The Australians' Brides: The Runaway and the Cattleman

Oh hell, he’d wanted her so badly and it had felt so good to rediscover how that felt. A little later, he’d loved her moments of hunger and impatience, too. How could a man’s ego not be gratified by that? She wanted him, and she hadn’t kept it a secret.

But then the pressure of her needs and her expectations had hit. He’d felt her heat against him, telling him she wanted more, insisting it with warm, full pressure, and he’d panicked and … oh, hell … deflated and pulled away—hopefully before she could have noticed.

He hadn’t compared her to Liz. He hadn’t—was this wrong?—even thought about Liz while he was kissing Jacinda. Not for a second. And when he’d panicked, it had been about the other women, the two very different blondes, and the excruciating awkwardness that had played out both times when his performance had fizzled.

He could still remember it in painful detail. The girl at the races, with her disinterested Whatever … when he’d stumbled through an apology and hinted at an explanation. After my wife … If the girl had noticed his raspy throat and horrible struggle for words, she hadn’t reacted. She’d already been putting on her clothes, miffed at her disappointing night.

The other woman, the backpacker, had soothed him like a baby at first. He’d felt foolish, so uncomfortable at her sickly reassurance. It was the way you talked to a three-year-old who couldn’t get his pants on the right way around.

Never mind, sweetheart, we’ll keep working on it and you’ll do better next time.

She’d turned the whole thing into a personal challenge. Dr. Birgit, Scandinavian Erotic Therapist, to the rescue. He’d felt as if they were writing a new chapter in a sex manual, full of strenuous gymnastic positions and clinical efforts at stimulation.

None of which had worked.

Oh, jeez!

Stop thinking about it!

Here. How about this book? He flipped through Joshie’s “Journal Writing” notebook from three years ago and saw several pages of painstaking numbers showing the date, and labored sentences summarizing his day. “We wnt to the crek. I rod Sam. His sadel sliped. I staid on. Dad fixded it up tite agen.”

The book had about twenty spare pages left at the end of it. If Jacinda could fill those, she might not feel so tense and uncomfortable about asking him for more.

He hoped she did fill them, because he could tell it was important to her.

He put the file box away, closed his office door and took the notebook along the corridor to where she waited for him in the kitchen. Her hands still didn’t seem to know what to do with themselves. She hugged herself, finger-combed her hair, picked up a cleaning sponge and wiped down the countertop even though it was clean already.

“Oh, you found something?” she said, when she saw the book in his grip. She smiled eagerly, but dropped the smile too soon, as if she didn’t want him to guess that this remotely mattered to her.

Too late for that.

Handing it over, he hid the depth of his understanding and told her, “Just let me know when you need another one.”

“Thanks,” was all she said.

After asking Callan so impatiently for paper to write on, Jacinda left Josh’s old notebook blank that night. She looked at it for a while, standing alone in the kitchen after Callan had gone, fingers and brain tingling to begin, but then fatigue overtook her.

And doubt.

What would she write in it, anyhow?

What was the point?

The simple act of having to ask Callan for it seemed to have doubled the pressure. Even though she’d tried to play it down, he wasn’t stupid. He was a practical man. He’d expect results. He had no idea about writing. He’d want to see six new chapters of her long-gone novel by tomorrow night.

Why had she brought the subject up? She could probably write down all the words left inside her on the inside of her wrist or the palm of her hand. She should have asked for a Post-it note.

Carly did sleepwalk at midnight that night, after her earlier fear about Mommy’s safety out in the dark. Or was it because she’d picked up on Jac’s own tension over—well, various things? Carly’s emotional radar was scary, sometimes, and Jac wondered how much Kurt’s behavior during the separation and divorce had affected her daughter deep inside where it might never clearly show.

During her nighttime escapade, Carly had a drink of water in the kitchen, went to the bathroom and checked on the dogs sleeping on the veranda, all of it in her sleep. Then, fortunately, she seemed happy to be led back to bed. Jacinda slid gratefully between her own sheets and didn’t lie awake for another hour as she’d feared she might.

And when she awoke the next morning to the sound of Darth Vader crowing in the chook run, heralding first light, the second thing that came into her head after looking across at her beautiful and safely sleeping daughter was the notebook Callan had given her, and its blank pages.

She wanted to fill them.

She did.

It was a hunger that postcards could never satisfy.

Even though every scrap of the doubt was still there, the need was stronger, and wouldn’t go away. She craved the physical act of holding a pen in her hand and moving it across the paper. She needed to think about words, much better words than just, “How’re you doing?” and “Thank you for your letter.” Dressing quickly, she grabbed the book, found the pen she’d taken last night from a jar on the kitchen benchtop and went out to the veranda.

No one else was up. No sounds of movement came from Callan’s room farther along. No light was visible in Kerry’s little cottage across the dusty front yard. It was the coldest hour of the day. Jacinda sat on the cane couch, spread the mohair blanket over her legs and pulled it up over her shoulders. She thought about coffee but decided to wait, not wanting to risk disturbing Callan if he was having a rare lie-in.

She opened the notebook and found the first empty page. The lines on one side were widely spaced, suitable for a child’s first efforts at literacy, and on the opposite side, the paper was completely blank, ready to be filled by a stick figure and a clumsy tree.

Five minutes went by, but nothing happened. She was tempted to doodle. Her fingers tended to make all these elaborate curly patterns and shapes without her even thinking about it on the rare occasions when she wrote by hand. But she resisted the doodling. She wanted to wait for words.

And finally they came.

“I’m sitting here,” she wrote, “watching light seep upward into the sky like the curtain rising on a Broadway show.”

It didn’t rank with classical literature’s great opening sentences, but she told herself not to care. It doesn’t matter,Jacinda. Just keep going. There doesn’t have to be a story, or a direction, or a logical sequence. Not yet. Not ever. You’re not selling this. You’re not showing it to a soul. No, not to Callan, if he asks. So just keep writing.

Her hand had begun to ache and she’d penned four pages when Callan found her. The light was on over at Kerry’s, and she could hear the boys in the kitchen. She must have been sitting here almost an hour.

“Want coffee?” Callan offered.

He stood beside the wicker couch, looking too tall, and she had to fight the need to cover her page because he had a bird’s-eye view and could have read it if he’d wanted to. As it happened, he wasn’t looking at the page, he was looking at her face.

“I’ll come inside in a minute,” she told him, twisting toward him and leaning her elbow over the paper as if it were just a casual, accidental movement.

“No, I can bring it out for you,” he said. “You’re busy.”

“No, I’m—That rooster of yours doesn’t like visitors to sleep in, does he?” she joked lamely. “I’m only filling in time till Carly wakes up.”

“Well, she has.”

So you’re not buying my excuses, Callan?

Could you pretend, at least?

“Oh, does she want me?” She shifted, started to close the book.

“She’s with the boys. She’s fine.” He leaned down and flipped the pages open again, and their fingers touched. He pulled his hand away. “Keep going, and I’ll bring the coffee.”

“No, no, I’m finished. I’m done. It’s okay.”

“You looked like you were still working on it.”