Outback Boss, City Bride

‘You’re not very like your sister, are you?’ he said abruptly and she turned to look at him with a resigned sigh.

‘It’s been said before,’ she told him. ‘Lucy’s the pretty one. I’m the clever one,’ she explained, a sardonic edge to her voice. ‘Or so we’ve always been told.’

‘Lucy doesn’t strike me as stupid,’ he said and Meredith laughed.

‘You know, you missed your chance there to say, Oh, but you’re pretty too, Meredith!’

Disconcerted by how much prettier she did look when she smiled, Hal returned his gaze firmly to the road ahead. ‘Would you have believed me if I had?’

‘Probably not,’ Meredith agreed. Who was she kidding? Of course not. She would have despised Hal if he’d pretended that he thought she was pretty when she patently wasn’t, so she was glad that he’d at least had the decency to be straight with her.

Honestly, she was glad. And it wasn’t as if she cared whether he thought she was pretty or not in any case.

‘That’s not what I meant, anyway,’ said Hal. ‘I wasn’t talking about looks when I said that you weren’t like Lucy. I was thinking about the way Lucy loves the outback. She loves Whyman’s Creek. She loves Wirrindago and the fact that we’re so isolated. If she were here now, she’d be hanging out of that window with a big smile on her face.’

Meredith’s heart sank. She told herself it was because her sister had clearly not yet outgrown her romantic ideals. Lucy’s enthusiasms normally waned after a couple of months, but if she were still as starry-eyed about the outback as Hal suggested, Meredith might have a harder time persuading her to leave than she had anticipated.

She would rather her heart was sinking because of that than at the realisation that even the dour Hal Granger was not immune to her sister’s sunny charm.

‘Yes, well, Lucy’s always been a romantic,’ she said.

‘And you’re not?’

She turned away to look out of the window once more. Her eyes were hidden behind her sunglasses, but Hal guessed that they were as cool as her voice. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I’m not.’

‘Just as well,’ he said. ‘The outback can be a harsh place. Romantics don’t tend to last very long.’

There was a distinctly dismissive note in his voice and Meredith found herself leaping to her sister’s defence. ‘Lucy’s been here a while now,’ she pointed out.

‘A couple of months.’ Hal brushed the idea aside with a gesture. ‘I’m talking about a lifetime. In the long run, a sensible person like you would probably last longer out here than someone like Lucy with a head full of romantic ideas.’

‘Frankly, I can’t understand how anyone sensible would want to spend a lifetime here,’ said Meredith, looking at the dreary landscape, the mile upon mile of nothingness unrolling towards the horizon. ‘Is it all this…empty?’

Hal’s gaze followed hers. ‘I don’t see emptiness,’ he said. ‘I see space. I see a big sky and no crowds. I see good grazing ground if we had a bit more rain.’ He paused. ‘I see home.’

‘I thought you weren’t a romantic?’ she said with a curious glance and Hal shrugged, half embarrassed by his eloquence.

‘I’m not,’ he said curtly. ‘I’m under no illusions about how difficult life in the bush can be.’

He was braking as he spoke and Meredith looked around in surprise. There seemed no reason to slow down on a dead straight road like this. ‘Where’s this?’

For answer, Hal indicated a tyre that had been cut in half and set on the corner between a dirt track and the sealed road. ‘Wirrindago’ had been painted around the curve of the tyre in white.

Meredith brightened and sat up straighter. ‘We’re here already!’ she exclaimed in relief. A glance at her watch showed her that they had been driving for less than thirty minutes. ‘That’s much quicker than I expected. I thought you said it would take a couple of hours.’

‘It will—to the homestead,’ said Hal, half shaking his head at her ignorance as he swung the truck off the tarmac and on to the track.

‘So this isn’t your drive?’ said Meredith, deflated, but reluctant to let go of her fantasy that they were almost there.

Hal thought of the track that ran across the plain, through the scrub, up into the low hills, across the creeks and paddocks and led finally to the heart of Wirrindago. He suspected Meredith’s idea of a driveway was somewhat shorter.

‘In a manner of speaking it is,’ he told her. ‘It’s not a sealed road and it only goes to Wirrindago.’

That sounded promising. Meredith relaxed a little. ‘Oh, well…’

‘I wouldn’t get your hopes up,’ said Hal, seeing her imagine an early arrival. ‘You might as well make yourself comfortable,’ he added. ‘There’s a long way to go yet.’

