So we’re going to pay Nuala back how, for coming up with this dream scheme?” Dusty drawled to Brant, almost six months later.

The Birdsville Races had been held on the first weekend in September. This was a Friday night in late February. Their horses had had a couple of promising wins during the spring season. Brant’s property had received higher than average rain, while Dusty’s had sweltered in the intense Queensland summer heat. Kerry Woods had talked again to both men about how worried she was about Callan.

“You were the one who said you didn’t care if it was crazy, as long as there was a chance it might help Callan, you’d do it,” Brant reminded him, a little defensive on his sister’s behalf, even though he’d had a few payback fantasies himself over the past couple of weeks, since the appearance of the February issue of Today’s Woman magazine.

“And I’m here, aren’t I?” Dusty retorted. “I did do it. I had my photo in that damned magazine. I had to list my hobbies and my background, and—” he hooked his fingers in the air to show the quote marks coming up “—what I’m looking for in a woman and why I believe love can last. And then the magazine didn’t use a quarter of what I’d said.”

“You did a better job with all those questions than I did,” Brant said.

Dusty shrugged and grinned. “I was more honest.”

“Yeah, mate, don’t you have any self-protective instincts?”

“Plenty of ’em. I’m just not a very good liar. Does your sister really think Callan’s going to find what he’s looking for this way?”

Both men looked around the room. It was just after six in the evening, and the air-conditioning in this elegant waterfront venue battled against Sydney’s lingering summer heat. The metropolitan beaches would be crowded with sleek, tanned bodies and sandy children. On the tangled city streets, traffic and exhaust fumes would still be thick, mingled with the blasts of restaurant smells evoking the cuisine of many nations. This was an attractive setting for a cocktail party, however, with its views over Darling Harbour, including a distant glimpse of the Harbour Bridge beyond the restored and remodeled shipping piers.

It was light-years away from the varied landscapes around Brant’s, Dusty’s and Callan’s homes.

There had to be around fifty people in the room, Brant decided. They appeared to consist of twenty single outback men and twenty single urban women, as well as some journalists and photographers from the magazine and a handful of catering staff who were gliding around with drink trays and fiddly little morsels of fashionable food that looked way too scary to eat.

“Not find what he’s looking for, find out what he’s looking for, according to Nuala,” he said to Dusty in clarification.

“Nuala, who has recently announced her engagement to a man she’s known since she was, what, three?” Dusty pointed out. “Oh, yeah, she’s a real expert on this relationship stuff.”

“Getting Nuala’s input on all this was your idea, I seem to recall. And she hasn’t been going out with Chris since she was three,” Brant said, in defense of his baby sister’s credentials in the field. “She wouldn’t look at him after she left school. She went to Europe for three years.”

“She had boyfriends then?”

“Their names have been permanently blacked out of the Nuala Jane Smith archival records, she says, but, yeah, she had a few.”

“So she really thinks—?”

“You want me to quote her?” Brant ticked his sister’s arguments off on his fingers. “This will get Callan to focus on what he wants and what’s missing from his life. It’ll remind him that there are still some decent women in the world even without Liz in it. It’ll show him he’s not the only one whose heart is in—”

He stopped. Pieces he was going to say, but suddenly, they were no longer alone.

“Hi! Who do we have here? Dustin, right?” The overenthusiastic American woman discreetly consulted some notes on a clipboard, while a photographic flash went off in a man’s hands, right next to her. Magazine people, both of them.

The flash made Dusty blink. If Dusty had been one of their own racehorses, Brant thought, the man would have shied and stepped a big hoof on the American’s foot, including her spike heel. He would have broken several of her bones. “Call me Dusty,” he said.

“Dusty ….” The American beamed artificially. Her eyelids fluttered and she barely looked in his direction. She had sleek hair, a wide mouth and a distracted manner. Nice legs, too, Brant saw as he stepped back out of range. Owning racehorses gave a man a deep appreciation of good female legs. Dusty gave them an interested glance, also. “Now, you’re here to meet Mandy tonight, Dusty, and here she is!” the American said.

Ta-da!

Mandy stepped forward. She was around five foot four and her legs were pretty ordinary, but she had dark eyes and an eager smile. She was also totally thrilled with herself for correctly matching Dusty’s personal details to his photograph and winning herself a place at the party tonight.

Dusty looked a little bewildered at her attitude, but when he answered the question she asked him and she listened with those big eyes fixed so intently on his face … Yeah, Brant thought he would probably have felt the ego stroke, too. It was nice when a woman was genuinely interested. He went in search of a drink, wondering with a faint stir of curiosity which of the as-yet-unpaired women in the room had been earmarked for him.

Passing Callan, he couldn’t help but notice that his friend, the object of this whole outlandish exercise, was mentally miles away.

“Why am I here?” Jacinda Beale muttered to herself.

As always, she had reacted to this dressed-up, extravagant, city cocktail party like an animal caught in a searchlight. She didn’t know a soul. She hadn’t yet been introduced to the man she was supposed to meet.

The woman who was supposed to do the introducing—and who had introduced herself to Jacinda as Shay-from-the-magazine—flitted around looking almost as stressed out as most of the guests, many of whom were clearly too shy to mingle easily.

Why are you here, Jac?

Well, go ahead and pick an option, replied the cynical and panicky running commentary in Jacinda’s brain. You’re a scriptwriter, after all. Choosing between different character motivations is one of the skills of your trade.

There were several such options to choose from, some of which were more honest than others.

Because I gave in to an insane impulse and thought this might be fun … or, failing that, good for me.

Because Today’s Woman magazine is running a series of stories called “Wanted: Outback Wives,” and I happened to a) guess correctly which Outback Wife-hunter’s description of himself matched with which Outback Wife-hunter photo—it wasn’t that hard!—and b) write a sufficiently appealing and correctly spelled letter outlining in three hundred words or less why I should get to meet him.

Yes, believe it or not, an invitation to this cocktail party was meant to be a kind of prize.

Because I’m desperate, and I’ll open any door that looks like it has a handle.

Because I’m a writer, so it’s research.

That last one scared her, adding to the already powerful panicky feeling. Writers could claim that pretty much anything was research, and in the past for Jacinda, the claim had always been true. In the name of research, she’d tried on expensive jewellery, combed through a stranger’s trash can, taken a ride on a seriously terrifying roller coaster, eaten in two or three of America’s most famous restaurants … The list went on.

But was she really a writer anymore?

Heartbreak Hotel’s head scriptwriter, Elaine Hutchison, still thought that she was.

“You’re blocked, Jac,” she’d said six weeks ago. “You have good reasons to be blocked, and you need a break. Take that gorgeous daughter of yours, cross an ocean, and don’t come home for a month. By then, you’ll be raring to go and I can give you Reece and Naomi’s storyline because you are the only one I trust to make their dialogue remotely believable.”

“Which ocean?” Jac had asked, because her initiative had also evaporated, along with her TV soap opera dialogue-writing skills.

“Any ocean, honey. Just make it a big one. Know what I’m saying? Know why I’m saying it?”

Elaine hadn’t mentioned any names but, yes, Jac had known what she was saying, and why. She should put some distance between herself and Kurt until she was stronger, better equipped to move forward. She should recognize that despite Elaine’s genuine friendship, she had divided loyalties because Kurt had the power to scuttle Elaine’s own career as well as Jacinda’s.

And the Pacific Ocean was the biggest ocean around—it conveniently washed ashore in California, too—so here she was on the far side of it, in Australia, at the bottom of the world, at the bottom of a glass, at a cocktail party she wasn’t enjoying any better than she’d enjoyed all those dozens and dozens of cocktail parties with Kurt.

Even when she and Kurt had been in love.

Thud, went her heart.

Yes, she had been naive enough to love him once.

But their marriage had given her Carly, her precious daughter, so the news wasn’t all bad.

“Jacinda?” said a woman’s voice, in an American accent that matched Jac’s own.

She turned to the energetic chestnut-haired magazine editor who’d greeted her on arrival. “Shay, hi ….”

Introduction time.

There was a man hovering at Shay-from-the-magazine’s elbow. Better looking than in his magazine photo, he appeared far less comfortable, however. The photo had shown him in his native element, with one long, jeans-clad leg braced against a rust-red rock and his dusty felt hat silhouetted against a sky the color of tinted contact lenses. He’d had his fingers laced in the fur of a big, tongue-lolling cattle dog—also rust-red—and a smile that narrowed his brim-shaded eyes so much you couldn’t even see them.

Jac could see them now, however, and they were, oh, unbelievable. Blue and deep and smoky with a whole lot of emotions that thirty seconds ago she might have thought would be too complex for a down-to-earth South Australian cattle rancher.

Yes, Today’s Woman hadn’t confused the issue by laying any false clues. The outback sky, the cattle dog and the fierce-looking lizard on the rock, which Jac’s Australian friend Lucy had identified as a bearded dragon, had strongly suggested that the man was Callan Woods, cattle rancher, not Brian Snow, opal miner, or Damian Peterson, oil rigger, or any of the other seventeen Outback Wife-hunters, whose photos and biographical details had appeared in the February issue of the magazine.

There were a lot of lonely outback men in Australia, Today’s Woman claimed. It was a big country, where such men ran free in their far-flung and sometimes lonely occupations, but had trouble finding the right woman.

Jac wasn’t going to be that, she knew.

Not for this man.

But now wasn’t the time to tell him so.

“Callan, meet Jacinda,” Shay-from-the-magazine said brightly.

“Hi. Yeah,” was all he said.

He didn’t look happy to be here … which gave them one thing in common, at least.

“Would you believe how Jacinda matched you with your photo, Callan?” Shay gushed. “She actually identified the species of lizard sitting on the rock! Can you believe that?”

“Yeah? The bearded dragon?” A stirring of interest appeared in those incredible eyes as he belatedly reached out to shake Jac’s hand. He had a firm, dry grip, which he let go of a little too soon, as if he really, seriously, didn’t want her to get the wrong idea.

“The lizard was the reason I chose you as the one I wanted to meet,” Jac confessed. “My daughter thought he looked so cute.”

Too late, she realized that it wasn’t a very tactful line. Callan was supposed to be the cute one, not the reptilian wildlife on his land.

But Callan didn’t seem to care about her gaffe. Seemed relieved about it, in fact. “Yeah, my son Lockie loves them,” he said, his eyes getting brighter as he mentioned his boy. “He had one for a pet, but then he couldn’t stand to see it caged.”

“So you have kids, too?” Jac asked. She grabbed on to the subject immediately, since it might be the only conversational lifeline they could come up with together. “My daughter is four.”

Then she listened as Callan Woods told her, “I have two boys. Lockie’s ten. Josh is eight. We lost …” He stopped and took a breath. “That is, my wife died four years ago. I’m sorry. I should tell you that up front.” He lowered his voice and glanced at Shay, who was already moving on to her next introduction, as if tonight’s schedule was impossibly tight.

“It’s okay,” Jac told him.

He might not even have heard her reassurance. “I’m not really a … what was it … Wild Heart Looking For Love.” He parodied the words from the magazine so that Jac could almost see them spelled with capitals. “Couple of my mates wanted to take part in this and they roped me in, too, for a bit of support.”

He glanced over his shoulder and caught sight of two tall men. One of them was looking down at a short brunette who had her hand pinned to his arm. Callan gestured at the two men for Jac’s benefit. They were his “mates.” She knew the Australian expression by this time. “I’m doing it for them,” he said. “For Brant and Dusty. I’m not seriously looking for anyone. I should be up front with you about that.”

The mates were staring this way.

At Callan.

Jac was good at character motivation. She saw the anxious frowns on their faces and the way they assessed both their friend and Jac herself, and she recognized the truth at once, now that this man had told her about his loss.

Callan was doing it for them?

No, it was the other way around. Brant and Dusty were doing it for him.

She heard him swear under his breath and understood the painful way his own words must be echoing in his head. My wife died four years ago. She hated saying it, too. Kurt and I are divorced now. It felt as if you were ripping open your clothing to show total strangers your surgical scars.

“It’s okay,” she repeated quickly to Callan Woods. “This is a very artificial situation, isn’t it? Anyone would be crazy to hold out serious hopes of meeting the right person, no matter how much they were looking for it. But I don’t think that makes it a pointless exercise. You know, just to get a bit of practice … or … or validation, maybe. I’m divorced. And it was a horrible divorce.” See, I have scars, too. “I actually can’t think when I last talked to a man I don’t know, purely for the pleasure of making some contact.”

He nodded, but didn’t make a direct reply. Maybe he was better at talking to his rust-colored dog. After a few seconds of silence, he said, “You’re not Australian.”

“No. The accent’s a giveaway, isn’t it?” She smiled, but he didn’t smile back.

“But you’re living here?” he said.

“No, again. On vacation. Staying with an Australian friend I met in California a few years ago. Lucy. She’s great. She’s babysitting my daughter tonight. She was the one who suggested I try that photo-matching thing in the magazine, just for fun. Most of them were pretty easy.”

“I guess it made sense, added more interest, having the magazine turn it into a kind of contest.”

“And, yes, it was fun,” Jac agreed. “I’m not sorry I did it.”

Oh.

Really?

Since when?

She’d spent the first twenty minutes of the cocktail party feeling deeply sorry that she’d given in to such an insane impulse at Lucy’s prompting, but at some point very recently that had changed. The blue eyes? The lizard? The fact that Callan Woods wasn’t serious about this, either?

“No,” Callan agreed. “I wouldn’t have done it, except for my mates, but, yeah, so far it’s turned out not to be as bad as I thought.”

Jac saw the expression in his eyes. Definitely relief. An after-the-dentist kind of relief that she understood and shared, and it felt nice to share the same emotion with a man again, even if it was a man she didn’t know.

“When do you fly home?” he asked.

“Tuesday. Three days from now. We’ve been here a month, and I can’t believe the time has flown so fast. I’ve loved all of it, and so has Carly.”

“Tuesday.” He relaxed a little more. “So you’re obviously not serious about tonight, either.”

“No.”

“Thank heavens we got that established nice and early!”

They grinned at each other, grabbed a canapé each from a passing tray and somehow kept talking for the next two hours without quite noticing how quickly the party went by.

“Mine? A washout,” Brant said over a state-of-the-art weekend urban café brunch the next morning, in answer to Dusty’s question. “A total washout. She had a chip on her shoulder so big I’m surprised she could stand straight. When I told her that being single didn’t bother me all that much, she acted as if I’d personally insulted her. She gave every one of my questions a one-syllable answer and couldn’t come up with a single bit of small talk when it was her turn. Thank the Lord you didn’t get her, Call.”

“Why me?” Callan asked.

Brant frowned. “Why you, what?”

“Why is it good that I didn’t get her? You think I’m particularly incapable of dealing with women with big shoulder chips and no small talk? Why?”

“Mine was great,” Dusty cut in before Brant could answer, but not before he and Brant had exchanged a strange, uneasy, lightning-fast look. “A genuine, decent woman who knows what she wants and doesn’t mind saying so. There’s a good chance we’ll stay in touch. I’m telling you, it was a heck of a lot better than I expected, the whole thing.” He added quickly and awkwardly, “And, you know, I thought it was a promising idea from the start, so …”

Hang on a minute.

Dusty had a look on his face that Callan recognized. It spoke loudly of his awareness that he wasn’t a very good liar, but what was he lying about?

Callan began slowly, putting the puzzle pieces in place as he spoke, “So you don’t mind that you’re single, Brant, and you’re suddenly pretending you thought this was a promising way for an isolated outback cattleman to meet a future wife, Dusty, even though four seconds ago you pretty much stated the opposite ….” He paused, watched the guilty expressions on his mates’ faces. “Can one of you tell me the real reason we put ourselves through this?”

He wasn’t stupid.

He didn’t really need their answer.

Which was good, because they both stumbled through some garbled piece of bull dust and didn’t actually give him one.

While the stumbling thing was still happening, he thought about whether he was angry with them—whether he wanted to be angry, whether he even had the energy.

Brant and Dusty had set him up in the worst way. They’d conspired behind his back. They’d conned him into putting his picture and his life story and his heartfelt feelings in a national women’s magazine. Why? In the hope that he might meet someone? Or … or … start to believe in the possibility of someday meeting someone? Or … or … even just enjoy himself for a night and get a bit of an ego tickle from the bunch of eager women’s letters the magazine had started sending him?

Angry about it?

To his own surprise he found himself grinning, after a moment. When all was said and done, they were his best friends. They meant well. They would never let him down. They were idiots, and he liked them.

“Serves you bloody right if yours was a washout, Branton Smith. Serves you right, Dustin Tanner, if you never hear from yours again. Me, like a prize con victim, thought I was helping you out, going along for the ride. Turns out I wasn’t, and I’m not looking for anything beyond … yeah … keeping my boys happy, but I had a good time last night, talking to Jacinda.”

He knew it couldn’t go anywhere. He didn’t want it to, and neither did she. That was probably the only reason they’d been able to talk to each other so freely in the first place—because of the safety valve of her imminent departure and the glaring nature of his loss and her divorce.

She looked nothing like Liz, and that was a big plus, also. Where Liz had been compact and strong, Jacinda was long and willowy. She had big, luminous gray eyes, not twinkling, sensible green ones. She had wild dark hair, in contrast to Liz’s neat, silky waterfall of medium blond, and an even, magnolia-olive skin tone, instead of fairness and freckles. Voices, accents, backgrounds, all of it was different and therefore much safer. Safe enough for him to feel as if Jacinda could be a friend, a new kind of friend, if he ever needed one.

This was how he saw her this morning—someone he might turn to, sometime in the future, for advice about his boys, or for a city woman’s perspective.

He even had the address of Jacinda’s friend Lucy in Sydney, and Jacinda’s e-mail address back in America, and she had his, but he wasn’t going to tell Brant and Dusty that. He just gave them another grin—a more teasing and evasive grin this time—and started talking about what they might do today, in each other’s company, before heading out of Sydney and back to land and animals and family tomorrow.

And he felt better—easier in his heart—than he had in quite a while.

Jac honestly hadn’t expected to see Callan again, even though they’d exchanged addresses.

His timing wasn’t great. He showed up at seven in the evening, when she was in the middle of getting her daughter ready for bed. She and Carly had eaten, her friend Lucy was out tonight and now Carly was tired. She was tired enough to make a fuss about getting out of the bath even when her skin had gone wrinkly, so that Jac was wet all down her front when she encountered Callan at the apartment door. A minute or two later, Carly was suddenly not too tired to want to investigate the gift he’d brought for her immediately.

“It’s just a little thing,” Callan told Jac quietly, as Carly sat on the floor in her pink-stripes-and-teddy-bears pajamas and ripped at the bright paper. For Jac herself, Callan had brought flowers—a huge, gorgeous bunch of Australian things whose names she didn’t know. “A paint-your-own-boomerang kit. Hope it’s not more trouble than it’s worth!”

“Could be, if she wants to sit down and paint it right now.” She smiled to soften the statement. He had kids. He should understand. She added in a lower tone, “You didn’t have to do this.”

“I know, but I woke up this morning and—” He stopped and tried again. Came up with just three words. “I wanted to.”

“You woke up this morning, but it’s seven in the evening, now. Did it take you all day to make up your mind that you wanted to?” she teased. She’d decided last night that he had a sense of humor, but wanted to test this perception in a cooler light.

“Yep,” he answered. “That’s about right.” His blue eyes glinted with amusement like sunshine on water. “Look, I guess it is getting late, but we could still eat somewhere, if you want.”

So she had to tell him about Lucy being out, and Carly needing bed, and that she and her daughter had eaten already anyhow.

He nodded. “I should have called. You’re right. I did leave it too late.”

She thought about asking if he wanted coffee or a drink, but chickened out. Pick a character motivation. She didn’t want to kiss him and discover she liked it—or discover she didn’t. She didn’t want to learn the hard way that they had nothing left to talk about, after those two easy hours last night. She definitely didn’t want to send the wrong message about how lucky he might get by the end of this evening.

No!

“Thank you,” she said instead. “The flowers are beautiful, and the gift for Carly. I really must get her into bed, now, or she’ll be a mess tomorrow. She was up before six.”

He looked at her wet front and her messy hair. She saw at once from his face that he’d read the situation correctly, and that he wasn’t the kind of man to argue. Instead, he just gave her his courteous hope that she and Carly would have a good flight home, told her that if she ever needed anything—needed him, needed to write or phone—that she shouldn’t hesitate.

“I mean that.”

And Jac believed him. Didn’t plan to put her trust in his words to the test, but found that the simple fact of believing him felt good—better, after Kurt, than she would have imagined possible.

Two days later, Jacinda and Carly’s plane touched down at Los Angeles International Airport and reality kicked into their lives once more.

Jac had allowed herself and her daughter a day to get over the worst of their jet lag, but then Carly was back in full-day preschool, and Jac was back on the script-writing production line for her soap. The moment she walked into the writers’ conferencing suite, a month on the opposite shore of the Pacific Ocean seemed to shrink to the size of a drop in that same ocean and she felt as if she’d never been away.

She didn’t want to write.

She couldn’t write.

Why the hell had she thought that she’d be able to write?

She’d picked up the mail held for her at the post office on her way in, and among the bills and credit card solicitations were two birthday cards from Kurt, one for herself and one for Carly, since they’d both been February babies and had celebrated while they’d been away. His handwriting on the envelopes, alone, would have been enough to paralyze her, let alone what he’d written to her inside.

Jacinda, sweetheart, don’t spend Carly’s birthday out of the country next year, please. Trust me, you can’t afford that kind of statement. Emotionally, financially. You just can’t, and you should know that. I’m going to be pretty busy this spring, and I’ll need Carly in my life to give me some balance. The network is rethinking its programming, and I’ll be micromanaging certain areas.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking I’m too busy to catch my own shows, even when they’re no longer my day-to-day concern. Reece and Naomi have some great scenes coming up—taut, edgy dialogue written while you were away by a young male writer who’s incredibly fresh. Elaine will be taking a good look at them with me. She’s been wanting to juggle the team for a while now.

Happy thirty-second birthday. Hope you’ve used the break as an opportunity to clarify your priorities. Deepest regards, Kurt.

This was what blocked her so badly. This kind of communication from Kurt. All the time. Phone calls, e-mails, letters from his lawyer, and even innocent comments from Carly after she’d spent an afternoon with him and his new wife. The threats were always so carefully veiled that they almost sounded like reassurances.

He changed his mind about what he wanted, and then the threats changed, as if to suggest that Jacinda should have been two steps ahead of his thinking all along. The reminders of his power and control, and his ability to wreak both personal and professional consequences pricked at Jacinda like poisoned barbs.

She had custody of Carly now, yes, because so far it had suited Kurt to utter lines such as, “All I want is my daughter’s best interests,” but she knew that if he wanted the situation to change, he’d stop at nothing to achieve his goal. She also knew that even if he had no intention of ever suing for custody of their child, he’d hang the possibility over her head like a sword on a fraying thread purely because of the power it gave him.

She read the card over again, to convince herself that the sinister tone was all in her head, but it didn’t work. She knew Kurt. She’d been married to him for seven years. He’d risen higher and higher in the universe of network television, and yet she knew he would never be too big or too important to let go of any of the dozens of chains of control that he loved to yank. Her own chain, Carly’s, Elaine’s …

Jacinda saw Elaine’s concerned look in her direction, and quickly brought up the Reece and Naomi file on her computer. She had a summary of the scene she was supposed to write this morning. “Reece and Naomi meet at their favorite restaurant and argue over whether to continue their affair.”

She centered REECE near the top of the page, pressed Enter, then Tab, then typed the word Hi. She managed to get NAOMI to say hi, also, but for an hour after that, the screen stayed blank, while the words taut, edgy and fresh, in Kurt’s spiky handwriting, floated in front of her eyes. She felt ill to the pit of her stomach, and when Elaine took her for a pep talk over lunch, she couldn’t eat a bite.

Elaine didn’t do much better. “I have to be honest with you, Jac,” she said, sounding tense. “I can’t run this kind of interference for you much longer. You know Kurt.”

“Yes, I do.”

“He has me walking on quicksand, and he knows it. We have the mortgage, we have school fees …”

There was an awkward pause, and Jac knew what she had to say.

So she said it. “Elaine, don’t ruin your own career trying to protect mine.” And she saw the relief in the senior writer’s eyes.

When she got back to her computer, she discovered that there was an e-mail from Callan Woods waiting for her. Until she caught sight of her daughter’s smile of greeting at preschool three hours later, it was the only pleasurable, decent, safe moment in her entire day.

Chapter Three

The mail flight would get here at any time now.

Beside the packed red dirt of the airstrip, Callan sat in the driver’s seat of his four-wheel-drive. He had the door open and the windows down to catch the breeze. In mid-April, the dry daytime heat in the North Flinders Ranges could still be fierce, even though it was technically autumn.

Lockie and Josh were back at the Arakeela Creek homestead doing their morning schoolwork via the Internet and the School of the Air. Sometimes when there was a visitor coming, Callan would give them a morning off so that they could come and meet the plane, but this time he’d said no.

He heard the buzz of the plane in the distance. It came in low with the arid yet beautiful backdrop of the mountains behind it, and he felt an odd lurch in his stomach as it got closer.

Was he looking forward to this arrival?

Like so many of his emotions since Liz’s death, this one shifted back and forth, giving him no consistent answer.

Callan didn’t know why Jacinda and her daughter were coming to Arakeela Creek, nor how long they wanted to stay, but he did know that Jacinda was a mess, that she wouldn’t have asked if she’d felt she had any other choice, and that he couldn’t even have considered turning down her desperate plea.

They’d been e-mailing each other for six weeks. A couple of times he’d thought about calling her, but the idea had panicked him too much. The e-mail correspondence was good. Nice. Unthreatening. A phone call would have been a stretching of boundaries that he wasn’t ready for and didn’t see the point in, since their lives were so far apart, in so many ways.

