Home to Hope Mountain

Today, though, her thoughts refused to drift. Should she take the job with Molly? She was barely skimping by on her income from the Horses for Hope program. What would Leif have wanted? Working in town felt like selling out on their dream, but on the other hand, she had the horses to consider. Blaze was due to foal in a few weeks. There might be vet bills. And all the horses needed to eat. Hay wasn’t cheap.

Maybe she shouldn’t have refused Adam’s request to treat his daughter as a private patient. But he unsettled her. Partly because of his association with the bushfires and Leif’s death. Partly because he was a stranger. Every man in Hope Mountain was as familiar to her as her Akubra hat. Adam was attractive and sophisticated. Rich. She didn’t know how to act around him.

A muffled curse on the vehicle track to her right broke into her thoughts. She reined in Bo and peered around a bush. Speak of the devil. Adam Banks had his knees up around his ears as he made wobbly progress on the muddy track. He didn’t look quite so intimidating now.

He lost his balance and thrust out a leg to brace himself only to end up ankle-deep in mud. Hayley stifled a smile. Bo shifted one of his enormous hooves and a twig broke.

Adam glanced around. “Hello? Is somebody there?”

“You need a horse, not a bike,” Hayley called out. She squeezed her thighs around Bo’s barrel-shaped stomach and the horse picked his way through the undergrowth. “Where do you think you’re going, anyway?”

He was heading in the direction of her property. She didn’t care if people strayed over property lines while hiking or riding. But she didn’t want Adam Banks becoming free with the track between their places. Didn’t want him popping over anytime he felt like it.

He reached into the saddlebag behind his seat and pulled out an empty plastic container. “I’m coming to beg a cup of sugar off you. Demerara would be ideal, but I’ll settle for plain brown. Or even white, in a pinch.”

“Sugar.” She looked him over, at the designer jeans, black polo shirt and expensive white running shoes splattered with mud. “Are you making cookies?”

Was this sugar quest a ploy to talk to her again? He seemed a determined type, used to getting his own way. She wouldn’t put it past him to have another go at convincing her to work with his daughter.

“Barbecue sauce. So, do you have any sugar? It would be nice to know now before I destroy my clothes and Summer’s bike. I promise to repay it tomorrow.”

Was that a subtle dig at her obviously straitened circumstances? The other day when she’d turned down a free movie ticket Molly had told her she was too defensive and too proud. It was hard to know anymore where to draw the line.

“I’ve got sugar. But you’re not going to be able to ride much farther. There’s a creek up ahead and the banks are a quagmire. What on earth possessed you to try to come through here on a bike?”

“I do a lot of cycling at home.” Hands on hips, he surveyed the dense forest and muddy track as if wondering how he’d come to be there. “Admittedly this wasn’t the brightest move.”

“Are you one of those MAMILs we get up here on the weekend?” She smirked. “They come through town in packs of twenty to thirty.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Middle-Aged Men In Lycra.”

“I confess to Lycra, but thirty-six is hardly middle-aged.”

She’d been joking, of course, calling him a MAMIL. He was nothing like the pot-bellied weekend warriors who puffed up the mountain, red-faced and sweaty, to collapse in the café with a piece of cake. And now that she knew he was a cyclist, she could see how he came by his lean, muscled physique. An image flashed through her mind of him in a tight-fitting jersey stretched across a hard chest, and shorts that clung like a second skin to a taut butt and sharply defined quads. No, not middle-aged. More like prime of his life.

Adam propped the bike against a tree. “I’ll walk.”

She doubted he would want to do that for long, either. Well, he would find out. With a nudge of her heels she turned Bo toward home.

Adam kept pace, making sure there were a couple of yards between himself and Bo. “That’s a big horse.”

“He’s half Clydesdale. Eighteen hands and as comfy as a couch.” She patted the smooth golden coat below the white mane. “You’re a good old boy, aren’t you, Bo.” Poor beast had been a mess when Ian, the Horses for Hope coordinator, had sent him to her. Bo’s coat had been falling out from mange, and he’d been so skinny his ribs had showed. With a lot of TLC, he’d recovered.

They ambled along in silence for a few moments. Hayley tilted her head, listening to the clear, ringing call of a bellbird. Leif’s favorite. Adam, struggling to watch where he put his feet, didn’t even seem to notice. “Have you found a therapist for Summer?” she asked.

