Outback Boss, City Bride

‘Well, let’s see what Lucy has to say first,’ she said, lifting her chin.

She couldn’t give up now, not when she’d got this far!

Meredith stole a glance at Hal. He wasn’t someone you’d want to cross if you didn’t have to, she acknowledged to herself. He was toughly built and there was a competent, purposeful air about him that, as a practical person herself, she couldn’t help appreciating. The trouble was that you really wanted someone like Hal on your side, rather than squaring up for a battle of wills.

Still, what could he do? He could hardly keep her and Lucy prisoners…could he? Meredith shook off the sudden doubt. Of course he couldn’t. And if he did, they would just have to think up an escape plan.

Looking at the inhospitable terrain around her, Meredith wasn’t quite sure what that would be—they certainly wouldn’t be walking!—but she would just have to cross that bridge when she came to it.

Beside her, Hal saw her chin set at a stubborn angle and his eyes narrowed slightly. Meredith West seemed like someone who was used to getting her own way, and she clearly hadn’t given up. If she thought she and Lucy would be able to talk him round, she was in for a disappointment, though. She had come all this way for nothing.

He felt a bit sorry for her, in fact.

‘There must be other people who can talk to your Richard,’ he offered. ‘Why not you?’

Meredith looked at him. ‘If you were longing with all your heart to see Lucy, don’t you think you’d be a bit disappointed if I turned up instead?’

‘But he’s in a coma, you said. He won’t know. He’ll just be aware that there’s someone there.’

‘Exactly,’ said Meredith. ‘That’s why it has to be Lucy. Richard wants to see her so much, I’m quite sure that as soon as he senses she’s there, it will give him the strength to come round. If he wakes up and sees me sitting there, he would be so disappointed he’d probably have a relapse, and that’s not what we want at all!’

She was making it into a joke, but Hal wondered about the underlying note of bleakness in her voice. He wasn’t a particularly perceptive man, but it was obvious that this Richard meant a lot more to her than she was letting on.

‘I’m sure you underestimate yourself,’ he said.

‘No, I don’t.’ Meredith shook her head firmly. ‘Richard’s not interested in me.’

She was protesting a bit too much, Hal thought. ‘You seem to be going to a lot of trouble for someone who’s not interested in you,’ he commented mildly.

Meredith averted her face. ‘He’s a friend,’ she said.

‘Would you fly all the way out to Australia for all your friends?’

‘I would if they needed me.’ She turned back to him, pulling a stray strand of brown hair distastefully from her face. ‘And if I could afford it. To be honest, Richard’s parents paid for my ticket. They’re desperate for anything that will help Richard get better, and they’ve pinned all their hopes on me finding Lucy.’

Hal’s mouth turned down disapprovingly. ‘It was a lot to ask you to do that.’

‘They didn’t. I offered,’ said Meredith. ‘I’m self-employed—I’m a freelance translator—so as long as I’ve got my laptop and can connect to the Internet, I can go wherever and whenever I want.’ She patted the computer by her side. ‘I couldn’t stand sitting around waiting for news about Richard, and told them I’d rather be doing something. I was worried about not hearing from Lucy too, and it seemed a good opportunity to find out if she was OK.’

‘So this is all your idea, in fact?’

She looked away again. ‘Richard’s parents kept saying how much they wished Lucy was there and it seemed like something useful I could do,’ she said in a low voice. ‘I would have paid for the tickets, but they insisted, and I let them pay because it made them feel that it was something they could do too, and obviously they can’t leave Richard at the moment.’

‘I see,’ said Hal.

He thought he did. Meredith West was obviously one of those managing women who always thought they knew best and who decided what everyone else wanted without ever bothering to actually ask. He wouldn’t be at all surprised to find that it was Meredith who had put the idea of bringing Lucy home into Richard’s parents’ minds.

Well, she wasn’t going to manage him.

