The Australians' Brides

And Jacinda reacted the same way.

He could see it and hear it and feel it because all of it echoed exactly what was happening inside him.

Their eyes met too often. They found too many reasons to share a smile. The smallest scraps of conversation took on a richer meaning. Shared coffee in the mornings was cozier. Jokes were funnier. It took him longer to wind down enough to sleep at night.

Sometimes he felt so exhilarated by it, as if he were suddenly equipped to rule the world. Or his corner of it, anyhow—those six hundred thousand acres that impressed her so much.

The new mustering yard was great, structured to minimize stress and injury to the cattle. His yield and his prices were definitely going to improve. The long-range weather forecast held the hope of rain, and he’d put in some new dams just last year—Jacinda called them ponds—to conserve as much of the runoff as he could.

He’d talked to her about all this and she’d listened and nodded and told him, “I had no idea so much research and thought had to go into running cattle in this kind of country.” And he’d thought, yes, he had skills and knowledge and strength that he took for granted, things that could impress a woman that he’d never seen in that light before.

Not even with Liz, because Liz had grown up with cattlemen and had taken it all for granted, too, just the way he did.

What did Mum see?

What did Pete see?

Pete had irritated the heck out of him, earlier in the week, with the ancient-tribal-wisdom routine that he liked to pull on unsuspecting victims from time to time.

No, it wasn’t really a con, because Pete was pretty wise in a lot of ways, but Callan had felt conned, all the same. He’d felt naked and exposed.

What did Pete see?

What was all that biblical-style stuff about seasons turning and everything having its place and its time? He liked Pete’s conversation better when it was about fence posts and calving. On Wednesday afternoon, they’d had a big, pointless argument about wildflowers.

“Desert pea? It’s too soon, Pete. We had those freak thunderstorms a month or two ago, I know, but the flowers won’t be out for a few weeks yet, I’d say. Maybe not until spring.”

“Yeah, but happens that way, sometimes. So busy saying it’s too soon, and that’s right when you see ’em, red flowers dripping on the ground like blood, right where the rainwater soaked into the ground.”

“I still say it’s too soon.”

“You want your friend to see ’em before she goes,” Pete had said. It was a statement, not a question. “You’re not happy, because you think she won’t.”

And he was right.

Callan liked Jacinda so much, he wanted to show her dawn from Mount Hindley, and Pete’s ancestors’ rock carvings farther up in the gorge, and the bloodred, black-eyed Sturt’s desert pea flowers blooming on his land.

“Got your camera?” he asked her, as they walked out to the four-wheel-drive parked in its usual crooked spot in front of the house.

They moved and spoke quietly because the kids were still asleep. Mum’s light was on. She’d have made her early morning cup of tea and would be drinking it in bed, in her quilted dressing gown. She’d be dressed and over at the main house before Carly and the boys had finished wiping the sleep from their eyes.

“Yep,” Jacinda answered, holding up her day pack. “Remembered it this time.” She shivered a little.

“Cold?” he asked. It wasn’t an award-winning question. Of course she was cold. So was he. They’d need to get moving before they would warm up.

“A bit, but I’m fine.”

He liked that about her, too. She didn’t complain. Being cold or hungry or scared or wet … or confronted by a carpet python … or teased about drooling … was never enough on its own to spoil her mood. She took things in stride, just like her daughter did.

Yeah, but there were limits.

Monday morning, five days ago, on the veranda.

Sheesh, what had he said?

You think you’re the only one it’s ever happened to?

Callan, idiot, you can’t say things like that in a naked moment and then drop it and refuse to talk.

It was still sitting there, the conversational elephant that they both pretended they didn’t see. Jac didn’t know what he’d meant, and he wasn’t going to tell her, so they would both just have to ride it out until the memory of Monday morning wasn’t so fresh and didn’t matter anymore.

Maybe papering it over with fresh memories of things like going into Leigh Creek with Carly, eating quandong pies, climbing Mount Hindley at dawn and watching yellow-footed rock wallabies come down to drink would help.

He warmed the engine and took his usual semicircular route around and out of the yard. They parked beside the dry creek bed under the same tree as last Saturday night, which was a mistake because it reminded him of … all sorts of things. But if he’d parked somewhere different, it might have looked as if he was avoiding that spot, which would just be crazy.

The sky had begun to soften in the east, but the air was still cold and the dew heavy.

“I love being awake and out of the house this early,” Jac said, but she shivered again as she spoke.

Which made him want to put his arms around her to keep her warm.

He hiked faster, instead, moving his feet over the rocks the way he’d been doing all his life, forgetting that her stride wouldn’t be as sure-footed or as wide. She didn’t ask him to slow down until they were almost at the top of the mountain, and then her request came just a few seconds too late.