CHAPTER TWO

THE truth of this was demonstrated barely seconds later as the truck jolted over a deep rut and Meredith found herself flung against Hal. Instinctively, she put out a hand to brace herself and realised too late that she was clutching his thigh.

‘You’ll have to hang on,’ he told her briefly as the truck crashed into another rut.

‘Hang on to what?’ snapped Meredith, snatching her hand away, more ruffled than she cared to admit by the feel of his hard body, and even crosser to realise that the unexpectedly close encounter had made absolutely no impression upon Hal. He had brushed her away as if she were one of those millions and millions of annoying flies that swarmed around you the moment you stopped anywhere out here.

Flushed with a mixture of embarrassment and indignation, Meredith grabbed on to the open window and tried to brace her feet against the floor to stop herself skidding back across the seat to Hal again, but it was hard work when the truck was bouncing and lurching from side to side.

‘Is it like this the whole way?’

Hal sent her a sideways glance. She looked hot and uncomfortable and her hair was sticking to her head in wind-blown clumps. Her smart outfit was covered in dust and her jaw was clenched with the effort of holding on, but she still had a certain style about her, he thought with grudging respect.

‘No,’ he said, ‘you can’t expect all the roads out here to be as good as this one, you know.’

Meredith’s jaw dropped and she stared at him in appalled disbelief. ‘Good?’ she echoed, her voice rising. ‘This is a good road?’

Then she saw a faint dent at the corner of his mouth. He was obviously amused by her ignorance of the outback. Well, let him laugh. She wasn’t trying to be accepted. She didn’t want to belong here. She just wanted to find Lucy and leave him to his heat and his dust and his horrible roads as quickly as possible.

‘Very funny,’ she said sourly.

‘It’ll get better in a minute,’ Hal offered by way of an apology.

‘Better’ was a matter of opinion, Meredith decided. The track did indeed flatten out, but instead of jolting slowly up and down the ruts, Hal put his foot down and sent the truck juddering over the corrugations at alarming speed.

‘Do we have to go this fast?’ she asked nervously, clinging to the window.

‘It’s easier at speed,’ he told her. ‘If you go fast enough you skip over the top of the corrugations rather than going up and down each one. Believe me, it’s a lot more comfortable this way.’

‘I’ve forgotten what comfortable means,’ sighed Meredith. Her back was aching and her arms and legs were stiff from being braced at awkward angles and, as for her backside…Even its admittedly substantial padding hadn’t protected it from the effects of being slammed up and down on the hard seat! She would be black and blue tomorrow.

She would never get the tangles out of her hair, she thought morosely, and that dust got everywhere. It was in her ears, under her nails, making her eyes gritty and insinuating itself into places she would rather not think about. The thought of sinking into a deep bath and soaking herself clean was so alluring that she found herself sighing again, until she caught Hal’s eye.

‘Don’t tell me,’ she said tartly, ‘Lucy would be loving this!’

The dent in his cheek deepened. Didn’t he ever smile properly? Meredith wondered irritably.

‘She probably would,’ he agreed, and then he slanted her another of those disconcertingly keen looks. ‘What about you? What do you love? Not the bush, obviously.’

‘No.’ She clutched her laptop to her as she looked out of the window. There were some sparse, spindly trees breaking the monotony of the low scrub and an occasional termite mound soared out of the ground but she couldn’t understand how anyone could love this landscape. It was all so bare. So brown. So empty.

It was just dust and glare and silence. What was there to love about that?

‘No,’ she said again. ‘I’m a city girl. I like buildings and pavements and lights and people and noise. And I love my house,’ she added, remembering it wistfully.

If only she could be there now. She could have a bath, pull the curtains in her pretty bedroom, snuggle under the duvet and sleep for a week. Bliss.

‘This…’ She took a hand off the dashboard to wave vaguely at the land stretching out interminably in every direction around them. ‘This is just…alien.’

‘What are you doing here, then?’ Hal heard the harshness in his own voice and was alarmed to realise that he sounded almost disappointed.

It wasn’t as if he was surprised. She had city girl written all over her, and an English city girl at that. It would be hard to find anyone who would look more out of place out here than she did.

Still, she was a stranger, and a stranger who had foisted herself upon him at that. After all that determination to get herself to Wirrindago, she could at least pretend to be interested in it.

