Kitabı oku: «Baby At Bushman's Creek»

CHAPTER ONE

EYES narrowed against the glare, Clare watched the cloud of dust approaching through the shimmering haze. Could this be Gray Henderson at last?

She certainly hoped so. She had been waiting for him all morning, with nothing to do but walk Alice up and down the main street of Mathison. It had not taken long, Clare remembered with a sigh.

Apart from the hotel, there was a general store, a bank and a petrol station. A handful of low, functional houses were set in dusty yards and the whole town—if such a straggling collection of buildings could be called a town—had an air of being battened down against the heat. They had seen no one during their walk, and had retreated to the shade of the hotel verandah, where Alice had been happy enough to play with her hands and chirrup gently to herself.

Clare, though, had been heartily bored. The emergence of the dust cloud on the road that stretched emptily out to the horizon had been enough to make her get to her feet, but it was some minutes before it materialised at last into a battered utility truck. It drew up opposite the hotel with a clunk of gears, the passenger door opened and a man got out.

From her viewpoint at the top of the verandah steps, Clare could see only that he was a lean, rangy figure in moleskin trousers and a checked shirt, bending down to say something through the window to the driver. As she watched, he slapped the roof of the cab in a gesture of farewell, the truck roared off, and he turned and walked across the road towards the hotel.

The unhurried stride, the laconic way he settled his hat on his head, matched so precisely the deep, slow voice on the phone that Clare’s nerves tightened with a mixture of relief that he had turned up at last and irritation. He clearly wasn’t in any hurry, in spite of having kept her waiting all morning!

Not that she would be able to say anything, Clare reminded herself. She would have to be very careful. She had to get this first meeting right, not just for Alice’s sake, but for her own. The realisation of just how important the next few minutes would be made Clare bend down and lift Alice into her arms, holding her small, solid body close for reassurance. Having spent the whole morning longing for Gray Henderson to arrive, she found herself suddenly hoping that it wouldn’t be him at all.

But it was.

The man paused at the bottom of the steps as he caught sight of her, eyeing her narrowly for a moment before climbing them with the same infuriating lack of haste. ‘Clare Marshall?’ he said, and took off his hat. His gaze flickered to Alice, and his brows lifted slightly. ‘I’m Gray Henderson. You wanted to see me.’

He had brown hair, brown weathered skin and a pair of unreadable brown eyes. Alice’s eyes, Clare realised with a jolt. Somehow she hadn’t expected that. Under their steady gaze, Clare was suddenly conscious of how strange and out of place she must look in this dusty outback town, with her pearl earrings and her yellow linen dress and her elegant Italian sandals. She had dressed with special care that morning, wanting to impress him, but if he was impressed, he was giving absolutely no sign of it.

‘Yes.’ She had a horrible feeling that her smile was as brittle and alien as she looked, and her voice sounded clipped and very English compared to his slow Australian drawl. ‘Thank you for coming,’ she added, stilted with the effort not to ask him why it had taken him so long.

‘You said it was important,’ he reminded her.

‘It is.’

Ever since she had learnt that she wasn’t going to be able to see Jack, as she had hoped, Clare had been practising how to explain the situation to Gray Henderson, but now that he was actually there all her careful speeches had vanished, and she was left staring at him, her mind blank with panic.

If only he had been more like his brother! Pippa had told her so much about Jack’s warmth and charm and reckless sense of fun that Clare almost felt that she knew him herself, and she was unprepared to deal with a man as coolly unapproachable as Gray Henderson appeared to be. Where Jack’s face in photographs was mobile and smiling, Gray’s was guarded, expressionless, giving her no clues as to what he was thinking.

‘Shall…shall we sit down?’ she suggested, playing for time while she tried to marshal her scrambled thoughts.

Gray followed her over to the bench at the back of the verandah, sat down next to her and waited calmly for her to tell him why she had asked him to meet her. It had seemed much too difficult to discuss over the phone when she had rung him last night, but now Clare wondered if it wouldn’t have been easier to explain without those enigmatic brown eyes on her face.