“No, I’m still looking.” Adam avoided a muddy puddle in a depression between the ruts. “Have you changed your mind?”

“No one’s dropped out of the program, if that’s what you mean.” He didn’t seem the kind of man to go for alternative practices. Maybe he didn’t realize certain things about her. “I’m not a qualified psychologist, you know. I didn’t go to university, and I don’t have any letters after my name.”

“But you get results.”

“Yes, I get results,” she conceded. “Why don’t you buy her a horse? It might not fix all her problems, but it would help. Give her something to focus on besides herself.” She didn’t know what she would do if it weren’t for Shane and her horses. She’d probably need therapy herself.

“Can’t do that. We’re not staying in Hope Mountain,” Adam said. “I hope to sell Timbertop and move back to the city before Christmas.”

Good. She didn’t want him bringing his city ways and his handsome face into her woods. But if she felt like that, why did she also feel disappointed?

“Summer’s not happy about the idea,” he went on, a troubled frown creasing his forehead. “I don’t understand why, really. She’s only been here a year or so.”

“She’ll miss her friends. And maybe she’s fallen in love with the area.” He looked skeptical. Hayley shook her head. “You haven’t actually lived in Hope Mountain, have you? I understand you used to come out on weekends occasionally, but that’s not living here, that’s just visiting.”

He threw her a glance filled with suppressed annoyance and chagrin. Had she hit a sore spot?

Diane had thrown a divorce party last year. Hayley and Leif had been the only locals, and she’d felt uncomfortable. But Diane and her friends regularly went on trail rides, so she supposed Diane was being polite.

“Even if you don’t want to live here, Diane will be back eventually, when her mother gets better,” Hayley said.

“I’ll have to discuss it with her. She hinted before she left that she may not want to come back.”

“Seems a shame to take Summer away, though.”

Adam stopped walking and planted his hands on his hips. “Yes, but this is where my sweet, smart, sunny little girl has inexplicably gone haywire and turned dark and miserable.”

“She’s, what, about fourteen? That’s a tough age.”

“I don’t believe it’s typical teenage blues. I know I haven’t been around much, but I’m her father. I can tell something is eating away at her.”

“Losing her horse to the bushfires?” Hayley still felt the ache in her own heart when she thought of her dead horses—Ranger, Lady, Sham, Smokey and Bella. They’d been part of her family. Even after nearly a year she still missed them.

“Maybe it’s that. I don’t know. She won’t talk to me.”

“Patience,” Hayley said. “Maybe you just need time to reconnect with her, get her to trust you.”

“What do I do in the meantime when the police catch her shoplifting? Next time that might not be enough for her. She might...do anything.”

Hayley’s first instinct was to offer help. Her opinion of Adam had improved slightly. He wasn’t just looking to off-load a problem; he was genuinely concerned about his daughter. She probably could carve out a couple of hours a week for Summer if she really wanted to.

Then the bellbird called again, reminding her of Leif. She owed Adam and his daughter nothing. Let them leave Hope Mountain. What was it to her?

The creek, when they came to it, was swollen with rain and rushing, overflowing the near bank and forming a large boggy area stretching ten yards toward them. On the other side of the creek, the coursing water had carved the bank into an undercut.

“Still need that sugar?” Hayley asked.

“No worries. I’ll take my shoes off and roll up my pants.”

“I wouldn’t take my shoes off if I were you. There are broken branches and stones in among the muck. Might even be snakes.”

That gave him pause, but only for a moment. “I didn’t like these runners much anyway.” He started rolling up his jeans.

“You must really want that barbecue sauce.”

Adam startled and gave a shamefaced grin. “To tell you the truth, I almost forgot what I was after. I just knew I had a goal and had to reach it. I guess that sounds crazy to you.”

“No, not really.” She understood goals, even crazy ones. Her goal was to rebuild her house on the spot her great-grandparents homesteaded and where she’d grown up and had lived as a married woman. She was going to do it despite everyone telling her she was wasting her time and despite what little money she had.

Sell the land, her city-dwelling divorced parents said. Use the proceeds to buy a house closer to the town, or better yet, in a Melbourne suburb close to one of them. She wouldn’t consider it. So, yes, she understood a man who’d walk through muck for something he wanted.

