Ally Blake - Wanted - Outback Wife

Free. Of all the words Mandy could have chosen to sell the idea that was the one that worked. For a child from a split home it certainly rang in her ears a lot more comfortably than marriage, or divorce…

But surely it couldn’t be that simple.

‘You and Lisa are both natives, yet Lisa has been single since I’ve known her and the closest thing to a long-term boyfriend you have managed to locate is rotten Jake. What makes you think I can do it in two and a half months?’

Lisa looked back down at her watch again, neatly avoiding Jodie’s comment.

‘One and a half,’ Mandy said, also ignoring the point.

‘Excuse me?’

‘You have to fill out an Intention To Marry form one month and one day before marrying. So at the outside, you have six weeks in which to find your man. Considering it has been a month since you starting putting big red crosses on your calendar in a passive-aggressive reminder of the looming Day You Have To Leave, I had my team make it top priority. As of today you have your own website!’

‘Website?’ Jodie repeated.

‘It’s called www.ahusbandinahurry.com,’ Mandy said, puffing up proudly.

Louise, who had been elegantly sipping on a Cosmopolitan, coughed inelegantly into her drink.

Jodie sunk her head onto her hands so as not to see the amplified mortification that would surely be in Louise’s eyes. ‘But what if anyone I know has seen it? What if my mother has seen it?’

‘Unless she is trawling the Internet looking for a cute British bride, then I think you’ll be fine. Besides, we did you proud. We used that photo of you from the Christmas in July barbecue on the home page.’

‘Not the action shot where I was laughing so hard you could see my tonsils as I fell off my chair by way of too much champagne?’ Jodie asked.

‘That’s the one,’ Mandy said, grinning. ‘The men at work voted that one their favourite. They all said you seemed, and I quote: “cute, adorable, and fun”.’

‘So why not just set her up with one of the guys from your work?’ Louise asked. Several faint frown lines marred her forehead. She wasn’t as aloof to the situation as she was making out. But Jodie couldn’t deal with what those frown lines meant. Not yet.

Jodie was beginning to see the possibilities. There was any number of reasons why two people could happily marry for convenience’s sake. And considering this was her last chance at staying in Australia, the place where she had found fabulous friends, a growing number of people who stopped her on the street to ask her where they could buy the unique floral-inspired earrings she herself created, and where she had begun to delight in her youth, maybe, just maybe, she could pull this off.

That was the clincher. After years of being the adult in the family, the one who remembered to pick up milk, the one who kept the house free of dust bunnies, the one who remembered to pay the gas bill, the one who made sure her mum got to work in time—when she managed to hold down a job—Jodie felt hopeful that at last she had a chance to find the youth inside herself.

‘Oh, no,’ Mandy said, ‘once they knew she was looking for a husband, even a two-year one, they backed away like I had pulled a shotgun.’

And there was the rub.

Jodie looked to Lisa, who had been quiet through all of this. ‘What do you think?’

Lisa held up both hands before slipping off the seat and backing away. ‘You don’t want to know what I think. Besides, can’t talk, I’m now on the clock.’

‘She has some old-fashioned view that you should only date, marry, sleep with a guy if you’re in love.’ Mandy shivered as though that would have saved her from a whole lot of fun. ‘But I’m not expecting you to worry about any of that. Leave it all to me.’

Jodie had every intention of leaving it all to Mandy. Though it wasn’t in her make-up to come out and say it, she needed help. For there was no way on God’s green earth she was ever going back to London. To that oppressive apartment. To that half life…

But the real question was: what sort of man would give up two years of his life to marry her, to be her husband, after knowing her for less than a month?

Heath swung back and forth on the love seat on the veranda of his big old home, staring out across the flat red dirt of Jamesons Run.

A blood-red sunset glowed across the plain. A nimble dry wind whipped along the dusty ground so that the golden kangaroo grass seemed to be waving toward the grand old willow dipping its sad leaves into the dam at the centre of his main paddock.

He could do with rain—and not just to damp down the dust storms that were springing up from nowhere more often than not these days. Rain would be a break in routine of stifling hot temperatures that spoke of an oppressive summer to come. Rain would be a change.

‘Knock, knock.’

Heath looked over his shoulder to find his older sister Elena standing in the doorway with a paper plate drooping under the weight of mixed desserts. An outfit of a floral dress and stockings on such a warm day could only mean one thing—a wedding or a funeral. And there had not been a wedding at Jamesons Run in years.

He let his riding-boot-clad feet drag against the wooden floor until the seat stopped swinging so she could sit beside him.

‘I brought this for you before the Crabbe sisters had the chance,’ Elena said. ‘No doubt they are still squabbling over whether you might prefer Carol’s custard tart or Rachel’s mud cake.’

Heath smiled, and he only hoped he had managed to make it reach his eyes. His appetite seemed to have departed him since the moment he had picked up the phone four days earlier to learn that Marissa was gone, but he swallowed a bite of Elena’s home-made pavlova to keep her happy. His mouth was so dry that the sticky passion-fruit topping caught on his palate. Now he would be prying pavlova loose with his heavy tongue all night.

‘How you doing, little brother?’ Elena asked, patting him on the knee. ‘You holding up okay?’

He nodded, though he turned away for a brief moment so she wouldn’t see his frown. Why was she worried about him? Cameron was the one she should have been comforting. Cameron was the one who had lost his wife. He had only lost…what? A friend? His last remaining link to the life he had once thought he might have?

‘Do we have enough ice?’ he asked, tidily avoiding the question. ‘I can run into town to get more.’

‘We have plenty of ice,’ Elena said. Her patting stopped. ‘Though I’m sure it won’t occur to Cameron to thank you, he appreciates you holding Marissa’s wake here. And when you took over for him during the eulogy, oh, that fair broke my heart then and there. You’re a good kid, Heath.’

‘A thirty-six-year-old kid,’ he reminded her. ‘Which makes you—’

‘A lady of indiscriminate age,’ Elena said, cutting him off quick smart. ‘So when are we going to get to use this big old place for more than Christmas parties, local community meetings and funerals? When do we all get to come here to celebrate your wedding?’

‘Ha! I’m surprised you and the Crabbe sisters haven’t lined Cam and me up for a double wedding by now.’

As soon as the words left his mouth he regretted them. They were cruel and hurtful and born of the fact that he barely believed the words even as he said them. He stood and moved to the edge of the veranda, wrapping his hands around the wooden railing until a bunch of splinters poked deep enough to hurt.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘That was out of order.’

‘And completely understandable, considering. Does the thought of settling down frighten you that much?’

Settling down? That was what she thought had kept him from the altar all this time? He had settled down a decade ago. What scared him was that if one day he settled down at Jamesons Run with someone else it meant that he would never leave. But now, on this tragic day, it no longer seemed the biggest problem in his life.