‘I told you,’ she said. ‘I need to see Lucy.’

‘Is she expecting you? She didn’t mention anything about you coming.’ Hal frowned. Lucy might be a bit scatty, but he was pretty sure she would have told him if her sister was on her way.

Meredith was shaking her head, though. ‘She doesn’t know,’ she told him. ‘I’ve tried to get in touch with her, of course, but there’s never any reply on her phone and she hasn’t responded to any of the messages I’ve left.’

‘Her phone won’t work at Wirrindago,’ said Hal as if it were something any fool knew. ‘There’s no signal out here.’

‘What, none at all?’

Meredith tried to imagine life without a mobile phone, but it was like trying to imagine a thousand square kilometres. It was a different world out here, that was for sure. Her laptop felt like the only bit of normality, and she held it protectively against her side as the truck juddered over the bumpy road.

‘Well, that explains why I haven’t heard from Lucy for so long,’ she said. ‘I was getting worried.’

‘Worried enough to fly all the way out to Australia?’ asked Hal incredulously. ‘Lucy’s a little old for you to be checking up on her just because you haven’t heard from her for a few weeks, isn’t she?’

‘I’m not checking up,’ said Meredith, slightly on the defensive. ‘I was just concerned in case something was wrong.’

Hal was unimpressed. ‘Lucy’s…what? Twenty-four? Twenty-five? I can’t believe you’ve come chasing to the other side of the world just because she hasn’t dropped you a postcard for a couple of months!’

‘It’s not just that.’ Meredith bit her lip. ‘A friend of ours was badly injured in a car accident about ten days ago. I wanted to tell her. I tried ringing, but I didn’t realise mobile phones wouldn’t work out here, and when I didn’t get a reply to any of my messages, of course I began to worry.’

‘So you’ve come all this way just to give Lucy some bad news?’ Hal frowned. ‘Couldn’t it have waited till she got home? I dare say she’ll be sorry, but there’s not much she can do about it out here.’

‘But there is,’ said Meredith. She turned her head slightly, as if looking out of the window so that he couldn’t see her face. ‘Richard needs her.’

Lucy. He needed Lucy, not her.

If she had expected Hal to be sympathetic, she was due for a disappointment. ‘Richard’s the guy who had the accident?’ he said. ‘Sounds to me as if he needs good medical care. Lucy’s not a nurse. I don’t see what she can do.’

‘She can help him out of a coma.’ Meredith had hoped to be able to explain all this to Lucy first, but Hal was going to have to know why her sister was leaving. ‘Richard’s been unconscious ever since the accident and the doctors suggested that familiar voices might help.’

Swallowing, she stared straight ahead, one hand clutching at the window, the other the bare metal dashboard, but she wasn’t seeing the outback. Instead she was in the intensive care ward, looking at Richard lying terrifyingly still in that bed, and the white, strained faces of his parents.

‘Richard’s parents are distraught,’ she went on. ‘They’ve been with him continually and the rest of his family have been talking to him too, but nothing seems to be working. They’re convinced that Lucy’s voice is the one that will help him regain consciousness.’

‘It sounds to me as if they’re grasping at straws,’ Hal commented and Meredith turned slightly to look at him, suddenly desperate to make him understand how important it was for Lucy to go back.

‘No, I’m sure they’re right,’ she said. ‘Richard adores Lucy.’ There, not even a betraying wobble in her voice, she thought, relieved. Hal wouldn’t know how much it had once cost her to acknowledge that truth.

‘She’s the most important person in the world to him,’ she went on. ‘He was devastated when she left for Australia. All he wanted was for her to come back to him. If anyone can bring him back,’ she assured Hal, ‘Lucy can.’

‘If he’s going to regain consciousness he will, regardless of whether Lucy’s there or not,’ said Hal. ‘And if he doesn’t, there’s not much point in her haring back to London, is there? I gather that’s what you want her to do?’

Meredith nodded. ‘We have to try, at least.’

‘I don’t see why. It sounds a lot of sentimental nonsense to me. Your Richard may “adore” Lucy, but she clearly doesn’t adore him. She wouldn’t have come out to Australia if she had, and I have to tell you that she hasn’t been showing any signs of pining. She’s been consoling herself very nicely with one of my ringers.’