There was something oddly intimidating about his quiet self-containment. Clare had never met anyone so unperturbed by silence. Anyone else would have explained why they were late, or even asked her what it was she wanted, but, no! He just sat there and waited.

Since he obviously wasn’t going to give her an opening, Clare cleared her throat. ‘This is Alice,’ she said, nodding down at the baby, who was studying him with her unwinking baby’s stare.

‘G’day, Alice,’ said Gray gravely.

He reached out to tickle her tummy with one brown finger, and Alice broke into a gummy smile that showed off her two bottom teeth. She grabbed at his finger, but lost her nerve the next moment. Overcome by shyness, she buried her face against Clare, but couldn’t resist a peep back at Gray from under impossibly long lashes. When she saw that he was still watching her, she quickly hid again, burrowing closer into the safety of Clare’s body.

Clare couldn’t help smiling. She was prejudiced, of course, but Alice really was a beautiful baby, plump and peachy-skinned, with fine blonde hair and brown eyes. Surely even Gray wouldn’t be able to resist her?

Glancing at him, she was immensely reassured to see that he was looking amused. There was a definite dent at the corner of his mouth, and a lurking smile in the brown eyes that made him look suddenly much more approachable. He prodded Alice on her tummy until she chuckled and squirmed, and Clare found herself thinking that he was much more attractive than he had seemed at first.

‘How old is she?’ he asked, and Clare was obscurely hurt to see that when he looked at her the gleam of amusement had vanished from his eyes.

‘Six months,’ she told him. ‘Nearly seven, in fact.’

Lifting Alice off her knee, she settled her into the baby seat that doubled as a backpack when required, and forestalled any protests by offering her a floppy rabbit that had already been so sucked, pummelled, dropped and generally loved into submission that few of its original pristine features survived. She had seen Gray steal a glance at his watch. It was time to get down to business.

Unconsciously squaring her shoulders, she looked at him. Unlike Alice’s, her eyes were grey, almost silvery in contrast to her smooth, dark hair. ‘I suppose you’re wondering what we’re doing here?’ she said.

‘You said on the phone that you wanted to see Jack.’ Gray’s expression gave nothing away, but there was a shade of wariness in his voice. ‘You didn’t say anything about a baby.’

‘No,’ she admitted. ‘As I told you, it’s difficult to explain over the phone, and when the hotel manager gave me your number he said that you had a party line, so I thought it would be better if we could talk face to face.’

‘Well, now that we are face to face, perhaps you could tell me what you want?’ said Gray coolly.

Clare hesitated. ‘It’s really Jack I need to see. Do you have any idea when he’ll be back?’

‘A month…six weeks, maybe.’

Gray seemed unconcerned by the vagueness of his brother’s plans, but Clare could only stare at him in dismay. She had been expecting him to say that Jack was in Darwin or Perth, and would be back in a matter of days. ‘A month! But…where is he?’

‘He’s in Texas, buying bull semen to improve our breeding programme.’

She swallowed. ‘Can you get in touch with him?’

‘Not easily,’ said Gray unhelpfully.

Clare’s shoulders slumped as a crushing wave of exhaustion rolled over her without warning. It was more than the effect of the interminable flight from London, or the way she had lain awake the previous night worrying about how Gray Henderson would react. It was as if the strain of coping with a small baby after losing Pippa had suddenly caught up with her. She felt as if she hadn’t slept for months. Planning the trip to Australia had given her something to focus on, but now that she was here she was too tired to think clearly, and the thought of trying to explain it all to Gray was all at once too much to bear.

Bowing her head as if beneath a physical weight, Clare clutched her hands together in her lap and forced herself to concentrate. She couldn’t fall apart now. ‘I should have written,’ she said with an effort, her face hidden by the slide of dark, silky hair. ‘It never occurred to me that Jack wouldn’t be here.’

‘If you want to leave a letter, I’ll make sure Jack gets it when he gets back,’ Gray offered, almost as if against his better judgement, but she only shook her head, defeated.

‘It’s too late for that. I need to talk to him now.’

‘I’m afraid that’s not possible, so you’ll have to talk to me instead.’

