Outback Boss, City Bride Read online

  ‘No wonder you’re so sensible now,’ he said, returning to his own task of going through the junk pile.

  ‘I sometimes wish I could be reckless and interesting and exciting,’ she confessed, ‘but I just can’t be.’

  Hal thought she had looked pretty exciting in the high heels she had worn the night before, but decided he had better not say so.

  ‘Do you ever try?’ he asked instead.

  ‘Of course not,’ said Meredith primly. ‘I’m much too sensible for that!’

  They both laughed, then both realised at the same time that it had been a mistake to let their eyes meet like that. The air was suddenly tight between them and there didn’t seem to be enough oxygen in the room to breathe properly.

  So much for being sensible! With an effort, Meredith wrenched her eyes away from Hal’s and concentrated on taking a proper breath, something that had never presented her with any difficulties before.

  Mindlessly, she tidied another pile of papers and sought desperately for something to say to break the fizzing tension. Her gaze skittered around the room, resting on anything except Hal, falling at last on the creased photograph that she had pulled out of the cardboard box earlier and propped against the computer. Meredith reached for it, seizing on the change of subject.

  ‘Talking of being children, I meant to ask you about this,’ she said, swinging round on the chair and leaning forward to show him the picture without actually meeting his eyes. ‘It’s a lovely photo. Is that you on the right?’

  The lingering smile was wiped from Hal’s face. ‘Where did you get that?’

  His voice was like a lash and Meredith jerked back in surprise. She had wanted to change the atmosphere, but she hadn’t counted on such spectacular success. The temperature in the room had plummeted and when she looked at Hal’s expression she felt suddenly cold. What had she done?

  Puzzled, she looked down at the photo. What was there in it to provoke such a reaction? It was just a happy family shot.

  ‘In that box,’ she said, pointing. ‘There was a load of rubbish in there, but I couldn’t throw it away. I thought Emma and Mickey might like to see their mum as a little girl. I presume that’s her in the middle?’ She tried a smile to lighten the atmosphere. ‘And who’s the little boy with the cheeky grin? I didn’t realise-what are you doing?’

  Her voice rose and she snatched the picture back from Hal, who had reached over to take it and was about to tear it in half.

  ‘You can’t do that!’ she said, holding the photo protectively and staring at him in disbelief.

  ‘I don’t want it.’ She had never seen his expression that cold. ‘It’s just junk.’

  ‘But it’s your family!’

  ‘Look, it’s none of your business!’ Hal lost control of his temper. ‘It doesn’t matter who it is or what it is. It’s nothing to do with you.’ He glared at her. ‘Why can’t you just leave things alone?’

  ‘But-’

  ‘You could have cleared a space for your computer and got on with your own work,’ he went on furiously. ‘But no! You couldn’t do anything as simple as that, could you? You always have to interfere. You have to poke around in things that don’t concern you,’ he said, practically spitting.

  Shaken by his anger, Meredith moistened her lips. ‘I’ve obviously touched a nerve,’ she said carefully, still not really understanding what she had done.

  ‘Too right you have!’ Suddenly needing only to get out, Hal swung for the door. ‘Keep the bloody photo if it matters so much to you,’ he snarled, kicking the stool out of his way. ‘But don’t show it to me again. I don’t want it.’

  Meredith sat very still after he had gone. She heard the screen door slam and the angry clatter of his boots down the kitchen steps. Seconds later he appeared striding across the yard, his body rigid. Watching him through the window, Meredith bit her lip as he disappeared in the direction of the paddock where the horses were kept. This was her fault.

  Carefully, she smoothed out the crumpled photo. It showed a family squinting at the camera, like thousands of other families before them. The man looked so like Hal that he had to be his father, so that, thought Meredith, turning her attention to the woman, had to be his mother. She had been a beautiful woman and obviously very stylish. Meredith could imagine her in that sitting room, if not in the kitchen or on the scruffy veranda.

  Hal looked about twelve, so his mother must have died not long after the picture had been taken. Was that what had upset him so much?