“Callan, could you—? Yikes! Ouch!”

She’d stepped onto an unsteady rock and it had tipped. She stumbled several steps and grazed her calf on another rock before almost falling to her knees.

“I’m sorry.” Oh, damn! She’d already hurt herself once this week, on that strand of barbed-wire fence while he’d feared she was lost. She’d only removed the Band-Aids Thursday morning. “I was going too fast. Wanted to warm us up.”

He doubled back to her, not reaching her as fast as he wanted to. He definitely shouldn’t have let himself get so far ahead. She bent down and started picking dirt from the graze, wincing and frowning.

“Let me,” he said.

“It’s nothing. The skin is barely broken.”

“What about this?” He took her arm and turned it over so she could see. She had a graze there, too, which she hadn’t even noticed yet, a scrape between her elbow and wrist where blood was beginning to well up.

She made a sound of frustration and impatience. “I shouldn’t have tried to go so fast.”

“It was my fault. You were only trying to keep up, and I have better boots than you.”

She smiled, tucking in the corner of her mouth. “That’s right. Blame it on the boots, not the hopeless city-bred American.”

“Don’t. It really was my fault.”

Together, they washed the grazes, dried them with the towel and put a couple of Band-Aids on the deepest scrapes, both of them finding too many reasons to apologize. Any awkwardness wasn’t in their first-aid techniques, it was in their emotions. He felt as if he shouldn’t be touching her, but that would have been impractical.

Oh, crikey!

Would he ever learn to act naturally around her?

He didn’t hold out a lot of hope.

“We must be almost at the top,” she said when they were ready to start moving again.

“Just about.” It felt good to find something safe to talk about! “See that cairn of rocks up ahead? That marks the official summit.”

“Did your family build it?”

It was a good-sized pile of stones, grading from larger at the base to smaller at the top, a couple of meters high.

“No, it’s been here way longer than we have, over a hundred and fifty years. A couple of brothers, the Haymans, built it when they first ran sheep here in the 1850s.”

“Do you know the whole history of your land, then, Callan?”

“Pretty much.”

“And the aboriginal myths?”

“And the geology. You’re standing on some pretty nice quartzite.”

She laughed, intrigued and pleased for some reason. “Am I?”

“Yep, although down in the gorge itself it’s granite. I can show you some maps. And I have satellite pictures, too. Those are fascinating, when you look at—” He stopped.

Or not.

Because she couldn’t be that interested, could she? She was just being polite.

“Finish,” she said.

“The way the land folds,” he summarized quickly, “but, no, I’m done on geology. Let me know if you ever do want to see pictures. Speaking of which, get your camera out or you’ll miss the sunrise.”

She nodded, swung her day pack off her shoulders and found the natty little piece of digital technology. He watched her switch it on, position herself on a rock, line up her shot. There was a moment of stillness and expectation. The whole earth waited, and Jac waited with it.

Callan’s body felt warm and loose from the walk, a little dusty around his bare lower legs. He was thirsty, but didn’t even want to breathe right now, let alone fiddle around in search of his water bottle. He just wanted to watch Jac watching the dawn.

She wore stretchy black shorts that finished snugly halfway down her lean, smooth thighs, and her legs were bare until they disappeared inside a pair of chunky white tennis socks just above her ankles. She had her backside parked on a rock and her knees bent up to provide a steady resting point for her elbows.

The sleeves of her navy sweatshirt were pushed up. Beyond gracefully bent wrists, her hands looked delicate yet sure as they held the camera, and she’d turned her baseball cap around the wrong way like a kid, so that the peak wouldn’t get in the way of her view.

“Oh, it’s fabulous … fabulous,” she whispered.

The horizon began to burn and the first rays shot across the landscape, setting it alight with molten gold. She clicked her camera, got impatient with her position and stood up, circling the whole three hundred and sixty degrees twice, clicked and clicking, as the light changed and flared and shifted around her. It settled on a herd of cattle, turning them from dark blobs into distinctive red-brown silhouettes, etched with a glow. Finally, she lowered the camera and smiled.

And he came so close to grabbing that back-to-front baseball cap off her head, throwing it on the ground and kissing her, except … except … all the terrifying reasons from the other night were still there, and he didn’t see how they were ever going to let him alone.

“I want to see the satellite pictures and hear about the history, Callan,” she told him. “Don’t think that you’re ever boring about this place, because you’re not.”

“Yeah, it had occurred to me as a possibility,” he managed to say.

“No. Not a possibility. Okay?”

