Falling for Mr. Mysterious

She couldn’t help wondering if there was something crucially wrong with her personality. Some genetic defect that caused her to always fall for the wrong man.

All she wanted, really, was to be like her parents, to find one person to love, one relationship to feel safe inside. She’d grown up watching their warmth and affection and she’d listened many times to their story of how they’d met at a country dance and married young, never regretting their decision.

Even her brother Jack had been lucky in love. He’d married his high school sweetheart, Kelly, a girl from a nearby farm. There’d only ever been one girl for Jack, and now he and Kelly were ridiculously happy.

Emily’s family made finding love look easy, and yet she’d tried so many times and failed. Now, she punished herself with memories, starting with Dimitri, the dark and ruggedly handsome Russian choreographer at the ballet school in Melbourne.

Having taken advantage of her youth and naivety, Dimitri had promptly dropped her overnight when he took up with one of the stars of the Australian Ballet. Emily had taken almost a year to recover from that heartbreak.

Back home in the Wandabilla district, she’d met Dave, a nice, safe farmer, and this time she was sure she’d struck gold. She would marry and live on a farm near her family, and she could envision her happy future so easily.

Dave had been as different from Dimitri as possible—practical and rough around the edges, and not the slightest bit interested in ‘culture’. She’d been happy to swap satin pointe shoes and the barre for tractors and cow manure.

But Dave’s first love was rodeos and, eventually, he’d taken off on the competition circuit, travelling to all the outback events. He’d expected Emily to throw up her job and follow him, but she wasn’t prepared to do that, she’d realised, much to her own surprise.

In western New South Wales, Dave had discovered Annie, a camp-drafting champion who shared his passion, and his phone calls to Emily had stopped.

After that, Emily had thrown herself into her work. She’d attended workshops on customer relations and marketing, and any other professional development programmes that could boost her up the corporate ladder.

When she’d dived into the dating pool—unsurprisingly, it was rather shallow in Wandabilla—she’d set herself strict rules. No longer would she be so trusting and open, and she wouldn’t allow herself to fall in love again until she met a man who ticked all the right boxes. Following her new plan, she’d never gone out with any one fellow more than a few times, and she was determined from then on that she would be the one who ended her relationships.

She had been feeling quite confident again. Before Michael had arrived in town.

Conservatively good-looking, intelligent and charming, Michael had been perfect. Emily had learned from her mistakes, however, and she’d resisted his attention at first. Michael had chased her with flattering persistence and, in the end, she’d decided he was genuine in his admiration.

And surely he was safe? He wasn’t a foreign artist or an outback drifter. He wasn’t even a local. He was a geologist from South Australia, prospecting in the Wandabilla district for a mining company.

Admittedly, Michael was only in her district for six weeks at a time, but he flew back regularly, and he always wrote to her or phoned her while he was away.

In time she was confident that he was The One.

After all, weren’t geologists clever and educated, and as solid and dependable as the rocks they studied?

What a joke.

Emily let out a long groan of frustration. And pain.

Losing Michael hurt. So much. Her pain went way beyond disappointment. She felt betrayed, used and foolish, as if she hadn’t gained one single jot of wisdom since Dimitri. And, even though she was the innocent party, she felt guilty that she’d slept with someone else’s husband and father.

She could too easily imagine how deeply Michael—no, Mark’s—wife loved him, could imagine how hurt the other woman would be if she ever found out.

Emily’s sense of gloom dived even deeper when she returned to the kitchen and saw the blinking light on her mobile phone.

Wincing at the possibilities, she clicked on her message bank and discovered five—count them, five—new text messages from people in Wandabilla.

Normally, she would try to reply, to at least thank these people for their concern, even though they weren’t genuinely close friends but mainly curious gossipers.

Today, however, there were also three voice messages from Michael-slash-Mark, and his first message was full of apologies and entreaties, begging her to ring him back.

Hearing his voice brought a fresh slug of misery and anger, and Emily almost hurled the phone across the room.

She might have done that, actually, if she wasn’t worried that the crash would wake Jude. Her gaze flashed to his novel, Thorn in the Flesh, sitting on the breakfast tray, and she remembered Morgan, Jude’s tough heroine.

Emily needed to be like her. From now on.

Smiling, she picked up the phone and deleted every single message without responding.

It felt good.

Very good, actually.

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