  Meredith sighed as she stared down at the faces, their smiles frozen in time. Hal was right. It was none of her business and she shouldn’t have poked around in his private papers, but it had seemed such a happy picture. She had never dreamt that he wouldn’t be glad to see it.

  He had listened so sympathetically when she had been talking about her childhood, too. Meredith had found herself talking easily, and it had almost been like finding a friend. Now she had spoilt everything.

  Depressed, she looked at her watch and got to her feet when she saw the time. She would apologise to Hal later, and would just have to hope that it wasn’t too late. In the meantime, there were potatoes to be peeled.

  She left the photo by the computer. It wasn’t hers to keep. If Hal wanted to destroy it, that was his choice, but she wouldn’t tear it up for him.

  Meredith hoped all evening for a chance to tell Hal how sorry she was, but they were never alone and she knew better than to raise the subject with anyone else there. Emma and Mickey had taken to hanging around in the kitchen, and by the time Meredith had changed into her evening clothes, the stockmen were having a beer with Hal.

  Hal himself had recovered his temper, but Meredith could see that he was withdrawn and the grey eyes were shuttered. When he turned down her offer to help with the clearing up after the meal, she decided that it might be better to leave it. If Hal didn’t want to talk, she shouldn’t make him. For once, she wouldn’t interfere or do what she thought was best, she thought, remembering how his comments about the way she treated Lucy had stung.

  Instead, she would do some work.

  The office was less inviting at night. Meredith tried to ignore the blank black windows and set up her laptop, averting her eyes from the photograph that had caused so much trouble that afternoon. Downloading her emails meant unplugging the phone, plugging in her laptop and dialing the Internet, a long process that had her remembering broadband at her house in London with affection.

  She was just plugging the phone in once more when the door opened and Hal came in with a mug of coffee for her. ‘I thought you’d like this if you’re going to work,’ he said.

  ‘Oh…thank you.’ Having waited all evening for a chance to talk to him, Meredith found herself suddenly tongue-tied.

  She could see the photo still propped against the base of the desktop computer and wished that she had put it away. It felt as if there were a flashing neon arrow pointing at it, reminding Hal of her interference. She went to sit back on the chair, where her body would partly obscure the picture, but it was too late. Hal had already seen it.

  ‘Hal, I’m sorry-’ she began, but he interrupted her.

  ‘No, I’m the one that’s sorry,’ he said. ‘I overreacted earlier. I haven’t seen a picture of my mother for over twenty years. I thought my father had destroyed them all and it was a shock to suddenly see her again.’

  He took a breath, knowing that it would be impossible to explain to Meredith just how much of a shock it had been to come face to face with the past without warning like that. ‘I took it out on you,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘I shouldn’t have been looking through your papers,’ Meredith apologised in her turn. ‘You were right; it was none of my business.’

  ‘I’ve never looked in that box,’ he told her. ‘It must have been my father’s.’

  Reaching past Meredith, Hal picked up the photograph and stood looking down at it, his mouth twisted. ‘I wonder why he kept this.’

 
It seemed obvious to Meredith. ‘It’s a lovely picture.’ She hesitated. ‘Your mother was very pretty.’

  ‘Yes, she was that,’ Hal agreed bitterly.

  ‘Why would your father destroy all pictures of her?’ asked Meredith. The pictures she and Lucy had of their own mother were their most treasured possessions. ‘It seems a terrible thing to do.’

  ‘As terrible as destroying a family?’ Hal dropped the picture back on the desk. ‘That’s what she did.’

  ‘Your mother?’ she said, startled. ‘But…I thought she died.’

  ‘No, she didn’t die,’ said Hal, a muscle beating in his clenched jaw. ‘She’s alive and well and living in Sydney, apparently. I haven’t seen her since she walked away from Wirrindago when I was twelve. She didn’t even say goodbye. She just left Dad a note, got into the ute and drove herself to Whyman’s Creek one day. Dad had to go and collect it from the airport after she’d gone.’

  Meredith stared at him, shocked. ‘She abandoned you?’

