Baby At Bushman's Creek

He studied the picture, frowning slightly. Jack had his arm around a vibrant, lovely girl who seemed to be zinging with happiness, and they were smiling at each other as if the rest of the world had ceased to exist. ‘Jack never mentioned your sister to me,’ he told Clare bluntly, ‘and it’s not like him to be secretive.’ He handed back the photograph. ‘How did they meet?’

‘Pippa got a job as a cook at Bushman’s Creek. I’m not sure how.’

‘Probably through the agency,’ he said, in spite of himself. ‘The station is so isolated that nobody ever stays very long, and in the dry season we always need people to help.’

If the station was anything like Mathison, Clare could imagine that no one would want to stay. ‘I know she was thrilled to get the job,’ she went on, unable to prevent her own mystification from creeping into her voice. ‘Pippa had always dreamed about working on a real outback cattle station.’

She sighed, remembering her sister’s face as she’d talked about the outback. ‘Even before she left school she was talking about Australia, and as soon as she could afford the fare she got herself a working visa and came out to find a job. She started in Sydney first of all, but after a while she moved to somewhere on the Queensland coast, and then, about eighteen months ago, she wrote and said that she’d got a job on a station called Bushman’s Creek.’

Clare turned to Gray as if struck for the first time. ‘You can’t have been there, or you would remember Pippa. She wasn’t the kind of person you could forget.’

‘I spent three months in South East Asia meeting buyers about eighteen months ago,’ Gray admitted reluctantly. ‘She could have been at Bushman’s Creek then.’

‘That would be about right.’ She nodded. ‘She was there nearly three months, and she said it was the happiest time of her life. She told me about the station, about how isolated it was and how hard everyone had to work.’ Clare shook her head, remembering. ‘I thought it sounded awful,’ she confessed, ‘but Pippa loved it.’

She paused, holding the photograph between her hands. ‘And then there was Jack,’ she said. ‘You can see how happy they were together. Pippa said that it was love at first sight. They spent all their time together, and were talking about getting married when a row blew up one day about something quite trivial. I don’t know what it was, or what was said, but I think they must have hurt each other very badly.

‘Pippa was incredibly volatile. She was either ecstatic or miserable.’ Clare smiled a little tiredly. ‘I don’t think she ever understood the meaning of moderation or balance, and she was never any good at compromising either.’

Clare glanced at Gray again. He didn’t look like a man who did much compromising either, but in a quite different way from Pippa. How could she explain Pippa’s intense, ebullient personality to someone like Gray?

‘You have to understand what Pippa was like,’ she said with an edge of desperation. ‘She was passionate about everything she did. She could be the kindest, funniest, most wonderful person, and she could also be the most difficult. There was no middle way with Pippa. It was typical of her to react so dramatically when she and Jack had that argument. She thought that it meant the end of everything, and she just threw her things in a bag and came home.’

Clare sighed a little, remembering how Pippa had collapsed messily back into her own calm, ordered life. ‘She didn’t discover that she was pregnant until a couple of months later.’

Gray had been listening in silence, leaning forward, holding his hat loosely between his knees, but he glanced up at that. ‘Why didn’t she contact Jack then?’

‘I tried to persuade her to write to him at least, but she wouldn’t.’ Clare’s gaze rested on Alice, who was still happily chewing her toy and dribbling down her chin. Reaching into her bag for a tissue, Clare wiped her face as she continued.

‘Pippa was still simmering after the argument. It had been over two months, and she hadn’t heard from Jack, so she assumed that he wasn’t interested any more, and she was too proud to ask him for help. She thought if he knew about the baby, he’d feel pressurised into a relationship he didn’t really want. I think Alice’s birth made her realise just how much she still loved him, though,’ Clare went on slowly. ‘That was something they should have shared, and she made up her mind to come back to Australia with Alice and see if she and Jack could sort something out, but…’

Her voice wavered, and she took a deep, steadying breath. ‘But a couple of months after Alice was born Pippa found a lump. She was diagnosed with cancer, and…well, she was one of the unlucky ones. There was nothing they could do for her. It was very quick.’ Clare’s eyes darkened with pain. ‘Three months later she was dead.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Gray quietly, and she sighed.

‘So am I. She was such a special person. Those last terrible weeks, all she thought about was Jack and Alice. She made me promise to tell Jack how much she had loved him, and to ask him to bring their daughter up. She wanted Alice to grow up with her father in the place she had been so happy.’

‘So you promised?’

Clare lifted her hands slightly and let them fall in a gesture of acceptance. ‘I promised,’ she said in a low voice. ‘And here I am.’

Gray got to his feet and walked over to lean on the verandah rail, looking out. ‘I’m not saying I don’t believe you,’ he said at last, ‘but can you prove that Alice is Jack’s daughter?’

‘Why would I make it up?’ she asked, bemused.

He turned to face her, folding his arms and leaning back against the rail. ‘Money?’ he suggested with a cynical look.