Where she and he differed was that she would never ruin a brand-new pair of shoes. When her house had gone up in flames, so had all her possessions. She clothed herself with donations and the odd new item. With so little to her name, everything she owned was precious.

“Stay here,” Hayley said. “I’ll ride back to the house and bring the sugar to you.”

“How long will that take? I don’t want to put you out.”

“Twenty minutes or so, round trip.”

“I couldn’t ask that of you. It was my bad for not checking the pantry before I started cooking. I’ll take my lumps.”

Before he stepped into the mud, she raised her hand to stop him. “Wait. I’ll double you.”

“Beg your pardon?”

“You can ride behind me. Bo can handle it.” She’d carried an extra passenger plenty of times on the big old carthorse.

“Well, all right. Thanks.” He studied the problem. “That is one very large horse. How do I get up there?”

“Over here.” She manoeuvred Bo to a fallen log. After a couple of tries Adam hoisted himself up and swung a leg over the back of the horse. Hayley moved forward to accommodate him. “Don’t sit too far back or you’ll be on Bo’s kidneys. Have you ridden before?”

“When I was a kid, on my grandfather’s farm.” As he found his balance his hands hovered near her waist for a second before settling on his own legs.

She gave Bo an encouraging pat and nudged his sides with her heels. “Let’s go home, boy.”

Bo lifted his enormous hooves with their shaggy white fetlocks and started through the sinking mud toward the creek.

Hayley hadn’t counted on being so aware of Adam close behind her. The heat from his body warmed her back and with every lurching step of Bo’s, Adam swayed forward, his quadriceps nudging the backs of her thighs. For the first time in many months she was reminded that she was a woman and a sexual being. In close proximity was a man. A very sexy man.

It was too soon after Leif’s death to even be thinking about someone else—especially Adam. He was indirectly responsible for the fact that she didn’t have her husband to warm her bed at night, to work alongside her during the day and to share her dreams and goals. Sure, they’d had their rocky times, but Leif had changed and their marriage had been on the mend.

At the edge of the rushing stream Bo needed a few encouraging digs of her heels to keep moving. Slowly he picked his way across, and then scrambled up the steep bank, his big hooves sliding in the mud.

Hayley leaned forward, one hand gripping the mane. Adam started to slide backward. “Hang on.”

He wrapped an arm around her waist and leaned forward, reaching for his own bit of mane. His fingers dug into her just below her ribcage and his hard chest pressed against her back. “Are we having fun yet?” he said, his warm breath close to her ear.

In the midst of feeling uncomfortable about his closeness, she laughed. Bloody Adam Banks. She should have let him get his damn shoes dirty. Or she should have gone farther upstream before attempting to cross. It was her own darn fault for wanting to make this journey as short as possible.

At the top of the bank, Bo made a final surge, crashing through the tree ferns. Adam lost his grip and slid right over the horse’s rump, landing in the mud. When he scrambled to his feet, dark brown streaks covered the front of his polo shirt and his pants. Hayley hooted with laughter, then quickly covered her mouth.

Adam tried to brush off the clods but only smeared them around. “Only the truly depraved laugh at other people’s misfortunes.”

“Sometimes if you don’t laugh, you cry.”

He glanced up sharply, then smiled. “Glad I could provide you with some light entertainment.”

“Want to get back up?” she asked, hoping he’d say no.

“Thanks, but I’ll walk from here.”

“Suit yourself.” And no, she was not disappointed. Well, maybe a little. But that must only be because she truly was depraved.

All levity evaporated as they walked up the slope of the ridge. At the highest point they emerged from the untouched forest and into a stand of trees with charred trunks and bare limbs, stark reminders of the firestorm that had swept through nearly a year ago. Another fifty yards and even these blackened ghosts petered out. Then there were no trees at all. The mountain was a wasteland as far as the eye could see, down into the valley and halfway up the other side of the hill.

Adam’s steps slowed, then stopped altogether. “Holy shit.”

“No kidding,” Hayley said grimly.

He glanced back to the untouched forest a mere hundred meters away. “So how did it happen? How did your property get razed and mine escaped with barely a singed leaf?”

“A fluke of nature.”