They drove on in silence. Meredith was so tired by this stage that her eyeballs seemed to be revolving in her head and her eyelids were so heavy that it was a huge effort to keep them from clanging down on to her lower lashes, and even that wasn’t enough. Incredibly, given all the jolting and bouncing, her head kept lolling to one side until a rough lurch of the truck jerked her awake again.

To Meredith it was as if they had been driving for ever. Every now and then, they would come to a creek bed and Hal would pause, shift gears and then bump cautiously down one side and up the other. It was funny to think that sometimes these creeks would be full of water. Meredith couldn’t imagine it at all. She had never been anywhere so brown and dry.

‘Nearly there,’ said Hal at long last, and Meredith shook herself awake and looked around her.

The landscape had changed, she realised. The dust was still that strange reddish-brown, the light still glaring, but it was rockier around here and there were sparse, spindly trees on either side of the track which made it look positively lush compared to the flat emptiness they’d been travelling through earlier.

After a while the trees thinned again and they came out on to more open land. ‘That’s the homestead up ahead,’ said Hal, pointing into the distance.

Meredith squinted, but couldn’t make out much more than a smudge of green and she was suddenly overwhelmed by the realisation of just how isolated they were, how far she was from home. This wasn’t a place you could just walk away from. If Hal stuck by his refusal to allow Lucy to break her contract, how on earth would they be able to get away?

It was almost impossible to judge distances here. One minute the homestead was no more than a shimmering mirage, the next, it seemed, they were bowling past fenced paddocks and a motley collection of what seemed to Meredith to be little more than sheds with corrugated iron roofs but which Hal told her were the stockmen’s quarters.

He had intended to drive through the yards and round to the side of the homestead where they could unload the stores in the back of the truck directly into the kitchen, but Meredith’s expression was so unimpressed that on an impulse he changed his mind and headed round to the front of the house instead where there was a little patch of grass, lovingly irrigated to an almost startling green.

This was the best view of the old homestead, with its deep veranda and the elegant lace ironwork that was left from a less practical age, but Meredith didn’t seem particularly impressed.

Why should she be? Hal wondered, annoyed with himself for even trying to give her a good impression of Wirrindago. Anyone would think he cared what she thought.

He jerked the truck to a halt at the bottom of the steps and for a moment Meredith sat numbly staring at the house in front of her, unable to believe that they had actually stopped moving.

It was a much bigger building than she had imagined, somehow. Bigger and older and more substantial in spite of the iron roof. The walls, almost hidden in the shadows of the veranda, were of solid stone and the door and windows hinted at a faded grandeur. This had once been a gracious home, she realised in surprise, but times had evidently been less gracious for a long time now. There were distinct signs of neglect—or perhaps of an ungracious owner, she thought, sliding a sidelong glance at Hal.

He seemed to be in a bad mood again. Getting out of the truck, he slammed the door as he spotted two sulky-looking children on the veranda. The girl was slumped in the chair, while the little boy’s head was bent intently over a computer game.

‘Uncle Hal’s back,’ Meredith heard one of them shout inside the house, but neither of them made any move to come down and greet them.

Bad move, thought Meredith as she saw Hal’s brows snap together in that forbidding frown.

‘You two can come and help take all this stuff to the kitchen,’ he snapped, moving round to the back of the truck.

‘Oh…do we have to?’ moaned the girl.

‘Yes, you do. You too, Mickey.’

‘I’m just finishing this game—’

‘Now!’

Evidently Hal didn’t believe in reasoning with children. No wonder the children looked sulky, thought Meredith. It worked, though. Mickey put down his computer game and trailed down the steps after his equally reluctant sister, but both stopped dead and stared when Meredith got stiffly out of the truck and stretched.

Hal followed the children’s glances. She looked decidedly the worse for wear. Her suit was rumpled, her hair a wild bush around her head and she was swaying with tiredness, but he had to admit that there was a certain style about her. Putting a hand to the small of her back, she stretched and winced at the soreness of her muscles.