  ‘She abandoned us all. Lydia was only nine.’

  The same age she had been when she had been left at boarding school, Meredith thought. She had felt abandoned then, but what if it had been her own mother who had walked out on her? Meredith couldn’t imagine it. She couldn’t imagine leaving her own children.

  ‘Jack was ten,’ he went on, and she remembered the little boy with the cheeky grin.

  ‘Your brother?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Hal, but he didn’t elaborate.

  ‘Do…do you know why she went?’ she asked after a moment.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ he said with a grim smile. ‘She was bored.’

  ‘Bored?’

  Hal raised an eyebrow at her incredulous expression. ‘I would have thought that you of all people would understand. You’re a city girl too. You don’t like the heat and the flies and the loneliness.’

  ‘No,’ Meredith agreed, stung by the implication that she would understand walking out on a family. ‘But I’m not married to you and I don’t have three children!’

  ‘True,’ he conceded. He leant back against the desk and picked up the picture once more, holding it as if he were fascinated and yet hated it at the same time. ‘Well, it was too much for my mother.’

  He studied his mother’s face. He had forgotten how young and pretty she had been. ‘She should never have married my father in the first place. She was from Brisbane. They met at some outback ball and she fell in love with the idea of living on a cattle station, but year after year of the reality of it wore her down. Some years can be hard,’ he told Meredith. ‘She missed having friends and complained that my father and the men only talked about cattle and horses, which they probably did.’

  ‘But what about you? Her children?’ Meredith was still struggling with the idea that anyone could walk away from their children. ‘Didn’t she want you to go with her?’

  Hal glanced up at her then, his grey eyes hard with the memory. ‘We would have cramped her style,’ he said. ‘She’d been going on longer and longer visits to her family, which turned out to be just a cover for meeting up with an old boyfriend. They moved to Sydney together-got married eventually-and they wouldn’t have wanted three half-wild kids around. Besides,’ he said, ‘we wouldn’t have gone. We couldn’t imagine living in a city. Wirrindago was all we knew.’

  Meredith was silent. It was easier to understand now why Hal was so determined not to get married. He wasn’t prepared to take the risk of being abandoned again, the way he had been as a boy.

  ‘It must have been very hard for you all,’ she said after a while. ‘How did your father cope?’

  ‘Badly.’

  ‘And you?’ she asked gently.

  Hal’s eyes went back to the picture, but this time he wasn’t looking at his mother. He was looking at the children with their bright, confident faces, unclouded by any suspicion that the world they knew could ever end.

  ‘We thought we were OK,’ he said. ‘After Mum left, Dad let things slip, and we were allowed to do what we wanted. For a while it was almost like a holiday.’

  He remembered those days so clearly. The freedom they had once longed for had been terrifying now, but they’d stayed out as long as they could, finding more and more dangerous things to do because they hadn’t wanted to go home. They hadn’t wanted to see the expression in their father’s eyes, or think about the empty place at the table where their mother had sat. She had been away often, as he had told Meredith, but this time her absence had been like a cold, heavy stone in his stomach.

  ‘You must have missed her,’ said Meredith. Children were programmed to adore their mothers, however little they might deserve it.

  ‘I suppose we did,’ Hal said slowly. ‘Jack certainly did. He’d been her favourite. He never talked about it, but I don’t think he ever got over the way Mum left without saying goodbye to him. He thought that if he could just go and find her, he could make her come back and everything would be all right again.’ Hal’s face twisted. ‘He was only a kid. He didn’t know.’

  At the look on Hal’s face, dread began to pool in Meredith’s stomach. ‘What happened?’ she whispered.

  ‘One day he ran away to try and find her. He had a plan, he said. He left a note and everything.’ Hal’s voice was very bleak, very controlled. ‘He sneaked on to a road train. The driver didn’t have a clue until they unloaded and found his body in with the cattle. They think he suffocated.’

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THERE was a long, terrible silence. ‘Oh…Hal…’ Meredith didn’t know what to say.