“Tell me more. All I know is that the wind pushed the fire up the mountain.”

“That’s right.” Hayley didn’t like to relive that day. She actively tried to cast it out of her mind, but the stark landscape never let her forget. “The wind was blowing steadily from the northwest, seventy miles an hour and gusting up to ninety, ninety-five. Leif led his firefighting crew down the slope below Timbertop, clearing and back-burning to create a firebreak. During the afternoon the wind veered around to the northeast.” Just as the Bureau of Meteorology had predicted. “It pushed the fire in the other direction.” She swallowed. “Toward the volunteer fire crew.”

For a moment she couldn’t speak and the taut silence stretched.

“It’s okay,” Adam said. “You don’t have to talk about it. I get the picture.”

“The fire roared up the mountain like a freaking freight train,” Hayley said, barely hearing him. “Jumping the break and taking out everything in its path.... Including Leif and his crew. They...they were dead before they could retreat.”

Her halting recitation of the details stalled on the choking pain in her chest. Breathe, just breathe. After a few seconds she was able to go on. “The fire continued to advance this way. There was no one to stop it. My house and outbuildings were burned to the ground. Leif sent me a message about an hour before he died. He couldn’t get out. He wanted me to head into town and stay with his parents. But I couldn’t leave the horses.”

Why hadn’t Leif listened to the weather bureau and positioned the firebreak on their side of the ridge? Was it because the fire was heading toward Timbertop and he wanted to help their neighbor? It had been a judgment call. A fatal one.

Damn Leif. Always had to be the hero.

“Where were you when the fire went through?” Adam asked.

She turned her gaze toward him but she wasn’t seeing him, she was seeing the black sky and hearing the unearthly roar of the fire, breathing in the choking smoke. “I was in the dam. Shane and I got in the dam, right out in the middle where I had to stand on my tiptoes. Shane kept wanting to swim to shore. I had to hold him in my arms. Hold him up so he could breathe. There were only three inches of air between the surface of the water and the smoke. We stayed in the dam for four hours.”

Adam swore. “That must have been awful.”

“I was lucky.” He looked surprised. She went on fiercely, “When people commiserate and tell me how sorry they are for me, losing everything, I say, no, I was the lucky one. I’m still alive.” Whenever she started feeling sorry for herself she thought about Leif, caught out in the bush with no protection from the inferno racing up the mountainside.

She had the garage to live in and her horses had shelter, albeit temporary. One day, the house and stables would be rebuilt. She would have a home again.

She started Bo walking again, and soon they came to the paddock. It was black and barren all the way from here to the garage, three hundred yards on the right.

She and Adam didn’t speak again until they approached the horse shelter, a three-sided corrugated iron box. Major emerged and whickered to Bo.

“What are your horses grazing on?” Adam said. “There’s not a blade of grass in there.”

“I buy timothy-hay and have it trucked in.” It was expensive, but she was used to most of her income going toward the horses. Some days the road back to solvency and a normal life seemed like a mountain she was climbing, but there was only one way she could go—onward.

She slid off Bo, removed his bridle and replaced it with a halter before letting him into the paddock. She would brush him down later.

“Did the horses get into the dam as well?” Adam asked.

“No. When the fire got close I opened the gate and let them out. They ran around the yard for a bit and then headed into the woods.” She still had nightmares about hearing their screams as burning shards of the barn’s corrugated iron roof rained down. One had struck Asha in the neck.... “Four of the five I have left came home one by one over the next week. Blaze was found months later. The rest I never saw again.”

“Do you think they’re alive somewhere out there?”

She cut him a scathing glance. “I’m too old to believe in fairy tales and happily-ever-afters.” She’d tried to find her horses. For weeks she’d gone up to the high country, scouting the alpine meadows and talking to the ranchers and park rangers.

“Sorry,” he murmured.

There was that pity again. Pity and charity. They had to be the two worst virtues in the world. They reminded the person on the receiving end that they needed help. That they were victims.

Brushing past him, she strode toward the garage at a fast clip with Shane at her heels. “I’ll get you that sugar.”

He caught up with her halfway across the yard. “Why don’t you sell up and move?”

“If you have to ask that, you don’t know me,” she said, opening the unlocked garage door.