‘Yes,’ said Clare numbly.

Alice had dropped her rabbit, and set up a shout when Clare didn’t immediately retrieve it for her. Automatically, Clare bent to pick it up and hand it back to her. She couldn’t think; she could just look at the baby who was utterly dependent on her to do the right thing. Reaching out, she stroked Alice’s head, and Alice smiled trustingly up at her as she stuffed the rabbit’s ear back in her mouth.

‘Look, I don’t want to rush you,’ said Gray after a while, and for the first time there was an edge of impatience in his voice, ‘but I’ve got a thousand head of cattle in the yards right now, and I’ve already given up time I can’t spare to come in and listen to you. Do you think you could get to the point?’

Straightening, Clare turned to look at him once more. ‘Alice is the point,’ she said.

He frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean that she is Jack’s daughter,’ she said steadily, ‘and she needs her father.’

There was an intense silence. ‘What?’ said Gray, dangerously quiet.

‘Alice is Jack’s daughter.’

His gaze narrowed, and he looked from Clare to Alice, who stared back at him with serious, uncannily similar eyes. One little hand held her toy to her mouth so that she could suck it, the other twiddled her ear as if to show off how versatile she was.

‘Jack said nothing about this to me,’ he said harshly at last.

‘He doesn’t know about Alice.’

‘Then isn’t it a little late to claim him as her father now?’

Clare pushed her hair behind her ears in an unconsciously nervous gesture. ‘I think he’d want to know.’

‘I think he’d have wanted to know a whole lot sooner than now if he had a child,’ said Gray in a hard voice. ‘If you say Alice is six months old, that means you’ve had a good fifteen months to decide on a father. Why wait until now to pick on Jack?’

Clare flushed. ‘I haven’t picked on him!’

‘That’s what it sounds like to me.’ He looked her up and down almost insultingly, taking in her slightness, her tired face and the eyes that were at once surprisingly vivid and desperately sad. ‘I wouldn’t even have said you were Jack’s type.’

‘I’m not,’ she admitted, smiling faintly in spite of herself. From all she had heard about Jack, she couldn’t imagine that she would ever have appealed to him. She was too calm, too sensible, too different from Pippa. ‘But my sister was.’

‘Then Alice isn’t your baby?’ said Gray slowly.

‘No, she’s my niece.’ Clare looked directly into his eyes. ‘She’s your niece, too.’

‘And her mother?’ he asked after a moment.

‘My sister. Pippa.’ She turned away to stare at the heat wavering above the empty road. ‘She died six weeks ago,’ she told Gray in a light, brittle voice, almost as if it didn’t matter, almost as if her world hadn’t fallen in.

There was a long silence. Beyond the shade, the sun bounced off the tin roofs and beat down on the road. A four-wheel drive, red with dust, drove past the hotel and parked a little further down, outside the general store, but that seemed to be the sum of the town’s activity. To Clare, used to busy city streets, the stillness was uncanny. She could smell the dryness of the air, feel the hard bench beneath her thighs, hear her pulse booming in her ears, and she was suddenly very conscious of the man sitting quietly beside her.

‘I think you’d better tell me everything,’ he said.

There was something peculiarly steadying about his voice. Clare drew a long breath. She had passed the first hurdle. He would listen to her. She couldn’t ask any more of him yet.

Digging in her bag, she drew out the photograph that Pippa had kept by her bed until the last. It was creased and dog-eared with handling, and Clare smoothed it out on her knee before passing it over to Gray. ‘That’s Pippa,’ she said. ‘And that’s your brother with her, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, that’s Jack,’ he admitted.

He studied the picture, frowning slightly. Jack had his arm around a vibrant, lovely girl who seemed to be zinging with happiness, and they were smiling at each other as if the rest of the world had ceased to exist. ‘Jack never mentioned your sister to me,’ he told Clare bluntly, ‘and it’s not like him to be secretive.’ He handed back the photograph. ‘How did they meet?’

‘Pippa got a job as a cook at Bushman’s Creek. I’m not sure how.’