Meredith wasn’t entirely sure what a ringer was, but she guessed that it was probably someone who worked for Hal. She might have guessed that Lucy would have found someone else, she thought with an inward sigh. Her sister was always in love with some man or other. She had even been in love with Richard for a while, until Meredith had somehow given herself away one day.

If only she’d kept a closer guard on her expression! Richard had never guessed how she felt, and Lucy wouldn’t have either if she hadn’t happened to catch sight of Meredith’s face in that mirror.

‘Why didn’t you tell me that you loved him?’ she had demanded, stricken.

But how could she have said anything when it was obvious that Richard was head over heels in love with Lucy?

With an effort, Meredith dragged herself back to the problem in hand, all grim-featured, six-foot male of it.

‘Lucy may well have found someone else, but she’s still very fond of Richard,’ she said. ‘I’m sure she’ll want to help him.’

‘Maybe she will, but she’s not jaunting back to London to do it,’ said Hal flatly. ‘She’s got a job to do here.’

‘You can’t stop her going!’ protested Meredith.

‘Can’t I? She’s on a six-month contract, and so far she’s only done two. If she wants to leave when her six months are up, that’s up to her, but until then she’s committed herself to staying at Wirrindago.’

Meredith stared at him in disbelief. ‘But you can’t mean to hold her to that when Richard’s so ill! Couldn’t you at least give her some compassionate leave?’

‘Look, it might be different if you’d come to me and said that a member of your family was dangerously ill but, from what I can make out, this guy is just an ex-boyfriend,’ said Hal callously. ‘Presumably Lucy had her reasons for breaking off that relationship. I don’t see why she should be expected to drop everything now and rush back to some man she’s already decided she doesn’t want to be with. The whole thing stinks of emotional blackmail!’

‘It isn’t blackmail!’ How could he be so unfeeling? wondered Meredith furiously. If he could only see how ill Richard was…! But he probably wouldn’t care. He obviously didn’t have any feelings at all. ‘I’m sure Lucy won’t think that, anyway,’ she told him with a defiant look that bounced right off him.

‘It doesn’t matter what she thinks,’ he said in an uncompromising voice. ‘She’s not going anywhere. The men need feeding and someone’s got to look after the children. Who’s going to take care of them if she goes?’

‘Well, let’s see…’ Meredith put her head on one side and pretended to consider the matter, too cross with him to care about the fact that he was evidently married after all. Or had been. ‘I know! What about you?’ she suggested acidly.

‘I’ve got a million acre property to run,’ he said. ‘I haven’t got time to look after two children.’

‘Perhaps you should have thought of that before you had them!’

‘They’re not mine,’ said Hal, effectively taking the wind out of her sails. ‘They’re my sister’s kids.’

‘Oh.’ Ready to be outraged at the way he was prepared to shrug aside his responsibilities as a father, Meredith was left feeling a little foolish. ‘Do they live with you all the time?’

‘No—thank God!’ he added with feeling. ‘Lydia—my sister—grew up at Wirrindago with me, but she married a city type and has been living in Sydney ever since.’

His tone made it clear what he thought about ‘city types’, thought Meredith, who couldn’t help thinking that Lydia had probably made a good decision. If she had to choose between this godforsaken place and the buzz of a city like Sydney, she knew which direction she would be heading.

‘Lydia and Greg have been having some problems,’ Hal went on, a tinge of distaste in his voice. ‘Greg travels a lot on business, and Lydia thinks it would help if they were able to spend more time together, so she’s arranged to go with him on a two month trip to Europe.’

‘So you get to look after the kids while they’re away?’ And she thought she’d been asking for a big favour when she’d begged a lift to Wirrindago! Meredith reflected. Hal’s sister must be a brave woman.

Hal nodded, but it was clear that the prospect of having nieces and nephews to stay left him less than enthralled. ‘Lydia couldn’t wait to leave Wirrindago for the city herself, but she likes the idea of an outback property, and she decided this trip was an ideal opportunity for the kids to connect with their “outback heritage”, as she calls it, and for me to get to know them properly.’

The stern mouth was turned down at the corners and Meredith felt sorry for the two children sent off to stay with a grim uncle in the back of beyond. Poor kids!

‘My sister and I spent a lot of time with our aunt when we were kids, so I guess she’s hoping that I’ll have the same kind of relationship with her children,’ Hal added wryly.

‘And do you?’