He honestly hadn’t expected anything to come out of the magazine thing, and yet something had—a small, new window into a different world, a friendship at a safe distance. He was also in e-mail contact with two of the Australian women who’d written to him, via the magazine, but in contrast to what he’d developed with Jacinda, those exchanges so far didn’t feel nearly as honest or as easy, and he suspected that either he or the women themselves would soon let them dwindle away. Meanwhile, letters from more women continued to arrive.

Why had his e-mails to and from Jacinda felt so much better?

Because she was a writer by profession, and her natural fluency smoothed their exchanges in both directions?

Maybe.

Sometimes, she hadn’t been fluent at all.

Meanwhile, Dusty seemed pretty happy with his own outcome to the magazine story and the cocktail party. He and that small brunette, Mandy, were still in touch. He was even talking about flying back down to Sydney to meet up with her again, and had written polite notes to the other women who’d contacted him to tell them thanks, but I’m not looking anymore. Dusty was the same with horses—only ever bet on one in each race, and always bet to win.

Brant was a lot less happy. He’d been receiving way more letters than he wanted. More than Callan, apparently, and Callan had already received quite a few. Since Brant’s property was closer to Sydney and Melbourne, where most of the letters came from, he’d met and been out with a couple of the women who’d written.

So far he hadn’t been impressed.

Or hadn’t admitted to being impressed.

Possibly because at heart he was perfectly happy as he was. The whole magazine campaign had been Brant’s sister’s idea, Callan had learned.

The plane skimmed the ground at the far end of the airstrip, bounced up for a moment or two, then bumped down harder, keeping its wheels in contact with planet earth this time. It careened along at speed, its wings rocking a little, but gradually slowed to a sedate taxi, propellers still roaring.

Callan climbed out of his vehicle. He didn’t bother to shut the door or take the keys. Six weeks seemed, simultaneously, like a long time and like no time at all. Would Jacinda look the way he remembered?

It hadn’t been her physical attributes that had drawn him, and yet the memories were all good. Big eyes, sparkly smile, an emotional warmth that showed in her whole body. Rose-colored spectacles, maybe? At a closer acquaintance, would a living, breathing, three-dimensional Jacinda Beale have anything in common with the woman who’d e-mailed him almost every day since they’d met?

Her e-mails had been far briefer over the past couple of weeks, he remembered. Stilted, almost. Cryptic, definitely. Not fluent at all. She’d said she didn’t want to talk about it, that she couldn’t talk about it, but that she was having some problems.

Then there had been total silence for several days. He’d even sent her a “Jacinda, are you okay?” message, which he’d regretted a split second after hitting Send.

Next thing, her phone call.

From Sydney.

Shaky voice, tense attempts at humor, nothing but stark honesty when she came to the point. “Would Carly and I be able to come stay with you for a little while? I can’t think of anywhere else to go. Everything’s a mess.”

“Sheesh, Jacinda! What’s the problem?”

“I—I can’t talk about it yet. But I promise it’s not because I’m, like, wanted for homicide in eleven jurisdictions, if that helps.”

“It sets a person’s mind at rest, yeah.”

“Callan, I’m sorry to be doing this. I can’t stay with Lucy. And I can’t—You are the only person I know who feels … your ranch is the only place that feels safe, so far away. Just until I catch my breath? Just until then, Callan. I—I do know it’s a huge thing to ask.”

How could he have said no?

Even if, right at this moment, he wished she hadn’t asked.

The plane had come to a halt in its usual spot less than fifty meters from his four-wheel-drive. A private outback airstrip didn’t need a terminal building, or even a sealed blacktop runway. The dust thrown up by the aircraft was still hanging in the air like a tea-and-milk-colored curtain. It drifted slowly to the east as the plane’s door opened and its steps folded down.

Rob, the pilot, helped Jacinda out and then reached for Carly. The little girl took her mother’s hand, while Rob went to get their bags from the back storage hatch where they were stowed. He brought out a mailbag, too, Callan noticed. It looked bulkier than usual. It had looked bulkier than usual for the past two months, so maybe “usual” was due for a new definition.

The bulky mailbag weighed on him. Rob was holding it up, grinning. He knew the story by now.

More letters to answer. More women Callan didn’t really want to meet.

Something squeezed tight inside him as he watched the woman and the little girl walk toward him. Carly looked neat and pretty and a little overwhelmed at finding herself in a place like this, so totally different from Sydney and L.A. Her mother moved awkwardly, her body appearing stiff in contrast to the unruly dark hair that whipped and undulated like fast-flowing stream water in the breeze.

Callan lifted his hand in greeting, but Jacinda didn’t even say hello, just, “I’m sorry,” the moment she reached him. It could have been I’m sorry, I think I’m about to get sick, because her face was stark-white and she could hardly move her dry lips, but he knew she was apologizing for a whole lot more than that.

He had to struggle to get his priorities worked out. Her nausea came top of the list right now.

“Take some deep breaths. Walk around.” He grabbed a plastic bottle of ice water from the four-wheel-drive and unscrewed the cap, wishing he’d brought a tin mug or something. Little Carly would probably like a drink, also, although she didn’t look anywhere near as ill as her mother.

Jacinda took the bottle and managed a few sips, then nodded. Yes, the water helped.

“You don’t have to apologize for anything,” he told her. “And you definitely don’t have to talk.”

“Carly?” She gave the water bottle to her daughter, even though Callan could see how much she still needed it for herself.

While Carly drank, Jacinda sucked and blew some careful air. Her gray eyes began to look less panic-stricken and her color was coming back. Callan tried to remember his impression of her the night they’d met, and again the next day when he’d made that impulsive visit to her friend’s place with flowers and a child’s gift.

She’d lost weight, he thought. She looked thin, now, rather than willowy. She wasn’t wearing makeup, but then she probably didn’t need it when she wasn’t pale green. Those eyes were so big and those lashes so dark, and her mouth was already the kind of shape that some women tried to paint in place without reference to their natural lip line.

He tried to decide whether she was beautiful … attractive … pretty. Each of those words meant something slightly different, but he couldn’t make up his mind if any of them fit.

Striking, maybe. That was the word for how she looked.

He felt as if he’d been struck.

By lightning.

By a sideways wall of wind.

By a blow to the head.

He hadn’t expected to feel so protective toward her, nor so helpless himself. Suddenly, he was more aware of his own masculinity than he had been in … hell … how long? Years?

He felt that if he were clumsy with her, in words or actions or assumptions, he might break her like a dried-out twig. He also sensed that she could just as easily break him, without her even knowing it, without her even understanding her power or his vulnerability.

Well, gee, that all made sense!

“Tell me when you’re ready for the drive,” he said, his voice too gruff in its pitch.

Rob had brought three suitcases, an overnight bag and that bulky mailbag over to the four-wheel-drive. “You want these …?” In the back, his gesture finished the question.

Callan nodded at him and he opened the vehicle’s rear door and lifted them inside, exaggerating his effort with the mailbag to suggest that it was almost too heavy to lift, full of all those women’s letters. Callan couldn’t help grinning, even though he shook his head at the man’s antics. They knew each other the way outback people often did: five minutes of contact a handful of times a month could feel like real friendship.

“The drive?” Jacinda said, meanwhile. “Where? How far?”

“To the homestead. It’s about five clicks.” She wouldn’t understand the Australian slang, and she probably didn’t measure her distances in kilometers, anyhow. “Three miles or so,” he translated for her.

“Right.” She looked relieved.

“But it’s bumpy. We’ll wait a bit.”

“I want to see the lizard,” Carly said, looking up at Callan as if she knew him.

“Got a few more hops, so I’ll say no to that beer,” Rob came in, leaning his hand on the top of the vehicle.

“Next time, mate,” Callan answered, as if beer had indeed been mentioned.

The lines were almost scripted, the kind of running joke that sustained male relationships out here. Rob never had a beer when he was flying, but the unstated offer—like an offer of help in times of trouble—was always there.

The two men waved at each other and Rob headed back to the plane. Jacinda managed to call, “Thank you!” in his direction and he waved again.

“Pick you two up on your way back,” he said, but was tactful enough not to ask when that might be.

“Can I see the lizard?” Carly repeated.

“She loved painting the boomerang. She’s talked about you quite a lot,” Jac murmured. To Carly she added, “I’m not sure if there are lizards here at the airstrip, honey. Maybe we’ll have time to look for one tomorrow. Can Mommy have the water again now, please?”

This time, she could take it in gulps, and when she’d had a long drink, she gave a grin of relief. “Never tasted so good!”

But he saw that her hands were shaking.

Carly had started to look hot and sweaty in the sun. She didn’t have a hat. Jacinda pushed the fine semiblond hair back from her wide little forehead and frowned. “Are you feeling sick from the plane, honey?”

“Not now. I was only a little, before, not as sick as you, Mommy.”

“So Callan wants to drive us to his house. Are you ready?”

“Where’s his house?”

Good question. You couldn’t see the homestead from here. It was set above a loop of Arakeela Creek, just under a kilometer from the line of white-trunked eucalyptus trees that marked the creek bed, on the far side of a low rise. “You’ll see it soon, Carly,” he told her. “Let’s get you strapped in.”

“You use seat belts out here? When there are no other cars around for miles?” Jacinda asked.

“They keep your head from hitting the ceiling on the bumps.”

She thought he was joking.

He had enough expertise at the wheel not to need to shatter her illusions on that point today, on the relatively well-made track between the airstrip and the homestead, but if she did any more extensive driving with him around the property, she’d soon find out the truth.

Once again, he wondered how long she would need to stay, what he could possibly do to make her feel welcome and entertained, and what would happen to such a new and untested kind of friendship in the isolation of the outback.

Most importantly, why had she fled her life in Los Angeles? What was she running from? And what was she hoping for, when she’d told him in such a desperate voice that she needed to catch her breath?

He couldn’t ask.

Not yet.

Callan stayed silent for the first few minutes of the drive. Jacinda listened to the grind of the vehicle’s engine and the squeak of its bodywork and springs on the unsealed track. The landscape they drove through was stark, yet she could already understand why some people would find it beautiful. She found it beautiful, herself. It was like looking at the very bones of the earth—bones that were colored clay red and ocher yellow and chalky white. In the distance, near an arc of eucalyptus trees, she saw a spreading herd of red-brown cattle grazing, their big bodies dwarfed by the sheer scale of ground and horizon and sky.

She knew she’d soon have to tell Callan why she was here, but not yet. She needed to wait until she was a little calmer and her blood sugar was a little higher, for a start. She wanted him to believe her. She needed him to understand how terrified she was and that her story wasn’t the product of her bitter feelings toward Kurt and her writer’s imagination—even if in some of her most paranoid, self-doubting moments, she had wondered if it was.

… Because if he didn’t believe her, and if she and Carly weren’t welcome here, she didn’t know where else they could go.

“There’s the homestead,” Callan finally said.

His bare, brown forearm and hand came into Jac’s body space, pointing strong and straight, across to the left of the vehicle. She’d forgotten what a powerful, sturdy build he had and, here in his natural element, the impression of strength was emphasized all the more. What would he look like on horseback, or wrestling with his cattle in a branding yard?

The mental images were too vivid and far too appealing. Kurt’s strength had never been physical … or even emotional. Instead, it was based purely on money and influence. Callan’s kind of strength would be so different, much simpler and more straightforward, and she needed that so much right now.

Right away she saw the cluster of buildings that he indicated, their forms and outlines growing clearer as the vehicle got closer. They had roofs painted a dark red that had faded to a dusty cherry color in the strong light and they were shaded by stands of willowy, small-leafed trees that she couldn’t identify. Not eucalyptus. As a California resident, she knew those well. Some of the buildings were wooden, but the main house was made of sand-colored stone with a framing of reddish brick where walls met and windows opened.

She glimpsed something that looked like a vegetable garden. It contained a couple of short rows of orchard trees and was protected on two sides by walls made of some kind of dry brush, and on a third side by a screen of living shrubs. In a sparsely grassed field close to the house, several horses grazed or drank water from a metal trough, placed in the shade of some trees.

Several of the buildings had wide verandas, and all of them had metal water tanks hugging close on one side, to collect roof runoff when the rare rains came. Houses, storage sheds, barns, she didn’t know what each building was for, but there was something very pretty and alluring about the grouping. It reminded her of circled wagons in an old-fashioned Western film, or a town in a desert oasis.

She had stretched a very new friendship by her desperate act of coming here, she knew, but at least she felt that she and Carly would be physically safe.

Far safer than she had felt they were in Los Angeles.

Safer than she’d felt at Lucy’s after those phone calls had started coming at all hours—hang-ups, every one of them. They had to have been from Kurt.

“How big is your ranch?” she asked Callan.

“My station. We don’t call them ranches here. It’s around twenty-four hundred square kilometers.”

“Wow!” It sounded like a satisfying number. “In acres, that would be … twice that? Four or five thousand?”

She was only guessing. Kurt had had a ranch around that size in eastern California. Six thousand acres. He used to spread his arms out and take a deep breath and tell everyone, “Man, this is a piece of land!”

But Callan laughed at her estimate. “Uh, a little bit bigger, actually. Nine hundred-odd square miles. In acres, six hundred thousand.”

“Six hundred thousand? You’re saying this is a hundred times bigger than my ex-husband’s dude ranch?”

“It’s a pretty small place compared to some in this country. Anna Creek, out west of Lake Eyre, is something like six million acres, the biggest pastoral lease in the world.”

Jacinda didn’t care about Anna Creek. “You own—heavens—Rhode Island!”

“Only I probably have a lot fewer cattle.”

“How many? Don’t tell me! More than the human population of the whole country?”

“Nowhere close. Again, around twenty-four hundred. One beast per square kilometer. It’s arid, out here. The land just doesn’t support more than that. Most of the time, they roam free, and they can be pretty hard to find when we want to round them up and send them to market.”

She didn’t care about the number of cattle, although she could well believe they were hard to locate in this vastness. Callan owned more land than the average European prince.

And a hundred times more land than Kurt.

Which probably shouldn’t make her want to grin with pleasure, but it did.

“As far as the eye can see? It’s all yours?”

“Yep.” And though he said it quietly—lazily, almost—she could see the pride and satisfaction it gave him.

Soon they rumbled across a metal grid between two lines of fence, and a couple of hundred yards later, they’d reached the homestead. Callan parked the vehicle at a casual angle out front and switched off the engine. Two dogs raced around from the side of the house and greeted their human as if they hadn’t seen him in a week. One was a black and white border collie and one was probably the red dog featured in Callan’s magazine photo.

“Okay, Pippa,” he said. “Okay, Flick. You like me. I get the message. But Jacinda and Carly don’t need to get told the same thing, you hear? They’re not used to wretches like you.” He issued a couple of sharp commands and the dogs dashed over to sit in the shade of the house, pink tongues panting and lolling, attitudes repentant.

A screen door squeaked on its hinges and flapped back against the jamb, and three people materialized on the shaded veranda. They must have heard the vehicle’s approach.

It wasn’t hard to work out who they were—Callan’s two boys and his mother, Kerry. All three of them had exactly his eyes—a glorious overload of piercing blue. He’d talked about them in his e-mails, and Jac knew that Kerry had been widowed by Callan’s father’s death eleven years ago and lived in a smaller cottage in this same grouping of buildings. That was probably it over there, about a minute’s walk away. It was a smaller version of the main house, with the same faded red roof, the same brick-and-stone walls, and set beneath the same willowy trees.

“I can’t get myself unstrapped, Mommy,” came Carly’s voice from the backseat.

Jacinda found that her own seat-belt catch was stiff, also. Thanks to its frequent exposure to dust, probably. She climbed out and opened the back door to help her daughter, aware that she was being stared at—in a welcoming way, but stared at all the same. Callan opened the four-wheel-drive’s back door.

“Suitcases? I’ll help,” Kerry Woods said, coming down the stone steps that led from the veranda. “You’re Jacinda and Carly, of course, and I’m Kerry.” She patted Jac’s shoulder and ruffled Carly’s fine hair as Carly slid her little body down from the high vehicle to the ground. “Boys, don’t just stand there, come and meet Carly. Someone to play with!”

“Does that mean we’ve finished school?”

“To play with when you’ve finished school, which is at lunchtime, as you well know, Lockie!”

It was now eleven-thirty, Jac saw when she looked at her watch. No, wait a minute, they were on central Australian time now, the pilot had said, which meant it was half an hour earlier here than it would be in Sydney.

“Did you have a good flight?” Kerry asked her.

“Yes, the view from the plane between Sydney and Broken Hill was fascinating. Um, I’m afraid between Broken Hill and here, though, I—”

“She looked pretty green when she landed,” Callan cut in on a drawl.

Kerry made a sympathetic sound, and Carly asked her lizard question. The boys had gotten the dogs all excited again and they almost tripped Callan up as he reached the steps with the two heaviest suitcases. Josh ignored the lizard question and asked a jumbo-jet question of his own. Carly ignored that, but Lockie answered it in the derisive tone of an older brother. Kerry grabbed the third suitcase and mentioned tea and biscuits. The dogs said, Yes, please! Lockie and Josh protested about their schoolwork once more.

Chaos, all of it.

Fabulous, safe, friendly, normal, reassuring family chaos.

“I’d love some tea and biscuits,” Jacinda said. She picked up the bag that Rob-the-pilot had unloaded from the plane along with her luggage. “Should I bring this?”

“Uh, yeah, it’s just the mail,” Callan said.

“Wow! You get a lot of mail out here!”

“Not usually.”

“More letters, Callan?” Kerry asked.

“I’m hoping most of it’s other stuff.”

“I think there are some books in here,” Jacinda said and saw that he looked relieved.

She still felt shaky. The difficult flight, the remnants of jet lag following their trip from California four days ago, the fact that she hadn’t been eating enough lately … Her blood sugar was down and she was stressed and emotionally stretched to the point where she thought she might snap like a perished elastic band.

Kerry must have seen at least a part of all this.

“Come inside,” she said. “Boys, leave our visitors alone for a bit, until we get them settled. Callan, I made up both beds in the back corner room. It looks out on the garden, Jacinda, and there’s a door opening to the back veranda. There’s a bathroom just across the corridor, and I’ve forbidden the boys to use it while you’re here. They can use Callan’s. So if you want to freshen up, or if you want me to bring the tea to your room …”

Chaos.

Then peace.

Carly had already made friends with lizard-loving Lockie, if not yet with Josh, and wanted him to show her the garden. Inside the house, the air was pleasantly dim and cool in contrast to the bright light and heat outside. Along the corridor, Jac saw prize ribbons in different colors from various cattle shows tacked up on the wall. The three suitcases and the overnight bag sat in the middle of her new room, for when she felt ready to unpack. Callan’s mailbag had disappeared somewhere, carried in his firm grip.

The guest room itself was spacious but modestly furnished—twin beds clothed in patchwork quilts, a ceiling fan, a freestanding varnished pine armoire, a matching chest of drawers with a mirror above, and a framed picture of a landscape that seemed to be made out of pieces of twig and leaf and bark.

Jacinda lay down on the bed and looked at the picture and at last felt truly safe. At last. She was far enough from Kurt, from his power and his contacts and his chains of influence and control. He wouldn’t find Carly here, and even if he did, his power did not extend into this Rhode-Island-sized cattle kingdom.

She closed her eyes and her head still whirled, but at least her heart had stopped its skittering rhythm and had steadied to a regular beat. She couldn’t stay here forever. Not more than a few weeks at most. Even in that time, she and Carly couldn’t let themselves be a burden on Callan or his family. But for now, for now …

Twenty minutes later, as soon as she was sitting down with Kerry and Callan over their cookies and tea, she told them, “Please give me something to do. Anything. I mean that. I’d suggest something, only I don’t know what you need. Dishwashing and cooking and vacuuming, obviously, but more than that. Don’t treat me like a guest when I’ve dumped myself and my daughter on you like this.”

She sounded sincere and almost pleading, Callan thought, and he knew it would be easier on all of them if he could find something for her to do. Mustering big, half-wild cattle on a dirty quad motorbike, maybe? Stretching wire on about four thousand meters of new fence? Harnessing herself to the faded red roofs and painting them?

Hmm. There was just a slight chance that in those areas, an ex–Los Angeles screenwriter wouldn’t have the necessary skills.

Mum, help me on this ….

His mother had brought out a set of blocks for Carly to play with and she was happy with them out on the veranda, visible through the screen door. The boys were back at their school desks, Josh working on math problems and Lockie struggling with a book report.

They did their lessons via Internet and mail through the South Australian School of the Air. Callan had done the same thing up until the age of twelve, back when the Internet hadn’t existed and his teacher was just a scratchy, indistinct voice on the high-frequency radio. In general, the boys enjoyed their schooling and it gave them a vital contact with other kids and the outside world, but Lockie wasn’t a keen reader or writer. They’d all been suffering through the book report this week.

“School?” his mother mouthed at Callan.

He was about to shake his head. He knew why she’d suggested it. If she didn’t have to supervise the boys, she’d be free to get more done in the garden. She worked too hard already, though, and had done since Dad’s death. Callan didn’t want to give her a way to work even harder.

But Mum didn’t give him time to nix the idea. “Lockie would love some help with his book report,” she told Jacinda. “Callan said you were a writer ….”

Jacinda gave a tight little nod. She looked as if she’d suddenly felt demon fingers on the back of her neck.

Callan jumped in. “Mum, I don’t think—I think that’s like asking a doctor for free medical advice at a party.”

“No, it’s fine,” Jacinda said. “Really.”

Callan could see it wasn’t fine.

Worse, Jacinda thought that Mum had meant right this minute, and she’d already stood up and gone into the office-cum-schoolroom adjacent to where they were sitting. Or rather, where Josh was huddled over his math book and Lockie was staring morosely at an almost-blank computer screen. “What’s the book, Lockie?”

What’sthebookLockiewhat’sthebookLockiewhat’sthebookLockie …

The words echoed in Jacinda’s head like a dinning bell for several seconds after she spoke them.

I can do this, she thought.

It would be insane if I couldn’t do this.

But she’d had trouble even filling in the passenger arrival card coming in to Sydney’s airport on the plane. She’d bought some postcards three days ago—twelve hours before her frantic call to Callan—and she’d left them behind at Lucy’s, unable to face what they did to her well-being. She’d picked up a pen at one point, on the day she’d bought them, stared at the rectangle of card and teetered on the edge of a full-fledged panic attack.

It was just like the panic attack that was boiling up inside her now, like thunder clouds boiling on a humid summer horizon. Only this time, there was no teetering on the edge. The panic attack descended and she had no power to fight it off.

The computer screen was so familiar. That slightly shimmery white space with its edging of Microsoft Word icons and line numbers, the bright royal blue band across the top, not much darker than the awesome blue sky above Callan’s land.

BOOK REPORT Lockie had typed, centered on the page like the words REECE and NAOMI. The heading vibrated and blurred and shouted at her.

She couldn’t breathe. Words tangled in her head, a nightmarish mix of dialogue lines from Heartbreak Hotel scenes she’d written months ago and lines that Kurt had delivered to her in person—those velvety threats, and pseudocaring pieces of advice and upside-down accusations. A black, cold, reasonless pit of fear and dread opened in her stomach and flight was the only possible response.

Out of here, out of here, out of here.

Dimly aware that Lockie was talking to her, answering her question about the book, she fled the room, out through the screen door, past a startled Carly, down the steps, out across the wide, hard-baked piece of red ground to a stand of trees grouped around a shiny metal windmill and an open water tank. She came to a halt, gasping, blood thundering in her ears.

The black pit inside her slowly closed over, leaving a powerful memory of her fear, but not the fear itself. She grasped one of the trailing branches of the willowy tree and felt a trickle of tiny, dusky pink spheres fall into her hand. Fruits? They were dry and papery on the outside and, when she rubbed them between her fingertips, they smelled like pepper.

A breeze made the top of the windmill turn. It was shaped like a child’s drawing of a flower, with a circle of metal petals like oars, and it turned with just enough force to pump an erratic stream of water up from the ground and into the tank, whose tarnished sides felt cool and clean in the sliver of midday shade.

Jac began to breathe again, but she was still shaking.

“What happened, Jacinda?” Callan said behind her. She’d heard the screen door and his footsteps, but hadn’t really taken in the sounds of his approach. “He wasn’t rude, was he?”

“No, no, nothing like that.” She turned away from the tank’s cool side. “It was me. My fault, completely.”

“So what happened?” He stepped closer—close enough to see the tiny, convulsive shudders that vibrated her body. “Hey ….”

He touched her arm, closing his fingers around the bones just above her wrist. His hand felt heavy and strong and warm, and before she knew it, she’d pulled her own hand around to grab him in the same place—a kind of monkey grip.

They stayed that way, too close to each other. He could easily have rested his jutting chin on the top of her bent head, could have hugged her or breathed in her ear.

“Lately I’ve been having panic attacks,” she said. “Please apologize to Lockie. He was in the middle of telling me about the book and I just … left.”

“Bit more dramatic than that, Jacinda.”

“I can’t even remember how I got out of the room.” Without planning to, she pushed her forehead into Callan’s shoulder, somehow needing to be in contact with his rocklike steadiness. She smelled hot cotton, and the natural fragrance of male hair and skin.

He held her gently and made shushing sounds, the kind he’d have made to a frightened animal—which was exactly what she was, she thought. There had certainly been no human rationality in her flood of fear.

When he made a movement, she thought he was letting her go, and the cry of protest escaped her lips instinctively. She wasn’t ready yet. He felt too good, too right. The air between them had caught fire with shared awareness, sucking the oxygen from her lungs. Again, it was animal, primal, physical. Her body craved the contact, needed it like warmth or food. You couldn’t explain it, plot out the steps that had led up to it; it was just suddenly there.

She could feel his breathing, sense his response and his wariness. Grabbing on to his hands and kneading them with her own, she gabbled something that was part apology, part explanation, and didn’t make much sense at all. Then she felt him push her away more firmly.