“No, I don’t. That’s why I’m asking.”

She tossed her hat on a hook beside the door and toed off her boots. She could give him an impassioned speech about how she grew up riding in these woods, how Hope Mountain was in her blood, how she couldn’t conceive of ever living anywhere else. But she didn’t know him, so she wasn’t about to tell him her innermost thoughts and feelings. They wouldn’t mean anything to him. So she shrugged it off. “Guess I’m just stubborn that way.”

Adam stood in the doorway, blatantly cataloguing the sparse furnishings. The shabby recliner, the old tea crate she used as a coffee table, the Indian bedspread she’d hung on the wall for color, the battered two-seater table and chairs and her pull-out couch with the extra blanket folded over the arm. If he said something cheerful about how cozy it was she just might pull out her rifle and shoot him.

“My paddocks are full of long grass,” he said instead. “You’re welcome to bring your horses over to graze.”

“That’s kind of you, but I can fend for myself.” She washed her hands, then rummaged through the cardboard box that held her supply of canned goods and packets of dry food.

She felt his skepticism and ignored it. She didn’t want to be beholden to the man who’d indirectly been responsible for her husband’s death.

“You’d be doing me a favor,” Adam went on. “I’m trying to clear away excess fuel and make Timbertop fire-safe. The grass is way overgrown. If you don’t bring your horses over I’ll have to get a flock of sheep.”

She got an image of him herding sheep in his fancy suit and polished leather shoes. Hiding a smile, she said, “That much feed is worth a lot of sugar.”

“I’m not offering it as some sort of repayment for services rendered, either now or in the future. I thought the creed of the bush was that everyone helped each other.”

She straightened, holding two partial bags of sugar, one white and one brown. “True, but you’re not part of the local community. You don’t have any responsibility to help.”

“My daughter lives here.”

So she did. And Adam had dumped four hundred dollars into the community center fund. Hayley felt ashamed. Why was she pushing him away so hard? Where was her tolerance? Another creed of the bush was “live and let live.”

Maybe he didn’t want anything from her. Maybe he was simply being generous because he could afford to be. And maybe that was why she was so prickly. An urbane, sophisticated man like Adam Banks couldn’t possibly be interested in a scruffy mountain girl like her except as a charity case. Not that she was ashamed of who she was. No, sir. If anything, she felt sorry for him because city folks were soft. Put Adam Banks in the bush without his smartphone and he would be lost within minutes.

But he had a point about reducing fuel. Come summer that grass would dry out and be tinder.

She took the plastic container from him and emptied the contents of both bags into it. Combined there was about three quarters of a cup of sugar. There went her nightly hot chocolate, one of her few indulgences. “I hope that’s enough.”

“Perfect.” His gaze flickered at the realization that he’d taken the last of her sugar.

Before he could do something stupid like try to give it back, she said, “Well, you’ve just done me a favor. I’ve been trying to use this up so I could go on a sugar-free diet. That stuff will kill you. Better you than me.”

“Come for dinner,” he said suddenly. “Summer would be glad to have company other than her father for a change.”

Lamb chops with barbecue sauce. Probably mashed potatoes and green beans or salad. For a moment she was so tempted she actually salivated. If she stayed home she’d be dining on canned tuna and toast. Or lentil soup, which was tasty enough and nutritious but uninspiring after the third or fourth night in a row. “Thanks, but I can’t.”

He waited for more. She shrugged and smiled but didn’t utter another word. She didn’t owe him an explanation. And frankly, she didn’t have one. She was no martyr. If anyone else had invited her for dinner she would’ve gone in a heartbeat, just for the company. But Adam, well...

He looked pretty tasty himself....

Admit it, you’re attracted to him.

No, no way. She was not attracted to him.

He was generous and kind. And hot, don’t forget hot. But that didn’t mean she was attracted. He didn’t belong here and he couldn’t wait to get away. He’d said so himself.

Leif hadn’t been gone a year. Getting involved with the man whose property he’d died defending when that man hadn’t even bothered to show up would feel like betrayal. She and Leif hadn’t made love for six months before he died, but so what? Despite their problems, she’d been loyal in life and she was loyal in death. And what would Molly and Rolf think if she started seeing someone so soon? Hurt and disappointment wouldn’t begin to describe their reaction.