‘Emma and Mickey, you’d better come and say hello to—’ he began, only to find himself interrupted by Lucy, who had come out of the door and was standing at the top of the steps, staring in disbelief at her sister.

‘Meredith?’ she said, astounded.

‘Hi, Lucy.’ Thousands of miles she had travelled, and that was all she could say!

Shaken out of her trance, Lucy came hurrying down the steps to sweep Meredith into a warm hug.

‘I can’t believe it’s really you!’ she cried. ‘It’s so good to see you.’ Then she pulled back to hold Meredith at arm’s length as her beautiful blue eyes darkened with puzzlement. ‘But what on earth are you doing here?’

CHAPTER THREE

‘POOR Richard!’ said Lucy again, shaking her blonde head as she tried to take in Meredith’s news. ‘I can’t believe it. And his poor parents! They must be worried sick.’

‘They are.’

Meredith was sitting at the kitchen table, drinking a mug of tea and explaining what had happened. There had only been time to give Lucy the bare bones when she’d arrived. Hal, for all his grumpiness, had insisted that she have a shower and a sleep before she did anything else, and Meredith had to admit that she was feeling a lot better for it.

Now she watched her sister preparing the supper and tried to think how best to raise the question of going home. Hal had warned her that Lucy was enjoying outback life and, much as Meredith had wanted to believe that he was wrong, it was obvious that her sister was very happy. She was going to have to lead up to the real reason she was here very gradually.

Lucy was a good cook, but a notoriously messy one, and Meredith had to fight all her instincts to get up and start tidying up after her. But she knew it would annoy Lucy if she did, so she averted her eyes from the mess and sat, turning the mug of tea between her hands and wondering how to start.

‘Poor you, too.’ Lucy turned up the heat under a pan of potatoes and turned to lean back against the worktop, her blue eyes serious for once as she regarded her elder sister.

‘Me?’ Meredith looked up from her tea in surprise.

‘I know how you feel about Richard,’ said Lucy gently. ‘It must be awful for you too.’

‘I’m all right,’ said Meredith in a brisk voice, hoping to ward off any further questions, but Lucy patently wasn’t convinced.

‘Meredith, I’m your sister,’ she said. ‘You don’t have to pretend to be Superwoman with me.’

‘That pan’s boiling over,’ said Meredith, nodding to the stove beside Lucy.

Lucy turned obediently to lift the lid and reduce the heat under the pan, but she cast a beady glance over her shoulder at Meredith as she did so. ‘Don’t change the subject!’

‘I’m not. I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about. I’ve never thought of myself as Superwoman!’

‘You might not think you are, but you’ve never been prepared to admit that you might be lonely or scared or unhappy like the rest of us,’ said Lucy, adding salt to the pan. ‘I know you’re in love with Richard. What’s wrong with admitting that you’re heartbroken and sick with worry about him?’

Unable to sit still any longer, Meredith got up and began clearing the dishes out of the sink where Lucy had dumped them as she’d gone along.

‘You always romanticise everything, Lucy,’ she said crossly. ‘I’m not heartbroken. Yes, there was a time when I hoped that Richard and I would get together…but it didn’t work out. He fell in love with you instead,’ she said, her voice carefully neutral. ‘I don’t blame him for that, and I certainly don’t blame you.’

‘Maybe you should blame yourself,’ Lucy suggested, and Meredith turned in surprise at the unexpected note of exasperation in Lucy’s voice, a bowl still in her hands.

‘Did it ever occur to you that if you had given Richard the slightest encouragement, he probably wouldn’t have fallen for me?’ Lucy went on.

Meredith rolled her eyes. ‘Right, a man like Richard is going to think, Hmm, here’s someone plain and dumpy, but over there is a tall, slim beauty…I know! I’ll go for the short, fat one!’

‘He might have done if you’d ever let him close enough to find out what you’re really like,’ said Lucy. ‘And you are not plain! You’ve got beautiful skin and your eyes are gorgeous, and I know loads of women who’d give their eye teeth for your cleavage.

