The Australians' Brides: The Runaway and the Cattleman

“It’s not work. It’s nothing.”

“Still, keep going and I’ll bring your coffee out,” he repeated stubbornly, for the third time.

“Okay. Thanks.” She didn’t want to argue anymore, because if she argued, he’d have questions about what she’d written, and she didn’t want questions.

He didn’t seem in a hurry to get the coffee he’d offered, however. He just stood there, leaning against the open doorway, making her skin itch and ripple with awareness. His body was magnetic. She wanted to grab his hip or push her face into his chest and smell his shirt.

Finally, mercifully—after probably a whole six seconds had elapsed—he asked, “Did I give you enough? I mean, are there enough pages left in the notebook? Because there are a couple more I can give you. And I have printer paper, too. Or if you want to use the computer again …”

“For the moment, I’m fine with this.” She laid her hand across the half-filled page.

It was, seriously, years since she’d written this much by hand, and yet she hadn’t even considered Callan’s computer, she realized. Somehow, this was the method that felt right for now, this filling of white paper with blue scrawl. She liked the physical act of scribbling out a wrong word, or jetting an arrow across the page toward a sentence added in after further thought.

Callan still hadn’t left.

“I’m guessing you don’t plan to show me right this minute.” He smiled, but she wasn’t in the mood to get teased on this.

“No.”

“No?”

She covered the page protectively with her arm once more. “It’s nothing. It’s terrible. It’s just—It’s not a story, or anything. It’s just little snatches. Impressions.”

“Like a poem.”

“Not even that. Sort of like a poem.” Unnh! “I might turn some of it into a poem later.”

“And then you can show me.” He gave her a sly look, and there was the promise of a grin hovering on his face.

“No! Please don’t … Please don’t treat this like a joke, Callan, or like tasting a batch of cookies I’ve made. It’s not like that. I couldn’t—I’m sorry, I don’t have a sense of humor about it, and I can’t explain that, I can’t explain why it’s important, I just—”

“Hey … hey.”

Oh crud, now he’d sat down, frowning and concerned. Now she’d really turned this into something. She should have fobbed him off, just agreed that, yes, it was a poem and that, sure, yes, she’d show it to him when it was done, and hope that the whole thing would drop from his mind because surely he had better things to think about.

“I’m not treating it like a joke, Jac,” he said.

His blue eyes were fixed on her, as motionless as the surface of the water hole at night, as deep and bright as the midday outback sky. The old, sagging couch pushed them closer together, the way it had on her first night here, as shameless as a professional matchmaker. Go on, it said, feel his thigh pressed against yours. Don’t fight it. You like it.

“I’m not laughing at you about this.” His voice had a husky note in it. “I wouldn’t. I know it’s important.”

“It’s not important.” She pushed her hand against his upper arm and tried to shimmy her butt sideways so the matchmaking couch didn’t get its wicked way. Callan leaned back, respecting her need for space, still watching her. “It’s stupid,” she said. “Writing really doesn’t matter. If I never wrote another word in my life, the universe would not be a poorer place.”

“You don’t believe that.”

She laughed. “No, I don’t, but I should! Because it doesn’t make sense that it’s so important. I’m not expecting you to understand any of this.”

“Give me some credit.”

“No, I didn’t mean that you’re not smart or—You’re not a writer, that’s all.”

“Do I have to be? Isn’t there only one thing I need to understand? Without it, you’re incomplete,” he said simply.

She nodded silently, stunned at the words.

Yes.

She’d never heard it put so plainly.

Without it she was incomplete.

“You just said it,” she stammered. “Y-you’re so right. How—?”

“Everyone has things like that. Their kids, their work, their land. Their gardening, their guitar playing, their sport.” His tone had changed, sounded more distant and defensive, like a lecture. But then he couldn’t sustain it, and seemed to give up the attempt. His voice dropped again, the pitch low and personal. “You don’t need to ask yourself or anyone else why writing is important, Jacinda. You just need to know—I have to have this in my life to feel complete. That’s okay. That’s no big deal. The bad, impossible part is that if something takes it away, it kills you, doesn’t it? It cripples you, torments you, until you find a way to get it back.”

“How did you know that?” It was almost a whisper. Barely aware of her action, she grabbed his hand, let the couch lean her in closer to him. “Just hearing you say it is … great, such a relief … thank you. For taking it seriously. For saying it. But how did you know about the torment?”

His body sagged. His eye contact dropped as if the thread of communication between them had been sliced through. He looked as if he was talking to the floorboards or to his shoes, not to her.

“Hell, Jacinda! D’you honestly think you’re the only one it’s ever happened to?” he muttered.

Chapter Nine

Callan wouldn’t follow through.

Jacinda didn’t push or demand, but she wanted to understand what he meant. How had it happened to him? Where was he incomplete? He couldn’t be talking about the loss of Liz, because there was grief in that, yes, but no shame and she was certain that she’d seen shame in him when he’d said those words.

D’you honestly think you’re the only one it’s ever happened to?

Shame? Why?

They had common ground, it wasn’t a source of shame, and she thought they should grab at it and make use of it, but he clammed up and wouldn’t talk about it, said it wasn’t important, he couldn’t explain, she should just forget it. Carly’s arrival on the veranda a moment or two later gave him an easy way out that he snatched up as shamelessly as a serial dater might claim, “I lost your phone number.”

“Woo-hoo, Carlz!” he said. “Ready for another big day?”

Knowing how much she didn’t want to feel pressured about her writing and therefore not wanting to pressure Callan in return, Jac let it go for the time being. Instead, she hugged Carly, closed Lockie’s old notebook and took it into the house. Four pages was enough for now. Four pages was good. Even a sentence would have been good, so four pages was actually great.

Three days later, she’d written fifteen.

They still weren’t a part of anything. Too disjointed and personal for a story. Too poetic for a diary. Not jazzy and chatty enough for a blog on the Net.

She wrote about the colors of her favorite hen’s feathers in the sun, about the feel of bread dough in her hands, and the words that Kerry had used when she’d taught the recipe and the technique. She wrote two pages of stuff she imagined herself yelling at Kurt, not in his huge executive office or out front of Carly’s preschool, but the things she would have yelled if she’d been standing on the rock ledge at the water hole about to jump in, while Kurt was down on the sand—and okay, admittedly, since this was a fantasy, cowering there.

She wrote out the words six hundred thousand acres and they looked really good on the page, much better than just the numbers. They looked so good that she found out some other numbers from Callan—the distance around the perimeter of Lake Frome, the length of all the fences on his land, the height above sea level of Mount Hindley and Mount Fitton and Mount Neil—and wrote those down in words, also.

She wrote about all the new things Carly did, and the new discoveries she made.

Including a snake.