The Australians' Brides: The Runaway and the Cattleman

“I heard the screen door,” he confessed.

She was wearing pink pajamas, herself, in kind of a plaid pattern on a cream background, and her dark hair fell over her shoulders like water falling over rock. Her skin looked shadowy inside the V of the pajama front, and even when she smiled, her lips stayed soft and full.

“Why does your mother sleep over at the little cottage?” she asked.

“Oh … uh …” He had no idea why her thoughts would have gone in that direction. “Just to give the two of us some space. She moved in there when I married Liz.” Newlyweds … privacy … he didn’t want to go there in his thoughts, and continued quickly, “She’ll sleep in the main house if I’m away, of course, but she works pretty hard around here and sometimes she needs a break from the boys.”

“Right. Of course.”

“Why did you ask?”

She blinked. “I don’t know. Gosh, I don’t know!” She looked stricken and uncomfortable.

They stared at each other and she made a movement, shifting over for him, finding him a piece of the blanket. Without saying anything, he sat down and took the corner of the blanket. Its edges made two sides of a triangle, across his chest and back across his knees. A wave of warmth and sweetness hit him—clean hair and body heat and good laundering.

The old cane of the couch was a little saggy in the center, and his weight pushed Jacinda’s thigh against his. Carly stretched in her sleep and began to encroach on his space, which stopped the contact between himself and her mom from becoming too intimate. This felt safe, even though it shouldn’t have.

“Well, you know, ask anything you like,” he told her. “I didn’t mean you had to feel it wasn’t your business.”

Silence.

“It’s so quiet,” she murmured.

“Is it spooking you?”

“A little. I guess it’s not quiet, really. The house creaks, and there are rustlings outside. Just now I heard … I think it was a frog. I’m hoping it was a frog.”

“You mean as opposed to the notorious Greerson’s death bat with its toxic venom and ability to chew through wire window screens to get to its human victims?”

“That one, yes.”

“Well, their mating cries are very similar to a frog’s, but Greerson’s death bats don’t usually come so close to the house except in summer.”

She laughed. “You’re terrible!”

“We do have some nice snakes, however, with a great line in nerve toxins.”

“In the house?”

He sighed at this. “I really want to say no, Jacinda, but I’d be lying. Once in a while, in the really hot weather, snakes have been known to get into the house. And especially under the house.”

She thought about this for a moment, and he waited for her to demand the next flight out of here, back to nice, safe Kurt and his power games in L.A. “So what should I tell Carly about snakes?” she finally asked.

“Not to go under the veranda. Not to play on the pile of fence posts by the big shed. If she sees one in the open, just stand still and let it get away, because it’s more scared than she is. If she gets bitten—or thinks she might have been, because snake bites usually don’t hurt—tell someone, stay calm and stay still.”

“If she gets bitten, what happens?”

“She won’t get bitten. I’ve lived on this land my whole life, apart from boarding school, and I never have.”

“But if she does?”

“We put on a pressure bandage, keep her lying quiet and call the flying doctor.”

“Which I’m hoping is not the same as the School of the Air, because I’m not sure what a doctor on a computer screen could do about snake bite.”

“The flying doctor comes in an actual airplane, with a real nurse and real equipment and real snake antivenin.”

“And takes her away to a real hospital, with me holding her hand the whole way, and she’s fine.”

“That’s right. But the pressure bandage is pretty important. I’ll show you where we keep them in the morning. And I’ll show you how to put one on, just in case.”

She nodded. “Got it. Thanks. So you’ve done some first-aid training?”

“A couple of different courses, yeah. So has Mum. Seems the sensible thing, out here.”

“And is that how you run your land and your cattle, too? Sensibly?”

“Try to.”

They kept talking. He was wide, wide awake and so was she. The moon drifted through its high arc toward the west, slowly shifting the deep blue shadows over the silver landscape. It was so warm under the blanket, against the chill of the desert night. Carly shifted occasionally, her body getting more and more relaxed, encroaching farther into his space.

Jacinda was a good listener, interested enough to ask the right questions, making him laugh, drawing out detail along with a few things he hadn’t expected to say—like the way he still missed Dad, but thought his father would be proud of some of the changes he’d made at Arakeela, such as the land-care program and the low-stress stock-handling methods.

Callan thought he’d probably spooked Jacinda more than she’d admitted to regarding the snakes, but she hadn’t panicked about it, she’d just asked for the practical detail. If it happened, what should she and Carly do?

And the fact that she hadn’t panicked made Callan think more about her panic over Kurt. The last piece of his skepticism dried up like a mud puddle in the sun, replaced with trust. Whatever she was afraid of from her ex-husband, it had to be real or she would never have come this far, landed on him like this. She wasn’t crazy or hysterical. She needed him, and even though he didn’t know her that well yet, he wasn’t going to let her down.

“Do you have any idea of the time?” she asked eventually. She hid a yawn behind her hand. “Has to be pretty late.”

“By where the moon is, I’d say around three.”

“Three? You mean we’ve been sitting here for three hours? Oh, Callan, I’m so sorry! You have work to do in the morning. I’m a guest with jet lag, I should never have kept you up like this.”

“Have I been edging toward the door?”

“No, because Carly has both feet across your knees!”

“True, and who would think she’d have such bony heels?”

The little girl must have heard her name. Her eyelids flickered and her limbs twitched. Callan and Jacinda both held their breath. She seemed to settle, but then her chest started pumping up and down, her breathing shallow.

“I think she’s having a bad dream,” Jacinda murmured. Carly broke into crying and thrashing, and had to be woken up to chase the dream away. “It’s okay, sweetheart, it wasn’t real, it was a dream, just a bad dream. Open your eyes and look at me. Mommy’s here, see? We’re sitting on the porch. The moon is all bright. Callan is here. Everything’s fine.” In an aside to Callan, she added, “I’m going to take her to the bathroom and get her back to bed, but you go ahead.”

She stood up, struggling to gather Carly into her arms at the same time.

“You’re carrying her?”

“She’ll get too wide awake if I let her walk.”