He lifted a shoulder. ‘They’ve only been here a couple of days. It’s obvious they don’t want to be in the outback any more than I want to run a crèche but beyond that I don’t really know what they’re like. It’s a busy time for us too, so I haven’t had the chance to spend much time with them.’

‘It doesn’t sound very suitable,’ said Meredith disapprovingly. ‘Why didn’t you just say no?’

‘It’s what I should have done,’ Hal conceded, ‘but once my sister gets an idea in her head, it’s hard to shift her. She can be difficult, but she hasn’t had an easy time of it and…well, I guess I just didn’t know how to refuse,’ he admitted in what Meredith imagined was a rare moment of weakness. ‘I was the eldest, so I always had to look after her when we were growing up, and I think she’s fallen into the way of relying on me.’

Meredith could sympathise with that, at least. She had been the eldest too, and had got used to protecting Lucy.

‘How old are these children?’ she asked.

‘Emma’s nine and Mickey—Michael, I’m supposed to call him—is seven.’

Meredith frowned. ‘Shouldn’t they be at school?’

‘They’re going to do School of the Air while they’re here, and Lucy’s going to do some lessons with them. I made it clear in her contract that she would have to be a governess as well as a cook once the children arrived.’

‘Lucy? A governess?’ Meredith couldn’t help laughing. ‘Really?’

Damn, there was that smile again. Hal wished she wouldn’t do it. It made her look vivid and interesting and much, much harder to ignore.

‘What’s so funny?’ he demanded gruffly.

‘It just seems so unlikely,’ she tried to explain. ‘Governess makes me think of a Jane Eyre figure, all prim and proper, and Lucy’s certainly never been that!’ When you thought about Lucy, you thought about warmth and fun and laughter and a sparkling zest for life. She paused, not wanting to drop her sister in it. ‘Did she tell you about her teaching experience?’ she asked carefully and Hal cast her a dour smile.

‘You don’t need to worry; she was very open about the fact that she’d never done any. That doesn’t matter to me. She doesn’t have to teach them anything, just make sure that they do the work and help them with their reading and so on. It’s not hard, but someone’s got to be there with them. You can’t leave two kids on their own all day.’

‘Of course not,’ said Meredith, wondering if he was expecting her to disagree.

‘So you see, I can’t let Lucy go now,’ said Hal firmly. ‘Lydia and Greg won’t be back for another couple of months.’

‘Couldn’t—’ Meredith broke off and winced as the truck went over a particularly nasty bump that shot her up in the air and then slammed her back down on to the seat. ‘Couldn’t you find someone else?’ she tried again when she had got her breath back.

‘Where?’ he asked. ‘It’s not that easy to find people who are prepared to live on an isolated property, away from their family and friends.’

Meredith couldn’t say that she was surprised. There was no way she would come and live out here, no matter how fat a salary was offered.

‘I was lucky to find your sister,’ Hal told her. ‘Lucy’s got a romantic idea about what life is like in the outback, but that’s fine by me. I needed a cook anyway, and once I knew Lydia was going to dump the kids on me about now, I made sure I tied her to a contract that would cover the whole time they were here. Lucy was perfectly happy to sign it,’ he added.

That sounded like Lucy, thought Meredith wearily. Her sister had always been prone to wild enthusiasms, throwing herself into things with abandon before her interest waned and she was enthralled by something else entirely. It was a characteristic that exasperated Meredith even while a secret bit of her envied Lucy’s ability to live for the moment.

‘Lucy’s never been a believer in wait and see,’ she said to Hal. ‘It would never occur to her to suggest a trial period before she committed herself to six months.’

‘Is that what you’d have done?’

‘In the unlikely event that I’d be applying for a job I’d never done before in a place I couldn’t easily leave and living with people I’d never met…yes, I would certainly have insisted on a trial!’

‘Then perhaps it’s just as well it’s Lucy who wanted the job and not you. She’s certainly not regretting it, so even if she had been sensible like you, she would be long past the trial period by now. I think you’ll find that Lucy is more than happy to stay. She’s a grown woman and she can make own decisions without her big sister telling her what to do.’

Meredith flushed. She had always hated that bossy big sister image, but if even Hal Granger could see it, perhaps it was true.

But she wasn’t bossy, she reminded herself. She wasn’t always trying to tell other people what to do. She just wasn’t someone who sat around waiting for things to happen. She certainly wasn’t going to simply sit back and hope that Richard got better if she could make a difference by taking Lucy back to him.