Wanted: Outback Wife

So while half of him couldn’t quite believe that he was with a woman whose intention to marry wasn’t just a niggling presumption in the back of his head, but a blatant prerequisite to his spending time with her, the other half of him found that the most heady inducement of all.

Added to that there was something about being with a city girl that took him away from his troubles back home. Something about the powders and potions they used to look after themselves. They always smelled so good. He wondered if he would get close enough to Jodie that night to find if she smelled half as good as he imagined she would.

And Jodie was not only a city girl, but a foreign city girl to boot. A girl with skin so creamy it was never meant to be exposed to the harsh Australian clime, with hair so fine it gleamed, and with an accent so strong that every word she uttered reminded him that there was a big world out there that he had been ignoring for the longest time. Until now.

Heath looked towards the front door where the blonde who had shown him to his table stood fighting with a rangy brunette. Both were staring at the ladies’ room door. Jodie’s last line of defence, perhaps?

The brunette glanced over at his table and he gave her a small wave. She grabbed the blonde and ducked behind her, leaving the blonde having to wave back. Yep. They both belonged to Jodie for sure. City girls and their mates…

With a secret smile, he turned back to his beer, his mind whirling through the night so far. But then he groaned as he remembered blurting out, ‘I am also a qualified civil engineer.’

How long had it been since he had even said those words out loud? Sure, they were true—he would have been eminently employable in the field if not for the fateful timing that had forced him to return to his outback home to look after his younger brothers and sisters and to run the family farm.

But why had he needed to let this slip of a girl know such information? Because she had been so obviously trying to reconcile to herself what the heck she was doing sitting across a table from a farmer, that was why! Well, he was more than that, just as he was sure that behind those liquid eyes there was more light and shade to Jodie Simpson than she was letting through her shield as well.

Thinking of light, he could still remember the radiance in Cameron’s eyes the day he had married Marissa. He remembered the scent of roses from Marissa’s bouquet as he had hugged her after the ceremony. She had thanked him that day, for being a good friend, to her and especially to Cameron.

The picture dissolved as he remembered the darkness in Cameron’s eyes as he’d sat in the funeral chapel while his young wife’s coffin had lain quiet and sombre to his right. The depth of Cameron’s sorrow rocked Heath to his very soul.

In his brother Heath had witnessed the extremes of both bliss and despair. But at thirty-six years of age he had never known either firsthand. His life had been lived by the rules and where had that put him? Alone.

Light and shade. It was way past time his stagnant life was injected with more of both. This was a woman who could take him out of his comfort zone. Jodie was a woman who wanted change so badly she was willing to risk everything by marrying a complete stranger in order to get it. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, right?

He pushed back his chair and walked towards the front door and the two women all but fell over themselves to look natural.

He reached into his pocket and pulled out his wallet.

‘Is everything all right?’ the blonde asked.

‘It’s fine, apart from the fact that my…date seems to have left me with the bill.’ He gave her enough money to more than cover his one beer and Jodie’s untouched glass of wine.

Then, with a spring in his step that would have been more appropriate for an eighteen-year-old buck on the prowl rather than someone twice that age, he stuck his hands in his trouser pockets and stepped out into a mild spring darkness feeling like a car whose battery had been jump-started after being flat for a decade.

CHAPTER THREE

SUNDAY morning Jodie pushed back the comforter, hitched up her too-loose flannelette pyjama pants, and yawned magnificently as she opened her bedroom door.

Louise, already showered and dressed in what amounted to a casual outfit for her—a lemon twin set and designer jeans—turned on the couch with a hand to her throat. ‘Oh, my. I thought I was the only one here.’

‘Mandy and Lisa have gone out?’ Jodie asked.

Louise nodded. Jodie looked to the clock on the microwave to find it was only nine in the morning. They’d still not been home when Jodie had snuck in at three that morning, so they would have had five hours’ sleep at the most.

Jodie shuffled to the couch on which Louise had slept, though you wouldn’t know it by the neat throw rug over the back of the chair and the perfectly placed scatter cushions. Louise sat, crossing her feet neatly at the ankle, an open bucket of ice cream before her. Jodie sat on her hand to stop herself from mussing up her sister’s perfect hair.

‘What’s with the nine in the morning ice-cream fix?’ Jodie asked.

Louise offered her spoon, but Jodie declined.

‘Mum…Ivy…just called.’ Poor Louise’s face crumpled as she fought to settle on how she ought to think of the woman who had brought her up as her own. ‘But that’s neither here nor there. Tell me about your night. Did you meet anyone brilliant?’

