The Australians' Brides

Even better than the meal and hot, clean water, there would be people. Mum, Josh, Carly … and Jac. His treacherous heart jumped sideways as he thought about her, but he couldn’t dwell on the reaction right now. Pete was pushing his big hand against Lockie’s slumped shoulder.

“Wake up, little mate,” Pete said. “Dinner’s up.”

“You staying for it, Pete?” Callan asked him, as Lockie opened bleary eyes.

The older man shook his head. “Headin’ home.”

“Come in for a bit.”

“Do that, I won’t get goin’ again. Have to stay all night.”

“I already told you to do that.”

Pete shook his head again. “Gettin’ home. Got some things to check up on.”

“Well, bring your gear tomorrow and stay tomorrow night.”

“Maybe.” He was already heading for his car, with around two hours of nighttime driving still ahead of him, and the return trip first thing in the morning. He was a tough one.

Lockie had woken up. “I’m starving!”

“Let’s see what’s cooking.”

Pippa and Flick followed them onto the veranda and found the fresh food and water Callan’s mother had already put out for them.

Inside the house, there was a fabulous aroma coming from the kitchen, but no sign of food on the table, which surprised Callan a little. Mum would have heard the truck. She would have known how ready they’d be for the meal. Josh and Carly had had baths and were prowling around in their nightwear, looking almost as hungry as Callan felt. His mother appeared with bathwater damp on her shirt and he asked, “Should I set the table?”

“I’m getting worried, Callan. Jacinda’s not back.”

“Not back?” His heart did another of those weird lurches that risked becoming a habit. “Where did she go?”

“For a walk, two and a half hours ago. Longer.”

“What did she take? How long was she planning to be gone? It’s almost dark out there!”

“I know. I thought she’d be gone half an hour. I’m not even sure she had water with her.”

“Feed the kids,” he said, energy surging back into him and hunger forgotten. “I’ll get the dogs, and we’ll head to the creek on foot to look for her. I’m not going to treat this as a crisis just yet.”

“I’ll do that for you!” his mother answered. “I like Jacinda a lot, and she’s no fool ….” She touched his arm, as if it was important that he know how she felt about Jacinda.

“No, she’s not,” he agreed.

And I’ve lived here all my life. I’m not going to panic because a grown woman is an hour late back to the house.

“But, Callan, she has no idea what this country can do to people who make mistakes.”

“I know. Listen, if I’m not back in half an hour, get Moss saddled for me.”

In the space of two minutes, he’d packed water and a couple of snacks into a backpack, as well as the jacket he’d found hanging in her room. He’d also packed the first-aid kit and a long roll of bandage.

Watching as he dropped it into the backpack, little pajama-clad Carly got a stricken look on her face. On top of hunger, fatigue and his own lurking fear, her frightened reaction didn’t help.

“Where is Mommy? Why isn’t she back?” she said.

Chapter Eight

The barbed wire had pierced and torn the skin on Jacinda’s palm in four places. It stung and throbbed, and the remaining half mile to the homestead felt like ten times that distance as she thought about taking each cautious step in the dark. She didn’t want to trip again. She needed better shoes. Proper hiking boots or something. And she shouldn’t have stayed out so long, even though she’d needed all that time to think.

I’ll try e-mailing Andy and Tom tonight, on Callan’s computer, she decided as she started walking again. She then spent the next five minutes of carefully trod distance trying to work out when she’d last done so. Could it really be more than two years?

The dogs started barking when she still had two hundred yards of fence to follow. They sounded overexcited and ready for action, but surely they didn’t think she was a stranger?

Someone must have let them through the gate because they came at her out of the darkness with a speed that frightened her, still letting out high, urgent sounds. She saw a circle of light behind them, bouncing in time to someone’s stride, then heard Callan’s voice.

“Jac, is that you?” He raised the flashlight in her direction.

“Yes, and please tell Pippa and Flick that I’m friendly!”

He whistled at the dogs as he came closer and they ran to heel beside him, panting and turning their faces up to him as if they expected a reward. “Yes, guys, well done, you found her,” he told them.