He just nodded, relieved but still wondering if she was simply being polite.

“Mmm, I need some water,” she said.

They both drank, then she put her camera away and asked, “Will we miss the kangaroos again?”

“We should get down into the gorge, before the sun climbs too high, yes.”

He stayed behind her, this time. The sun at this height was already warm on their bare legs, but when they got lower, the gorge was still in shade. It was magical. They saw several kangaroos and a pair of yellow-footed rock wallabies, impossibly nimble and sure-footed as they bounded back up the rugged sides of the gorge after their morning drink. A family of emus showed up, too, their big curved backs heaped with the usual pile of untidy gray-brown feathers that bounced as they got startled by the human presence and ran.

Jacinda took more photos, then went to put her camera away.

“I brought breakfast, if you want it,” Callan told her. “We can light the fire. Or we can head back.”

She twisted to look back at him, trying to read what he really wanted, not wanting to be a time-waster or a nuisance. “Can we stay? Is there work you have to do?”

“We can stay. I’m getting pretty hungry.”

And I don’t want to end this, because it’s too good.

She helped him with the fire. He’d brought an old pan, eggs and bacon, bread to make toast, a couple of garden tomatoes to grill, long-life milk, instant coffee and the billycan to boil the water in. They got everything ready, but the flames were still too high to start cooking. Their hungry stomachs would have to wait for glowing coals.

Jacinda looked at her day pack a couple of times in an uneasy kind of way and he almost teased her about it. Was she checking no snakes were lurking, eager to crawl inside? Finally, she blurted out, “I brought my … Lockie’s … notebook. Would you mind if I scribbled in it for a little while?”

Of course he didn’t mind.

And he tried not to watch, because he knew that somehow it was private. She didn’t like to feel herself under the spotlight of someone else’s observation when she stared at the blank page or scratched the ballpoint pen impatiently back and forth over a wrong word—or even when she was writing smoothly and unconsciously smiling at the fact that it was going well.

Okay, so that meant he was watching. Sneaking glances, anyhow.

Even though the flames had still not died back quite right, he started cooking to distract himself, putting strips of bacon and halves of tomato into the pan and poking at them with a barbecue fork more than he needed to. He knew he shouldn’t keep spying on Jac’s tentative new relationship with written words.

He was so busy not noticing her write that he didn’t notice when she stopped. Her question sneaked up and leaped at him like an enemy ambush. “Callan, tell me what you meant the other day, that I’m not the only one it’s ever happened to.”

He whipped around, bringing the sizzling pan with him and almost losing the freshly cooked eggs over the rim. She had the notebook open in her lap and the pen still in her hand. What was she going to do? Record his answer?

She looked startled at his sudden movement. Her gaze dropped to the pan. “Careful ….”

“Sheesh, Jacinda!” he said on a hiss.

The ambush metaphor still held. He felt like a soldier, taken by surprise but on such a hair trigger that he was ready for the attack anyhow, weapon fully loaded. He bristled all over, prepared to lie under oath, stay silent under torture, neutralize the onslaught in any way he could.

He wasn’t going to talk about this!

Wrong, wrong, wrong, Jacinda realized at once, watching Callan set the pan of eggs down on a rock without looking at it.

They’d each gotten to different places during the past ten minutes of silence, she saw. She had felt increasingly peaceful, close to Callan, at home ….

And braver, because some nice snatches of language were happening on her page, and writing well always made her brave. Out of nowhere, she’d had an insight into one of the half-forgotten but very real characters in her old, unfinished novel, and suddenly that character wasn’t half-forgotten anymore, but was right here, as if sitting beside Jac, her story clamoring to be told.

When she’d looked up from her writing, she’d seen Callan crouched by the fire, his muscles pulling under his shirt as he reached to poke the coals or flip the toast on the old wire rack. He wasn’t saying anything, wasn’t looking her way, and she thought he must be feeling peaceful, too, happy about being together like this, enjoying each other’s uninterrupted company, sharing the same appreciation of nature’s gifts at this fresh hour.

The question hadn’t felt abrupt to her. It had felt right.

But it wasn’t right.

She could see it instantly in the way he turned, the way his face changed, the sharpness in his voice, the appalled expression in his eyes.

Sheesh, Jacinda! In her head, she echoed his own exclamation.

You could have led up to it better, couldn’t you, Jac? Given him some warning?

She let her notebook slide to the ground and stood up, covering the few yards of physical distance between them—and hopefully some of the miles of emotional distance—in one breath … in four heartbeats.

“Callan.” She put her hand on his arm and he flinched. “I didn’t intend for it to be such a tough question.”