Jodie wasn’t quite sure what to say. While her life felt as if it was on the up and up, Louise’s was falling apart at her feet.

Before searching out Jodie, Louise had discovered that before she was born her father had sired illegitimate twin sons. And they were back, wanting to take their place in the infamous Valentine family. The shock had sent her father into cardiac arrest, and, believing he was dying, he had told her that she was adopted. Shattered to find herself the object of so many lies, she had registered to find her birth mother and, in discovering Patricia was uncontactable, she had found Jodie instead and flown to Australia in an instant. Now Jodie was Louise’s only support—the only person in her life not in any way linked to her complicated adoptive family.

‘It went okay,’ Jodie said, playing down mightily how much better than okay her night with Heath Jameson had been. After escaping The Cave, she and Heath had walked for hours, following their feet up boulevards and down side streets, as they’d enjoyed the balmy spring night.

And they had talked. The subject of Jodie’s disinclination for and Heath’s love of chocolate had kept them going for an hour all on its own. They had never even found the dessert Heath had been hankering for; instead, hours later they had settled for a kebab when a take-away van had loomed in their meandering path.

‘Come on, Lou, what happened with Ivy? Tell me.’

Louise half nodded and half shook her head. ‘It was awkward to say the least. I thought I would be upset, or angry. But I just felt numb.’

‘Did you talk to your dad?’

Louise shook her head. ‘I’m livid enough at her, but I’m nowhere near ready to tackle the mistrust I feel for him. He didn’t just lie to me; he lied to so many of us. If I didn’t have you here, now, and this place…’

Jodie leant over and gave Louise a one-armed squeeze. ‘I’m glad you’re here too,’ Jodie said. ‘Truly. And stay as long as you like. No worries. You might even fall in love with the place as I have.’

Louise smiled at her, her blue-grey eyes so familiar. So much like Patricia’s. For one blinding moment, Jodie missed her mum, and wondered where she was. She hadn’t heard from her in a few weeks since she and her new husband Derek had started travelling, but if they hit trouble surely he would let her know and ask her to come home and…

No. That wasn’t her place now.

‘No worries?’ Louise repeated. ‘There was a definite Australian accent there.’

‘Really?’ Jodie liked that idea very much.

‘Absolutely. And you’ve got the whole relaxed Aussie thing going on as well. I’m wondering if it comes to you all through the sun rays.’

Jodie laughed. ‘I think it must. Back home I was a right Londoner. Cool, grey, and with all the vigour of a wet winter’s day.’

Jodie’s mind shot once again to her night with Heath. He was the perfect embodiment of all the things she loved about Australia—warmth, ease, leisure—the antithesis of bleak, wet, bustling London. Was that why she had been so instantly drawn to him? So ready to know him outside the loaded atmosphere of The Cave, to pretend that it was a real date?

Louise sighed. ‘Listening to you talk with your lovely half-Australian accent, home seems so far away it almost feels unreal.’

Jodie knew just what she meant. She loved the fact that her life here felt unreal. Unreality was bliss. Jodie reached out and took her by the hand. ‘Do you understand now why I have to do whatever I can to stay?’

Louise’s cool blue-grey eyes filled with an even mix of sadness and understanding. She sighed and Jodie knew everything between them was going to be okay. ‘I am actually a little jealous of you, you know. I wish I was in your shoes, with my future a blank canvas before me. Nothing tying me down. Nothing drawing me home.’

‘But you are. You are just like me. Simply choose to stay. For real. Stay for ever.’

A ray of sun seemed to break through the dark cloud hanging over Louise’s head. ‘Ha! Wouldn’t that shock the pants off the whole lot of them? Max, my cousin, would have a conniption fit if he heard that I, the perennial good girl, ran away from home never to return. Well, I guess he’s not really my cousin now, if you come to think about it. But, oh, I would still love to see the look on his face—’

A noise at the front door called their attention. Mandy and Lisa spilled inside carrying their regular Sunday-morning French sticks and Brie.

‘Well, well, well. Look what the cat dragged in,’ Mandy said as she threw the brown paper bags onto the counter. ‘When you didn’t come back out of the bathroom last night, we thought you had fallen in. You took off with the hot farmer, didn’t you?’

‘Well, actually yes, I did,’ Jodie said, glancing at Louise, who had managed to drag herself away from her deep dark thoughts about her non-cousin Max and was now watching her with renewed interest.