“Carly’s worried about you,” he murmured on a note of warning. “She’s coming down the steps now. And Mum’s behind her.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No. Will you stop that? The apologizing?”

“You can let me go, now. I’m fine.”

“Not sure if Mum’s going to stop Carly from coming over here. This must look pretty, um, private.”

He’d felt it, too. The awareness. She knew he had.

But he didn’t like it any more than she did.

“Yes,” she said. “Okay. Yes. Let me talk to them.”

“Wait, though. Listen, I don’t want to push, but I really can’t afford … don’t want … for my mother to get the wrong idea.” He stepped back, making it clear what kind of wrong idea he meant. “Jacinda, when you can, as soon as you can, please, you have to give me some idea of why you’re here.”

Chapter Four

“Mum’s giving the kids some lunch,” Callan reported. “I’ve told her you and I needed to talk.”

“Thanks. We do. I don’t want to keep you in the dark about what’s been going on.”

“Sit on the bench. No hurry. Are you hungry? Thirsty?”

“I’m fine. I can wait.”

He’d brought her out to the garden, and it was beautiful. She’d never realized herbs and vegetables could look so pretty. There were borders of rosemary and lavender and thyme, beds of young, fist-size lettuces set out in patterns of pale green alternating with dark greenish-red, orange-flowered marigolds like sentinels at the end of each row. Shade cloth stretched overhead protected some of the beds from the harshness of the midday sun, while brushwood screens kept out the dusty wind.

The soil looked rich and dark, nothing like the red- and ocher-hued earth of the surrounding country, so it must have been trucked in from elsewhere. Beyond the garden there was a chicken run, and she could see several rusty-brown and glossy black birds scratching happily, watched over by a magnificent rooster. Carly would love a newly-laid egg each morning.

Jac whooshed out a preparatory breath, knowing she couldn’t spend the next hour admiring plants and hens. “Where to begin,” she said.

“You had a bad divorce,” Callan prompted. “But I thought that was over. Property settlement, custody, all set.”

“So did I, but Kurt has other ideas. He wants Carly.” Did he really? She still wasn’t sure what game he was playing. “Or he wants to terrorize me with the idea that he wants Carly,” she revised. “Which is working, by the way. I’m terrorized. His actions have gone beyond industry power games.”

Kurt had always loved to play those, too.

“Yeah?” Callan studied her face for a moment with his piercing blue gaze, then seemed to realize it might be easier if they both looked away, that she wouldn’t want her emotions under a microscope while she talked. He picked up some bits of gravel from under the bench and started tossing them lazily, as if they both had all the time in the world for this. Somewhere overhead, a crow cawed.

“Can I copy you with the rock-throwing thing?” Jac asked, and he grinned and deposited half his handful into her open palm. They threw gravel together for a minute in silence before she could work out how to begin. Decided in the end just to tell the story as straight as she could. “Last week, a woman that Carly didn’t know, a complete stranger, tried to collect her from preschool. And she looked just like me.”

The memory was still very fresh, and the words came tumbling out as she told Callan the full story. She’d seen the woman herself. Hadn’t thought anything of it, had just idly registered that a slender female with long dark hair was getting into the same make, model and color of car as her own, fifty yards down the block from the preschool gate.

Maybe, yes, she’d had some idea in the back of her mind that Kurt himself might try to pick up Carly one day, even though he wasn’t supposed to and the preschool staff knew it. She’d started coming ten minutes earlier than usual because of her suspicion, but she hadn’t imagined a strategy as devious as this.

She had gone inside and found the head teacher, Helen Franz, sitting at her desk pale and shaking and unable to pick up the phone to call the police. The stranger had known Carly’s name, her best friend’s name, the teachers’ names.

“This woman, this … this … me look-alike, comes past Helen toward Carly,” Jac told Callan. “She says to Helen, ‘Hi, Mrs. Franz, I’m a touch early, I signed her out on my way through,’ and Helen says that’s fine—because, you know, I have been coming early, the past few weeks—and that Carly is right here. ‘Here’s your mom, honey.’ And she doesn’t really look closely at this woman, but she has no suspicions at all and she’s all set to let Carly go. That was what made Helen start shaking, afterward, when she realized what she’d almost done. I started shaking, too, as soon as she started telling me. So Helen’s actually ready to let Carly go. ‘That’s fine, Jacinda,’ she tells this woman. No suspicions.

“Except that Carly knows it’s not me. She won’t budge. Digs in her heels. Throws a tantrum, which isn’t like her. The woman says, ‘Sweetheart, you don’t have time to finish your game.’ And she has my mannerisms. My voice. Carly starts screaming. Helen comes closer to see what the problem is. Carly screams out, ‘That’s not my real mommy. It’s an alien!’ She’s terrified. Completely terrified. Partly because the deception is so neat and close. It would have been less frightening for her, I think, if the woman hadn’t looked anything like me at all.”

“I can understand that,” Callan muttered. He stretched his arm along the garden bench. He’d finished with the gravel. He looked skeptical, but interested. “Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. It’s … yeah … scary if someone looks right and wrong at the same time. It really gets to you.”

“Meanwhile, Helen’s still one step behind, at this stage. She looks up to find the woman heading out of there, just quietly slipping away. But fast. As if she’s been given instructions to abort the mission the moment she’s seriously challenged. She had my style of sunglasses, an outfit like one of mine, my hairstyle. She was really well rehearsed. Coached, Callan.”

He looked at her, eyes narrowed in the bright light, and she saw the doubt still in place. Dropped her bits of gravel. Grabbed his arm with dusty fingers. “Yes, I know it sounds paranoid … crazy. But my ex-husband is a big-time TV producer. He has access to desperate actresses, expert makeup artists, wardrobe people, acting and movement coaches. He could pull it off like that.” She snapped her fingers. “I can put you in touch with Helen Franz if you want to hear it from her. We never called the police, in the end, because nothing actually happened, but she wrote up a full report. There were two other teachers in the room who witnessed the whole thing from a distance. It did happen, Callan!”

“I—I guess I’m not doubting it. But who would have gone along with something like that? It was a kidnapping attempt!”

“Kurt wouldn’t have called it that when he hired the actress. He would have called it a reality TV show with hidden cameras, or a method-acting audition for a big movie role. He would have paid in five figures. And he’s Kurt Beale. So people listen. Desperate actresses sure listen! They listen to anything! And they believe him. And they do what he says. He has the power, he has the control. He loves to use it. He’s Kurt Beale,” she repeated.

“Yeah?” Callan said. Then he gave a slow grin. “Well, I’ve never heard of him.”

She closed her eyes. “I know. That’s exactly why I’m here.”

She told him about not being able to write anymore, about being scared the inspiration might never come back, about resigning from Heartbreak Hotel for Elaine’s sake, about fleeing to Sydney and getting all those hang-up calls at Lucy’s.

“And panicking,” she added. “I know I’m panicking. I do know it. Overreacting, obsessing over worst-case scenarios. Do you know what a curse it can be, a writer’s imagination? But there’s no place I can draw the line, Callan. If you seriously asked me, is Kurt capable of taking Carly and hiding her somewhere so I’d never see her again? Is he capable of stalking me in the entertainment industry so that I’ll never write again? Is he capable of murder, that kind of if-I-can’t-have-her-then-no-one-can awful thing that some men do? There’s no place I could draw the line and say, “No, I know Kurt, and I know he wouldn’t do that.” He could do it. Any of it. I know it.”

“Hey … hey.”

“Yeah, enough about me, right?” she tried to joke. “You look like you’re thinking six hundred thousand acres isn’t going to be big enough for both of us.”

“No, no, the opposite. I wanted to tell you that six hundred thousand acres is big. We’re isolated. You’re safe here. For—well, for—”

He wanted the bottom line. How long did she want to stay?

“A month, okay?” she told him quickly. “Our return flight is in a month. I’ll have something worked out by then.”

I’ll know if there’s a chance I can ever go back to writing.

I’ll decide on somewhere Carly and I can safely live. Texas, maybe. Vermont, or Maine. Somewhere like this, where there’s space and air, and where Kurt has no power.

I’ll have talked myself out of the panic attacks, and Carly won’t sleepwalk anymore.

“Carly sleepwalks,” she blurted out.

“Does she?”

“Yes, I should tell you, and the boys, and your mom. It started a couple of months ago, before we came to Sydney that first time. The doctor thought it might be the stress of the divorce and all the conflict, Kurt’s games. She doesn’t do it every night. Maybe once or twice a week.”

“Is it dangerous?”

“No, but it’s unpredictable, and she can get upset if she’s woken up in the wrong place or the wrong way. I’ve been sleeping pretty lightly, though, so I always hear her getting up. If she’s handled gently and not startled in any way, I can just lead her back to bed.”

“I can’t think how it would be a problem from our end. The boys are pretty sound sleepers. And Mum’s in the other house.”

“Yes, it’s probably fine, but I thought you should know.” They both sat silently for a moment, then she added, “You say Mum, not Mom.” She imitated the clipped sound of the word, compared to the longer American vowel.

“Yep. Short and sweet.”

“I like it. What should I call her, by the way, your mom?”

“Just Kerry.”

“And Carly?”

“I’d say keep on calling her Carly.” He nodded thoughtfully. “Might confuse her if you changed it to Goldilocks, at this stage.”

Jac laughed. “Well, Goldilocks is in fact her middle name, but I take your point.” The moment of silly humor was nice. Unexpected. “No, I meant—”

“I know what you meant. What should Carly call Mum? Just Kerry. Or Gran, like the boys do. She won’t mind either way.”

“Thanks. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for this, Callan.”

For seeming so relaxed about it.

For making her laugh when she wasn’t expecting to.

For not being Kurt.

“Does she have any grandmothers of her own, your Carly?” he asked.

“No, she doesn’t. Kurt’s mother died just before he and I met. Mine, when I was twelve. My dad lives back east.” She stood up, didn’t want to talk about any of that, right now. “I love those chickens.” She walked toward the wire mesh that separated them from the vegetable garden and called back, “I never realized their feathers would be so beautiful. The black ones are almost iridescent on their breasts.”

“And they’re good layers, too.” His tone poked fun at her, just a little. Iridescent feathers? These birds weren’t for decoration. They had a job to do!

“Is egg collecting something Carly and I could handle? She’d love it, I think.”

“Sure.” He stood up and came over, and they looked at the chickens side by side.

“Do they … like … bite? I’m good with horses. Kurt and I used to ride on his ranch.”

If you could call six thousand acres a ranch.

She had, once.

But she’d seen Callan’s place, now.

“But chickens …” She spread her hands. She didn’t know anything about chickens. They hadn’t fit with Kurt’s image.

“They’ll peck at anything that looks like it could be something to eat,” Callan said. “Shoelaces, rings. But they’ll stop when it doesn’t taste good. And they’re not aggressive. You can pet ’em and feed ’em out of your hand.” He pulled some leafy sprigs of parsley from a garden bed and gave half of them to her, then bent down to hen level and stuck his parsley through the wire. A red-brown bird came peck-peck-pecking at once. “See? Try it.”

She squatted. “Well, hi there, Little Red Hen.”

“The boys have names for them. They can introduce you and Carly properly after lunch.”

“Her ex-husband was stalking her,” Callan told his mother. “Professionally and personally. She needed somewhere safe, and far.”

“Well, Arakeela should be both,” his mother said.

They stood on the veranda, watching the two female figures in the chook run—the adult and the little girl. Their clothing was bright in the midafternoon light and their hair glinted where the sun hit, one head dark and the other blond. Lockie and Josh had introduced Carly and her mum to the rooster, Darth Vader, and the hens, Furious, Gollum, Frodo, Shrek, Donkey, Princess and Hen.

Carly thought those names were great. Callan and Kerry could both hear her little voice saying, “Tell me which one’s Frodo, again, Mommy?”

“Well, I know it was one of the black ones ….”

The boys had gone, now, having shown Jacinda and Carly the chooks’ favorite laying places. They were working on the quad-wheeled motorbikes in the shed, changing the oil. Most outback kids of their age got to ride quad bikes around the property when they helped with the cattle, but Callan was pretty strict about it. If Lockie and Josh were going to ride, they had to know how to take care of the bikes and they never rode one unless he was there.

“How long are they staying?” Kerry asked.

“Their return flight is a month from now, she said. I don’t know how it’s going to work out, Mum, to be honest, but I couldn’t say no.”

“Of course you couldn’t! Do you think I’m suggesting it?”

“You seemed a bit doubtful.”

“I could tell something was wrong, that’s all. That she wasn’t just a tourist friend wanting an outback stay.”

“She’s been having panic attacks. That was what happened with Lockie’s book report before lunch. She doesn’t know what she’ll do for an income instead of writing, if the … you know … drive and hunger and inspiration never come back.”

He knew nothing about writing. Couldn’t imagine. How did you create a plot and action out of thin air? How did you dream up people who seemed so real that they jumped off the page or out of a TV screen like best friends? How did you string the words together, one by one, so that they added up to a story?

And yet he understood something about how she felt. He knew the same fear that the drive might never come back. He knew the huge sense of loss and failure, now that the hunger was gone. He had the same instinctive belief that without this certain special pool inside you, you were physically incomplete, even though the pool wasn’t something tangible and solid like a limb.

“She probably just needs to rest her spirit,” Kerry said. “Take the pressure off and forgive herself.”

“I guess,” he answered, not believing it could be that simple. Not in his own case.

Take the pressure off? Rest the spirit? Forgive yourself?

Was that all it took?

His mother didn’t know.

Hell, of course she didn’t! And Callan would never tell her.

He hadn’t breathed a word about the freckled blonde at the Birdsville Races three years ago. When he’d gone down to chat to the Scandinavian backpacker camping at the water hole a few months later, Mum had thought he was only protecting their land. He’d reported that he’d told the young woman about where it was safe to light a campfire and where best to photograph the wildlife that came to drink at the water hole at dusk.

Mum had no idea that he’d seen a phantom similarity to Liz in both those women, and that the women themselves had picked up on the vibe. As Jacinda had said before lunch, however, when she’d told him about the woman at Carly’s preschool, it was more terrifying to confront the differences when someone bore a passing resemblance to the person you loved.

They hadn’t been Liz’s freckles, her kind of blond, her skin, her body, her voice.

Why had he gone looking for something that he could never find?

No one, but no one—not Brant or Dusty, no one—had known about the Danish girl’s open-eyed seduction attempt, or Callan’s failure. No one ever would.

“We got eggs!” Carly shrieked out, coming out of the hen run. “Look, guys, we got eggs! Six! Mommy has four and I have two because my hands are too little. I have one brown one with white speckles and one brown one with brown speckles.”

“Carly? Don’t run so fast, honey,” said her mum, coming up behind her, “because if you trip and fall, they’ll break.”

“But I want to show ’em to Callan and—” She slowed and looked back at her mother for guidance, asking in a stage whisper, “What’s the lady’s name?”

Jacinda looked at Callan and shrugged, asking a question with her face. Kerry or Gran? They’d discussed it—that joke about Goldilocks—but Jacinda clearly didn’t know what to say. She had that vulnerable look about her again—the loss of grace, the slight slouch to her shoulders. It made her look thinner. And it made him want to give her promises about how he’d look after her that she would be bound to read the wrong way.

Before he could answer, Kerry stepped off the veranda.

“It’s Gran, love,” she said, in her usual plainspoken way. As she spoke, she leaned down to admire the eggs that had made Carly so excited. “You can call me Gran.”

Jet lag crept up on Jacinda and Carly a short while after the evening meal. Jac tried to hide her yawns and droopiness, but Carly wasn’t so polite. “Mommeee! I’m so tired! I wanna go to bed right now!” They were both fast asleep before eight o’clock.

At midnight, according to the clock on the table beside the bed, Jac woke up again. At first she couldn’t work out why, then she saw the pale child-size shadow moving near the door. Carly was sleepwalking, and subconsciously she’d heard her daughter’s familiar sounds.

She caught up to her in the corridor and tried to steer her back to bed. Carly wouldn’t come. “Honey? This way … Come on, sweetheart.”

“Butter banana on the machine in the morning.” She talked in her sleep, too, and it never made any sense.

“Let’s turn around and come back to bed,” Jac repeated.

Carly’s eyes were open, but she wasn’t awake. She had a plan. She wanted something. And as always when sleepwalking, she was hard to dissuade. “I’m coming in the morning up,” she said, pushing at Jac with firm little hands.

“Well, let’s not, honey.”

“No!” Carly said. “Up in the, in the out.”

Maybe it was best to let her walk it off. The doctor had said that it wasn’t dangerous to waken her, contrary to popular myth, but it did always end with Carly crying and talking about bad dreams that she would have forgotten by morning if Jac could get her back to bed while she was still asleep.

“Okay, Carly, want to show me?” She took her daughter’s hand and let her lead the way.

They crept along the corridor, through the big, comfortable living room and out of the front door, first the solid wooden one and then the squeaky one with the insect-proof mesh. Oh, that squeak was loud! Would it wake Callan and the boys? Jac tried to close it quietly behind her.

Carly looked blindly around the yard, while Jacinda waited for her next move. An almost full moon shone high in the sky, a little flat on one side. It didn’t look quite right, because it was upside-down in this country. Even with the moon so bright, the stars were incredible, thousands of pinpoints of light against a backdrop of solid ink. No city haze.

Carly went toward the steps leading down from the veranda, and Jac held her hand more tightly. She didn’t stand as steady on her feet when she was asleep, even with her eyes open. She could easily trip and fall. At the last moment, she turned. Not going down the steps after all. There was a saggy old cane couch farther along the veranda, with a padded seat, recently recovered in a summery floral fabric with plenty of matching pillows, and she headed for that.

Jac thought, Okay, honey, we can sit here for a while. There was a mohair blanket draped over the back of it.

Carly nestled against her on the couch. “Yogurt, no yogurt,” she said very distinctly. Then her face softened and she closed her eyes.

“No yogurt. I’ll carry you back to bed in a minute,” Jac whispered.

She unfolded the blanket and spread it over them both because the night had chilled considerably from the moment the sun had dropped out of sight. The blanket was hand-knitted in bright, alternating squares of pink and blue, and it was warm and soft. No hurry in getting back to bed. So nice to sit here with Carly and feel safe.

Callan found them there several minutes later. He’d heard that screen door, had guessed it was probably Jacinda, unable to sleep. They didn’t lock doors around here at night. If anyone showed up with intentions good or bad, you’d hear their vehicle a mile off and the dogs would bark like crazy.

Still, after thinking about it and feeling himself grow more and more awake, something made him get up to check that everything was all right.

Yeah, it was fine. The two of them were dead to the world, snuggled together under the blanket. The fuzz of the fabric tickled Carly’s nose and she pushed at it with her hand in her sleep. He moved to go back to bed himself, but the old board under his foot creaked and, coupled with Carly’s movement, it disturbed Jacinda and she opened her eyes.

“Was she sleepwalking?” he asked.

“Yes, and we ended up here. I didn’t mean to fall asleep myself. Did we waken you?” She looked down his body, then back up. He wore his usual white cotton T-shirt and navy blue pajama pants—respectable, Dad-type nightwear that couldn’t possibly send the wrong message.

“I heard the screen door,” he confessed.

She was wearing pink pajamas, herself, in kind of a plaid pattern on a cream background, and her dark hair fell over her shoulders like water falling over rock. Her skin looked shadowy inside the V of the pajama front, and even when she smiled, her lips stayed soft and full.

“Why does your mother sleep over at the little cottage?” she asked.

“Oh … uh …” He had no idea why her thoughts would have gone in that direction. “Just to give the two of us some space. She moved in there when I married Liz.” Newlyweds … privacy … he didn’t want to go there in his thoughts, and continued quickly, “She’ll sleep in the main house if I’m away, of course, but she works pretty hard around here and sometimes she needs a break from the boys.”

“Right. Of course.”

“Why did you ask?”

She blinked. “I don’t know. Gosh, I don’t know!” She looked stricken and uncomfortable.

They stared at each other and she made a movement, shifting over for him, finding him a piece of the blanket. Without saying anything, he sat down and took the corner of the blanket. Its edges made two sides of a triangle, across his chest and back across his knees. A wave of warmth and sweetness hit him—clean hair and body heat and good laundering.

The old cane of the couch was a little saggy in the center, and his weight pushed Jacinda’s thigh against his. Carly stretched in her sleep and began to encroach on his space, which stopped the contact between himself and her mom from becoming too intimate. This felt safe, even though it shouldn’t have.

“Well, you know, ask anything you like,” he told her. “I didn’t mean you had to feel it wasn’t your business.”

Silence.

“It’s so quiet,” she murmured.

“Is it spooking you?”

“A little. I guess it’s not quiet, really. The house creaks, and there are rustlings outside. Just now I heard … I think it was a frog. I’m hoping it was a frog.”

“You mean as opposed to the notorious Greerson’s death bat with its toxic venom and ability to chew through wire window screens to get to its human victims?”

“That one, yes.”

“Well, their mating cries are very similar to a frog’s, but Greerson’s death bats don’t usually come so close to the house except in summer.”

She laughed. “You’re terrible!”

“We do have some nice snakes, however, with a great line in nerve toxins.”

“In the house?”

He sighed at this. “I really want to say no, Jacinda, but I’d be lying. Once in a while, in the really hot weather, snakes have been known to get into the house. And especially under the house.”

She thought about this for a moment, and he waited for her to demand the next flight out of here, back to nice, safe Kurt and his power games in L.A. “So what should I tell Carly about snakes?” she finally asked.

“Not to go under the veranda. Not to play on the pile of fence posts by the big shed. If she sees one in the open, just stand still and let it get away, because it’s more scared than she is. If she gets bitten—or thinks she might have been, because snake bites usually don’t hurt—tell someone, stay calm and stay still.”

“If she gets bitten, what happens?”

“She won’t get bitten. I’ve lived on this land my whole life, apart from boarding school, and I never have.”

“But if she does?”

“We put on a pressure bandage, keep her lying quiet and call the flying doctor.”

“Which I’m hoping is not the same as the School of the Air, because I’m not sure what a doctor on a computer screen could do about snake bite.”

“The flying doctor comes in an actual airplane, with a real nurse and real equipment and real snake antivenin.”

“And takes her away to a real hospital, with me holding her hand the whole way, and she’s fine.”

“That’s right. But the pressure bandage is pretty important. I’ll show you where we keep them in the morning. And I’ll show you how to put one on, just in case.”

She nodded. “Got it. Thanks. So you’ve done some first-aid training?”

“A couple of different courses, yeah. So has Mum. Seems the sensible thing, out here.”

“And is that how you run your land and your cattle, too? Sensibly?”

“Try to.”

They kept talking. He was wide, wide awake and so was she. The moon drifted through its high arc toward the west, slowly shifting the deep blue shadows over the silver landscape. It was so warm under the blanket, against the chill of the desert night. Carly shifted occasionally, her body getting more and more relaxed, encroaching farther into his space.

Jacinda was a good listener, interested enough to ask the right questions, making him laugh, drawing out detail along with a few things he hadn’t expected to say—like the way he still missed Dad, but thought his father would be proud of some of the changes he’d made at Arakeela, such as the land-care program and the low-stress stock-handling methods.

Callan thought he’d probably spooked Jacinda more than she’d admitted to regarding the snakes, but she hadn’t panicked about it, she’d just asked for the practical detail. If it happened, what should she and Carly do?

And the fact that she hadn’t panicked made Callan think more about her panic over Kurt. The last piece of his skepticism dried up like a mud puddle in the sun, replaced with trust. Whatever she was afraid of from her ex-husband, it had to be real or she would never have come this far, landed on him like this. She wasn’t crazy or hysterical. She needed him, and even though he didn’t know her that well yet, he wasn’t going to let her down.

“Do you have any idea of the time?” she asked eventually. She hid a yawn behind her hand. “Has to be pretty late.”

“By where the moon is, I’d say around three.”

“Three? You mean we’ve been sitting here for three hours? Oh, Callan, I’m so sorry! You have work to do in the morning. I’m a guest with jet lag, I should never have kept you up like this.”

“Have I been edging toward the door?”

“No, because Carly has both feet across your knees!”

“True, and who would think she’d have such bony heels?”

The little girl must have heard her name. Her eyelids flickered and her limbs twitched. Callan and Jacinda both held their breath. She seemed to settle, but then her chest started pumping up and down, her breathing shallow.

“I think she’s having a bad dream,” Jacinda murmured. Carly broke into crying and thrashing, and had to be woken up to chase the dream away. “It’s okay, sweetheart, it wasn’t real, it was a dream, just a bad dream. Open your eyes and look at me. Mommy’s here, see? We’re sitting on the porch. The moon is all bright. Callan is here. Everything’s fine.” In an aside to Callan, she added, “I’m going to take her to the bathroom and get her back to bed, but you go ahead.”

She stood up, struggling to gather Carly into her arms at the same time.

“You’re carrying her?”

“She’ll get too wide awake if I let her walk.”

“She looks heavy for you. Would she come to me?”

“It’s fine.” She smiled. “There’s nothing builds upper-arm strength as effectively as having a child, right? Better than an expensive gym. Thanks for sitting up with me, Callan.”

“No problem.”

For some reason, they both looked back at the couch, where the mohair blanket had half-fallen to the veranda floor, then they looked at each other. And suddenly Callan knew why she’d asked that question about his mother sleeping in the cottage, three hours ago, even if Jacinda herself still didn’t.

She’d unconsciously imagined how it would have looked to Mum if she’d happened to waken and find them sitting there together, under the same blanket, sharing the warm weight of Jacinda’s sleeping child.

His mother had given him a particular kind of privacy when he and Liz had been married, moving over to the cottage. When Liz had died, Mum hadn’t moved back. Somewhere in her heart, although she never spoke about it, she must hope he’d someday need that kind of privacy again. He should tell her gently not to hold her breath about it.