“Found me?” Jac reached them, while Callan was still bending down to the dogs.

“Please don’t scare us like that again, okay?” He pointed the flashlight beam away from her and toward the ground, but it had already shone into her face and dazzled her vision and she had spots before her eyes.

“Scare you?” She blinked, covered her closed eyes with her hand for a moment, but her vision was slow to clear and, when she opened them again, she could still barely see him. She could sense him, though. That big body, that aura of dust and hard work. “Callan, I wasn’t lost or anything.” She peered at him. It was the first time they’d talked all day. “Were you worried?”

Stupid question. He didn’t look worried, she saw at last as the spots faded. He looked angry, slapping the flashlight in a slow rhythm against his hard, denim-clad thigh and narrowing his eyes. “How much water did you have with you?” he demanded.

“I had a big drink before I left.”

“And did you take a jacket? Even a cotton sweater?”

“I only went for a quick breath of fresh air.” She began to guess that these weren’t adequate answers.

“And you were gone nearly three hours.”

“I know. I was thinking about a few things. Time got away from me a bit, and I didn’t turn back along the creek as soon as I should have. I was a bit shocked to see that the light was going.” Instinctively, she touched the sunglasses on top of her head, useless now. She had her baseball cap folded and stuffed into the back pocket of her jeans, equally useless once the sun went.

“Sunglasses aren’t a survival kit.”

He poked at them with a rigid finger, pushing them farther back into her hair—a gesture that could have been tender in other circumstances, but wasn’t this time. It brought him closer, though, and she remembered with every sense and every nerve ending how she’d felt in his arms last night.

“If you’d twisted your ankle on a tree root and had to sit there all night until we found you,” he went on, “you would have been happy in short sleeves without a drop to drink or a morsel of food, with the temperature dropping into the forties, is that right?”

“Well …”

“People who get lost or hurt out here … people who don’t have the right gear … people whose engines break down and they go looking for help instead of staying with their vehicle … they die, Jacinda, and it doesn’t take that long, either.” His voice rasped and dropped deeper. “This country doesn’t forgive mistakes.”

“Shoot, I didn’t think, did I?” she realized aloud.

He whooshed out a sigh, bent down once again to Pippa and gave her a rough pat, his strong hand splayed out in her thick fur. The way he marshaled his emotions was almost palpable. His shoulder muscles moved under his shirt. “I guess I never spelled it out to you,” he said, after a moment. “Too busy giving you a crash course in snake behavior.”

“Which I very much appreciated!” She took a breath. “You’re right, I should have taken water and a jacket. Shouldn’t have needed a crash course in that kind of basic common sense. And I did grab on to the barbed wire, just now, so common sense has definitely deserted me this evening.”

“We’ve both been a bit … yeah … off beam today,” he growled, and she knew he was thinking about last night.

“See, I’ve spiked my hand.” She blurted out, then grabbed the flashlight from him, pointed the beam at her palm and showed him.

“We’ll need to take care of that as soon as we get back to the house. Are you up to date on your tetanus shot?”

“Lord, I have no idea! No, wait a minute.” She remembered that she’d had one when Carly was a baby, as part of a routine health check with her doctor. “Yes, I would be.” Thank goodness, one area in which she could impress him as faintly sensible. “Have I upset Kerry, too?” she added, thinking about her earlier conversation with Callan’s mother.

Liz would never have let something like this happen. Gone off without water, food or clothing? Never!

She had belonged here, body and soul.

And yet Kerry considered this to have been a mixed blessing.

“She was pretty concerned when Pete and Lockie and I got back before you did,” Callan said. “She couldn’t tell me what you’d taken with you.” He was silent for a moment. “Sorry I was angry. We didn’t know where to start looking, didn’t want to worry Carly.”

“Is she worried?”

“Mum’s with her,” he hedged. “Dinner’s on the table.”

“She is worried. Oh, hell!” She began to stride back to the house, and Callan and the dogs went with her.

“Best way for you to learn, I guess,” Callan said.

“You’re right. I’ll know next time.”

“Forget it. Forget that I was angry, please. It didn’t help.”