‘Probably through the agency,’ he said, in spite of himself. ‘The station is so isolated that nobody ever stays very long, and in the dry season we always need people to help.’

If the station was anything like Mathison, Clare could imagine that no one would want to stay. ‘I know she was thrilled to get the job,’ she went on, unable to prevent her own mystification from creeping into her voice. ‘Pippa had always dreamed about working on a real outback cattle station.’

She sighed, remembering her sister’s face as she’d talked about the outback. ‘Even before she left school she was talking about Australia, and as soon as she could afford the fare she got herself a working visa and came out to find a job. She started in Sydney first of all, but after a while she moved to somewhere on the Queensland coast, and then, about eighteen months ago, she wrote and said that she’d got a job on a station called Bushman’s Creek.’

Clare turned to Gray as if struck for the first time. ‘You can’t have been there, or you would remember Pippa. She wasn’t the kind of person you could forget.’

‘I spent three months in South East Asia meeting buyers about eighteen months ago,’ Gray admitted reluctantly. ‘She could have been at Bushman’s Creek then.’

‘That would be about right.’ She nodded. ‘She was there nearly three months, and she said it was the happiest time of her life. She told me about the station, about how isolated it was and how hard everyone had to work.’ Clare shook her head, remembering. ‘I thought it sounded awful,’ she confessed, ‘but Pippa loved it.’

She paused, holding the photograph between her hands. ‘And then there was Jack,’ she said. ‘You can see how happy they were together. Pippa said that it was love at first sight. They spent all their time together, and were talking about getting married when a row blew up one day about something quite trivial. I don’t know what it was, or what was said, but I think they must have hurt each other very badly.

‘Pippa was incredibly volatile. She was either ecstatic or miserable.’ Clare smiled a little tiredly. ‘I don’t think she ever understood the meaning of moderation or balance, and she was never any good at compromising either.’

Clare glanced at Gray again. He didn’t look like a man who did much compromising either, but in a quite different way from Pippa. How could she explain Pippa’s intense, ebullient personality to someone like Gray?

‘You have to understand what Pippa was like,’ she said with an edge of desperation. ‘She was passionate about everything she did. She could be the kindest, funniest, most wonderful person, and she could also be the most difficult. There was no middle way with Pippa. It was typical of her to react so dramatically when she and Jack had that argument. She thought that it meant the end of everything, and she just threw her things in a bag and came home.’

Clare sighed a little, remembering how Pippa had collapsed messily back into her own calm, ordered life. ‘She didn’t discover that she was pregnant until a couple of months later.’

Gray had been listening in silence, leaning forward, holding his hat loosely between his knees, but he glanced up at that. ‘Why didn’t she contact Jack then?’

‘I tried to persuade her to write to him at least, but she wouldn’t.’ Clare’s gaze rested on Alice, who was still happily chewing her toy and dribbling down her chin. Reaching into her bag for a tissue, Clare wiped her face as she continued.

‘Pippa was still simmering after the argument. It had been over two months, and she hadn’t heard from Jack, so she assumed that he wasn’t interested any more, and she was too proud to ask him for help. She thought if he knew about the baby, he’d feel pressurised into a relationship he didn’t really want. I think Alice’s birth made her realise just how much she still loved him, though,’ Clare went on slowly. ‘That was something they should have shared, and she made up her mind to come back to Australia with Alice and see if she and Jack could sort something out, but…’

Her voice wavered, and she took a deep, steadying breath. ‘But a couple of months after Alice was born Pippa found a lump. She was diagnosed with cancer, and…well, she was one of the unlucky ones. There was nothing they could do for her. It was very quick.’ Clare’s eyes darkened with pain. ‘Three months later she was dead.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Gray quietly, and she sighed.

‘So am I. She was such a special person. Those last terrible weeks, all she thought about was Jack and Alice. She made me promise to tell Jack how much she had loved him, and to ask him to bring their daughter up. She wanted Alice to grow up with her father in the place she had been so happy.’

‘So you promised?’

Clare lifted her hands slightly and let them fall in a gesture of acceptance. ‘I promised,’ she said in a low voice. ‘And here I am.’