Chapter Five

“Saturdays and Sundays we don’t have school,” Lockie told Jac. He added, “It’s the weekend,” as if maybe Americans didn’t know what weekends were.

His explanation covered the wilder-than-usual behavior of both boys this morning, which Carly had latched on to within minutes of waking at six. They kept early hours at Arakeela Downs. This was Jac’s fourth awakening on the vast cattle station, and she had discovered that the dawns here were magical.

And chilly.

There was something satisfying about it. She would beat the predawn bite in the air by scrambling into layers of clothes, along with Carly, and head straight for the smell of coffee luring her toward the kitchen. Lockie, Josh and Callan would already be there, making a big, hot breakfast. Toast, bacon and fresh eggs with their lush orange yolks, or oatmeal and brown sugar, with hot apple or berry sauce.

They’d start eating just as the sun slid up over the horizon, and the colors of the rugged hills Jac could see from the kitchen windows would almost make her gasp. She and Carly would go out into the day as soon as they could. “To feed the chooks” was the excuse—Carly constantly referred to the hens as chooks, now; she’d be speaking a whole different language by the time they got back to the U.S.—but in reality, Jac just couldn’t bear to miss the beauty of this part of the day.

The bare, ancient rock glowed like fire, slowly softening into browns and rusts and purples as the sun climbed higher. Dew drenched the yellow grass, the vegetable garden, the fruit trees, and made spiderwebs look like strings of diamonds. Flocks of birds in pastel pinks and whites and grays, or bright yellows, reds and greens, rose from the big eucalyptus trees in the wide creek bed and wheeled around calling their morning cries. The air was so fresh, she felt as if simply breathing it in would be enough to make her fly.

When Lockie had managed to sit down at the table, after teasing the dogs along with Carly and Josh at the back door, Jac asked him, “So what happens at weekends?”

“We get to go out with Dad. Riding boundary, checking the animals and the water.”

Callan was listening. “Except today it’s not work, it’s a picnic,” he said. “We’re going to show Jacinda and Carly the water hole.”

“Can we swim?” Lockie asked. “Can we get yabbies?”

“Yeah!” Josh’s face lit up, too.

“Yabbies? What kind of a disease is that?” Jac asked the boys, grinning. It did sound like a disease, but from their eagerness she knew it couldn’t be.

“A really nasty one!” Lockie grinned back. “Don’t you have yabbies in America?”

“We’re pretty advanced over there. Doctors have already found a cure.”

“Yabbies you catch in the water hole and you cook them and eat them,” Josh said. He was a little more serious than his big brother, a little more prickly and slower to warm to the American visitors, with their accents that belonged on TV and their ignorance regarding such obvious things as yabbies.

“Like big prawns,” Callan said.

Setting silverware on the table, Jac looked up at him. “Shrimp?”

“Big freshwater ones.” He poured the coffee into two big mugs and added a generous two inches of hot milk to each. The two of them liked their coffee the same way. It was one of the simple, reassuring things they had in common. Not important, you wouldn’t think, but nice. “Yes, guys, we can swim and fish for yabbies,” he said. “If you and Carly want to go on a picnic, Jacinda, that is.”

He looked for her approval, courteous as always. They’d been over-the-top polite to each other since Tuesday night, and over-the-top careful about respecting each other’s space. Which was dumb, really, because space hadn’t been trespassed upon in any major way during those hours of moonlit talking on the veranda.

“If that’s not interfering with your routine.” Jac whacked the politeness ball right back over the net at him. She didn’t know quite why they were both doing it. For safety, obviously, but she didn’t really understand the source of the danger. “We’d love it.”

Carly was nodding and clapping her hands.

“Doing something different on a Saturday is our routine,” Callan said. “I like to check the water holes pretty often. Sometimes you get tourists leaving garbage, and you don’t want that, or a dead animal fouling the water. Good drinking water’s too important for the cattle and the wildlife out here.”

“That makes sense.” She found it interesting when he told her this kind of stuff, but also suspected that when he slipped into the tour-guide routine, it was another safety valve.

“So we’ll ride there, give the horses some serious exercise, take lunch, yabby nets, the whole kaboodle, light a fire, make a day of it. I’ll see if Mum wants to come, but she’ll probably stay at home.”

“She’s pretty amazing, your mom.”

“Yeah, and I spend half my time trying to get her to be less amazing.” He grinned, and relaxed. “Last flying doctor clinic we went to, that’s what the doc told her. You need to cut down on the amazing, Mrs. Woods, it’s pushing your blood pressure too high.”

The kitchen timer beeped, which meant their boiled eggs were ready, and the five of them sat down to breakfast.

Like a family, Jacinda decided.

No, she guessed it, really.

She’d never been part of a family in that way.

Callan somehow read this information like a teleprompter, directly from her forehead, because as they ate he asked her, over a background of kid noise, “So where did you grow up? Where is your family from? Did you live your whole life in L.A.?”

“No, New Jersey, until I was twelve. Very different from L.A. but just as urban. I’ve never been in a place like this.” She deliberately chose to focus on the geographical element of his questions, ignored the mention of family.

It didn’t work.

“Why did you move?” Callan asked next.

Uhh … “When my mom died.”

“Your dad didn’t want the memories in New Jersey?”

“No, Dad stayed. I was the one who moved.”

Okay, she was going to have to talk about it now, after giving him that revealing answer. It wasn’t so terrible. She believed in honesty and didn’t know why she was always so reluctant to unload this stuff. Because it made her sound too much like a stray mongrel puppy who’d never found the right home?

She hadn’t thought of it quite like this before, but it made a connection.

Kurt had treated her like a stray puppy. He’d scooped her up, after they’d met at a script-writing seminar when she was still incredibly naive and raw. He’d had her professionally groomed, house-trained her himself, put a diamond collar round her neck, spoiled her rotten …. And then he’d lost interest when she still didn’t perform like a pedigreed Best in Show.

Callan was waiting for her explanation.

“Dad didn’t believe he could raise a teenage daughter on his own, you see,” she said. “I have two brothers, but they’re much older. They were eighteen and sixteen when I was born. Dad’s seventy-eight now, and lives in a retirement home near my oldest brother, Andy.”

She’d had a very solitary childhood. Her parents had both been in their forties when she was born, unprepared for their accidental return to diapers, night feeds, noisy play and bedtime stories. They’d expected her to entertain herself and she’d mostly eaten on her own, in front of a book. And then Mom had died ….

“So Dad sent me to Mom’s younger sister, because she had daughters and he thought she would know what to do.” She pitched her voice quietly. Carly wasn’t ready to hear about her mom’s lonely childhood yet. Fortunately, she and the boys were keeping each other well entertained, vying for who could make the weirdest faces as they chewed.

Seated to Jac’s left, around the corner of the table, Callan looked at her. He took a gulp of his coffee. She liked the way he held his mug, wrapping both hands around it in appreciation of the warmth. “But he was wrong about that? Your aunt didn’t know what to do?”

“I was a bit different,” Jac admitted. “I mean, don’t go imagining Cinderella and her wicked stepmother, or anything. She tried very hard. And my cousins tried … only not quite so hard. They were three and five years older than me, beautiful, blonde and busy, both of them. They were into parties and dates and modeling assignments and dance classes. They had a whole … oh … family style that I had to slot into and mesh with. Frantic pace. Drive-through breakfasts and take-out dinners in front of TV, or on the run. Modeling portfolios and salon appointments and endless hours stuck in traffic on the way from one class to another. And I just didn’t. Mesh with it, I mean. I’d grown up almost as an only child, with a very quiet life. I liked to read and think and imagine. I dreamed about horses and learning to ride. I was the polar opposite of cool. And even after the four years of ballet I took with my cousins, you would not want to see me dance!”

He nodded and stayed silent for a moment, then added with a tease in his voice, “But I’d like to see you ride.”

She smiled at him, happy that he’d dropped the subject of family. “It’ll be great to ride. But what will we do about Carly? She’s been on a three-foot-tall Shetland pony a handful of times at Kurt’s ranch, around and around on a flat piece of grass with someone holding the pony on a rope. She couldn’t ride a horse of her own out here.”

“We’ll work something out.”

“She can ride with me,” Lockie said. “I’ll show you how to gallop, Carlz. I’ll show you Tammy’s tricks. You wait!”

“Carlz” looked up at him, round-eyed and awestruck. “Yeah?” she breathed.

“Uh, Lockie, let’s save the galloping and tricks for another time, okay?” Callan said. He got a glint in his eye when he saw how relieved Jac looked, then he dropped his voice and said to her, “Nice little friendship going between those two, though.”

“Yes, and I think it’s really good for her, Callan. I appreciate it.”

Carly hadn’t sleepwalked since that first night. Possibly because with all the activity generated by boys and dogs and chooks, horses to feed, gates to swing on, trees to climb and a million places to hide, by bedtime she was just too worn out to stir. This morning, as soon as she’d eaten her breakfast, she was off with the boys, who’d been dispatched to catch the horses, bring them to the feed shed where their tack was stored and get them ready.

“But Carly stays outside the paddock and outside the shed, okay?” Callan said, as all three kids fought to be the first one out the door. “She’s too little, she doesn’t know horses and they could kick if she spooks them.”

“Will they remember?” Jac asked.

“Yep. They’re good kids.”

Jac liked his confidence, and after almost four days here, she trusted it. Given more responsibility and physical freedom than any child she’d ever met … let alone the child she’d once been, herself … the boys knew their boundaries and stayed within them. They understood the dangers in their world, and respected the rules Callan gave them to keep them safe. They’d keep Carly safe, also.

“… while we get the rest of the gear together,” Callan said.

By the time they were ready to leave, the temperature had begun to climb, in tandem with the sun’s climb through that heavenly, soaring sky. It would probably hit eighty or even ninety degrees by midafternoon, Jacinda knew. Everyone had swim gear under their clothes, and water bottles and towels in their saddlebags, as well as their share of picnic supplies. On a pair of medium-size, sturdy horses whose breed Jac didn’t know, the boys also had yabby nets, bits of string and lumps of meat for bait.

Kerry was staying home, and Carly was riding right in front of Callan on his big chestnut mare, Moss, her little pink backpack pressing against his stomach. She looked quite comfortable and happy up there. Her mommy was a little nervous about it, but Josh’s old riding helmet and Callan’s relaxed attitude helped a lot.

It was a wonderful ride. The dogs were wildly jealous, but Kerry wanted them at home with her for company. Their barks chased after the four horses and five humans for several minutes until the trail that followed the fence line cut down toward the dry creek bed and the hill between creek and homestead cut off the sound, at which point, “They can bark all they want but we don’t have to hear,” Callan said.

He let the boys lead the way and brought up the rear himself, with Jacinda in the middle. It felt good to know that he was behind her, that he would see right away if something went wrong and he’d know what to do about it.

Not that you could imagine anything going wrong on a day like today. A breeze tempered the sun’s heat, and the stately river gums spread lacy patterns of shade over the rapidly warming earth. They startled a mob of red-coated kangaroos who’d been sleeping in some dry vegetation and the ’roos bounded away, over the smooth-worn rocks and deep sand of the creek bed. On the far side of the creek, there were cattle grazing on coarse yellow grass. Some of them looked up at the sound of the horses, but soon returned to browsing the ground.

“When does the creek actually flow?” Jacinda asked, craning around to Callan in her saddle. It was a different style from the ones on Kurt’s ranch, not so high in front. “In winter?”

“Only when we’ve just had rain,” Callan answered. He nudged Moss forward to close the distance between them a little. Carly sat there, so high. Her little body rocked with the motion of the horse’s gait like she was born to it, and her helmet looked like a dusty white mushroom on top of her head. “It doesn’t stay running for long. A couple of days. Enough to top up the water holes. Fortunately we have a string of good deep spring-fed ones in the gorge, and a couple more downstream.”

“Does the creek water ever get to the sea?”

“Nope. It drains into Lake Frome, east of here.”

“Which is dry, too, most of the time, right? A salt pan?” She’d been looking at a map and some books with Carly while the boys did schoolwork during the week.

“That’s right. Salt and clay. Flat, as far as the eye can see. I like these mountains better.”

“Well, yeah, because you own these mountains.”

She couldn’t keep the satisfaction out of her voice, and he picked up on it. “You really like that, don’t you?”

Yes.

A lot.

The safety of it.

The strength.

“Almost as much as you do, Callan Woods.”

He didn’t answer, just did that lazy, open grin of his, which she could barely see beneath his brimmed stockman’s hat. Correction—she could see the mouth, but not the eyes. Didn’t matter. She already knew what the eyes looked like. Kept seeing them in her mind when she twisted back the right way in her saddle, bluer than this sky, brighter than sun on water.

It was midmorning when they reached the deep water hole lodged in the mouth of the red rock gorge. Callan and the boys led the horses down to drink, then tethered them in the shade on the creek bank, where they found tufts of coarse grass to chew on.

“Swim first?” he said.

“Is it really safe?”

“If you’re sensible.”

“So you mean it’s not safe?” She imagined crocodiles.

“It’s deep in parts, and it’s cold.”

“But no crocodiles?”

He laughed. “Not a one. But it’s colder than you would think, especially once you go a few feet below the surface. Keep Carly in the shallows. See, it’s like a beach. The sand’s coarser than beach sand but it shelves down nice and easy.”

“Mmm, okay.” She could see for herself the way the water darkened from pale iced tea to syrupy cola. “Why is it that color?” she asked.

“It gets stained from the eucalyptus leaves. In some lights, it looks greener. The boys and I like to jump and dive in a couple of spots off the ledge on the far side, there, but we always check the places out first. I’ve been swimming in this water hole my whole life, but you can get tree branches wedged in the rocks that you can’t see from the surface, and you don’t want to get caught or hit your head.”

“I’ll stick with Carly in the shallows.”

He was right. It was cold. Enough to make her gasp when she stepped into it from the warm sand. And it had a fresh, peaty kind of smell that she liked. Carly splashed and ducked and laughed, while Jac watched the boys and their dad swimming across an expanse of water that looked black from this angle, toward the rock ledge. They trod water back and forth, scoping out the depths for hidden dangers, then having determined that it was safe, no hidden snags, they hauled themselves out onto the rock, climbed to the high point, gave themselves a good long run-up and started to jump.

After fifteen minutes, Carly’s teeth began to chatter. She lay on a towel in the sun for a short while, but soon warmed up again, put a T-shirt over her semidry swimsuit and was ready to make canal systems and miniature gardens in the sand. Lockie had had enough of the water, also. He swam back to the beach to get his towel, but Callan and Josh were still jumping and whooping, their voices echoing off the rock walls of the gorge behind them, the only human sound for miles around.

“Swim over and give it a go,” Callan called out to Jacinda. He stood at the edge of the highest part of the ledge, a good twelve feet above the waterline.

Not in a million years, Jac thought.

“I’m watching Carly,” she called back.

“Lockie’s with her now. She’s dressed. She’ll be fine.”

“No, really …”

“I’m going back to the sand, Dad,” Josh said. He and Callan did one last whooping jump from the ledge together, with legs kicking wildly in the air and arms turning like windmills, then they swam toward the stretch of beach.

“She’ll be fine with the boys,” Callan repeated when he approached Jacinda, as if there’d been no break to the conversation. “She’d have to go in pretty far to get out of her depth here.”

He touched bottom and stood waist-deep, then began to stride toward the beach, the water streaming from his body as he got closer and shallower. He reached Jacinda, his skin glistening and his dark, baggy swim shorts hanging low on his hips. He wasn’t self-conscious about his body, just took it for granted.

Jac didn’t. She saw hard bands and blocks of muscle, a shading from tan to pale halfway down his upper arm, a neat pattern of hair across his chest, and the way the cold and wet made every inch of his skin taut.

Standing calf-deep, he gestured behind him. “See, there’s about six meters of sand all the way along this side, before it starts to shelve down. She’s safe without you. And you’d be safe, too, if you came for a jump off the ledge. It’s so much fun, Jac.”

He used the same tone that some men might reserve for attempting to get a woman into bed, and it was the first time he’d called her Jac, even though she’d asked him to three days ago.

“Mmm …”

That’s not an answer, she realized. I can’t believe I’m even considering this.

“Hey?” he cajoled. “Thinking about it? The rush as you race forward and hit the air? It’s so good. And you have to yell, that’s a requirement. Lockie first did it when he was five. Promise you’ll yell?”

Live a little, said his eyes. There was a contained eagerness coming from him. He was like Carly about to give Mommy a special piece of artwork from preschool. How could you not respond just exactly the way those eyes begged you to?

“Callan, I’m not even promising to—”

“You need a reason to yell in life, sometimes, and this is the best one I know.”

“Yeah?”

I don’t believe this.

I am considering it.

I’m seriously thinking about it.

The yelling idea is incredibly attractive.

Her heart started beating faster. She could smell horse on her body, dust in the air, creek water in Carly’s wet hair. She was eight thousand miles from the place she called home, on six hundred thousand acres of land.

And she was seriously wondering if she might be brave enough to run and jump, while yelling, into a deep, creepy water hole.

Just do it.

“Gotta earn those yabbies.” Callan held out his hand, ready to pull her up. Behind him, Lockie had started putting lumps of meat inside old stocking feet and tying them with string. Under his direction, Josh was searching for good long sticks of eucalyptus to act as fishing poles.

“This is way outside of my comfort zone!” Jacinda warned as Callan’s grip locked with hers.

A moment later, she reached a standing position and they came face-to-face, confronting Jac with something else that was way outside of her comfort zone. His hard, wet body, his slightly quickened breathing, his exhilarated grin. All of it was too close and too real when they stood just inches apart like this.

Feeling it, too, and clearly not liking it, he let her go and told her in an awkward way, “Strip, before you chicken out.”

She was only wearing a T-shirt over her two-piece tank-style animal print swimsuit. She crossed her arms, peeled the T-shirt over her head and dropped it on a patch of dry sand safely distant from the kids’ messy play. She discovered Callan looking over at the kids. His lean, strong neck looked too tight and twisted. It wasn’t a natural angle. He’d been—what?—averting his eyes while she stripped?

In her animal print, she felt like Jane to his Tarzan. But had Tarzan been that much of a gentleman?

“I’m coming as far as the ledge, but I don’t promise to jump,” she said.

His head turned again, back to her, and a frown dropped away, replaced with a twinkle in the depths of those eyes. “We’ll see,” he drawled.

He grabbed her hand and galloped her into the water. Getting deeper in two seconds than she’d gone with Carly in fifteen minutes, she gasped again. He was right, the deeper you went, the colder it got. “Let me go!”

“Swim,” he said, and struck off ahead of her with a powerful stroke.

She followed, terrified. The water felt so different to California pool water or salty ocean. So smooth. Sooo deep. How far down did it go? She had to fight away images of creatures lurking down there.

Before her imagination got out of control, they reached the lower part of the ledge and she hauled herself up onto the warm rock, copying Callan’s fluid movement with a more awkward one of her own. Her body tingled all over and she panted for breath.

“You did great,” he told her. “You’re a good fast swimmer.”

“Only because things were chasing me.”

“Bunyips?”

“Wha-a-at? There is something down there! I knew it! What the heck are bunyips? Oh sheesh, I’ll never get back to the beach, now! I’ll have to go the long way around, over the rocks.”

Which didn’t look easy.

“Don’t panic. Bunyips are mythical. Kind of an Australian version of the Loch Ness monster.”

“You know, Callan, there are people who don’t think the Loch Ness monster is just mythical. I don’t think these things should be dismissed. I’ve read articles about it, and there’s also that in-some-ways-quite-credible urban myth about alligators in the New York—”

He wasn’t listening. He’d somehow gotten hold of her hand again and they were climbing to the higher part of the ledge, over the rough shelves of rock that acted like steps. At the top, he turned away from the water and led her back into the shade of the gorge’s overhanging sides. He had her in a kind of monkey grip now. He was holding her forearm in the circle of his fingers, and she held his forearm the same way. It was so strongly muscled that her fingers went barely halfway around.

“Repeat after me, Jac,” he said. “Bunyips are mythical.”

“Bunyips are mythical. But I have a very powerful imagination, I’m telling you.”

“Okay, louder. Bunyips—are—mythical.”

“Bunyips—are—mythical. And if they’re not, you know how to scare them away, right?”

“Bunyips are mythical. And plus they’re very friendly.”

“Callan …”

“Right, now, let’s go, but this time we’ll yell it. Ready?” He didn’t give her a chance to tell him she wasn’t. Hand in hand, they sprinted forward, with Callan yelling at the top of his lungs. “Bunyips … are …”

Jac joined him on the last word, screaming it, whooping it, as they came to the end of the ledge and hit the air, legs still working wildly, arms flung high but still joined. “Mythical!” The word echoed off the gorge walls, bouncing like a ball, and she heard it come back to them while they were in midflight. Their voices seemed to claim this whole place.

She whooped again.

Felt a surge of utter exhilaration.

Hit the water.

Callan still had her hand. They went down, down into the icy darkness and she kicked frantically to bring herself back up, just as he was doing. She broke the surface gasping and laughing. “Get me out of here! I know there’s a bunyip down there!”

“Wanna do it again?”

“Unnhh,” she whimpered. “Unnhh!”

Do I?

Could I?

“Yes!”

They jumped together four more times, whooping and yelling and laughing, until Lockie complained, “Dad, you’re scaring the yabbies! We haven’t caught a single one.”

“Try for them in that reach of water behind the rocks where it gets muddy,” he called back to his son. “Are we done, Jacinda?”

“I think so,” she said, breathless and starting to shiver.

The contrast between the cold water and the hot sun on the rocks felt wonderful with each jump and climb, but she’d had enough, and Carly must be getting hungry. They were cooking sausages and lamb chops for a midday barbecue, and Callan still had to light the fire. They swam back, side by side, no bunyips in sight, nothing nipping at her toes.

Walking through the shallows, she confessed, “I was so scared, Callan, you have no idea!”

“It’s a healthy kind of scared, though, isn’t it? You push the fear back with yelling, and then you feel great.”

“How would you know? You said you’d been doing it your whole life. You can’t ever have been scared here.”

“I haven’t been scared of here—of the water hole.”

“Or bunyips.”

“Or bunyips.” He paused. “But I’ve been here, scared.” Paused again. “I’ve come here a few times to try and yell it away, and it’s always worked.”

“Scared of what, then, if not the water hole?” She said it before she thought, shouldn’t have needed to ask.

“After Liz died.” His voice went quiet and his body went still, reluctant and stiff. “Scared of—”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry. You don’t need to spell it out. I understand.”

He gave a short nod. “Yeah, there was nothing unique about it.”

“I’m sorry,” she said again, but she didn’t show that he’d heard.

“I got given some, you know, brochures at the hospital in Port Augusta,” he said. “Information leaflets. About bereavement. And they had lists of things I might be feeling, and I was. Feeling those things. All of them. It’s stupid. I hated having my whole gutful of emotions put onto a bloody list. There were lists of things you could do about the emotions, too. Ways of getting help, ways to help get yourself through it.”

“But those lists didn’t have yelling and jumping into the water hole?”

“Nope.”

And that was good, Jac understood, so Callan had jumped into the water hole a lot.

She felt privileged, sincerely privileged, that he’d wanted to push her to do it, and very glad that she had. She was pretty sure he didn’t offer the same opportunity for terror and yelling to just anyone. She was very sure he was right to think that she needed it.

Bunyips were mythical.

And Kurt’s power games were a long way away.

“Got one! Got one! Got one!” Josh shrieked out.

About twenty seconds later, Carly screamed, “Mommy, I got one, too!”

“Let Lockie put it in the bucket for you, Carlz,” Callan warned her quickly. “It might nip you with its claw if you touch it. Lockie—?”

“I’m helping her, Dad, it’s okay.”

“Let’s get that fire going.”

He grabbed his towel and dried himself with the vigor of a dog shaking its wet coat, then dragged his T-shirt and jeans over his still-damp body, hauled on his sturdy riding boots and went to work unpacking backpacks and saddlebags, while Jac was slower to cover her damp swimsuit with her clothes. She couldn’t help watching Callan as she dressed.

There was a circle of big river stones in the shade near the creek bank. The remnants of charcoal within it, as well as the blackened sides of the stones themselves, told Jac that the circle was another detail to this place that Callan had known his whole life.

“Want to find some bark and sticks?” he said.

She gathered what he’d asked for, while he broke thicker wood into short lengths with a downward jerk of his foot. He had a fire going within minutes, with water heating in a tin pot that he called a billycan. Out here in the middle of the day, the light was so bright you could barely see the flames, but you could feel the heat and the water was soon steaming.

Jac checked on the yabby tally. The kids had twelve in their red plastic bucket, but the yield seemed to be slowing and interest had waned. “The bait meat’s losing its flavor,” Josh said.

“And yabbies aren’t stupid. They’re on to us,” Lockie decided. “Twelve’ll have to be enough.” He stood up, leaving the bucket behind, and wandered in the direction of the horses.

“They’re our appetizer,” Jac said, without thinking.

“We’re going to eat them?” Carly wailed. “We can’t eat them!”

They were kind of cute, in a large, shrimpy sort of way, Jac conceded, with blue and black and green markings that would turn red and pink when they were cooked. Too cute to eat?

“Nah, it’s okay. They won’t know it’s even happening,” Josh told Carly in a matter-of-fact voice.

“How come they won’t know?” she asked.

Over by the fire, Callan called out, “Lockie, can you grab the tea bags while you’re there?” Lockie was still with the horses, looking for something in a saddlebag.

“Dad drops them into the boiling water and they don’t even have time to feel it. If I was a yabby, I’d way, way rather be eaten by a human than anything else.”

“Why, Josh?” Carly asked seriously.

“Because anything else would be eating me alive.”

“Eww! Yeah! Alive! Are you listening, yabbies?” Carly spoke seriously to the scrabbling contents of the red bucket. “We’re nice, kind humans. We’re not going to eat you alive.”