“We’re both tired.”

And what’s the bet that Carly has a sleepwalking episode tonight? Jac added to herself inwardly.

Carly rushed into her arms back at the homestead, as soon as they saw each other. “Mommy, I thought a snake bit you. I thought you were lost.”

“It was my fault, sweetheart. I was fine, but I should have let Kerry know exactly where I’d be, and I should have turned back sooner. I won’t make that mistake again.”

“Gran was worried about you.”

“I know she was.”

Pressed against Carly’s warm little back, Jac’s injured palm throbbed. The decision to contact Andy and Tom felt like less of a positive step than it had seemed a short while ago, and when she asked after dinner if she could use Callan’s computer to send some e-mails, she sat in front of a blank screen for too long before anything would come.

Finally, with her left hand crisscrossed in fresh Band-Aids and still smarting after the run-in with the barbed-wire fence, she typed, Hi, Andy! Guess what? I’m in Australia! Visiting a friend at a place called Arakeela Creek. With Carly, of course. Don’t run to get a map. It won’t be marked. Even though it’s the size of Rhode Island. How are the kids? How’s Dad? You can reach me at this e-mail address until May 13. Let me know how you’re doing. Your sister, Jacinda.

Just in case he’d forgotten her name?

She looked at the words on the screen. She thought about all the other things she could have said. Talked about Kurt? Apologized for not keeping in better contact? At least redrafted it into some slightly more complex and grammatical sentences? With Carly, of course had no verb.

A familiar feeling of panic and dread began to flutter inside her, making Kerry’s fabulous chicken casserole sit uneasily in her stomach, and she knew that for now, these few stilted phrases would have to be enough. She hit Send and Receive, then copied the sent message and pasted it into a new one addressed to Tom, cut the How’s Dad? sentence and replaced it with Any special news?

“And I used to call myself a writer,” she muttered.

When she hit Send and Receive again, she got a system message telling her that the message to Andy had bounced. Checking again after a wait of less than a minute, she was told that Tom’s had bounced, also. In the long interval since she’d last made contact this way, both her brothers’ e-mail addresses had changed.

Coming in to his office to see if she needed any help with his computer and e-mail system, Callan could see her disappointment, she knew, even though she tried to hide it.

“Do you want to try calling them instead?” he asked. He looked to be fresh out of the shower. The ends of his hair were still wet against his neck and his tanned skin looked smooth. He smelled of soap and steam.

She thought about the time difference, and said, “Too early in the morning there.” It was eight in the evening here and Carly was already asleep, which meant six-thirty in the morning on the U.S. east coast. Then she added more honestly, “And anyway, over the phone I don’t think I’d know what to say.”

“That’s too bad.” He looked sincerely disappointed.

In her?

For her?

In her brothers?

Either way, it made her determined not to give up so easily. “But would you have any postcards, or something?” she asked. “I’d like Andy and Tom to at least know where I am, in case … well, they don’t often get in touch, but you never know.”

“I have to head into Leigh Creek later in the week to pick up some supplies. You can get postcards there, and anything else you need. Have a think about it. Your own brand of shampoo, or any food that Carly likes that we don’t have. We’ll bring her with us. It’s a bit of a drive, but we can have some stops along the way.”

“Thanks,” she said. “That’d be great.”

And if Carly was with them, Jac surely wouldn’t spend the whole drive remembering how it felt to kiss him, the way she was doing now ….

They didn’t quite know what to do or say next, how to end the conversation. Callan picked up some unopened letters from a big pile on the corner of the desk and let them drop back down. Was he planning to apologize again for getting angry at her about her poorly planned walk? She didn’t want that. Nor did she want any more awkward references to last night.

It was gone, finished, done with.

She had to keep telling herself that.

“You’ve got quite a pile of mail there,” she said quickly, to deflect the subject onto something … anything … safer.

“Forwarded from the magazine,” he answered, and only then did she realize what the letters were.

From women.

Hoping Callan was “sincerely looking for an Outback Wife.”

Looking closer, she saw that all of them were still sealed. “You haven’t opened them?”