‘You should try showing off your body some time, not hiding it away,’ she scolded Meredith, who had turned back to the sink, having heard this argument many times before. ‘Richard probably didn’t know that you had a cleavage! You were so busy being careful and not letting him guess how you felt that he thought you were only interested in being good friends, and of course then he’s going to start looking around.

‘I just happened to be the first likely person he came across,’ she said, ‘and if you had told me, I would never have thought about going out with him, and we could have saved ourselves the whole mess!’

Lucy stared in exasperation at her sister’s unresponsive back, but something about the set of those shoulders made her relent suddenly. With a sigh, she went over and hugged Meredith.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said guiltily. ‘I’m sorry. The last thing you need after that journey is me having a go at you. I just want you to be happy, as happy as I am now with Kevin, and you won’t be as long as you keep everything bottled up like this.’

Meredith could feel tears pricking behind her eyes and she blinked them away furiously. She must be even more tired than she had thought.

Setting the last of the pans on the work surface, she wiped out the sink and began to run the hot water. ‘I’m not bottling things up, Lucy, I promise you,’ she said. ‘I was—I am—fine about you and Richard. There was no need for you to throw everything up and dash off to Australia.’

‘I felt so awful when I realised how you felt about him,’ Lucy tried to explain. ‘But it wasn’t just that, to be honest. I was bored with my job and…well, Richard’s lovely, but we didn’t go out for very long, and it was never that serious.’

‘It was for him.’ Meredith turned off the tap and turned to face Lucy. ‘He really loves you.’

‘You can’t know that.’

‘I do.’

Meredith wasn’t going to tell Lucy about the evenings Richard had spent with her, talking about how much he loved Lucy, how empty life was without her, wondering what he had done to make her leave so suddenly. Meredith had listened and comforted him as best she could. It had seemed all that she could do for him, but she had never told him the real reason Lucy had left. She had told herself that Lucy would soon get bored with Australia, that she would come home and Richard would have another chance to be happy.

But she had left it too late.

Lucy was bending to take a huge joint of beef out of the oven. ‘Richard didn’t seem that upset when I left,’ she said.

‘He didn’t want to make things difficult for you,’ said Meredith. ‘Lucy, you’re really important to Richard. He needs you now.’

Biting her lip, Lucy basted the joint. ‘I wish there was something I could do to help.’

‘There is.’ Meredith took a breath. ‘I think—it’s not just me, though, his parents and the doctors think it too—we all think that the sound of your voice might be what it takes to bring Richard round.’

Lucy’s head came up at that, and she froze in mid-baste. ‘What?’

‘The doctors told us to keep talking to him,’ Meredith hurried on, ‘so that’s what everyone’s been doing, but I’m sure it’s you he wants to hear. I’m sure he would wake up for you.’

To her horror, she found her voice cracking a little at the end and she clamped her lips together in a fiercely straight line for a moment. ‘I just think that if you were to sit next to him,’ she went on after drawing a steadying breath, ‘if you were to hold his hand and tell him that you were there, I think Richard would make that extra effort that he needs.’

Lucy put the roast back in the oven. ‘You want me to go back to London?’ she said in a dull voice.

‘Yes.’ Meredith nodded eagerly. ‘Richard’s parents have given me the money for your ticket. They just want you there as soon as possible.’ She paused, seeing the reluctance in her sister’s expression. ‘It wouldn’t be for ever, Lucy. You could come back to Australia as soon as Richard was out of danger, but…yes, please come back with me,’ she said. ‘It would mean so much to Richard.’

‘And to you?’ asked Lucy.

Meredith looked away, unable to meet her eyes. ‘I just want him to get better,’ she said in a low voice. ‘That’s all.’

Lucy sighed. Pulling out a chair, she sat down at the table and rubbed her eyes. ‘I’m on a contract,’ she said. ‘I’m committed to staying here for another four months, at least.’