Which seemed to deal with the whole too cute issue, thank goodness.

Ten minutes later, Carly was eating a hot yabby sandwich, with butter, pepper and salt.

Jac ate one, too, and it sure tasted good. “This is one of those moments when I blink and shake my head and can’t believe I’m here,” she told Callan, hard on the heels of the last mouthful, her lips still tasting of butter and salt.

“Yeah?” Callan waved pungent blue smoke away from his face.

He had a blackened and very rickety wire grill balanced on the stones over a heap of coals. It looked as if someone had fashioned it out of old fencing wire, but it held the lamb chops and sausages just fine, and they smelled even better than the yabby sandwich had tasted.

In a little pan, also blackened, he had onions frying in the froth from half a can of beer. The other half of the can he drank in occasional satisfied gulps, while Jacinda sipped on a mug of hot tea.

“I’ve just eaten something that a week ago I’d never even heard of,” she said. “I’ve swum in terrifying water, chock-full of bunyips. I’ve let you tell me about snakes in the house without screaming.”

“I noticed you didn’t scream.” He gave her his usual grin. “I was impressed.”

“Thank you. Meanwhile, there’s a road faintly visible over there that you claim leads eventually to Adelaide, but there hasn’t been a car on it since we got here, what, an hour ago? In fact, have I seen or heard a car since Tuesday? I don’t think so.”

“There have been cars.”

“I haven’t noticed them. I’ve been too busy. It’s incredible here. Carly is—Carly will—I hope Carly never forgets this. It’s going to change who she is.”

And “Carly” is code for “Carly and me.”

It’s going to change who I am, even more, but there are limits to my new yelling-and-jumping-induced bravery, and I’m not prepared to say that out loud.

“Wouldn’t be surprised if it changes the boys, too,” Callan answered.

He flipped a couple of lamb chops with a pair of tarnished tongs, drained the last of the beer and looked at her with those steady blue eyes, and she suspected … decided … hoped … that “the boys” was code, also.

Chapter Six

“Dad?” Through a fog of steam, the bathroom door clicked shut behind the new arrival.

“What’s up, Lockie?”

“Can I talk to you for a sec?” The tone was reluctant, yet confiding.

“Can’t it wait until I’m done in the shower?” Callan had been caught this way by Lockie before.

His evening shower was one of the few intervals in his day that was both relaxing and private, and maybe that was why Lockie came looking for him here. He knew the two of them wouldn’t be disturbed by Josh or Gran or the dogs or, tonight, Carly or her mother.

The shower ran on bore water from deep in the ground, which meant it was as hard as nails but hot and steamy and in plentiful supply. Conserving water was deeply bred into anyone who lived beyond Australia’s coastal fringe, but four minutes of steamy peace per day was, surely, not too much to ask.

Apparently, yes.

“Well, you see, the thing is …” Lockie trailed off. The reluctance had increased.

Callan sighed and surrendered his peace, realizing he wasn’t dealing with a mere request for homework intervention or a new computer game, here. “Go ahead, spit it out.”

“You know when we were at the water hole today?”

“I have a faint memory of something like that, yes, even though it’s been a whole four hours since we left the place.”

Out it came in a sudden rush. “I left my Game Boy behind on a rock.”

“You what?” Callan shut off the water and reached around the edge of the shower curtain for his towel. “You brought your Game Boy down there? Why?”

“In case I got bored.”

“But you didn’t get bored. I didn’t even see you with it.”

“I got it out after we stopped yabbying, but then we had lunch and I forgot about it and I left it and I only remembered it now.”

“Right.”

“Sorry, Dad.”

“What do you think we should do about it?” He wrapped the towel around his waist and slid the shower curtain aside, confronting his son.

He was strict about this kind of thing, and Lockie knew it. The boys were good, usually. Callan had trained them that way. They always left a gate the way they found it. They did a job, then put their tools away. They didn’t leave feed bags open to attract vermin, or riding gear lying around to get its leather cracked in the sun.

“I think I should go back first thing in the morning and get it,” Lockie said. “Like, very, very first thing.”

“I think you’re right,” Callan said. “And I think you know I’m not happy about this. How long did you have to save up your pocket money to buy that thing? A year?”

“I’m not happy about it, either.”

It was almost fully dark out, now, and they were just about to eat. Mum had cooked something special, the way she often did on a Saturday or Sunday. Smelled like lasagna and garlic bread, and the kids had already discovered and reported that there would be hot peach cake and ice cream for dessert.

Callan was hungry. He’d been up since five-thirty this morning. He didn’t want to have to stir from the house again tonight.

“Is it going to be safe on a rock all night?” Lockie asked him.

“Yeah, that’s what I’m wondering. What do you think?”

“If dew gets in it, or a ’roo knocks it off, or a cow steps on it, it could get destroyed.”

“All those things are possible.”

“So maybe I should go now,” Lockie said.

“No, Lockie.” Callan sighed. He wasn’t going to send a ten-year-old out alone on horseback or a quad bike after dark, on the tail of a long day. “We’ll eat, and then I’ll go.”

“I can come with you.”

“Nope.” Lockie looked yawning and droopy-eyed already. He’d helped with the horses, done various yard chores. He didn’t need to come. “You can watch some TV, then read in bed for a bit and go to sleep.”

“I can pay you my pocket money for the next couple of months, like, for your time.”

Callan laughed. “No, you can just not do it ever again.”

“Thanks, Dad.”

He told Mum about the problem as he helped her serve out the meal, which was indeed lasagna, and he felt hungry enough to eat a whole trayful.

“Take Jacinda with you,” she said at once. “You won’t ride, will you? You’ll take the four-wheel-drive?”

“Seems best. Although it’s rough, getting to that spot in a vehicle, especially in the dark.”

“You can walk the last few hundred meters. But you must take Jacinda. Two pairs of eyes. Even if Lockie thinks he can describe to you exactly which rock it’s on.”

Which Lockie couldn’t.

“If Jacinda wants to come,” Callan said.

“Of course I’ll come,” Jac told him.

They’d just eaten Kerry’s fabulous meal, all appetites sharp after the day spent outdoors. She felt deliciously sated, and she felt exhausted. It was very tempting to pick up on the various outs he’d offered her and let him go alone. If she was too tired, if she didn’t think Carly would settle to sleep without her, if a rough ride in a four-wheel-drive held no appeal …

But she’d vowed earlier in the week to jump at any chance to help around here. Searching a creek bed with a flashlight in the dark was definitely something she could do.

“So Gran will put me to bed?” Carly wanted to know.

“That’s right, ducks,” Kerry said cheerfully.

“Yes,” Jac agreed, wondering how many new nicknames her daughter would have at the end of four weeks. She already answered quite happily to Carlz and ducks. “And I’ll creep in and kiss you as soon as I get back, beautiful.”

“Kiss me now, too.”

“Of course.”

A few minutes later, Jac had a not-very-suitable pink angora sweater over her T-shirt, and two flashlights in her lap, and she was seated next to Callan in the four-wheel-drive, ready to leave.

He hadn’t exaggerated about the rough ride. “Problem is,” he half yelled above the engine noise, as they bounced and lurched along, “there’s a track, but you tend to lose it in the dark.”

“Because it’s not much of a track, if it’s what we rode along today.”

“You have a point.”

“Ow! And I’m going to have some bruises!” Her shoulder bumped the door.

“Sorry, I should have insisted that this would be way too much fun for you in one day.”

“After the fun of the bunyip jumping?”

“But you did like the horse riding and the barbecue, right?”

“I liked the bunyip jumping, too, Callan.”

Instinctively, they turned to look at each other at the same moment. His face was shadowed and indistinct in the darkness, but she could see that grin. And she could feel the awareness, the way she’d been feeling it at certain moments for the past four days.

They were both so cautious about it, so full of doubt. It was still only a hint in the air, like the smell of approaching rain or the sound of a church bell across city rooftops. Distant. You had to strain to catch it. The rain might pass over different terrain and never fall. The wind might carry the sound of the bells away.

And they might very easily never act on this … this little zing, this recognition. They might let it go. Smile and move on. It might fade as they got to know each other better, if what they saw on the surface wasn’t reflected deeper within.

Or they might get too scared, because things like this rarely stayed simple for long.

For now, it made Jacinda’s heart beat faster sometimes, it made her stomach go wobbly, and she watched these things happening in her body and didn’t know what to think.

The vehicle lurched again, throwing her in his direction, this time. They jarred against each other, one solid, the other soft. He reached and clamped an arm around her shoulder, working the wheel with one hand. “Going to stop under that tree, and we’ll walk the rest.”

The awareness hit again, stronger in her because she’d felt his body against hers, harder to resist. It made her breathing go shallow. It started her wondering.

The tree he’d mentioned loomed in the headlights, its trunk the same grayish white as the horse Jac had ridden today. After a couple more lurches and the screech of protesting suspension, Callan braked beneath it, switched off the engine and jumped out.

Jacinda followed him, handing him a flashlight.

“See that moon?” he said. “We hardly need these.” He tossed it up in his hand and caught it. “We can leave them switched off until we’re searching the rocks.” Lockie’s description of the Game Boy’s location had been vague.

They tramped along in the dark, surrounded by the same magical blue and silver shadows and shapes that Jacinda had noticed the other night. They didn’t talk. Callan had said as they drove that there might still be wildlife at the water hole at this hour. They always came down at dawn and dusk to drink. “And if we’re quiet, we can take a look.”

It was good not to talk. Good just to walk along, listening to the sound of their feet on rock and sand, listening to the way Callan’s boots creaked, aware of the way he moved with such sure-footed balance and such economy.

In Los Angeles, everyone seemed to talk all the time. They were chained to their cell phones, locked in meetings, constantly updating arrangements, passing messages through secretaries. There was a whole, ever-shifting hierarchy regarding who Kurt would speak to directly, who he’d call back right away, who he’d fob off on an assistant and who he wouldn’t call back at all.

There was a standard repertoire of lies and evasions. I love the script. This is so fresh. We ’re in contract negotiations right now. Our marriage is rock solid. Jacinda had believed way too many of those statements for way too long—believed them when she’d heard them from Kurt, from his staff, from his so-called friends.

She’d had a solitary childhood. Too much silence. First, her parents’ quiet, immaculate home, and then her own protective silences, withdrawing to the inner kingdom of her imagination, as she sat squashed into the corner seat in the back of the car while Aunt Peggy drove her cousins around.

When Kurt had brought her into his world, fresh from taking her college degree in English and creative writing, she’d loved the opening of new horizons; she’d loved all the talk, meeting other writers, traveling to Europe, adventures on yachts and ski slopes and horseback. She’d wanted to talk and hadn’t needed silence, at first.

But then she’d hit overload, and had discovered that her distant, reluctant parents had given her a positive legacy, after all. Silence could be good sometimes. It could be necessary. It didn’t mean that communication disappeared. Sometimes you could understand more about a person when you left some space between all the words.

“We should start looking for the wretched thing,” Callan finally said. His voice sounded a little rusty, as if he hadn’t wanted to break into the rhythm of their walking. “Here’s the water hole just ahead.”

“Can we check for kangaroos first?” she asked him on a whisper.

“They’re much less scary than bunyips, I promise.”

“No, I want to see them drinking. You said we might.”

He looked at her, gave a quick nod, grabbed her hand and they crept toward the water hole. It looked still and beautiful, but they crouched behind a rock, waiting and watching for several minutes, and there were no animals there.

Only the two of them.

Jac didn’t feel quite human tonight, alone with Callan in the desert. Watching the water hole for signs of movement, she heard his breathing, felt his body like a flannel-and-denim-covered magnet just inches away. A man like this gave masculinity a whole new meaning, reminded a woman that human beings were animals, too.

“We were a bit late for them, I guess,” he said, as they walked back toward the ring of barbecue stones in the creek bed. “It’s better when there’s still some daylight. We’ll make a special trip one day. You can bring your camera.”

She’d forgotten it on their picnic, today. “That would be great. Could we get up extra early and come at dawn? I just love the light and the air then.”

“We can climb Mount Hindley, watch the sunrise, make breakfast over the fire in the creek. Would that be good?”

“Oh, it would be wonderful!”

He gave her a look. They still hadn’t switched their flashlights on. “You sure you’re from L.A.?”

“Last time I checked.”

“You’re supposed to like shopping malls better than water holes, aren’t you?”

“I like new things.” She thought about it for a moment. “No, that’s not right. That sounds like I am talking shopping malls.” She tried again. “I like being made to see things in a new way. Like dawn.”

“Dawn is new?”

“It’s new for me. In L.A. dawn means you stayed out late at a party, or you had to set the alarm early for a flight. If you do see the sunrise, you only see it through glass. You don’t smell it, or feel the dew falling on your skin. Here, dawn is … yes, new. It notches my senses up higher, makes me aware. And writers need that. Writers—” She stopped.

There was an old, fallen eucalyptus tree lying on the creek bed at this point. Its trunk was as big as a concrete culvert pipe, as hard and smooth as iron. Without taking his eyes from her face, Callan leaned his lower back against the curved wood as if the two of them had all the time in the world. He put his flashlight down on the tree trunk beside him, tested its balance for a moment, then let it go.

“Tell me about writers,” he prompted.

But Jacinda shook her head and closed her eyes against the idea. “Doesn’t matter.”

“No, it was important,” Callan insisted. “I was interested. Say it.”

She faced him, ignoring the invitation in his body language that told her to lean against the horizontal trunk, too. Those bells of awareness weren’t so distant or so faint, now. The breeze had carried the sound this way and it was clearer, much closer. But she still had the freedom to ignore the bells, if she wanted.

“I don’t know if I’m a writer anymore, that’s all,” she said. “I think it’s gone. Was it ever really there, I wonder?”

“Hey, you made a living at it.”

“I had an ear for dialogue, and I could make those crazy soap-opera plot twists semibelievable when I put the right words into the characters’ mouths. Was it ever more than that? If it was, I can’t remember.” She laughed, moved a little closer to him, although she was barely aware of it, and reached her hand out to the tree trunk. It wasn’t white or gray, it was silver, and scoured to satin by years of sun and wind. “I have this novel somewhere,” she confessed. “Not finished. Miles from finished. A few early chapters and some notes, and snatches of dialogue from a couple of big scenes later on.”

“Was it any good?”

“Listen to you, asking me something like that!” She laughed and leaned her hip against the wood. They were like two strangers propped at a bar, trading life stories with loosened tongues.

“It’s a really naive question, isn’t it?” he said. “Sorry.”

“No, no, it’s not naive. Well, I guess it is. But it’s good naive. No one in L.A. would ever ask that question because of course I’m going to say it’s good. I’m trying to sell it, aren’t I? I’m going to put the right spin on it, package it into a sound bite. Do you know there are people in the industry there who can talk up a project so well that they get development money for script after script even when they’ve never actually written a word?”

“They’re the ones who sound like they’re not writers.”

“Truth is, Callan, I have no idea if my novel is any good. I have no idea if it’s important. Finishable. Remotely saleable. I just have no idea.”

“But you must have known, once.”

“I think it’s been dying inside me for a long time.”

“But you think dawn in the North Flinders Ranges might bring it back.”

She shook her head again.

“Yes.” He rolled his body ninety degrees so that they faced each other. “Because that’s where this started. You were telling me why you loved our dawn, and why you needed to see new things. Because you’re a writer.”

“Let’s find Lockie’s Game Boy.”

“You hope you can get it back. Being a writer, I mean.” He put his hand on her arm. “You really want to get it back. It’s important to you.”

“It’s not your problem, Callan.”

“No, but I can understand—” He stopped suddenly. “No, you’re right, it’s not my problem.”

She knew there was more he wanted to say. Or didn’t want to say, but could have said. The words stayed locked inside him, powerful and important in some way.

Stuck.

Too scary.

Her thigh was pushing lightly against his. They weren’t pretending anymore. He held her softly, weighing their options as he weighed her in his arms. Let each other go, or pull tighter? Hey, Jac? What do you want? The same as me? Yes, I know what you want ….

She looked up into his face.

New.

She hadn’t known him at all two months ago, and even after the magazine article and the cocktail party, this face had only existed in her memory like a few snapshots and video clips. E-mailing him, she had remembered the first smile of relief he’d given her when he’d realized she wasn’t serious about the Outback Wives thing, either, and his quiet good manners the following evening when he’d brought her and Carly the gift and the flowers.

She’d kept his picture from the magazine and, to be honest, she’d looked at it a couple of times. Learned it by heart, along with all the things the picture said about him.

New, but fascinating.

He wasn’t smiling. His mouth was flat and closed and smooth. She liked its shape. She loved his eyes, and the lines of his brows and jaw. Above his mouth, she found a small stretch of skin that he’d missed this morning when he’d shaved. She brushed it with the ball of her thumb, the way she’d have brushed a streak of dirt from Carly’s face, and it felt rough.

She waited for him to make the next move—it sounded too clinical and cold, putting it like that—but he didn’t. He didn’t let her go, either, just kept that light hold, and watched her watching him. She could still feel the roughness of the beard stubble on her thumb, long after she’d taken her hand away. The tension built and became unbearable. He bent his head, suddenly, and pushed his forehead against her neck, whooshing out a breath into the soft angora of her sweater.

“Oh, Lord, Jacinda!”

“I want to kiss you,” she blurted out, because someone had to say it, someone had to take some action.

“I want to kiss you, too.”

“So do it. Please?”

He was so tense, she could feel it, every muscle knotted tight enough to hurt. He breathed against her neck this time, then touched his mouth to her skin there, the movement dry and soft. He made a sound deep in his chest, imprinted his lips on her skin once again. They were so warm.

She waited.

For more.

Oh, Lord, this was unbearable.

Wonderful and unbearable.

Why didn’t he move?

You might have thought he was holding a grenade with the pin already pulled. They both stood turned to stone … except that stone was never as warm and alive as his body. She couldn’t hold on to this any longer; she wanted to force that mouth to move on her neck, to come and find her.

Tilting her jaw, she rubbed her face against him like a cat. She tightened the press of her body, rocked her hips a little. He was aroused. She could feel it. Finally—finally!—he moved to find her lips, only brushing them at first, then softening his mouth, tasting her.

“Yes,” she said. The word was part of the kiss. “Like this.”

It was such a relief to get there at last, such a release. She wrapped her arms around his neck, parted her lips, felt the pleasure spinning through her, tasted the faint notes of peach and vanilla in his mouth. He wanted this, so she didn’t disguise her own need, deepened the contact until they were drinking each other and tangling their tongues. She gave him everything with her kiss—thanks and hunger and happiness and hope.

That was what you had to do, at some point. You just had to give yourself to it and wait until afterward to see how it felt, what you wanted next, what the repercussions might be.

Yes, she and Carly were leaving in three and a half weeks, going back to Sydney. Two days after that, they’d fly out of the country, to a future she hadn’t begun to work out yet. But none of that was enough of a reason never to kiss this man, never to give or to explore.

She gave some more, slid her hands around and ran them down his back, over the tight curve of his denim-clad backside. She pulled him closer. Mmm. Their legs pressed harder together, and she knew he would feel her breasts, too, not Hollywood huge but neat and nice and female.

Mmm, Callan.

She let the hot mound at the top of her thighs squash against his hardness, the denim of two pairs of jeans diluting the intimacy. Oh, but she wished the denim wasn’t there! She wanted his fingers dragging aside the lace edge of her underwear, wanted everything he could do to her, wanted the words he would say, and the convulsive tensing of his whole body.

It was like jumping into the water hole. You started, you ran, you yelled, and you didn’t want to stop. She just hadn’t expected the idea of stopping to feel so impossible and wrong. She didn’t care that the air had started to chill, that the sand would be hard and scratchy and cold, that they might get spied on by mythical bunyips, she just wanted.

Him.

The escape.

The heat.

The newness.

How long did it take her to understand that he hadn’t traveled toward the same place?

Too long.

He had to drag his mouth and his legs away before she realized, before she sensed the change in him—she could practically hear the squeal of the brakes—and then she felt foolish … and a little too naked … because the zing in the air was more like a force field now. It pushed her away, didn’t draw her closer, and he’d already started to apologize before she had a chance to draw her first breath of non-Callan-tasting air.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry!”

“For what?” She blinked.

“This … I shouldn’t have done this.” He’d half turned back to the fallen log in a gesture of self-protection, and every angle in his body screamed regret. What didn’t he want her to see or know? She already knew he was aroused. So was she. Her body throbbed, her mouth tingled, and she was hot and moist and swollen. It shouldn’t be a source of shame for either of them. It was human … normal … wonderful.

“Why, Callan?” She felt too bewildered to keep it from showing. “It was—it was good, wasn’t it? Real nice.”

Real nice? Sheesh, no wonder she didn’t dare call herself a writer anymore! Real nice bore as much connection to what she’d felt in his arms as cheap hamburger meat bore to sirloin steak.

“It—it—Yes, it was nice. But it sets up—I shouldn’t have done it.” He circled around, his actions restless, erratic and unpredictable, like a freshly filled balloon escaping from somebody’s grip before they’d knotted the opening. Whoosh. All over the place.

“Kissed me?” she said. “What does it set up? It doesn’t set up anything.”

In her confusion, she came across as indignant to the point of anger, and way too aggressive. The whole atmosphere between them jarred her spirit. How could the physical connection have simply … evaporated?

“Not anything bad, anyhow,” she went on, trying to speak more reasonably. “Please don’t think I’m expecting—” She made some vague circles with her hand, not wanting to put her expectations or lack of them into concrete phrasing. She was only here for a few weeks. She hadn’t been thinking ahead, nailing down a prescribed pathway.

“I’m sorry,” he said again. “I’m not saying you’re responsible for any of this.”

Any of what?

“I don’t know what the problem is, Callan.” She said it gently because he looked so troubled.

“Yeah, neither do I.” The words came out on a growl. “But whatever it is, it’s mine, not yours. Okay?”

“Okay,” she echoed obediently. “Um, in that case, thanks for a fabulous kiss. Shall we leave it at that?”

He nodded, but didn’t look grateful that she’d let him off the hook. “Best to.” His circles around the creek bed grew wider. “We have to find that damned Game Boy,” he muttered. “They’re going to wonder what’s happened to us, up at the house.”

I’m wondering what’s happened to us, too, Jacinda thought. And I’m not up at the house. I’m right here. I’m looking right at you, Callan, and I have no idea.

She didn’t join in his search. Or not wholeheartedly, anyway. She was still too confused, didn’t know whether she should be burning with mortification, angry with him, or whether all of that would have been an overreaction. He looked as if he felt all of those same emotions on her behalf anyhow. He didn’t look happy with himself. Didn’t look happy with the entire universe.

He muttered something about Lockie’s carelessness … stupid electronic toys … shouldn’t ever have let him buy the thing in the first place … kids got spoiled with that stuff.

Then he found it, sitting in what was probably the first place they should have tried, on a rock near where the horses had stood in the shade. He expressed his relief in a profanity and headed directly for the four-wheel-drive, his strong shoulders hunched as if to keep Jacinda safely away.

They drove back to the homestead, the jolting of the vehicle echoing her jarred confidence. He’d said it wasn’t her fault, but that was such a classic line. It’s not you, it’s me. Did anyone ever mean it when they said that?

Wheeling around in the front yard, he eyed the lit-up house with a bull-like glowering stare. “Looks like Mum’s still getting the kids to bed.”

“Carly gets overtired sometimes, after a long day, and it’s hard to settle her down. I hope Kerry’s not having trouble with her.”

“We’re all tired. So please, just forget this ever happened. All of it.” He sounded angry, and she didn’t understand.

“Do you want us to leave, Callan?”

“What?” His eyes narrowed. “No! Heck, no! That would be even worse.” He struggled with himself and she decided that if he was angry, he wasn’t angry with her, which made her shaky with relief because the memories of Kurt’s veiled, terrorizing anger were still too strong. “Please stay,” he said. “If you can. If you can forget tonight.”

“I’ll try.” Then something made her add, touching him on the arm, “But no, Callan, I don’t want to forget it. It was—”

“But I do,” he cut in.

She didn’t have time to cut off her final words. “—so good.”

He didn’t say anything. Didn’t look at her. Just opened the creaky door and climbed out of the vehicle.

Chapter Seven

That night, Jacinda couldn’t sleep for thinking about it … thinking about him. The way he’d kissed her. The way he’d turned his back.

It must have been after one in the morning by the time the memories released her body from its prison of sensual awareness, and her mind from circular questions. Even then, she had a restless night and was shocked to see how bright the morning light had grown when she woke up.

Eight-thirty, already?

Carly was long gone. Jac could hear her outside with the boys. Dressing, she heard a car, also, its engine missing some beats as the sound dropped to idling level in the front yard. She could make out an adult male voice that didn’t sound like Callan’s.

“Oh, that’s Pete,” Kerry told her a few minutes later, in the kitchen. She stood at the sink, washing fresh eggs and vegetables. “He’s one of our local North Flinders people, the Adnyamathanha. He used to be a stockman here, but he lives at the settlement at Nepabunna, now. He still drops over pretty often to help Callan out.”

“Drops over?” Jacinda repeated. “How far is Nepabunna from here?” Callan had mentioned the place, she thought, but she’d gotten the impression it wasn’t very near.

Kerry grinned, the same open, wicked grin that genetics had also given to her son. “Just a hop. Around a hundred and fifty kays. Ninety miles to you.”

“It’s okay. I’m learning to translate distances. And a hundred and fifty kilometers is just a hop?”

“It’s practically next door.”

“Well, so I’ve learned a new definition for next door, too.”

“And it’s handy for us that he is that close, because some things are a bit much for me, these days. We take on a couple of seasonals when we’re doing a big muster, but when they’re not around, it’s just Callan and Pete. They’re driving out to Springer’s Well today, working on a new mustering yard Callan’s been wanting to put up, and doing some tagging. Lockie’s going with them, I think.”

“Oh. Right. Carly will miss him.”