“Okay …”

“I’m sorry, I’m too self-absorbed over this. You seemed to understand so much the other day. About the whole thing with my writing. The problem. The block. The incompleteness. And today it was flowing so well. I have to thank you, because I never imagined finding a place where I’d feel so safe, after what was happening with Kurt at home. And I just wanted to understand about you, in return, that’s all. I wanted to hear from you about the incompleteness that happened to you, and what you did about it. What worked for you, when you solved it.”

He froze.

Wrong again, Jac.

Hell, how could her intentions have been so good and still have led to such a mess?

He closed his eyes, gritted his teeth. When he answered, she could hardly hear. “I haven’t solved it.”

He broke roughly away from her, turning his back to her just the way he had on Saturday night.

Guarding himself.

Guarding against some power she had over him, or some threat she was unconsciously making. Either way, she didn’t understand.

But her bravery was still in place—that sizzling sense of capability and strength that good writing could give her. And that meant she wasn’t prepared to let the issue go.

“Please don’t turn your back, Callan,” she said and stepped toward him.

He didn’t move, apart from thrusting his hands down into the pockets of his shorts. He didn’t speak, either.

“You turned your back the other night, too, when we were here,” she pressed on. “You know when I mean. Looking for Lockie’s Game Boy, when we—”

“Yes, I know when you mean.”

She reached him, but his body language practically screamed at her not to touch. It created physical pain because she wanted to touch him so much.

“I would really like to talk about this, Callan. To understand it.”

He laughed, as if she was being completely naive.

Maybe she was, because the bravery was still there inside her, only she was kidding herself that it came from her good writing.

It didn’t.

It came from something else.

Desire.

She wanted Callan so much, and at some level she trusted the wanting—had to trust it because it was that powerful, and she knew, despite everything he said—and did—and didn’t do—that it reflected back at her from him with equal force. He wanted her, too.

“Okay, then we won’t talk,” she said, standing behind him and wrapping her arms around his rigid body. “For the moment, we’ll just do this….”

His torso was as hard as a board, vibrating with tension, and her touch didn’t soften him at all. If she’d been feeling even a fraction less brave, less sure, she would have let him go, her face flaming with embarrassment at his rejection.

But if it was the desire, after all, that had made her brave, it was the writing that had made her see clearly and she knew … just knew … that he wasn’t rejecting her. There was something way more complex going on here.

She slid her hands up to his shoulders and began to caress him, running from his warm, solid neck and out to his upper arms, over and over again. Soon, she let her fingers trespass farther, touching his jaw, brushing the lobes of his ears, feathering into his hair. Still, he didn’t soften or move.

“Prebreakfast massage,” she murmured. “The sun’s on my back, so I’m getting a massage, too. Whatever’s happening, Callan, don’t be angry. Don’t push me away.”

He didn’t answer, but his breath came out in a shuddering sigh.

“If you’re going to tell me to stop, then you have to tell me why,” she said.

Silence. She kept touching him.

“I’m not going to tell you to stop,” he finally answered.

She didn’t jump on his words, she just let them hang. Then she leaned her cheek against his back, slid her hands between his rigid upper arms and his sides and began to stroke them down his chest. To begin with, she stopped at his ribs, which moved up and down with his breathing. His back moved with his breathing, also, pushing against her breasts. Her nipples were hard against his body. Could he feel?

She let her caress drop lower, reaching the waistband of his shorts, and then his hips, drifting in toward the center, and she forgot about anything more she might want from these moments because they were so precious and delicious all on their own.

He moved.

At last.

His body snaked around and he held her. She wanted to kiss him, take his face in her hands and press her mouth over his, imprint her taste onto him, drink him, make him respond. More than that, however, she wanted him to talk, which meant she couldn’t capture his mouth. Not yet.

“You said you were incomplete, and you didn’t mean incomplete because you’d lost Liz,” she whispered. “We haven’t known each other very long, but you’re important to me, Callan. You’re good to me. Good for me. And I trust you. I wish you’d trust me, because we can help each other better then.”

“I trust you. I don’t need help.” She thought he was going to push her away at that point, but he didn’t. After a moment, like an afterthought, he added, “But I want you. Oh, I want you.”

“Yes …”

“But that’s where I’m incomplete, Jacinda. God, can I say it? Am I saying it?” He was talking more to himself than to her. His whole body was shuddering, shaking.

“I don’t understand.”

“I couldn’t satisfy you, that’s the problem. I couldn’t satisfy either of us. I haven’t been able to in four years, since—” He broke off and swore beneath his breath, then looked her full in the face with his blue eyes burning. “You see, I’m impotent,” he said, and she knew for him these had to be the ugliest two words in the world.

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