  Hal acknowledged her sympathy with a hunch of his shoulders. ‘You see why Dad didn’t want any reminders of her around? After Jack…I’ll never forget the way he tore up every picture, anything that might remind us of her. He wouldn’t have her name mentioned, and we all pretended that she was dead. Like Jack.’

  ‘Did your mother know?’

  ‘She must have done. I don’t know if she ever tried to contact Lydia or me-if she did, Dad wouldn’t have told us. Lydia’s seen her once or twice in Sydney, but I’ve never wanted to, not after Jack, and not after what she did to my father.’

  He shook his head. ‘Dad was never the same after she left. I think there was part of him that knew it had been inevitable from the start, and that they should probably never have got married in the first place, but still, he couldn’t break himself of her spell. After she left, he just…gave up. He lost interest. It was only when he died that I realised how far he had let Wirrindago run down. It’s taken a long time to build things up again.’

  Meredith’s throat was tight as she watched Hal, trying to imagine life in the homestead over twenty years ago, when his mother had gone and Jack was dead and his father had turned in on himself. Her heart ached for him, for the boy he had been, and she wanted to take him in her arms and hold him tightly.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said instead, desperately conscious of how inadequate that sounded.

  Hal looked into her warm, dark eyes and felt something tight around his heart loosen. ‘That’s what I said to you when you told me about boarding school, and you told me that you got used to it,’ he reminded her. ‘It was the same for me.’

  ‘Who looked after you and Lydia?’

  ‘We ran pretty wild for a time, then my father’s sister got wind of the situation and came to sort us out. She’d grown up at Wirrindago but met Guy’s father when she was in England and stayed there. She and my father were always close, and I think she hated seeing how broken he was by what had happened, but she’s a very practical person too. In fact, you remind me of her a lot,’ Hal said with a half smile.

  ‘She arranged for a housekeeper and tried to get us back to our schooling. I went to boarding school and she took Lydia to live with her in England until she was old enough to go to boarding school as well.’

  Meredith hated the thought of Hal, losing his mother and his brother, and then his little sister too before being sent off to school on his own. Poor boy.r />
  ‘Going to boarding school must have been horrible for you,’ she said compassionately.

  ‘No worse than for you,’ said Hal, ‘and I was nearly thirteen, not nine.’

  ‘I had Lucy,’ she pointed out. He hadn’t had Jack or Lydia.

  But Hal refused to be pitied. ‘It was the right decision. I missed Wirrindago, but at least I got some education, and it was easier for Dad not to have to worry about who was looking after Lydia and me. I’d come back in the holidays and once a year my aunt would come out, bringing Lydia and Guy with her.’

  ‘So that’s why you’re so close to Guy?’

  He nodded. ‘Guy was like another brother for me and Lydia. It wasn’t that he replaced Jack, but we didn’t miss Jack so badly when he was there. He was always fun.’

  Meredith’s memory of the evening she had arrived was somewhat hazy, but she still had a clear impression of Guy’s dancing eyes and the way Hal had laughed with him. Guy must have been very good for Hal and his sister.

  ‘What about Lydia?’ she asked. ‘Are you still close to her?’

  ‘I’d say so. I suppose I feel responsible for her, and Lydia’s quite capable of taking advantage of that. You see,’ he added, ‘I’m in no position to criticise you and Lucy!’

  ‘Is that why you agreed to look after Emma and Mickey?’

  ‘It’s certainly why I feel guilty about not giving them a better time.’ Hal rubbed his face. ‘I think you’re right. I should take them out and show them what we used to do when we were kids.’ His eyes took on a faraway expression as he remembered. ‘We had some good times.’

  ‘You should remember those.’ Meredith got up and picked up the photo from the desk. ‘Maybe your father remembered them too,’ she said. ‘Maybe that’s why he kept this.

  ‘You all look so happy,’ she said, looking down at the picture. ‘Jack’s there, and your mother. He must have wanted something to remind him that it hadn’t all been bad. You have to believe that however terrible things are, there have been times when it was all worth it; otherwise it would be too hard to bear.’