The Australians' Brides

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.”