Carly and him being code for I and Callan.

He’s avoiding me, she decided, because of last night at the water hole.

Or else I’m kidding myself to think our kiss was that important to him, even in a negative, let’s-forget-it-ever-happened way, and he’s just building a mustering yard.

Whatever that was.

Going outside to find Carly several minutes later, she saw that Lockie and the two men were ready to leave. They were taking the chunky four-wheel-drive truck that Jac had seen garaged in a shed, and its rear tray was filled with the pile of heavy fence posts that Callan had warned Jac and Carly away from last week because of the snakes that might be living underneath.

Callan stood on top of the posts, tanned legs braced and broad shoulders working loosely as he casually caught the tools that Pete tossed up to him. He wore sturdy work gloves—possibly as a concession to the snakes—khaki shorts that came halfway down his thighs, heavy boots and the ever-present hat.

He looked so gorgeous like that—so physical, so strong, so much in his element—it made her ache.

Last night made her ache.

He waved at her and she waved back, starting to smile.

Then he turned away.

She stood like a marble statue, rocked by the strength of her response to the sight of him, stomach dropping at the brevity of that wave, hoping none of it showed. He was saying something to Pete, whose full head of white hair contrasted in the sunlight with skin that looked like hot chocolate fudge, dark and shiny.

Callan was definitely avoiding her.

Leaping down from the rear tray, he went around to the driver’s side of the vehicle and climbed in, calling Lockie at the same time. “We need to get going, mate.” Lockie scrambled into the middle of the front seat, Pete climbed in after him and Callan revved up the engine.

The truck circled out of the yard in the usual boiling mass of dust, bouncing its cargo of fence posts noisily up and down. Pippa and Flick stood in the back like sentinels and barked at the rush of air that increased as the vehicle picked up speed. Carly and Josh ran from the dust, shrieking as if pretending it was chasing them like a monster, up the veranda and into the house.

Callan waved at Jacinda again through the dry, choking curtain. Lockie and Pete did the same, and then they disappeared from sight heading down the track that headed toward the alleged road to Adelaide.

Jacinda’s breathing went sharp in her chest and she was shocked at how vulnerable she felt. Because of one kiss? Because it hadn’t ended with the promise of more? Because Callan’s wave and turn told her he’d meant what he’d said, last night, and the fact that he hadn’t stopped to introduce her to Pete only served to emphasize his state of mind?

Or just because she wasn’t going to see him all day?

“I’m too emotional. It’s just stupid,” she muttered, moving aimlessly around the yard as she listened to the ebbing sound of the engine.

But she’d always been this way. She knew it. Could manage to pep talk herself out of it sometimes, if she was really careful about it. Today it might be tough, because there was so much going on inside her. Yesterday, she’d felt so alive. Exhilarated. Proud of herself. She’d jumped into that water hole. She’d heard the echo of her voice thrown back from the rocks like a battle cry.

All of that was still there in this potent mix of feelings, but she didn’t know what to do with it, how to match it against Callan and his apparent rejection.

There was more to his reaction than met the eye. She felt sure of it. With time, she would understand and it would be all right.

Give it time, just give it time.

Turning to go back inside the house, the sudden certainty calmed her spirit, gave her direction, but then she hit the shade of the veranda and the certainty ebbed just as suddenly as it had come, the emotional transition as sharp as the physical one between heat and shade.

Callan wasn’t Kurt.

Kurt was the king of complex, incomprehensible reactions, shifting layers that you had to peel back and pick apart. Callan was probably as simple and uncomplicated as he seemed. He’d kissed her. He’d defeated that initial impulse of curiosity and chemistry between them. He’d decided that any kind of involvement was a mistake. He’d stopped. He didn’t want it to happen again, and he’d told her so.

Get a grip, Jacinda.

In the kitchen, Kerry was kneading bread dough, while Carly and Josh bickered over LEGO in the next room. Josh still acted more protective of his territory than Lockie did. He wasn’t quite convinced that Carly’s presence at Arakeela Creek was a plus. “I need all the curved bits for my tower,” Jac heard him say.

“But I’m making a tower, too.”

“I started making my tower, first. You’re not old enough for LEGO. Your fingers aren’t good enough.”

“Yes, they are.”

“They’re not, and anyway, I started my tower, first.”

Kerry and Jac looked at each other, wondering about intervention. “Give it another minute?” Kerry suggested.

“Can you teach me what to do with the bread, while we listen and hold our breath?”

Kerry laughed. “That’s about right, isn’t it, holding our breath?”

“I wonder why Carly and Lockie do so much better together. He’s that much older, I guess, and she’s less of a threat to his space.”

“More than that.” Kerry paused for thought and thumped away at the elastic ball of dough, flinging it with some violence onto a floured wooden board. The nearest store was several hours away, so if you wanted fresh bread out here, you made it yourself. When Jac smelled it baking, every second day, she practically drooled.

“Josh is like Callan, I think,” Kerry said after a moment. “He works hard to get his life just the way he wants it, and then he doesn’t like it to change.”

“That’s Callan?”

“It’s a part of Callan.” Kerry paused in her thumping and began to knead, pushing the dough away from herself so that it stretched into an oval, then folding it toward herself again and rotating it ninety degrees. The fluid efficiency of the movement said that she’d done this thousands of times before. “Which makes him sound too rigid, doesn’t it?” she added, shooting a sharp look at Jac.

“I wouldn’t say he was rigid, from what I’ve seen of him,” she answered carefully.

“No, he’s not. I’m glad you can see that. He just … needs time with some things.”

They were both silent for a moment, and the air felt a little too heavy, too full of meaning. Kerry seemed extra alert to nuances today, watchful somehow.

Watchful of me. Watchful of Callan and me, and the way I react to his name.

Jac didn’t know if that was a good thing, or not. What had Kerry thought about the two of them taking so long to retrieve Lockie’s Game Boy last night? What had she sensed in the air between them?

“Want to have a go at this, then?” the older woman said eventually.

“Can I? Will I ruin it? I’ve never made bread before. Should I thump, or knead?”

“I’ve done enough thumping. It releases the gluten in the flour, makes the bread lighter and more elastic. And it’s good for working out your aggression.”

On cue, they heard Carly’s voice rise in an angry scream. “You did that on purpose!”

“Somebody else is working out some aggression, I think,” Kerry drawled. She strode out to the children, the firm rhythm of her feet signaling a no-nonsense approach. “Joshie, we need to work this out,” Jacinda heard.

She began tentatively kneading, thinking that Kerry was probably the best equipped to handle the situation, in this instance. Kneading bread dough was tougher than it looked, however.

Push, fold, quarter turn. Push, fold, quarter turn. Tougher than it looked, but it felt good. The dough was like a baby’s skin, satiny smooth and warm from its first rising. The dusting of flour slipped across it like talcum powder on that same baby’s tush. Push, fold, quarter turn. Physical, creative, satisfying. Human beings had been doing it for thousands of years.

Kerry and Josh discussed LEGO towers in the next room—the possibility of two towers, of coordinated efforts to make a whole village of towers, square ones as well as curved, of Carly being the assistant and Josh helping her with bits that were too fiddly for her fingers. Eventually hurt feelings were soothed and territorial impulses reined in.

“We’ll see how long it lasts,” Kerry drawled again when she returned.

“And that’s what Callan was like?” She couldn’t help talking about him, despite what Kerry might think.

“Actually, no, he was pretty good at sharing,” the older woman answered. “They’re close in age, him and his sister. Nicky’s only fifteen months younger, so he never had to adjust to her as something new. As far as he was concerned, she was always there.”

“And she lives in Adelaide, now? Is that right?”

“A couple of hours north of there, the Clare Valley. She studied agriculture and married a farmer, but he has vineyards, not cattle.”

“You must have found it hard when she moved so far away.”

“To be honest, Clare was better than I’d hoped. I was afraid she might end up in Sydney or Perth!”

“Still, is it hard to keep in close touch?”

“Not with a bit of effort. We e-mail a lot, and take turns to phone each other every week. Sundays usually. Tonight it’s my turn. I send her drawings from the boys and she sends me magazine articles and newspaper clippings and we gossip about those. Silly things like celebrity marriages. We’re big fans of Prince Frederik and Princess Mary! But I’d communicate with Nicky by carrier pigeon if I had to. I don’t think it really matters what you talk about, either, if it helps you stay close. And I’m getting my first granddaughter in two months! I’ll be going down to stay with them, then.”

“That’s wonderful.”

Except that Jacinda was a little regretful that she’d nudged the conversation away from Callan. She had an itchy, secret urge to talk about him that she couldn’t remember feeling since her teens, when telling her friends, “I don’t even like Matt Walker,” had given her the delectable excuse to say a certain male classmate’s name out loud.

“If Callan doesn’t like change, we’re probably imposing on you even more than I’d realized, with our visit,” she said after another moment of silence.

“I shouldn’t have said it. I’m not putting it the right way.” Another pause. “I’m thinking about Liz, not about you and Carly.” The words came out in a rush, as if Kerry might regret anything she said too slowly.

“Oh, okay.”

Kerry divided the ball of dough in two and began shaping each piece into a log, ready for the greased loaf tins she had waiting on the countertop. “You see, thinking about the future, about the boys, about how lonely Callan must sometimes feel—how lonely I know he feels—I worry that any woman who’s not Liz is going to scare him too much. He’s never been any good at asking for help. Which means he’s going to have to get past the fear on his own, and I’m not sure how he’ll do it. Or if he can.”

She opened the oven door and it squeaked. After putting the tins on a lower shelf, she spread a damp dish towel on the top shelf. Jacinda knew that in the moist, tepid space of the oven, the loaves would rise to a high dome shape over the next hour. Squeak went the oven door as Kerry closed it again. Neither she nor Jacinda had spoken.

It’s my turn, though.

Talking like this, in the middle of routine household chores, made it easier to tackle tough subjects, she decided. When you were silent as you gathered the right words, other activity was still going on and the silence didn’t seem so difficult.

“I think … I wonder if …” she tried after a moment. “I think he’s stronger than that, Kerry.” She thought about what he’d said yesterday about yelling and jumping to get rid of the fear. He had his own strategies. They might not be the ones suggested in the hospital leaflets—he didn’t want them to be the ones in the hospital leaflets—but they were strategies, all the same.

Kerry looked eager, as if she itched to talk about Callan, too. “Has he said something to you? Has he talked much about Liz?”

“Not much. A little. He’s said—”

“No, please!” She warded off Jac’s words with her hands. “Don’t tell me what he said. I’m not asking for that. But I do worry.”

“Of course you do.” Jacinda was a mother, just as Kerry was. She knew. “But I think Callan at least does know what he’s fighting in himself.” He’d talked about the fear, and this made more sense now. The fear of change. The fear, if Kerry was right, of there being no one in the whole world to match Liz. “And you know, Kerry, when you understand the enemy, that’s always an advantage.”

“True. He is a fighter. In his own way. Always in his own way!” She laughed, and ran water into the electric jug, which she then placed on the countertop and plugged in.

“Yeah, I’ve noticed that, too.”

“The boys do him a lot of good. Lockie, now that he’s getting older.”

“It’s funny,” Jac said. “Before I had Carly, I always assumed I’d be the big influence on her. That I’d make her who she was. And of course I am doing that. But I think she’s changed me more than I’ve changed her. I never realized that would happen, that kids had such, oh, influence. Kerry, does that make sense?”

“It does.”

They talked about it a little more—kids and change, Callan and Liz. Nothing earth-shattering. Some of it a little tentative, still. But nice.

“Are you having coffee?” Kerry asked. “It’ll only be instant.” The electric jug was about to boil.

“Instant is fine. I’d love a cup.” Jac got the coffee down from the shelf while Kerry found two mugs and poured the boiling water in, leaving plenty of room for Jacinda’s big dollop of milk. Kerry had filled the jug just an inch or two higher than she needed, and rather than waste the precious water, she poured it in to soak the mixing bowl she’d used for the bread dough. Jac made a mental note to take more care with saving water from now on. Her shower, this morning, for example …

“Is it a pain in the butt, doing that?” she asked suddenly.

Kerry looked surprised. “Doing what?”

“Thinking about saving water all the time. Every drop. Pouring the dregs from the electric jug into the dough bowl. Piping the shower and laundry water out to the garden so it gets used twice.”

“I guess I don’t think about it, it’s such second nature. It’s part of living here, and I love living here.”

“Teach me, won’t you? Don’t let me do the wrong thing, here, without thinking. Make sure you teach me.” All at once, for some reason, the words meant more. She wasn’t just talking about saving water. She was talking about Callan.

Teach me about Callan.

Don’t let me do the wrong thing with Callan.

If Kerry understood, she didn’t refer to the fact directly. Instead, she poured milk into the two mugs, gave Jacinda’s the extra zap in the microwave that she liked. Handing Jac the hot mug, she took a big breath.

“Callan and Liz were too alike,” she said, at the faster pace she seemed to use when she wasn’t quite comfortable with what she was saying. Her voice had dropped, too, in case there was any chance of Josh listening in the other room. “I don’t want to say that, because it sounds critical. I loved Liz. I was so happy that Callan had found someone like her, someone who belonged here and belonged in his life. If I could have, I would have gone in her place. People say that. But I really would have gone in her place.”

“I know you would.”

“They were the kind of couple that grows together. Like two trees, the way trees shape each other sometimes. They would even have looked alike, after fifty years. She was the kind of wife a man should have for fifty years. She was so safe for him, though. It made it even harder when she died.” She looked across the top of her coffee mug, her expression appealing for Jac to understand. “Does that make any sense at all?”

“You mean, if their marriage had been more of a challenge …?”

“Yes. Callan would have been equal to a more challenging marriage. And it might have left him …” She slowed and stopped, stuck for the right words. “Better prepared.” She shook her head impatiently. “It still sounds wrong. I can’t put it right. I can’t say it without it sounding like I’m criticizing him, or her, or their marriage.”

“No, but I understand.”

And I wonder what it is that you’re not saying. I’m not used to this, Kerry. I haven’t had a woman like you in my life before, to talk to. I lost my mother too soon, and I was never close enough to my aunt, so, no, I’m not used to this.

Are you telling me that I could be good for Callan, even if I’m nothing like Liz? Because I’m nothing like Liz? Do you want me to be a part of his awakening from grief, Kerry? Or are you warning me away because I could never truly belong? I’m only here a few more weeks ….

Despite her best hopes, despite the creative act of helping with the bread, despite playing with Carly and Josh, and working in the garden, Jac stayed restless and uncertain and churned up inside all day.

At four, she needed more air and space than the homestead and its garden could provide. “I thought I’d go for a walk down to the creek, Kerry, if that’s all right with you,” she told Callan’s mother. “I’ll take Carly with me.”

“Leave her if you’d rather,” Kerry answered. “She’s quite happy with her drawing, and I’m making them a snack in a minute.”

“Thanks. All right, then. I will leave her.”

Not knowing how long it would take her to walk this restlessness away, Jac was happy that Kerry had suggested leaving Carly behind. She really wanted to stride, breathe, think uninterrupted thoughts. She drank a big glass of water, found her hat and sunglasses and set out, following the fence line down to the wide swathe of dry creek bed, the same way they had gone yesterday on horseback.

When she reached the creek, however, she turned north along it instead of south, wanting to explore some new ground. Keeping to the creek bed itself, she covered the distance slowly because the sand was deep in some places, uneven in others, and there were stretches of rock and smoothly worn river stones as well.

The late afternoon was pleasantly still—cool in the shade and hot in the sun. She heard birds overhead, and disturbed a couple of lizards. If there were snakes, they had sensed the vibration of her footfalls and disappeared before she caught sight of them, as Callan had said they would.

She didn’t want to think about Callan.

“Five days down, twenty-three to go,” she said aloud to the eucalyptus trees. She had to make some decisions about the future. At least examine the possibilities.

It was frightening how little pull she felt toward home. Pull? More like dread. Running through a mental list of California friends as she’d done many times before, she couldn’t think of a single one who would risk alienating Kurt by taking her side, or by helping her in any way. They’d support her with lip service as they’d done since her separation from Carly’s father, but nothing more.

Lip service wasn’t enough.

And who did she have farther afield?

She thought about her two brothers, and her father, back east, and knew she’d let those relationships slide more than she should have done. She could have phoned or e-mailed more often, over the past few years. She should have made more of an effort to see her brothers for holidays.

It wasn’t enough of an excuse to say that they hadn’t met her halfway, even though it was true. If she’d worked harder at it, kept pushing, giving something to the relationship, they surely would have seen some value in getting closer to their little sister after a while. Their kids were almost grown, but teenagers might have loved a cute baby cousin.

She thought about the way Callan and Kerry had stayed so close yet still managed to give each other space, thought about the love in Kerry’s voice when she’d talked about Nicky hundreds of miles away, her coming baby, all the ways they found to communicate, and the determination when Kerry had said that she would contact Nicky by carrier pigeon if there was no other way. Families didn’t just chug along like magic, maintenance-free engines. They had to be worked at like anything else.

Jacinda had never made a conscious decision that working on her relationship with her brothers was important to her but she could make that decision now.

Was it too late?

If she’d had a pen and some postcards in her pocket, she would have scribbled greetings to her brothers on the spot. If she’d had a car, she would have jumped into it and zipped to the nearest—

Store.

What “nearest store”?

It was well over a hundred miles away.

Still, the idea of making contact, even with such a trivial, tentative first step as an e-mail or a postcard from outback Australia, stayed with her and felt important. She’d have to ask Callan. Maybe he or Kerry had some cards. Or maybe they were planning a trip into Leigh Creek soon—they did that fairly often, she thought—so she could buy some, to replace the ones she’d left in Sydney in a panic. She felt more confident about being able to write postcards, now.

But how did the mail plane work? Where did you get the postage stamps? Definitely, she needed to talk to Callan.

And it was probably about time to turn around and start heading back.

The journey back along the creek bed seemed farther than she would have thought, and she realized that she’d lost track of time while she’d been thinking about her future and her family. The color of the sky had begun to change. If she didn’t soon reach the line of fence marching at right angles into and across the creek, she might miss it in the fading light.

No, here it was, at last, just visible. In the distance, as she climbed through it and up out of the creek bed, she saw one of those familiar trails of dust. It marked the track that led from the main road to the homestead, which meant it had to be Callan, Lockie and Pete returning from their long day’s work just in time for a good wash before the evening meal.

Her heart lifted and lurched at the same time.

Callan.

Who’d kissed her last night and then turned away.

Callan, who got his life the way he wanted, and then resisted change, which was pretty much the opposite of what Jac needed to do. Her life wasn’t the way she wanted it, right now, but changing it was easier said than done.

Thinking about this and not about where she was going—it was getting hard to see the detail of the terrain, despite the huge yellow full moon rising—she tripped on a loose rock and instinctively grabbed the top line of fence wire for support.

It was barbed.

In the front seat of the truck, Lockie slept, his head lolling onto Pete’s shoulder. At some point, Pete had lifted the head gently and placed his own felt bushman’s hat there for a makeshift pillow. Callan himself was tired enough to consider that the squashed hat looked darned comfortable. The dogs were flung out on the now-empty rear tray sleeping, too, and when Pete lowered Lockie’s head back down, he didn’t even stir. He’d worked well today, and he’d learned some new skills.

At the wheel, Callan blinked several times to keep himself alert. His eyes felt gritty from the dust and his head ached from squinting in the bright light for hours, even though he’d worn sunglasses. They’d made some good progress on the new mustering yard, but they’d need several more days yet. Pete wasn’t as strong or quick as he used to be. And they might run out of supplies before they were done. He had a new shipment to pick up sometime this week in Leigh Creek.

Turning in front of the homestead, he felt a surge of well-being at the sight of the lights, and his aching muscles began to relax. There would be dinner waiting. He might have a beer with the meal. Jacinda could cook, he’d discovered. Maybe she would have convinced Mum to let her do so today and they’d get to taste some new California creation or an Asian stir-fry. His stomach growled in anticipation, and he knew a shower would feel pretty good, too.

Even better than the meal and hot, clean water, there would be people. Mum, Josh, Carly … and Jac. His treacherous heart jumped sideways as he thought about her, but he couldn’t dwell on the reaction right now. Pete was pushing his big hand against Lockie’s slumped shoulder.

“Wake up, little mate,” Pete said. “Dinner’s up.”

“You staying for it, Pete?” Callan asked him, as Lockie opened bleary eyes.

The older man shook his head. “Headin’ home.”

“Come in for a bit.”

“Do that, I won’t get goin’ again. Have to stay all night.”

“I already told you to do that.”

Pete shook his head again. “Gettin’ home. Got some things to check up on.”

“Well, bring your gear tomorrow and stay tomorrow night.”

“Maybe.” He was already heading for his car, with around two hours of nighttime driving still ahead of him, and the return trip first thing in the morning. He was a tough one.

Lockie had woken up. “I’m starving!”

“Let’s see what’s cooking.”

Pippa and Flick followed them onto the veranda and found the fresh food and water Callan’s mother had already put out for them.

Inside the house, there was a fabulous aroma coming from the kitchen, but no sign of food on the table, which surprised Callan a little. Mum would have heard the truck. She would have known how ready they’d be for the meal. Josh and Carly had had baths and were prowling around in their nightwear, looking almost as hungry as Callan felt. His mother appeared with bathwater damp on her shirt and he asked, “Should I set the table?”

“I’m getting worried, Callan. Jacinda’s not back.”

“Not back?” His heart did another of those weird lurches that risked becoming a habit. “Where did she go?”

“For a walk, two and a half hours ago. Longer.”

“What did she take? How long was she planning to be gone? It’s almost dark out there!”

“I know. I thought she’d be gone half an hour. I’m not even sure she had water with her.”

“Feed the kids,” he said, energy surging back into him and hunger forgotten. “I’ll get the dogs, and we’ll head to the creek on foot to look for her. I’m not going to treat this as a crisis just yet.”

“I’ll do that for you!” his mother answered. “I like Jacinda a lot, and she’s no fool ….” She touched his arm, as if it was important that he know how she felt about Jacinda.

“No, she’s not,” he agreed.

And I’ve lived here all my life. I’m not going to panic because a grown woman is an hour late back to the house.

“But, Callan, she has no idea what this country can do to people who make mistakes.”

“I know. Listen, if I’m not back in half an hour, get Moss saddled for me.”

In the space of two minutes, he’d packed water and a couple of snacks into a backpack, as well as the jacket he’d found hanging in her room. He’d also packed the first-aid kit and a long roll of bandage.

Watching as he dropped it into the backpack, little pajama-clad Carly got a stricken look on her face. On top of hunger, fatigue and his own lurking fear, her frightened reaction didn’t help.

“Where is Mommy? Why isn’t she back?” she said.

Chapter Eight

The barbed wire had pierced and torn the skin on Jacinda’s palm in four places. It stung and throbbed, and the remaining half mile to the homestead felt like ten times that distance as she thought about taking each cautious step in the dark. She didn’t want to trip again. She needed better shoes. Proper hiking boots or something. And she shouldn’t have stayed out so long, even though she’d needed all that time to think.

I’ll try e-mailing Andy and Tom tonight, on Callan’s computer, she decided as she started walking again. She then spent the next five minutes of carefully trod distance trying to work out when she’d last done so. Could it really be more than two years?

The dogs started barking when she still had two hundred yards of fence to follow. They sounded overexcited and ready for action, but surely they didn’t think she was a stranger?

Someone must have let them through the gate because they came at her out of the darkness with a speed that frightened her, still letting out high, urgent sounds. She saw a circle of light behind them, bouncing in time to someone’s stride, then heard Callan’s voice.

“Jac, is that you?” He raised the flashlight in her direction.

“Yes, and please tell Pippa and Flick that I’m friendly!”

He whistled at the dogs as he came closer and they ran to heel beside him, panting and turning their faces up to him as if they expected a reward. “Yes, guys, well done, you found her,” he told them.

“Found me?” Jac reached them, while Callan was still bending down to the dogs.

“Please don’t scare us like that again, okay?” He pointed the flashlight beam away from her and toward the ground, but it had already shone into her face and dazzled her vision and she had spots before her eyes.

“Scare you?” She blinked, covered her closed eyes with her hand for a moment, but her vision was slow to clear and, when she opened them again, she could still barely see him. She could sense him, though. That big body, that aura of dust and hard work. “Callan, I wasn’t lost or anything.” She peered at him. It was the first time they’d talked all day. “Were you worried?”

Stupid question. He didn’t look worried, she saw at last as the spots faded. He looked angry, slapping the flashlight in a slow rhythm against his hard, denim-clad thigh and narrowing his eyes. “How much water did you have with you?” he demanded.

“I had a big drink before I left.”

“And did you take a jacket? Even a cotton sweater?”

“I only went for a quick breath of fresh air.” She began to guess that these weren’t adequate answers.

“And you were gone nearly three hours.”

“I know. I was thinking about a few things. Time got away from me a bit, and I didn’t turn back along the creek as soon as I should have. I was a bit shocked to see that the light was going.” Instinctively, she touched the sunglasses on top of her head, useless now. She had her baseball cap folded and stuffed into the back pocket of her jeans, equally useless once the sun went.

“Sunglasses aren’t a survival kit.”

He poked at them with a rigid finger, pushing them farther back into her hair—a gesture that could have been tender in other circumstances, but wasn’t this time. It brought him closer, though, and she remembered with every sense and every nerve ending how she’d felt in his arms last night.

“If you’d twisted your ankle on a tree root and had to sit there all night until we found you,” he went on, “you would have been happy in short sleeves without a drop to drink or a morsel of food, with the temperature dropping into the forties, is that right?”

“Well …”

“People who get lost or hurt out here … people who don’t have the right gear … people whose engines break down and they go looking for help instead of staying with their vehicle … they die, Jacinda, and it doesn’t take that long, either.” His voice rasped and dropped deeper. “This country doesn’t forgive mistakes.”