Gray got to his feet and walked over to lean on the verandah rail, looking out. ‘I’m not saying I don’t believe you,’ he said at last, ‘but can you prove that Alice is Jack’s daughter?’

‘Why would I make it up?’ she asked, bemused.

He turned to face her, folding his arms and leaning back against the rail. ‘Money?’ he suggested with a cynical look.

‘What money? From all Pippa ever told me, you don’t exactly live in the lap of luxury at Bushman’s Creek!’

‘We don’t, but between us Jack and I own a fair chunk of land. As Jack’s daughter, Alice would have a claim on that.’

Clare could hardly believe what she was hearing. ‘I’m not interested in your land!’ she said furiously, eyes blazing. ‘What do you think I am?’

‘I don’t know. That’s the whole point,’ he said with infuriating calm. ‘Until last night I’d never heard of you, or your sister, and now you expect me to believe that my brother is father to a child he knows nothing about. How do I know you’re telling the truth?’

‘The photograph—’ she began, but he interrupted her.

‘A photograph isn’t proof of paternity.’

‘If Jack wants to have DNA tests, he can,’ said Clare, ‘but I think that once he looks at Alice, he’ll know that she’s his daughter. You only have to look at the photo to see what he and Pippa had together, and I don’t believe that Pippa would have loved anyone who could turn his back on that completely.’

‘Maybe,’ said Gray, clearly unconvinced, ‘but that’s a decision only Jack can make. You can’t expect me to accept responsibility for a baby on his behalf.’

‘I understand that.’ Clare was feeling very tired, but she forced herself to her feet and went to lean next to him at the verandah rail. ‘All I want is for you to contact Jack and ask him to come home as soon as he can. That’s not too much to ask, is it?’

He looked from her to the baby, kicking her feet against the floor and squealing at the excitement of a new sensation. ‘No,’ he conceded, ‘but it may take some time to track him down. He didn’t have a fixed itinerary, so I’ll have to ring round a few contacts and hope that he turns up and gets the message sooner rather than later.’

Gray’s gaze came back to rest on Clare. The straight dark hair that swung below her jaw was pushed wearily behind her ears, and there were shadows beneath the great silvery eyes. She looked bruised and exhausted, and when she looked up at him it was clear that only the stubborn strength of her will was keeping her going.

‘I think it would be better if you went back to England and waited for Jack there,’ he said gruffly.

Clare straightened from the rail. ‘I’m not going to do that,’ she told him quite simply. ‘Alice and I only arrived yesterday, and even if I could face turning round and getting back on that plane for another twenty-three hours, I wouldn’t. I couldn’t afford to bring Alice back to Australia again when Jack finally turns up, and if he does decide to accept responsibility for her, I’d want to be able to stay with her for a while until she settles.’

‘So what are you going to do?’

‘Can’t we come back to Bushman’s Creek with you?’

There was a pause. Gray looked down into pleading eyes the colour of pale smoke and ringed with black, as if someone had taken a dark pen to outline each iris, and turned almost abruptly away.

‘Bushman’s Creek isn’t a suitable place for you or the baby,’ he said brusquely.

‘Are you trying to tell me that there are no women or children in the outback?’

‘I’m trying to tell you that conditions on the station are very different to what you’re used to,’ said Gray with an edge to his voice. ‘It takes nearly forty minutes to fly there from here, and it’s over two hours by road. In the Wet, the only way you can get in and out is by plane. You’d be a very long way from shops and doctors and all the other things you probably take for granted, and, quite frankly, I haven’t the time to look after you at the moment. This is one of the busiest times of the year.

‘I’ve got fifteen thousand head of cattle out there,’ he went on, nodding his head at the distant horizon. ‘They’ve all got to be mustered in so that we can deal with them and draft out the sale cattle. The last cook-cum-housekeeper left several weeks ago, and nobody’s done any cleaning since. We’re taking it in turns to cook, and the kindest way to describe meals at the moment is “basic”.’