‘Hal Granger told me about that,’ said Meredith. ‘It sounds to me as if he was taking advantage of you, Lucy. He can’t hold you to it if you want to leave.’

‘But that’s just it, I don’t want to leave,’ Lucy confessed, raising her head. ‘I love it here.’

She half smiled at Meredith’s expression. ‘I know it’s not your kind of place, but I feel as if I’ve finally found the place I want to be and the man I want to be with.’

‘You’ve fallen in love again?’ said Meredith, resigned, and Lucy bridled.

‘Don’t say it like that! This time it’s for real…it is!’ she insisted, offended by her sister’s sceptical expression. ‘Kevin’s different from anyone else I’ve ever met. You’ll understand when you meet him.

‘He’s so…’ She hugged her arms together, trying to find the words to describe him. ‘Well, he’s special,’ was the best she could come up with. ‘It’s an incredible feeling when you look at someone and your knees go week, and you just think, That’s the one!’

Meredith didn’t say anything. She was thinking about the first time she had met Richard. She had taken one look into his smiling brown eyes and her heart had done a strange flip. There you are, she had thought. I’ve been waiting my whole life for you.

‘I really love him,’ Lucy was saying, ‘and I’m sure—well, almost sure—that Kevin feels the same way about me. We’ve been getting on really well. Kevin’s not someone who rushes into things—he’s not like me, which is a good thing, isn’t it?—but I’ve just got this feeling, here,’ she said, thumping her heart, ‘that’s it’s meant to be.’

‘I see,’ said Meredith flatly.

‘It’s not that I don’t want to help Richard,’ Lucy said. ‘I do. I’m very fond of him. He’ll always be a friend and, even if he wasn’t, I’d do it for you, Meredith, but…’

She bit her lip. ‘If I go, I won’t be able to come back,’ she said. ‘Hal Granger is a hard man. He’d be furious with me if I broke my contract, and I know he wouldn’t let me come back. And how could I leave Emma and Mickey on their own? The poor kids have just arrived and they’re horribly homesick. Hal’s too busy to look after them and—’

Lucy stopped abruptly, catching sight of the look on Meredith’s face. She covered her face with her hands and shook her head slowly. ‘Listen to me,’ she said, appalled at herself. ‘I shouldn’t be talking like this when Richard’s so ill. I’m sorry, Meredith.’

Lowering her hands, she took a deep breath. ‘Do you really think it will make such a difference if I go back?’

It was Meredith’s turn to hesitate. She hadn’t realised until now quite what she was asking Lucy to give up. ‘Yes, I do,’ she said slowly. ‘I wish we had some way of finding out how he was. If he’s come round already, then of course there would be no need for you to go back, but how can we know? I tried ringing Richard’s mother when I got here, but then I remembered that my phone wouldn’t work.’

‘I’ll ask Hal if we can use the phone in the office,’ said Lucy, pushing back her chair. ‘He’s hard, but he’s not mean.’

Barely five minutes later, Meredith was listening to Richard’s mother weeping down the phone. ‘He’s still just lying there,’ she said through her tears. ‘We’re at our wits’ end. The doctors say we need to find something to stimulate him, but we’ve tried everything. If only Lucy were here! Have you found out where she is yet?’

Meredith hesitated, not wanting to commit her sister to anything before she was ready, but Lucy, who had been listening in, reached calmly across and took the phone from her.

‘Yes, she’s found me, Ellen. I’m coming back as soon as I can.’

‘Lucy…’ said Meredith a little helplessly when she had put down the phone.

‘It’s OK.’ Lucy smiled at her. ‘Richard being ill didn’t seem quite real when you told me about it, but hearing Ellen so upset brought it home to me. Of course I’ll go back.’

‘What about Kevin?’

‘He’ll wait for me,’ said Lucy, determinedly bright. ‘I know he will. I’ll come back to him. Something will turn up. Maybe he could find a job on another station and I could join him there.’

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