The Australians' Brides

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.