“I’ve opened a ton of ’em. And I’ve replied. I was e-mailing a couple of them for a while, but that’s tailed off. These are just the letters from the past two mail flights, which I … uh … haven’t gotten to, yet.”

“My goodness! You need a secretary!”

He grinned, and some of that easy, familiar humor between them came creeping back. “Are you applying for the position?”

So they looked at the letters together, and she helped him with his replies. Kerry brought them each a mug of tea and offered her opinion of a woman who stressed the importance of Callan being “visually literate.”

“Whatever that means! Give her a discouraging answer!”

“Want to draft some replies, Mum?” Callan offered.

“Oh, no, thank you! I’ll leave you to it!” She quickly disappeared.

In the next letter they opened, a woman announced that if she and Callan became involved, she was “prepared to live in the wilderness for up to two years before we renegotiate a move to a more urban environment.”

This one received one of the polite “Thanks for your interest, but I’m not looking for anything right now” replies that Callan had become impressively fluent with by now.

A few letters later, a girl called Tracey “hadn’t had much luck with men, because I’m shy, which I know is my fault. I have a good family—two brothers and a sister, my mum and dad—and we’re close, but I’d move away from Ballarat for the right man. I’d want to take things slow, though. I think marriage, or any relationship, is too important to get wrong because you haven’t thought it through.”

“She sounds nice,” Jacinda said. “You should write her a good letter.”

“She looks nice, too,” answered Callan, showing her a simple snapshot of a slightly chunky woman of around twenty-five or so, with a tomboy smile and light brown hair.

Jac leaned closer to see the picture better, and her arm brushed Callan’s. Turning instinctively, she found him looking at her and could read his face like a book.

She looks nice, but right now you’re the woman I want. It’s too complicated so I’m not going to give in to it, but you’re definitely the woman I want.

“Maybe we’ve done enough secretarial work for tonight,” he said on an uncomfortable growl. “I’ll write something back to her tomorrow.”

Jac nodded. “This is more words than I’ve strung together in—well, a while.”

Frustrated, she knew she needed something more, something other than drafting polite lines to people that neither she nor Callan really knew—and, yes, she included her brothers in that. A need was building inside her, demanding release and expression. It made her scared and it made her twitchy, and she’d only ever known one way to get the feeling under control.

She needed to … really, genuinely, seriously … write.

“I’m going to check on Carly,” she told him, even though she knew Carly was asleep. She wanted to see if by some faint chance she had writing materials in a forgotten outer sleeve of one of her suitcases.

“Callan, would you have a legal pad or a notebook I could use?” Jacinda looked a little tense about asking the question.

A lot tense, in fact. Meeting in front of the waistband of her jeans, her fingers zipped back and forth as she rubbed her nails together, making a buzzing, clicking sort of sound that gave out way too much of a clue as to her state of mind. She didn’t seem to notice that she was doing it.

“Even just some scrap paper?” she added, as if she only had a shopping list to write.

“One of the boys’ old school notebooks?” Callan suggested. He pretended he hadn’t noticed the tension, or the sound and movement of the fingernails, even though his gaze kept pulling in that direction. “They get a new set every year and some of the ones from last year still have a lot of blank pages. Would that work?”

“It’d be great.”

She looked relieved that she’d managed to ask the question, that he hadn’t asked too many questions of his own in response, and that she’d gotten an easy answer. Her hands dropped to her sides, but the thick denim waistband of the jeans stood out a little from her tightly drawn in stomach, showing the weight she must have lost in recent months, and Callan kept looking there, at the place where the clicking fingernails had been, for just a second or two too long.

“Let me dig one out,” he said, dragging his eyes upward, trying to forget how clearly he’d pictured himself seated in a squashy armchair. He would have grabbed her as she went by. He would have wrapped his arms around that willowy waist of hers, and hugged the tension out of those drawn-in stomach muscles.

He wanted to tell her to put the weight back on so that she filled out the lean lines of the jeans. He wanted to apologize again about coming down too hard on her tonight about going for a walk with no water. He hadn’t exaggerated the potential danger in this country, but he could have skipped the anger, because the anger was far more about … something else.

