The Australians' Brides: The Runaway and the Cattleman

Would he ever learn to act naturally around her?

He didn’t hold out a lot of hope.

“We must be almost at the top,” she said when they were ready to start moving again.

“Just about.” It felt good to find something safe to talk about! “See that cairn of rocks up ahead? That marks the official summit.”

“Did your family build it?”

It was a good-sized pile of stones, grading from larger at the base to smaller at the top, a couple of meters high.

“No, it’s been here way longer than we have, over a hundred and fifty years. A couple of brothers, the Haymans, built it when they first ran sheep here in the 1850s.”

“Do you know the whole history of your land, then, Callan?”

“Pretty much.”

“And the aboriginal myths?”

“And the geology. You’re standing on some pretty nice quartzite.”

She laughed, intrigued and pleased for some reason. “Am I?”

“Yep, although down in the gorge itself it’s granite. I can show you some maps. And I have satellite pictures, too. Those are fascinating, when you look at—” He stopped.

Or not.

Because she couldn’t be that interested, could she? She was just being polite.

“Finish,” she said.

“The way the land folds,” he summarized quickly, “but, no, I’m done on geology. Let me know if you ever do want to see pictures. Speaking of which, get your camera out or you’ll miss the sunrise.”

She nodded, swung her day pack off her shoulders and found the natty little piece of digital technology. He watched her switch it on, position herself on a rock, line up her shot. There was a moment of stillness and expectation. The whole earth waited, and Jac waited with it.

Callan’s body felt warm and loose from the walk, a little dusty around his bare lower legs. He was thirsty, but didn’t even want to breathe right now, let alone fiddle around in search of his water bottle. He just wanted to watch Jac watching the dawn.

She wore stretchy black shorts that finished snugly halfway down her lean, smooth thighs, and her legs were bare until they disappeared inside a pair of chunky white tennis socks just above her ankles. She had her backside parked on a rock and her knees bent up to provide a steady resting point for her elbows.

The sleeves of her navy sweatshirt were pushed up. Beyond gracefully bent wrists, her hands looked delicate yet sure as they held the camera, and she’d turned her baseball cap around the wrong way like a kid, so that the peak wouldn’t get in the way of her view.

“Oh, it’s fabulous … fabulous,” she whispered.

The horizon began to burn and the first rays shot across the landscape, setting it alight with molten gold. She clicked her camera, got impatient with her position and stood up, circling the whole three hundred and sixty degrees twice, clicked and clicking, as the light changed and flared and shifted around her. It settled on a herd of cattle, turning them from dark blobs into distinctive red-brown silhouettes, etched with a glow. Finally, she lowered the camera and smiled.

And he came so close to grabbing that back-to-front baseball cap off her head, throwing it on the ground and kissing her, except … except … all the terrifying reasons from the other night were still there, and he didn’t see how they were ever going to let him alone.

“I want to see the satellite pictures and hear about the history, Callan,” she told him. “Don’t think that you’re ever boring about this place, because you’re not.”

“Yeah, it had occurred to me as a possibility,” he managed to say.

“No. Not a possibility. Okay?”

He just nodded, relieved but still wondering if she was simply being polite.

“Mmm, I need some water,” she said.

They both drank, then she put her camera away and asked, “Will we miss the kangaroos again?”

“We should get down into the gorge, before the sun climbs too high, yes.”

He stayed behind her, this time. The sun at this height was already warm on their bare legs, but when they got lower, the gorge was still in shade. It was magical. They saw several kangaroos and a pair of yellow-footed rock wallabies, impossibly nimble and sure-footed as they bounded back up the rugged sides of the gorge after their morning drink. A family of emus showed up, too, their big curved backs heaped with the usual pile of untidy gray-brown feathers that bounced as they got startled by the human presence and ran.

Jacinda took more photos, then went to put her camera away.

“I brought breakfast, if you want it,” Callan told her. “We can light the fire. Or we can head back.”

She twisted to look back at him, trying to read what he really wanted, not wanting to be a time-waster or a nuisance. “Can we stay? Is there work you have to do?”

“We can stay. I’m getting pretty hungry.”

And I don’t want to end this, because it’s too good.

She helped him with the fire. He’d brought an old pan, eggs and bacon, bread to make toast, a couple of garden tomatoes to grill, long-life milk, instant coffee and the billycan to boil the water in. They got everything ready, but the flames were still too high to start cooking. Their hungry stomachs would have to wait for glowing coals.

Jacinda looked at her day pack a couple of times in an uneasy kind of way and he almost teased her about it. Was she checking no snakes were lurking, eager to crawl inside? Finally, she blurted out, “I brought my … Lockie’s … notebook. Would you mind if I scribbled in it for a little while?”

Of course he didn’t mind.

And he tried not to watch, because he knew that somehow it was private. She didn’t like to feel herself under the spotlight of someone else’s observation when she stared at the blank page or scratched the ballpoint pen impatiently back and forth over a wrong word—or even when she was writing smoothly and unconsciously smiling at the fact that it was going well.

Okay, so that meant he was watching. Sneaking glances, anyhow.

Even though the flames had still not died back quite right, he started cooking to distract himself, putting strips of bacon and halves of tomato into the pan and poking at them with a barbecue fork more than he needed to. He knew he shouldn’t keep spying on Jac’s tentative new relationship with written words.

He was so busy not noticing her write that he didn’t notice when she stopped. Her question sneaked up and leaped at him like an enemy ambush. “Callan, tell me what you meant the other day, that I’m not the only one it’s ever happened to.”

He whipped around, bringing the sizzling pan with him and almost losing the freshly cooked eggs over the rim. She had the notebook open in her lap and the pen still in her hand. What was she going to do? Record his answer?

She looked startled at his sudden movement. Her gaze dropped to the pan. “Careful ….”

“Sheesh, Jacinda!” he said on a hiss.

The ambush metaphor still held. He felt like a soldier, taken by surprise but on such a hair trigger that he was ready for the attack anyhow, weapon fully loaded. He bristled all over, prepared to lie under oath, stay silent under torture, neutralize the onslaught in any way he could.

He wasn’t going to talk about this!

Wrong, wrong, wrong, Jacinda realized at once, watching Callan set the pan of eggs down on a rock without looking at it.