‘What money? From all Pippa ever told me, you don’t exactly live in the lap of luxury at Bushman’s Creek!’

‘We don’t, but between us Jack and I own a fair chunk of land. As Jack’s daughter, Alice would have a claim on that.’

Clare could hardly believe what she was hearing. ‘I’m not interested in your land!’ she said furiously, eyes blazing. ‘What do you think I am?’

‘I don’t know. That’s the whole point,’ he said with infuriating calm. ‘Until last night I’d never heard of you, or your sister, and now you expect me to believe that my brother is father to a child he knows nothing about. How do I know you’re telling the truth?’

‘The photograph—’ she began, but he interrupted her.

‘A photograph isn’t proof of paternity.’

‘If Jack wants to have DNA tests, he can,’ said Clare, ‘but I think that once he looks at Alice, he’ll know that she’s his daughter. You only have to look at the photo to see what he and Pippa had together, and I don’t believe that Pippa would have loved anyone who could turn his back on that completely.’

‘Maybe,’ said Gray, clearly unconvinced, ‘but that’s a decision only Jack can make. You can’t expect me to accept responsibility for a baby on his behalf.’

‘I understand that.’ Clare was feeling very tired, but she forced herself to her feet and went to lean next to him at the verandah rail. ‘All I want is for you to contact Jack and ask him to come home as soon as he can. That’s not too much to ask, is it?’

He looked from her to the baby, kicking her feet against the floor and squealing at the excitement of a new sensation. ‘No,’ he conceded, ‘but it may take some time to track him down. He didn’t have a fixed itinerary, so I’ll have to ring round a few contacts and hope that he turns up and gets the message sooner rather than later.’

Gray’s gaze came back to rest on Clare. The straight dark hair that swung below her jaw was pushed wearily behind her ears, and there were shadows beneath the great silvery eyes. She looked bruised and exhausted, and when she looked up at him it was clear that only the stubborn strength of her will was keeping her going.

‘I think it would be better if you went back to England and waited for Jack there,’ he said gruffly.

Clare straightened from the rail. ‘I’m not going to do that,’ she told him quite simply. ‘Alice and I only arrived yesterday, and even if I could face turning round and getting back on that plane for another twenty-three hours, I wouldn’t. I couldn’t afford to bring Alice back to Australia again when Jack finally turns up, and if he does decide to accept responsibility for her, I’d want to be able to stay with her for a while until she settles.’

‘So what are you going to do?’

‘Can’t we come back to Bushman’s Creek with you?’

There was a pause. Gray looked down into pleading eyes the colour of pale smoke and ringed with black, as if someone had taken a dark pen to outline each iris, and turned almost abruptly away.

‘Bushman’s Creek isn’t a suitable place for you or the baby,’ he said brusquely.

‘Are you trying to tell me that there are no women or children in the outback?’

‘I’m trying to tell you that conditions on the station are very different to what you’re used to,’ said Gray with an edge to his voice. ‘It takes nearly forty minutes to fly there from here, and it’s over two hours by road. In the Wet, the only way you can get in and out is by plane. You’d be a very long way from shops and doctors and all the other things you probably take for granted, and, quite frankly, I haven’t the time to look after you at the moment. This is one of the busiest times of the year.

‘I’ve got fifteen thousand head of cattle out there,’ he went on, nodding his head at the distant horizon. ‘They’ve all got to be mustered in so that we can deal with them and draft out the sale cattle. The last cook-cum-housekeeper left several weeks ago, and nobody’s done any cleaning since. We’re taking it in turns to cook, and the kindest way to describe meals at the moment is “basic”.’

He shook his head. ‘I think you’d find the conditions too uncomfortable,’ he told Clare bluntly. ‘If you don’t want to go home, you’d be better off taking Alice to one of the resorts on the coast and waiting there until Jack gets back.’

‘I don’t think I can afford to do that, either.’ Clare flushed, humiliated at having to admit how precarious her financial situation was. ‘I’ve got a good job at home, but Pippa had never managed to save any money, and babies are expensive little things. And then when Pippa was ill, and I had to take time off to look after her and Alice, I used up the savings I had. I bought our ticket out here on credit as it was.’ She bit her lip. ‘I just don’t see how I could manage staying in a hotel or renting a house without knowing when Jack was going to get your message.

‘Besides,’ she went on bravely, ‘it sounds as if I could be useful to you.’

Gray’s unsettling brown gaze travelled from her earrings down over the stylishly simple dress to her strappy sandals. ‘Useful?’ he echoed, lifting one brow in a way that brought a flush to her cheeks. ‘In what way?’

His expression didn’t change, but she knew that he was amused. It was something to do with the deepening of a dent at the corner of his mouth, a creasing at the edges of his eyes, the faintest of glimmers in the unfathomable eyes. If he thought she was funny, she thought illogically, he might at least have the decency to smile properly!

She put up her chin. ‘I could be your housekeeper,’ she said with a shade of defiance. ‘I’m perfectly capable of cooking and cleaning.’