He wanted to thank her for helping him with the letters. He knew it must have been hard at first, despite the way she’d relaxed into it. Yes, and he wanted to tell her exactly how he came to understand so much regarding her tension and fear about the whole writing thing, even though he’d hadn’t tried to write a poem or a story since high school.

“I’m sorry, if it’s too much trouble at this hour it can wait until morning,” she said quickly, ready to backtrack on the whole writing idea at the slightest excuse.

“It’s fine.”

True, he was about to head off for bed. It already felt overdue after the long day working on the new mustering yard with Lockie and Pete, and the heart-pumping but mercifully short-lived interval when he’d feared that Jacinda might be lost. But he was still racked with guilt and regret about what had happened down at the water hole last night. They should have simply been tracking down Lockie’s Game Boy and getting the hell out of there, instead of watching for wildlife and exchanging life stories and—

Yeah.

Guilt and regret and awareness rushed through him, none of it helped by having sat with her in his office writing polite rejection letters to other women for almost an hour.

It wasn’t Jacinda’s fault.

It was totally, utterly him.

Had he managed to get that across to her? Could finding an old schoolbook of Lockie’s for her, without asking her what she wanted to use it for, in any way make up for the way he’d turned away from her down at the creek, and then again back at the house? Make up for the way he’d barely been able to look at her this morning, hadn’t introduced her to Pete, and was almost sinfully grateful that she’d slept in so that they hadn’t needed to confront each other over breakfast? For the way he’d been angry at her tonight, the moment that first flood of relief at her safety had ebbed away?

Why the heck had he let last night’s kiss happen at all? He’d known it would end that way.

Only maybe he hadn’t known.

Maybe he’d been kidding himself all along.

In his office, he dug out the cardboard file box where he kept the boys’ old schoolbooks. He didn’t know why he hung on to them. Because it was easier than throwing them out? He wouldn’t have said he was the nostalgic type, and yet he did have a problem with change, didn’t he?

Mum had talked about it a couple of times since Liz’s death. Mum’s attitude had been helpful rather than accusing, but there’d been the hint of criticism all the same. He’d never wanted to go away to school, as a twelve-year-old, and it had taken him months—had taken hooking up with Dusty and Brant—for him to settle into Cliffside.

And now here were these stupid schoolbooks he put away every year like a pack rat, because something inside him wouldn’t allow them to get thrown away.

He took out a stack of them and flipped through, finding worksheets about the ocean and weather, and words with sh in them that gave him a little twist inside because of the fact that Liz, who would have been so proud and so interested, had never seen them.

Was that why he kept them? Some stupid, illogical, subconscious, impossible belief that if he kept them long enough, her benign spirit would pay a visit and take a look?

Brrr, shake it off, Callan.

How much working space did Jacinda need? He didn’t want to slight her writing ability with just three pages, or scare her with a whole blank book. He thought he understood too much about her fears.

Jacinda looked nothing like Liz. He’d told himself lately that he’d been looking too hard for Liz in those other two women, three years ago, and maybe he’d seriously believed last night, down at the creek, that with her long dark hair and olive skin, Jacinda looked different enough to cure the problem.

The Problem.

A cure?

Maybe it was only getting worse. A man hit his sexual peak by twenty. At thirty-four, things could easily have started to slide. The level of need. The frequency. Had losing Liz pushed him so far away from his natural potency that he’d never claw back the lost ground?

Everything had been fine … fantastic … powerful … intense … while he and Jacinda had kissed last night. The chemistry between them was huge, not something you could explain or trace to its source but something animal and instinctive. Water on a thirsty day. A completion. She had tasted so good.

He loved the way she moved. Loved how at first she’d been happy just to wait and feel those motionless, paralyzed lips of his against her neck while he gathered his courage and gloried in his unexpected and almost shocking need.

Oh hell, he’d wanted her so badly and it had felt so good to rediscover how that felt. A little later, he’d loved her moments of hunger and impatience, too. How could a man’s ego not be gratified by that? She wanted him, and she hadn’t kept it a secret.