He shook his head. ‘I think you’d find the conditions too uncomfortable,’ he told Clare bluntly. ‘If you don’t want to go home, you’d be better off taking Alice to one of the resorts on the coast and waiting there until Jack gets back.’

‘I don’t think I can afford to do that, either.’ Clare flushed, humiliated at having to admit how precarious her financial situation was. ‘I’ve got a good job at home, but Pippa had never managed to save any money, and babies are expensive little things. And then when Pippa was ill, and I had to take time off to look after her and Alice, I used up the savings I had. I bought our ticket out here on credit as it was.’ She bit her lip. ‘I just don’t see how I could manage staying in a hotel or renting a house without knowing when Jack was going to get your message.

‘Besides,’ she went on bravely, ‘it sounds as if I could be useful to you.’

Gray’s unsettling brown gaze travelled from her earrings down over the stylishly simple dress to her strappy sandals. ‘Useful?’ he echoed, lifting one brow in a way that brought a flush to her cheeks. ‘In what way?’

His expression didn’t change, but she knew that he was amused. It was something to do with the deepening of a dent at the corner of his mouth, a creasing at the edges of his eyes, the faintest of glimmers in the unfathomable eyes. If he thought she was funny, she thought illogically, he might at least have the decency to smile properly!

She put up her chin. ‘I could be your housekeeper,’ she said with a shade of defiance. ‘I’m perfectly capable of cooking and cleaning.’

In response, Gray reached out and took hold of her hands. Turning them over, he ran his thumbs consideringly over her palms. ‘It doesn’t look as if you do very much rough work.’

His touch was quite impersonal, but Clare was disconcerted to feel her skin tingling. His hands were strong, cool and callused and very brown against the paleness of her English skin. It was as if his fingers were charged with electricity, sending tiny shocks shivering all the way up her arm, and she snatched her hands away, furious to find herself blushing.

‘Herding a few cows around is easy compared to looking after a baby for twenty-four hours a day,’ she snapped, to cover her confusion. ‘I’m used to getting my hands dirty.’

‘You’re not used to the heat and the dust and the flies and the boredom,’ Gray pointed out, apparently unperturbed by the way she had pulled her hands out of his. ‘I’m not sure you realise how tough things can be out there.’

Not quite sure what to do with her hands now that she had freed them, Clare folded her arms in an unconsciously defensive pose. ‘I’m tougher than I look,’ she said.

Gray was unimpressed. ‘I’m talking about physical toughness, and right now you don’t look very tough to me.’ He eyed Clare critically. ‘You look as if you’re about to collapse.’

‘I’ve got jet-lag,’ she said, wondering why she could still feel her hands burning where he had touched her. ‘We only arrived in Australia yesterday morning, and I haven’t been able to rest much since then. I’ll be fine after a good night’s sleep.

‘Look,’ she went on persuasively, seeing that Gray still looked unconvinced, ‘I may not be your ideal housekeeper, but you said yourself that you haven’t the time to find anyone else, and I’m prepared to work hard in return for accommodation. I won’t get in your way. To be honest, I’d rather have something to do to keep my mind off things.’

She hesitated. ‘You’ve been very frank about the conditions on the station. I can’t say I’m going to like it out there—I’m not like Pippa; I’ve never enjoyed roughing it—but I’ll do whatever I have to to get to Bushman’s Creek.’

‘Why are you so keen to get there if you don’t think you’re going to like it?’ he asked.

‘Because I can’t afford to do anything else,’ said Clare, pushing her hair wearily behind her ear. ‘Because I want to see the place that meant so much to Pippa. If conditions are as unsuitable as you say, it may be that I’ll have to take Alice home with me, but I need to see for myself. If, on the other hand, I think it’s somewhere she could grow up safely and happily, I could make sure that she’s settled by the time Jack gets back. And, to be perfectly frank,’ she finished, ‘because I just want to stop for a while. I want to stop travelling, stop thinking, just…stop.’

‘If I let you come, I don’t want you to take anything for granted,’ Gray warned, but she could see that he was relenting. ‘Jack will have to make a decision about Alice when he gets home. Nobody else can do it for him.’