“Shoot, I didn’t think, did I?” she realized aloud.

He whooshed out a sigh, bent down once again to Pippa and gave her a rough pat, his strong hand splayed out in her thick fur. The way he marshaled his emotions was almost palpable. His shoulder muscles moved under his shirt. “I guess I never spelled it out to you,” he said, after a moment. “Too busy giving you a crash course in snake behavior.”

“Which I very much appreciated!” She took a breath. “You’re right, I should have taken water and a jacket. Shouldn’t have needed a crash course in that kind of basic common sense. And I did grab on to the barbed wire, just now, so common sense has definitely deserted me this evening.”

“We’ve both been a bit … yeah … off beam today,” he growled, and she knew he was thinking about last night.

“See, I’ve spiked my hand.” She blurted out, then grabbed the flashlight from him, pointed the beam at her palm and showed him.

“We’ll need to take care of that as soon as we get back to the house. Are you up to date on your tetanus shot?”

“Lord, I have no idea! No, wait a minute.” She remembered that she’d had one when Carly was a baby, as part of a routine health check with her doctor. “Yes, I would be.” Thank goodness, one area in which she could impress him as faintly sensible. “Have I upset Kerry, too?” she added, thinking about her earlier conversation with Callan’s mother.

Liz would never have let something like this happen. Gone off without water, food or clothing? Never!

She had belonged here, body and soul.

And yet Kerry considered this to have been a mixed blessing.

“She was pretty concerned when Pete and Lockie and I got back before you did,” Callan said. “She couldn’t tell me what you’d taken with you.” He was silent for a moment. “Sorry I was angry. We didn’t know where to start looking, didn’t want to worry Carly.”

“Is she worried?”

“Mum’s with her,” he hedged. “Dinner’s on the table.”

“She is worried. Oh, hell!” She began to stride back to the house, and Callan and the dogs went with her.

“Best way for you to learn, I guess,” Callan said.

“You’re right. I’ll know next time.”

“Forget it. Forget that I was angry, please. It didn’t help.”

“We’re both tired.”

And what’s the bet that Carly has a sleepwalking episode tonight? Jac added to herself inwardly.

Carly rushed into her arms back at the homestead, as soon as they saw each other. “Mommy, I thought a snake bit you. I thought you were lost.”

“It was my fault, sweetheart. I was fine, but I should have let Kerry know exactly where I’d be, and I should have turned back sooner. I won’t make that mistake again.”

“Gran was worried about you.”

“I know she was.”

Pressed against Carly’s warm little back, Jac’s injured palm throbbed. The decision to contact Andy and Tom felt like less of a positive step than it had seemed a short while ago, and when she asked after dinner if she could use Callan’s computer to send some e-mails, she sat in front of a blank screen for too long before anything would come.

Finally, with her left hand crisscrossed in fresh Band-Aids and still smarting after the run-in with the barbed-wire fence, she typed, Hi, Andy! Guess what? I’m in Australia! Visiting a friend at a place called Arakeela Creek. With Carly, of course. Don’t run to get a map. It won’t be marked. Even though it’s the size of Rhode Island. How are the kids? How’s Dad? You can reach me at this e-mail address until May 13. Let me know how you’re doing. Your sister, Jacinda.

Just in case he’d forgotten her name?

She looked at the words on the screen. She thought about all the other things she could have said. Talked about Kurt? Apologized for not keeping in better contact? At least redrafted it into some slightly more complex and grammatical sentences? With Carly, of course had no verb.

A familiar feeling of panic and dread began to flutter inside her, making Kerry’s fabulous chicken casserole sit uneasily in her stomach, and she knew that for now, these few stilted phrases would have to be enough. She hit Send and Receive, then copied the sent message and pasted it into a new one addressed to Tom, cut the How’s Dad? sentence and replaced it with Any special news?

“And I used to call myself a writer,” she muttered.

When she hit Send and Receive again, she got a system message telling her that the message to Andy had bounced. Checking again after a wait of less than a minute, she was told that Tom’s had bounced, also. In the long interval since she’d last made contact this way, both her brothers’ e-mail addresses had changed.

Coming in to his office to see if she needed any help with his computer and e-mail system, Callan could see her disappointment, she knew, even though she tried to hide it.

“Do you want to try calling them instead?” he asked. He looked to be fresh out of the shower. The ends of his hair were still wet against his neck and his tanned skin looked smooth. He smelled of soap and steam.

She thought about the time difference, and said, “Too early in the morning there.” It was eight in the evening here and Carly was already asleep, which meant six-thirty in the morning on the U.S. east coast. Then she added more honestly, “And anyway, over the phone I don’t think I’d know what to say.”

“That’s too bad.” He looked sincerely disappointed.

In her?

For her?

In her brothers?

Either way, it made her determined not to give up so easily. “But would you have any postcards, or something?” she asked. “I’d like Andy and Tom to at least know where I am, in case … well, they don’t often get in touch, but you never know.”

“I have to head into Leigh Creek later in the week to pick up some supplies. You can get postcards there, and anything else you need. Have a think about it. Your own brand of shampoo, or any food that Carly likes that we don’t have. We’ll bring her with us. It’s a bit of a drive, but we can have some stops along the way.”

“Thanks,” she said. “That’d be great.”

And if Carly was with them, Jac surely wouldn’t spend the whole drive remembering how it felt to kiss him, the way she was doing now ….

They didn’t quite know what to do or say next, how to end the conversation. Callan picked up some unopened letters from a big pile on the corner of the desk and let them drop back down. Was he planning to apologize again for getting angry at her about her poorly planned walk? She didn’t want that. Nor did she want any more awkward references to last night.

It was gone, finished, done with.

She had to keep telling herself that.

“You’ve got quite a pile of mail there,” she said quickly, to deflect the subject onto something … anything … safer.

“Forwarded from the magazine,” he answered, and only then did she realize what the letters were.

From women.

Hoping Callan was “sincerely looking for an Outback Wife.”

Looking closer, she saw that all of them were still sealed. “You haven’t opened them?”

“I’ve opened a ton of ’em. And I’ve replied. I was e-mailing a couple of them for a while, but that’s tailed off. These are just the letters from the past two mail flights, which I … uh … haven’t gotten to, yet.”

“My goodness! You need a secretary!”

He grinned, and some of that easy, familiar humor between them came creeping back. “Are you applying for the position?”

So they looked at the letters together, and she helped him with his replies. Kerry brought them each a mug of tea and offered her opinion of a woman who stressed the importance of Callan being “visually literate.”

“Whatever that means! Give her a discouraging answer!”

“Want to draft some replies, Mum?” Callan offered.

“Oh, no, thank you! I’ll leave you to it!” She quickly disappeared.

In the next letter they opened, a woman announced that if she and Callan became involved, she was “prepared to live in the wilderness for up to two years before we renegotiate a move to a more urban environment.”

This one received one of the polite “Thanks for your interest, but I’m not looking for anything right now” replies that Callan had become impressively fluent with by now.

A few letters later, a girl called Tracey “hadn’t had much luck with men, because I’m shy, which I know is my fault. I have a good family—two brothers and a sister, my mum and dad—and we’re close, but I’d move away from Ballarat for the right man. I’d want to take things slow, though. I think marriage, or any relationship, is too important to get wrong because you haven’t thought it through.”

“She sounds nice,” Jacinda said. “You should write her a good letter.”

“She looks nice, too,” answered Callan, showing her a simple snapshot of a slightly chunky woman of around twenty-five or so, with a tomboy smile and light brown hair.

Jac leaned closer to see the picture better, and her arm brushed Callan’s. Turning instinctively, she found him looking at her and could read his face like a book.

She looks nice, but right now you’re the woman I want. It’s too complicated so I’m not going to give in to it, but you’re definitely the woman I want.

“Maybe we’ve done enough secretarial work for tonight,” he said on an uncomfortable growl. “I’ll write something back to her tomorrow.”

Jac nodded. “This is more words than I’ve strung together in—well, a while.”

Frustrated, she knew she needed something more, something other than drafting polite lines to people that neither she nor Callan really knew—and, yes, she included her brothers in that. A need was building inside her, demanding release and expression. It made her scared and it made her twitchy, and she’d only ever known one way to get the feeling under control.

She needed to … really, genuinely, seriously … write.

“I’m going to check on Carly,” she told him, even though she knew Carly was asleep. She wanted to see if by some faint chance she had writing materials in a forgotten outer sleeve of one of her suitcases.

“Callan, would you have a legal pad or a notebook I could use?” Jacinda looked a little tense about asking the question.

A lot tense, in fact. Meeting in front of the waistband of her jeans, her fingers zipped back and forth as she rubbed her nails together, making a buzzing, clicking sort of sound that gave out way too much of a clue as to her state of mind. She didn’t seem to notice that she was doing it.

“Even just some scrap paper?” she added, as if she only had a shopping list to write.

“One of the boys’ old school notebooks?” Callan suggested. He pretended he hadn’t noticed the tension, or the sound and movement of the fingernails, even though his gaze kept pulling in that direction. “They get a new set every year and some of the ones from last year still have a lot of blank pages. Would that work?”

“It’d be great.”

She looked relieved that she’d managed to ask the question, that he hadn’t asked too many questions of his own in response, and that she’d gotten an easy answer. Her hands dropped to her sides, but the thick denim waistband of the jeans stood out a little from her tightly drawn in stomach, showing the weight she must have lost in recent months, and Callan kept looking there, at the place where the clicking fingernails had been, for just a second or two too long.

“Let me dig one out,” he said, dragging his eyes upward, trying to forget how clearly he’d pictured himself seated in a squashy armchair. He would have grabbed her as she went by. He would have wrapped his arms around that willowy waist of hers, and hugged the tension out of those drawn-in stomach muscles.

He wanted to tell her to put the weight back on so that she filled out the lean lines of the jeans. He wanted to apologize again about coming down too hard on her tonight about going for a walk with no water. He hadn’t exaggerated the potential danger in this country, but he could have skipped the anger, because the anger was far more about … something else.

He wanted to thank her for helping him with the letters. He knew it must have been hard at first, despite the way she’d relaxed into it. Yes, and he wanted to tell her exactly how he came to understand so much regarding her tension and fear about the whole writing thing, even though he’d hadn’t tried to write a poem or a story since high school.

“I’m sorry, if it’s too much trouble at this hour it can wait until morning,” she said quickly, ready to backtrack on the whole writing idea at the slightest excuse.

“It’s fine.”

True, he was about to head off for bed. It already felt overdue after the long day working on the new mustering yard with Lockie and Pete, and the heart-pumping but mercifully short-lived interval when he’d feared that Jacinda might be lost. But he was still racked with guilt and regret about what had happened down at the water hole last night. They should have simply been tracking down Lockie’s Game Boy and getting the hell out of there, instead of watching for wildlife and exchanging life stories and—

Yeah.

Guilt and regret and awareness rushed through him, none of it helped by having sat with her in his office writing polite rejection letters to other women for almost an hour.

It wasn’t Jacinda’s fault.

It was totally, utterly him.

Had he managed to get that across to her? Could finding an old schoolbook of Lockie’s for her, without asking her what she wanted to use it for, in any way make up for the way he’d turned away from her down at the creek, and then again back at the house? Make up for the way he’d barely been able to look at her this morning, hadn’t introduced her to Pete, and was almost sinfully grateful that she’d slept in so that they hadn’t needed to confront each other over breakfast? For the way he’d been angry at her tonight, the moment that first flood of relief at her safety had ebbed away?

Why the heck had he let last night’s kiss happen at all? He’d known it would end that way.

Only maybe he hadn’t known.

Maybe he’d been kidding himself all along.

In his office, he dug out the cardboard file box where he kept the boys’ old schoolbooks. He didn’t know why he hung on to them. Because it was easier than throwing them out? He wouldn’t have said he was the nostalgic type, and yet he did have a problem with change, didn’t he?

Mum had talked about it a couple of times since Liz’s death. Mum’s attitude had been helpful rather than accusing, but there’d been the hint of criticism all the same. He’d never wanted to go away to school, as a twelve-year-old, and it had taken him months—had taken hooking up with Dusty and Brant—for him to settle into Cliffside.

And now here were these stupid schoolbooks he put away every year like a pack rat, because something inside him wouldn’t allow them to get thrown away.

He took out a stack of them and flipped through, finding worksheets about the ocean and weather, and words with sh in them that gave him a little twist inside because of the fact that Liz, who would have been so proud and so interested, had never seen them.

Was that why he kept them? Some stupid, illogical, subconscious, impossible belief that if he kept them long enough, her benign spirit would pay a visit and take a look?

Brrr, shake it off, Callan.

How much working space did Jacinda need? He didn’t want to slight her writing ability with just three pages, or scare her with a whole blank book. He thought he understood too much about her fears.

Jacinda looked nothing like Liz. He’d told himself lately that he’d been looking too hard for Liz in those other two women, three years ago, and maybe he’d seriously believed last night, down at the creek, that with her long dark hair and olive skin, Jacinda looked different enough to cure the problem.

The Problem.

A cure?

Maybe it was only getting worse. A man hit his sexual peak by twenty. At thirty-four, things could easily have started to slide. The level of need. The frequency. Had losing Liz pushed him so far away from his natural potency that he’d never claw back the lost ground?

Everything had been fine … fantastic … powerful … intense … while he and Jacinda had kissed last night. The chemistry between them was huge, not something you could explain or trace to its source but something animal and instinctive. Water on a thirsty day. A completion. She had tasted so good.

He loved the way she moved. Loved how at first she’d been happy just to wait and feel those motionless, paralyzed lips of his against her neck while he gathered his courage and gloried in his unexpected and almost shocking need.

Oh hell, he’d wanted her so badly and it had felt so good to rediscover how that felt. A little later, he’d loved her moments of hunger and impatience, too. How could a man’s ego not be gratified by that? She wanted him, and she hadn’t kept it a secret.

But then the pressure of her needs and her expectations had hit. He’d felt her heat against him, telling him she wanted more, insisting it with warm, full pressure, and he’d panicked and … oh, hell … deflated and pulled away—hopefully before she could have noticed.

He hadn’t compared her to Liz. He hadn’t—was this wrong?—even thought about Liz while he was kissing Jacinda. Not for a second. And when he’d panicked, it had been about the other women, the two very different blondes, and the excruciating awkwardness that had played out both times when his performance had fizzled.

He could still remember it in painful detail. The girl at the races, with her disinterested Whatever … when he’d stumbled through an apology and hinted at an explanation. After my wife … If the girl had noticed his raspy throat and horrible struggle for words, she hadn’t reacted. She’d already been putting on her clothes, miffed at her disappointing night.

The other woman, the backpacker, had soothed him like a baby at first. He’d felt foolish, so uncomfortable at her sickly reassurance. It was the way you talked to a three-year-old who couldn’t get his pants on the right way around.

Never mind, sweetheart, we’ll keep working on it and you’ll do better next time.

She’d turned the whole thing into a personal challenge. Dr. Birgit, Scandinavian Erotic Therapist, to the rescue. He’d felt as if they were writing a new chapter in a sex manual, full of strenuous gymnastic positions and clinical efforts at stimulation.

None of which had worked.

Oh, jeez!

Stop thinking about it!

Here. How about this book? He flipped through Joshie’s “Journal Writing” notebook from three years ago and saw several pages of painstaking numbers showing the date, and labored sentences summarizing his day. “We wnt to the crek. I rod Sam. His sadel sliped. I staid on. Dad fixded it up tite agen.”

The book had about twenty spare pages left at the end of it. If Jacinda could fill those, she might not feel so tense and uncomfortable about asking him for more.

He hoped she did fill them, because he could tell it was important to her.

He put the file box away, closed his office door and took the notebook along the corridor to where she waited for him in the kitchen. Her hands still didn’t seem to know what to do with themselves. She hugged herself, finger-combed her hair, picked up a cleaning sponge and wiped down the countertop even though it was clean already.

“Oh, you found something?” she said, when she saw the book in his grip. She smiled eagerly, but dropped the smile too soon, as if she didn’t want him to guess that this remotely mattered to her.

Too late for that.

Handing it over, he hid the depth of his understanding and told her, “Just let me know when you need another one.”

“Thanks,” was all she said.

After asking Callan so impatiently for paper to write on, Jacinda left Josh’s old notebook blank that night. She looked at it for a while, standing alone in the kitchen after Callan had gone, fingers and brain tingling to begin, but then fatigue overtook her.

And doubt.

What would she write in it, anyhow?

What was the point?

The simple act of having to ask Callan for it seemed to have doubled the pressure. Even though she’d tried to play it down, he wasn’t stupid. He was a practical man. He’d expect results. He had no idea about writing. He’d want to see six new chapters of her long-gone novel by tomorrow night.

Why had she brought the subject up? She could probably write down all the words left inside her on the inside of her wrist or the palm of her hand. She should have asked for a Post-it note.

Carly did sleepwalk at midnight that night, after her earlier fear about Mommy’s safety out in the dark. Or was it because she’d picked up on Jac’s own tension over—well, various things? Carly’s emotional radar was scary, sometimes, and Jac wondered how much Kurt’s behavior during the separation and divorce had affected her daughter deep inside where it might never clearly show.

During her nighttime escapade, Carly had a drink of water in the kitchen, went to the bathroom and checked on the dogs sleeping on the veranda, all of it in her sleep. Then, fortunately, she seemed happy to be led back to bed. Jacinda slid gratefully between her own sheets and didn’t lie awake for another hour as she’d feared she might.

And when she awoke the next morning to the sound of Darth Vader crowing in the chook run, heralding first light, the second thing that came into her head after looking across at her beautiful and safely sleeping daughter was the notebook Callan had given her, and its blank pages.

She wanted to fill them.

She did.

It was a hunger that postcards could never satisfy.

Even though every scrap of the doubt was still there, the need was stronger, and wouldn’t go away. She craved the physical act of holding a pen in her hand and moving it across the paper. She needed to think about words, much better words than just, “How’re you doing?” and “Thank you for your letter.” Dressing quickly, she grabbed the book, found the pen she’d taken last night from a jar on the kitchen benchtop and went out to the veranda.

No one else was up. No sounds of movement came from Callan’s room farther along. No light was visible in Kerry’s little cottage across the dusty front yard. It was the coldest hour of the day. Jacinda sat on the cane couch, spread the mohair blanket over her legs and pulled it up over her shoulders. She thought about coffee but decided to wait, not wanting to risk disturbing Callan if he was having a rare lie-in.

She opened the notebook and found the first empty page. The lines on one side were widely spaced, suitable for a child’s first efforts at literacy, and on the opposite side, the paper was completely blank, ready to be filled by a stick figure and a clumsy tree.

Five minutes went by, but nothing happened. She was tempted to doodle. Her fingers tended to make all these elaborate curly patterns and shapes without her even thinking about it on the rare occasions when she wrote by hand. But she resisted the doodling. She wanted to wait for words.

And finally they came.

“I’m sitting here,” she wrote, “watching light seep upward into the sky like the curtain rising on a Broadway show.”

It didn’t rank with classical literature’s great opening sentences, but she told herself not to care. It doesn’t matter, Jacinda. Just keep going. There doesn’t have to be a story, or a direction, or a logical sequence. Not yet. Not ever. You’re not selling this. You’re not showing it to a soul. No, not to Callan, if he asks. So just keep writing.

Her hand had begun to ache and she’d penned four pages when Callan found her. The light was on over at Kerry’s, and she could hear the boys in the kitchen. She must have been sitting here almost an hour.

“Want coffee?” Callan offered.

He stood beside the wicker couch, looking too tall, and she had to fight the need to cover her page because he had a bird’s-eye view and could have read it if he’d wanted to. As it happened, he wasn’t looking at the page, he was looking at her face.

“I’ll come inside in a minute,” she told him, twisting toward him and leaning her elbow over the paper as if it were just a casual, accidental movement.

“No, I can bring it out for you,” he said. “You’re busy.”

“No, I’m—That rooster of yours doesn’t like visitors to sleep in, does he?” she joked lamely. “I’m only filling in time till Carly wakes up.”

“Well, she has.”

So you’re not buying my excuses, Callan?

Could you pretend, at least?

“Oh, does she want me?” She shifted, started to close the book.

“She’s with the boys. She’s fine.” He leaned down and flipped the pages open again, and their fingers touched. He pulled his hand away. “Keep going, and I’ll bring the coffee.”

“No, no, I’m finished. I’m done. It’s okay.”

“You looked like you were still working on it.”

“It’s not work. It’s nothing.”

“Still, keep going and I’ll bring your coffee out,” he repeated stubbornly, for the third time.

“Okay. Thanks.” She didn’t want to argue anymore, because if she argued, he’d have questions about what she’d written, and she didn’t want questions.

He didn’t seem in a hurry to get the coffee he’d offered, however. He just stood there, leaning against the open doorway, making her skin itch and ripple with awareness. His body was magnetic. She wanted to grab his hip or push her face into his chest and smell his shirt.

Finally, mercifully—after probably a whole six seconds had elapsed—he asked, “Did I give you enough? I mean, are there enough pages left in the notebook? Because there are a couple more I can give you. And I have printer paper, too. Or if you want to use the computer again …”

“For the moment, I’m fine with this.” She laid her hand across the half-filled page.

It was, seriously, years since she’d written this much by hand, and yet she hadn’t even considered Callan’s computer, she realized. Somehow, this was the method that felt right for now, this filling of white paper with blue scrawl. She liked the physical act of scribbling out a wrong word, or jetting an arrow across the page toward a sentence added in after further thought.

Callan still hadn’t left.

“I’m guessing you don’t plan to show me right this minute.” He smiled, but she wasn’t in the mood to get teased on this.

“No.”

“No?”

She covered the page protectively with her arm once more. “It’s nothing. It’s terrible. It’s just—It’s not a story, or anything. It’s just little snatches. Impressions.”

“Like a poem.”

“Not even that. Sort of like a poem.” Unnh! “I might turn some of it into a poem later.”

“And then you can show me.” He gave her a sly look, and there was the promise of a grin hovering on his face.

“No! Please don’t … Please don’t treat this like a joke, Callan, or like tasting a batch of cookies I’ve made. It’s not like that. I couldn’t—I’m sorry, I don’t have a sense of humor about it, and I can’t explain that, I can’t explain why it’s important, I just—”

“Hey … hey.”

Oh crud, now he’d sat down, frowning and concerned. Now she’d really turned this into something. She should have fobbed him off, just agreed that, yes, it was a poem and that, sure, yes, she’d show it to him when it was done, and hope that the whole thing would drop from his mind because surely he had better things to think about.

“I’m not treating it like a joke, Jac,” he said.

His blue eyes were fixed on her, as motionless as the surface of the water hole at night, as deep and bright as the midday outback sky. The old, sagging couch pushed them closer together, the way it had on her first night here, as shameless as a professional matchmaker. Go on, it said, feel his thigh pressed against yours. Don’t fight it. You like it.

“I’m not laughing at you about this.” His voice had a husky note in it. “I wouldn’t. I know it’s important.”

“It’s not important.” She pushed her hand against his upper arm and tried to shimmy her butt sideways so the matchmaking couch didn’t get its wicked way. Callan leaned back, respecting her need for space, still watching her. “It’s stupid,” she said. “Writing really doesn’t matter. If I never wrote another word in my life, the universe would not be a poorer place.”

“You don’t believe that.”

She laughed. “No, I don’t, but I should! Because it doesn’t make sense that it’s so important. I’m not expecting you to understand any of this.”

“Give me some credit.”

“No, I didn’t mean that you’re not smart or—You’re not a writer, that’s all.”

“Do I have to be? Isn’t there only one thing I need to understand? Without it, you’re incomplete,” he said simply.

She nodded silently, stunned at the words.

Yes.

She’d never heard it put so plainly.

Without it she was incomplete.

“You just said it,” she stammered. “Y-you’re so right. How—?”

“Everyone has things like that. Their kids, their work, their land. Their gardening, their guitar playing, their sport.” His tone had changed, sounded more distant and defensive, like a lecture. But then he couldn’t sustain it, and seemed to give up the attempt. His voice dropped again, the pitch low and personal. “You don’t need to ask yourself or anyone else why writing is important, Jacinda. You just need to know—I have to have this in my life to feel complete. That’s okay. That’s no big deal. The bad, impossible part is that if something takes it away, it kills you, doesn’t it? It cripples you, torments you, until you find a way to get it back.”

“How did you know that?” It was almost a whisper. Barely aware of her action, she grabbed his hand, let the couch lean her in closer to him. “Just hearing you say it is … great, such a relief … thank you. For taking it seriously. For saying it. But how did you know about the torment?”

His body sagged. His eye contact dropped as if the thread of communication between them had been sliced through. He looked as if he was talking to the floorboards or to his shoes, not to her.

“Hell, Jacinda! D’you honestly think you’re the only one it’s ever happened to?” he muttered.

Chapter Nine

Callan wouldn’t follow through.

Jacinda didn’t push or demand, but she wanted to understand what he meant. How had it happened to him? Where was he incomplete? He couldn’t be talking about the loss of Liz, because there was grief in that, yes, but no shame and she was certain that she’d seen shame in him when he’d said those words.

D’you honestly think you’re the only one it’s ever happened to?

Shame? Why?

They had common ground, it wasn’t a source of shame, and she thought they should grab at it and make use of it, but he clammed up and wouldn’t talk about it, said it wasn’t important, he couldn’t explain, she should just forget it. Carly’s arrival on the veranda a moment or two later gave him an easy way out that he snatched up as shamelessly as a serial dater might claim, “I lost your phone number.”

“Woo-hoo, Carlz!” he said. “Ready for another big day?”

Knowing how much she didn’t want to feel pressured about her writing and therefore not wanting to pressure Callan in return, Jac let it go for the time being. Instead, she hugged Carly, closed Lockie’s old notebook and took it into the house. Four pages was enough for now. Four pages was good. Even a sentence would have been good, so four pages was actually great.

