Lilian Darcy - The Australians' Brides - The Runaway and the Cattleman

The thought of several glorious early morning hours alone with Jac made him heat up way too much.

He just liked her.

A lot.

Her company. Her outlook. Her smile.

And he was a man, so liking channeled itself into predictable pathways.

Physical ones.

He knew that his mood changed when he walked into the house and she was there. His spirits lifted, floating his energy levels up along with them the way empty fuel cans used to float the scrappy wooden rafts he and Nicky had hammered together to ferry around the water hole as kids.

Who noticed?

Someone had to.

Mum wasn’t blind, and her hearing was pretty sharp, too. Could she hear the way his voice changed? He got more talkative, louder. He laughed more. He threw Carly up in the air, wrestled with Josh, told bad jokes to Lockie, got all three kids overexcited before bedtime just because he was too keyed up himself and couldn’t keep it dammed back.

And Jacinda reacted the same way.

He could see it and hear it and feel it because all of it echoed exactly what was happening inside him.

Their eyes met too often. They found too many reasons to share a smile. The smallest scraps of conversation took on a richer meaning. Shared coffee in the mornings was cozier. Jokes were funnier. It took him longer to wind down enough to sleep at night.

Sometimes he felt so exhilarated by it, as if he were suddenly equipped to rule the world. Or his corner of it, anyhow—those six hundred thousand acres that impressed her so much.

The new mustering yard was great, structured to minimize stress and injury to the cattle. His yield and his prices were definitely going to improve. The long-range weather forecast held the hope of rain, and he’d put in some new dams just last year—Jacinda called them ponds—to conserve as much of the runoff as he could.

He’d talked to her about all this and she’d listened and nodded and told him, “I had no idea so much research and thought had to go into running cattle in this kind of country.” And he’d thought, yes, he had skills and knowledge and strength that he took for granted, things that could impress a woman that he’d never seen in that light before.

Not even with Liz, because Liz had grown up with cattlemen and had taken it all for granted, too, just the way he did.

What did Mum see?

What did Pete see?

Pete had irritated the heck out of him, earlier in the week, with the ancient-tribal-wisdom routine that he liked to pull on unsuspecting victims from time to time.

No, it wasn’t really a con, because Pete was pretty wise in a lot of ways, but Callan had felt conned, all the same. He’d felt naked and exposed.

What did Pete see?

What was all that biblical-style stuff about seasons turning and everything having its place and its time? He liked Pete’s conversation better when it was about fence posts and calving. On Wednesday afternoon, they’d had a big, pointless argument about wildflowers.

“Desert pea? It’s too soon, Pete. We had those freak thunderstorms a month or two ago, I know, but the flowers won’t be out for a few weeks yet, I’d say. Maybe not until spring.”

“Yeah, but happens that way, sometimes. So busy saying it’s too soon, and that’s right when you see ’em, red flowers dripping on the ground like blood, right where the rainwater soaked into the ground.”

“I still say it’s too soon.”

“You want your friend to see ’em before she goes,” Pete had said. It was a statement, not a question. “You’re not happy, because you think she won’t.”

And he was right.

Callan liked Jacinda so much, he wanted to show her dawn from Mount Hindley, and Pete’s ancestors’ rock carvings farther up in the gorge, and the bloodred, black-eyed Sturt’s desert pea flowers blooming on his land.

“Got your camera?” he asked her, as they walked out to the four-wheel-drive parked in its usual crooked spot in front of the house.

They moved and spoke quietly because the kids were still asleep. Mum’s light was on. She’d have made her early morning cup of tea and would be drinking it in bed, in her quilted dressing gown. She’d be dressed and over at the main house before Carly and the boys had finished wiping the sleep from their eyes.

“Yep,” Jacinda answered, holding up her day pack. “Remembered it this time.” She shivered a little.

“Cold?” he asked. It wasn’t an award-winning question. Of course she was cold. So was he. They’d need to get moving before they would warm up.

“A bit, but I’m fine.”

He liked that about her, too. She didn’t complain. Being cold or hungry or scared or wet … or confronted by a carpet python … or teased about drooling … was never enough on its own to spoil her mood. She took things in stride, just like her daughter did.

Yeah, but there were limits.

Monday morning, five days ago, on the veranda.

Sheesh, what had he said?

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

Callan, idiot, you can’t say things like that in a naked moment and then drop it and refuse to talk.

It was still sitting there, the conversational elephant that they both pretended they didn’t see. Jac didn’t know what he’d meant, and he wasn’t going to tell her, so they would both just have to ride it out until the memory of Monday morning wasn’t so fresh and didn’t matter anymore.

Maybe papering it over with fresh memories of things like going into Leigh Creek with Carly, eating quandong pies, climbing Mount Hindley at dawn and watching yellow-footed rock wallabies come down to drink would help.

He warmed the engine and took his usual semicircular route around and out of the yard. They parked beside the dry creek bed under the same tree as last Saturday night, which was a mistake because it reminded him of … all sorts of things. But if he’d parked somewhere different, it might have looked as if he was avoiding that spot, which would just be crazy.

The sky had begun to soften in the east, but the air was still cold and the dew heavy.

“I love being awake and out of the house this early,” Jac said, but she shivered again as she spoke.

Which made him want to put his arms around her to keep her warm.

He hiked faster, instead, moving his feet over the rocks the way he’d been doing all his life, forgetting that her stride wouldn’t be as sure-footed or as wide. She didn’t ask him to slow down until they were almost at the top of the mountain, and then her request came just a few seconds too late.

“Callan, could you—? Yikes! Ouch!”

She’d stepped onto an unsteady rock and it had tipped. She stumbled several steps and grazed her calf on another rock before almost falling to her knees.

“I’m sorry.” Oh, damn! She’d already hurt herself once this week, on that strand of barbed-wire fence while he’d feared she was lost. She’d only removed the Band-Aids Thursday morning. “I was going too fast. Wanted to warm us up.”

He doubled back to her, not reaching her as fast as he wanted to. He definitely shouldn’t have let himself get so far ahead. She bent down and started picking dirt from the graze, wincing and frowning.

“Let me,” he said.

“It’s nothing. The skin is barely broken.”

“What about this?” He took her arm and turned it over so she could see. She had a graze there, too, which she hadn’t even noticed yet, a scrape between her elbow and wrist where blood was beginning to well up.

She made a sound of frustration and impatience. “I shouldn’t have tried to go so fast.”

“It was my fault. You were only trying to keep up, and I have better boots than you.”

She smiled, tucking in the corner of her mouth. “That’s right. Blame it on the boots, not the hopeless city-bred American.”