Kitabı oku: «The Australians' Brides: The Runaway and the Cattleman»

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

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?”