Three days later, she’d written fifteen.

They still weren’t a part of anything. Too disjointed and personal for a story. Too poetic for a diary. Not jazzy and chatty enough for a blog on the Net.

She wrote about the colors of her favorite hen’s feathers in the sun, about the feel of bread dough in her hands, and the words that Kerry had used when she’d taught the recipe and the technique. She wrote two pages of stuff she imagined herself yelling at Kurt, not in his huge executive office or out front of Carly’s preschool, but the things she would have yelled if she’d been standing on the rock ledge at the water hole about to jump in, while Kurt was down on the sand—and okay, admittedly, since this was a fantasy, cowering there.

She wrote out the words six hundred thousand acres and they looked really good on the page, much better than just the numbers. They looked so good that she found out some other numbers from Callan—the distance around the perimeter of Lake Frome, the length of all the fences on his land, the height above sea level of Mount Hindley and Mount Fitton and Mount Neil—and wrote those down in words, also.

She wrote about all the new things Carly did, and the new discoveries she made.

Including a snake.

Yep, bit of a shock, that. She and Carly had gone out to collect eggs before lunch on Tuesday and hadn’t even seen the huge, silent thing coiled against the shade cloth at the side of the chook house until they were close enough to touch.

Oh … dear … Lord.

Her heart had felt like it had stopped, but Carly’s scream was more one of surprise than fear. Kerry had come running from her vegetable garden and had quickly been able to tell them it was only a carpet python.

Right.

Only.

Harmless, Kerry had said. Really. Wouldn’t even squeeze you to death, which had been Jac’s second theory, once she’d abandoned the toxic venom idea.

“Take a look at it, Carly,” Kerry had invited, and Carly had looked.

From a little farther away, so had Jac.

They’d seen the markings and Kerry had told Carly her version of an Australian aboriginal myth about a lizard and a snake who had taken turns to paint markings on each other’s backs, which had kept both Carly and Jacinda looking at the python long enough to really see its beauty.

Because it was beautiful. The markings were like the neat stitches in a knitting pattern, with subtle variations of creams and yellows on a background of brownish gray—gorgeous and neat and intricate. Jacinda was discovering so much that was beautiful on Callan’s land, and Callan watched her doing it, knew she was writing about it, and seemed to be happy with that, even though he didn’t say very much.

On Thursday, they drove for three hours with Carly to Leigh Creek in the truck, and picked up fence posts and postcards, among other supplies. The town was modern and neat and pretty, with young, white-trunked eucalyptus trees and drought-tolerant shrubs flowering pink, yellow and red. For lunch they stopped in a tiny and much older railway town called Copley just a few miles to the north of Leigh Creek and ate at Tulloch’s Bush Bakery and Quandong Café—well-known in the area, apparently, as well as a popular tourist stop.

“You have to taste a quandong pie for dessert,” Callan decreed, so the three of them ate the wild peach treats, which tasted deliciously tangy and tart, something like rhubarb, inside a shortcrust pastry with crumbly German-style streusel on top.

Jac sat in the café for a little longer and wrote her postcards, while Callan entertained Carly by taking her for a wander around the quiet little town. The postcards were tough, and there were lots of places where her pen hovered over an uncompleted line while she searched for words. But she managed to fill the space in the end, and included Callan’s e-mail address. “I’d love to hear from you, if you get a chance,” she told both her brothers, hoping they would realize that she meant it, hoping they’d care enough to respond.

On the long journey home, Carly fell asleep in the seat between them, and with her sweet-scented little head on Jac’s shoulder, Jac got sleepy as well. They’d left pretty early this morning, and Callan had even let her drive for part of the journey. In a truck of this size, on outback roads, it had been a challenge but she couldn’t have chickened out. It seemed important, right now, to push herself in new ways, to prove her own strength—to herself, more than to anyone else.

Proving yourself did definitely leave you sleepy, though.

The smooth gravel of the road hummed and hissed beneath the wheels, and even the sight of a group of kangaroos bounding away across the red ground didn’t do more than make her eyes widen again for a few moments.

Callan teased her when she woke up again. “You had a good nap, there, judging by the size of the wet patch on your shirt.”

“Oh! Was I—?”

Drooling? True, Carly sometimes did, in her sleep.

Without speaking, he handed Jac a tissue, but there was no wet patch that she could find. She wadded the tissue up and pelted him with it. “I was not!”

“Snoring, muttering, reciting Shakespeare and your bank account number. Kept me awake, so thanks.”

“I was not! Pass me another tissue!” Even though it wasn’t a very effective weapon.

“Okay, I won’t mention any of the other things you do in your sleep.”

“I snoozed lightly. For about ten minutes.”

“Forty-five, actually.”

“You mean we’re nearly back?” Taking a better look at the surrounding country, she recognized Mount Hindley approaching to the right. She knew its distinctive silhouette, now. “Oh, we are! I really did sleep!”

“Yeah, my conversation was that interesting.”

“You didn’t say a word!”

They grinned at each other over Carly’s head and it just felt good.

On Friday evening, he asked her, “Do you still want to see the animals drinking, down at the water?”

“I’d love to.”

“Because we could do it tomorrow, if you want.”

Apart from Thursday’s trip into town, he’d been working hard since Sunday to get the new mustering yard completed, going out to Springer’s Well with Pete first thing every morning and not returning until late in the afternoon, leaving Lockie behind after that first day because of School of the Air. The mustering yard was almost completed now, Jacinda knew, ready for the next roundup of cattle for trucking to the sales down south.

Pete had had enough of the twice-daily drive between Arakeela Downs and Nepabunna by Monday afternoon, on top of the even rougher trip out to Springer’s Well, so he’d stayed at the homestead overnight on Monday and Tuesday nights to give them longer working days.

He had slept on the front veranda, wrapped in a sleeping bag laid on top of the ancient canvas of an army camp stretcher. He’d been an easy guest. Didn’t talk too much. Didn’t make a mess. Ate whatever was put in front of him.

And he’d told Carly stories about the mythical Akurra serpent, whose activities explained the existence of the water holes and gorges all over this region, as well as the existence of Lake Frome. “Big rocks in the creek, Akurra’s eggs. Belly rumbles ’cos he drank too much saltwater, and you can feel it under your feet. You feel one day, Carly, if the earth ever shakes a bit, that’s Akurra.”

Mythical serpents, real carpet pythons, yabby sandwiches … Carly took it all in stride. But her little legs probably weren’t yet equal to a dawn climb up Mount Hindley, so Callan suggested that this time they leave all the kids and Kerry behind. He packed breakfast and hiking supplies that evening, and suggested that Jac bring a day pack, too.

“For water and sunscreen, your towel, your camera, and somewhere to put your sweatshirt once the sun gets higher.”

Packing these items, Jac thought about the second schoolwork notebook that Callan had given her today—“In case you’re in danger of filling up the first one,” he’d said, and she dropped that in, also, along with a pen. She thought she was probably just giving herself unnecessary extra weight.

If he hadn’t made that rash promise about a dawn hike to Jacinda down at the water hole last Saturday night, he wouldn’t be doing this, Callan knew. He set the alarm for five-thirty because they wanted to get to the top of Mount Hindley to see the sun’s first rays, but he didn’t need its jangling sound to rouse him. He’d already been lying awake since four forty-five, locked in a whole slew of illogical feelings.

The thought of several glorious early morning hours alone with Jac made him heat up way too much.

He just liked her.

A lot.

Her company. Her outlook. Her smile.

And he was a man, so liking channeled itself into predictable pathways.

Physical ones.

He knew that his mood changed when he walked into the house and she was there. His spirits lifted, floating his energy levels up along with them the way empty fuel cans used to float the scrappy wooden rafts he and Nicky had hammered together to ferry around the water hole as kids.

Who noticed?

Someone had to.

Mum wasn’t blind, and her hearing was pretty sharp, too. Could she hear the way his voice changed? He got more talkative, louder. He laughed more. He threw Carly up in the air, wrestled with Josh, told bad jokes to Lockie, got all three kids overexcited before bedtime just because he was too keyed up himself and couldn’t keep it dammed back.

And Jacinda reacted the same way.

He could see it and hear it and feel it because all of it echoed exactly what was happening inside him.

Their eyes met too often. They found too many reasons to share a smile. The smallest scraps of conversation took on a richer meaning. Shared coffee in the mornings was cozier. Jokes were funnier. It took him longer to wind down enough to sleep at night.

Sometimes he felt so exhilarated by it, as if he were suddenly equipped to rule the world. Or his corner of it, anyhow—those six hundred thousand acres that impressed her so much.

The new mustering yard was great, structured to minimize stress and injury to the cattle. His yield and his prices were definitely going to improve. The long-range weather forecast held the hope of rain, and he’d put in some new dams just last year—Jacinda called them ponds—to conserve as much of the runoff as he could.

He’d talked to her about all this and she’d listened and nodded and told him, “I had no idea so much research and thought had to go into running cattle in this kind of country.” And he’d thought, yes, he had skills and knowledge and strength that he took for granted, things that could impress a woman that he’d never seen in that light before.

Not even with Liz, because Liz had grown up with cattlemen and had taken it all for granted, too, just the way he did.

What did Mum see?

What did Pete see?

Pete had irritated the heck out of him, earlier in the week, with the ancient-tribal-wisdom routine that he liked to pull on unsuspecting victims from time to time.

No, it wasn’t really a con, because Pete was pretty wise in a lot of ways, but Callan had felt conned, all the same. He’d felt naked and exposed.

What did Pete see?

What was all that biblical-style stuff about seasons turning and everything having its place and its time? He liked Pete’s conversation better when it was about fence posts and calving. On Wednesday afternoon, they’d had a big, pointless argument about wildflowers.

“Desert pea? It’s too soon, Pete. We had those freak thunderstorms a month or two ago, I know, but the flowers won’t be out for a few weeks yet, I’d say. Maybe not until spring.”

“Yeah, but happens that way, sometimes. So busy saying it’s too soon, and that’s right when you see ’em, red flowers dripping on the ground like blood, right where the rainwater soaked into the ground.”

“I still say it’s too soon.”

“You want your friend to see ’em before she goes,” Pete had said. It was a statement, not a question. “You’re not happy, because you think she won’t.”

And he was right.

Callan liked Jacinda so much, he wanted to show her dawn from Mount Hindley, and Pete’s ancestors’ rock carvings farther up in the gorge, and the bloodred, black-eyed Sturt’s desert pea flowers blooming on his land.

“Got your camera?” he asked her, as they walked out to the four-wheel-drive parked in its usual crooked spot in front of the house.

They moved and spoke quietly because the kids were still asleep. Mum’s light was on. She’d have made her early morning cup of tea and would be drinking it in bed, in her quilted dressing gown. She’d be dressed and over at the main house before Carly and the boys had finished wiping the sleep from their eyes.

“Yep,” Jacinda answered, holding up her day pack. “Remembered it this time.” She shivered a little.

“Cold?” he asked. It wasn’t an award-winning question. Of course she was cold. So was he. They’d need to get moving before they would warm up.

“A bit, but I’m fine.”

He liked that about her, too. She didn’t complain. Being cold or hungry or scared or wet … or confronted by a carpet python … or teased about drooling … was never enough on its own to spoil her mood. She took things in stride, just like her daughter did.

Yeah, but there were limits.

Monday morning, five days ago, on the veranda.

Sheesh, what had he said?

You think you’re the only one it’s ever happened to?

Callan, idiot, you can’t say things like that in a naked moment and then drop it and refuse to talk.

It was still sitting there, the conversational elephant that they both pretended they didn’t see. Jac didn’t know what he’d meant, and he wasn’t going to tell her, so they would both just have to ride it out until the memory of Monday morning wasn’t so fresh and didn’t matter anymore.

Maybe papering it over with fresh memories of things like going into Leigh Creek with Carly, eating quandong pies, climbing Mount Hindley at dawn and watching yellow-footed rock wallabies come down to drink would help.

He warmed the engine and took his usual semicircular route around and out of the yard. They parked beside the dry creek bed under the same tree as last Saturday night, which was a mistake because it reminded him of … all sorts of things. But if he’d parked somewhere different, it might have looked as if he was avoiding that spot, which would just be crazy.

The sky had begun to soften in the east, but the air was still cold and the dew heavy.

“I love being awake and out of the house this early,” Jac said, but she shivered again as she spoke.

Which made him want to put his arms around her to keep her warm.

He hiked faster, instead, moving his feet over the rocks the way he’d been doing all his life, forgetting that her stride wouldn’t be as sure-footed or as wide. She didn’t ask him to slow down until they were almost at the top of the mountain, and then her request came just a few seconds too late.

“Callan, could you—? Yikes! Ouch!”

She’d stepped onto an unsteady rock and it had tipped. She stumbled several steps and grazed her calf on another rock before almost falling to her knees.

“I’m sorry.” Oh, damn! She’d already hurt herself once this week, on that strand of barbed-wire fence while he’d feared she was lost. She’d only removed the Band-Aids Thursday morning. “I was going too fast. Wanted to warm us up.”

He doubled back to her, not reaching her as fast as he wanted to. He definitely shouldn’t have let himself get so far ahead. She bent down and started picking dirt from the graze, wincing and frowning.

“Let me,” he said.

“It’s nothing. The skin is barely broken.”

“What about this?” He took her arm and turned it over so she could see. She had a graze there, too, which she hadn’t even noticed yet, a scrape between her elbow and wrist where blood was beginning to well up.

She made a sound of frustration and impatience. “I shouldn’t have tried to go so fast.”

“It was my fault. You were only trying to keep up, and I have better boots than you.”

She smiled, tucking in the corner of her mouth. “That’s right. Blame it on the boots, not the hopeless city-bred American.”

“Don’t. It really was my fault.”

Together, they washed the grazes, dried them with the towel and put a couple of Band-Aids on the deepest scrapes, both of them finding too many reasons to apologize. Any awkwardness wasn’t in their first-aid techniques, it was in their emotions. He felt as if he shouldn’t be touching her, but that would have been impractical.

Oh, crikey!

Would he ever learn to act naturally around her?

He didn’t hold out a lot of hope.

“We must be almost at the top,” she said when they were ready to start moving again.

“Just about.” It felt good to find something safe to talk about! “See that cairn of rocks up ahead? That marks the official summit.”

“Did your family build it?”

It was a good-sized pile of stones, grading from larger at the base to smaller at the top, a couple of meters high.

“No, it’s been here way longer than we have, over a hundred and fifty years. A couple of brothers, the Haymans, built it when they first ran sheep here in the 1850s.”

“Do you know the whole history of your land, then, Callan?”

“Pretty much.”

“And the aboriginal myths?”

“And the geology. You’re standing on some pretty nice quartzite.”

She laughed, intrigued and pleased for some reason. “Am I?”

“Yep, although down in the gorge itself it’s granite. I can show you some maps. And I have satellite pictures, too. Those are fascinating, when you look at—” He stopped.

Or not.

Because she couldn’t be that interested, could she? She was just being polite.

“Finish,” she said.

“The way the land folds,” he summarized quickly, “but, no, I’m done on geology. Let me know if you ever do want to see pictures. Speaking of which, get your camera out or you’ll miss the sunrise.”

She nodded, swung her day pack off her shoulders and found the natty little piece of digital technology. He watched her switch it on, position herself on a rock, line up her shot. There was a moment of stillness and expectation. The whole earth waited, and Jac waited with it.

Callan’s body felt warm and loose from the walk, a little dusty around his bare lower legs. He was thirsty, but didn’t even want to breathe right now, let alone fiddle around in search of his water bottle. He just wanted to watch Jac watching the dawn.

She wore stretchy black shorts that finished snugly halfway down her lean, smooth thighs, and her legs were bare until they disappeared inside a pair of chunky white tennis socks just above her ankles. She had her backside parked on a rock and her knees bent up to provide a steady resting point for her elbows.

The sleeves of her navy sweatshirt were pushed up. Beyond gracefully bent wrists, her hands looked delicate yet sure as they held the camera, and she’d turned her baseball cap around the wrong way like a kid, so that the peak wouldn’t get in the way of her view.

“Oh, it’s fabulous … fabulous,” she whispered.

The horizon began to burn and the first rays shot across the landscape, setting it alight with molten gold. She clicked her camera, got impatient with her position and stood up, circling the whole three hundred and sixty degrees twice, clicked and clicking, as the light changed and flared and shifted around her. It settled on a herd of cattle, turning them from dark blobs into distinctive red-brown silhouettes, etched with a glow. Finally, she lowered the camera and smiled.

And he came so close to grabbing that back-to-front baseball cap off her head, throwing it on the ground and kissing her, except … except … all the terrifying reasons from the other night were still there, and he didn’t see how they were ever going to let him alone.

“I want to see the satellite pictures and hear about the history, Callan,” she told him. “Don’t think that you’re ever boring about this place, because you’re not.”

“Yeah, it had occurred to me as a possibility,” he managed to say.

“No. Not a possibility. Okay?”

He just nodded, relieved but still wondering if she was simply being polite.

“Mmm, I need some water,” she said.

They both drank, then she put her camera away and asked, “Will we miss the kangaroos again?”

“We should get down into the gorge, before the sun climbs too high, yes.”

He stayed behind her, this time. The sun at this height was already warm on their bare legs, but when they got lower, the gorge was still in shade. It was magical. They saw several kangaroos and a pair of yellow-footed rock wallabies, impossibly nimble and sure-footed as they bounded back up the rugged sides of the gorge after their morning drink. A family of emus showed up, too, their big curved backs heaped with the usual pile of untidy gray-brown feathers that bounced as they got startled by the human presence and ran.

Jacinda took more photos, then went to put her camera away.

“I brought breakfast, if you want it,” Callan told her. “We can light the fire. Or we can head back.”

She twisted to look back at him, trying to read what he really wanted, not wanting to be a time-waster or a nuisance. “Can we stay? Is there work you have to do?”

“We can stay. I’m getting pretty hungry.”

And I don’t want to end this, because it’s too good.

She helped him with the fire. He’d brought an old pan, eggs and bacon, bread to make toast, a couple of garden tomatoes to grill, long-life milk, instant coffee and the billycan to boil the water in. They got everything ready, but the flames were still too high to start cooking. Their hungry stomachs would have to wait for glowing coals.

Jacinda looked at her day pack a couple of times in an uneasy kind of way and he almost teased her about it. Was she checking no snakes were lurking, eager to crawl inside? Finally, she blurted out, “I brought my … Lockie’s … notebook. Would you mind if I scribbled in it for a little while?”

Of course he didn’t mind.

And he tried not to watch, because he knew that somehow it was private. She didn’t like to feel herself under the spotlight of someone else’s observation when she stared at the blank page or scratched the ballpoint pen impatiently back and forth over a wrong word—or even when she was writing smoothly and unconsciously smiling at the fact that it was going well.

Okay, so that meant he was watching. Sneaking glances, anyhow.

Even though the flames had still not died back quite right, he started cooking to distract himself, putting strips of bacon and halves of tomato into the pan and poking at them with a barbecue fork more than he needed to. He knew he shouldn’t keep spying on Jac’s tentative new relationship with written words.

He was so busy not noticing her write that he didn’t notice when she stopped. Her question sneaked up and leaped at him like an enemy ambush. “Callan, tell me what you meant the other day, that I’m not the only one it’s ever happened to.”

He whipped around, bringing the sizzling pan with him and almost losing the freshly cooked eggs over the rim. She had the notebook open in her lap and the pen still in her hand. What was she going to do? Record his answer?

She looked startled at his sudden movement. Her gaze dropped to the pan. “Careful ….”

“Sheesh, Jacinda!” he said on a hiss.

The ambush metaphor still held. He felt like a soldier, taken by surprise but on such a hair trigger that he was ready for the attack anyhow, weapon fully loaded. He bristled all over, prepared to lie under oath, stay silent under torture, neutralize the onslaught in any way he could.

He wasn’t going to talk about this!

Wrong, wrong, wrong, Jacinda realized at once, watching Callan set the pan of eggs down on a rock without looking at it.

They’d each gotten to different places during the past ten minutes of silence, she saw. She had felt increasingly peaceful, close to Callan, at home ….

And braver, because some nice snatches of language were happening on her page, and writing well always made her brave. Out of nowhere, she’d had an insight into one of the half-forgotten but very real characters in her old, unfinished novel, and suddenly that character wasn’t half-forgotten anymore, but was right here, as if sitting beside Jac, her story clamoring to be told.

When she’d looked up from her writing, she’d seen Callan crouched by the fire, his muscles pulling under his shirt as he reached to poke the coals or flip the toast on the old wire rack. He wasn’t saying anything, wasn’t looking her way, and she thought he must be feeling peaceful, too, happy about being together like this, enjoying each other’s uninterrupted company, sharing the same appreciation of nature’s gifts at this fresh hour.

The question hadn’t felt abrupt to her. It had felt right.

But it wasn’t right.

She could see it instantly in the way he turned, the way his face changed, the sharpness in his voice, the appalled expression in his eyes.

Sheesh, Jacinda! In her head, she echoed his own exclamation.

You could have led up to it better, couldn’t you, Jac? Given him some warning?

She let her notebook slide to the ground and stood up, covering the few yards of physical distance between them—and hopefully some of the miles of emotional distance—in one breath … in four heartbeats.

“Callan.” She put her hand on his arm and he flinched. “I didn’t intend for it to be such a tough question.”

“Okay …”

“I’m sorry, I’m too self-absorbed over this. You seemed to understand so much the other day. About the whole thing with my writing. The problem. The block. The incompleteness. And today it was flowing so well. I have to thank you, because I never imagined finding a place where I’d feel so safe, after what was happening with Kurt at home. And I just wanted to understand about you, in return, that’s all. I wanted to hear from you about the incompleteness that happened to you, and what you did about it. What worked for you, when you solved it.”

He froze.

Wrong again, Jac.

Hell, how could her intentions have been so good and still have led to such a mess?

He closed his eyes, gritted his teeth. When he answered, she could hardly hear. “I haven’t solved it.”

He broke roughly away from her, turning his back to her just the way he had on Saturday night.

Guarding himself.

Guarding against some power she had over him, or some threat she was unconsciously making. Either way, she didn’t understand.

But her bravery was still in place—that sizzling sense of capability and strength that good writing could give her. And that meant she wasn’t prepared to let the issue go.

“Please don’t turn your back, Callan,” she said and stepped toward him.

He didn’t move, apart from thrusting his hands down into the pockets of his shorts. He didn’t speak, either.

“You turned your back the other night, too, when we were here,” she pressed on. “You know when I mean. Looking for Lockie’s Game Boy, when we—”

“Yes, I know when you mean.”

She reached him, but his body language practically screamed at her not to touch. It created physical pain because she wanted to touch him so much.

“I would really like to talk about this, Callan. To understand it.”

He laughed, as if she was being completely naive.

Maybe she was, because the bravery was still there inside her, only she was kidding herself that it came from her good writing.

It didn’t.

It came from something else.

Desire.

She wanted Callan so much, and at some level she trusted the wanting—had to trust it because it was that powerful, and she knew, despite everything he said—and did—and didn’t do—that it reflected back at her from him with equal force. He wanted her, too.

“Okay, then we won’t talk,” she said, standing behind him and wrapping her arms around his rigid body. “For the moment, we’ll just do this….”

His torso was as hard as a board, vibrating with tension, and her touch didn’t soften him at all. If she’d been feeling even a fraction less brave, less sure, she would have let him go, her face flaming with embarrassment at his rejection.

But if it was the desire, after all, that had made her brave, it was the writing that had made her see clearly and she knew … just knew … that he wasn’t rejecting her. There was something way more complex going on here.

She slid her hands up to his shoulders and began to caress him, running from his warm, solid neck and out to his upper arms, over and over again. Soon, she let her fingers trespass farther, touching his jaw, brushing the lobes of his ears, feathering into his hair. Still, he didn’t soften or move.

“Prebreakfast massage,” she murmured. “The sun’s on my back, so I’m getting a massage, too. Whatever’s happening, Callan, don’t be angry. Don’t push me away.”

He didn’t answer, but his breath came out in a shuddering sigh.

“If you’re going to tell me to stop, then you have to tell me why,” she said.

Silence. She kept touching him.

“I’m not going to tell you to stop,” he finally answered.

She didn’t jump on his words, she just let them hang. Then she leaned her cheek against his back, slid her hands between his rigid upper arms and his sides and began to stroke them down his chest. To begin with, she stopped at his ribs, which moved up and down with his breathing. His back moved with his breathing, also, pushing against her breasts. Her nipples were hard against his body. Could he feel?

She let her caress drop lower, reaching the waistband of his shorts, and then his hips, drifting in toward the center, and she forgot about anything more she might want from these moments because they were so precious and delicious all on their own.

He moved.

At last.

His body snaked around and he held her. She wanted to kiss him, take his face in her hands and press her mouth over his, imprint her taste onto him, drink him, make him respond. More than that, however, she wanted him to talk, which meant she couldn’t capture his mouth. Not yet.

“You said you were incomplete, and you didn’t mean incomplete because you’d lost Liz,” she whispered. “We haven’t known each other very long, but you’re important to me, Callan. You’re good to me. Good for me. And I trust you. I wish you’d trust me, because we can help each other better then.”

“I trust you. I don’t need help.” She thought he was going to push her away at that point, but he didn’t. After a moment, like an afterthought, he added, “But I want you. Oh, I want you.”

“Yes …”

“But that’s where I’m incomplete, Jacinda. God, can I say it? Am I saying it?” He was talking more to himself than to her. His whole body was shuddering, shaking.

“I don’t understand.”

“I couldn’t satisfy you, that’s the problem. I couldn’t satisfy either of us. I haven’t been able to in four years, since—” He broke off and swore beneath his breath, then looked her full in the face with his blue eyes burning. “You see, I’m impotent,” he said, and she knew for him these had to be the ugliest two words in the world.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.