Barbara Hannay - Claiming His Family

The boy’s bottom lip protruded as he thought about this. ‘What can we have to eat?’

‘What would you like?’

‘Pancakes?’

‘Pancakes at this hour?’ Two seconds later, she shrugged. ‘Why not? I’m sure the hotel can fix them for us. And then the sooner you get to sleep the sooner you’ll see your dad in the morning.’

She was rewarded with a huge grin.

What exactly was our problem?

Why, Luke wondered, had he asked Erin that? After all, he’d had five years to come up with his own answers. He’d worked out exactly why their marriage had ended.

At the time, he hadn’t seen it coming. There’d been no lead up. No storm warning.

It was only later that he’d understood that he should have taken Erin’s concerns seriously. When she’d fretted about the baby he’d tried to jolly her out of it, had told her she worried too much.

When she’d got mad with him for spending too much time away working with cattle he hadn’t tried to explain the pressures of running the property, he’d simply tried to shrug and crack a joke. Which had been pretty damn thoughtless. But he hated conflict.

If there had been a problem—a little bickering—he’d tended to say, ‘Let’s forget it and have a cuddle.’ Erin, on the other hand, was a bit of a terrier. She was an up-front person. She wanted to push an issue through to the bitter end.

But tonight he’d been the terrier pushing her, goading her. Why the hell couldn’t he stay calm and play this game her way? Their marriage was over.

Why was that so hard to remember?

What exactly was our problem?

Erin lay staring at the ceiling, desperate for sleep, while Luke’s question echoed in her head.

How could Luke pretend not to know the answer? Their problem had been clear as day. Right from the start it had been there in letters ten feet high for everyone to see—everyone, that was, except the two of them, blinded by foolish, foolish passion.

Luke’s parents and the Mannings’ neighbours and the ranch hands—they had all known that Luke’s Yankee bride was wrong for him. Her taste in clothes, her accent, her complexion, her attitude—everything was wrong.

The people at Warrapinya were friendly enough, but they had shown Erin, with varying degrees of subtlety, that she didn’t fit in. Even the contract fencing team, who had spent a few weeks on the property repairing barbed wire fences, had looked at her with puzzled smiles and she knew they’d joked about her behind her back.

Even so, she felt so terribly, terribly guilty because the things that had ended their marriage were so small really. Luke hadn’t gambled or drunk excessively or beaten her. But the little problems had snowballed till they loomed too large.

And that had been before Joey was born and her real problems started.

Everything had become completely clear once she had been safely back in NewYork. How could she ever have been so idiotic as to think she could live anywhere else?

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