Outback Boss, City Bride Read online

  Presumably people did meet and marry, though. Hal might even be married himself. It was a thought that made Meredith pause. Was he married? He was a few years older than her-pushing forty, she guessed-so it wasn’t beyond the bounds of possibility, although she couldn’t quite picture it, somehow. He seemed so closed and stern, it was impossible to think of him happy and smiling, falling in love, making love…

  Which was a shame, really, with a mouth like that.

  The thought came out of nowhere, like an unexpected poke in the stomach, and Meredith was so shocked by it that she actually gasped. It was little more than an indrawn breath, in fact, but the next instant she found herself skewered by Hal’s cold, oddly light, grey gaze as he turned his head to look directly at her.

  ‘Are you OK?’ he asked, frowning, his hand stilling on the gear shift.

  To her horror, Meredith found herself blushing. ‘Yes, fine,’ she said quickly. ‘I’m just…a bit hot, that’s all.’

  Oh, God, what had she said that for? She had made it sound faintly suggestive, and if it had seemed like that to her, what would Hal have made of it?

  ‘I’m fine,’ she added again, ridiculously flustered.

  To her intense relief, Hal didn’t seem to notice anything amiss. ‘There’ll be a bit of a breeze once we get going,’ he said.

  ‘A bit of a breeze’, Meredith discovered as they bowled along the tarmac, was his way of describing the constant buffeting of the air through the open windows. In no time at all it had snarled her hair into an impenetrable tangled mess and deposited what felt like an inch-thick layer of red dust on her face. When she lifted her hand to touch her cheek it felt like sandpaper and she grimaced.

  ‘How long will it take us to get to Wirrindago?’ she asked, raising her voice above the sound of the rushing air.

  Hal shrugged. ‘Couple of hours,’ he suggested.

  ‘A couple of hours?’ Appalled, Meredith stared at the tarmac, stretching remorselessly straight ahead until it vanished into the shimmering heat haze. ‘I didn’t realise it would take so long,’ she confessed.

  ‘Two hours is a good trip.’ He glanced at her as she struggled to keep her dark hair from blowing about her face. ‘It can take a lot longer in the Wet when there’s water in the creeks,’ he told her. ‘Sometimes we can’t get across at all and have to fly in and out.’

  ‘It seems a long way to go for some shopping,’ Meredith commented, thinking longingly of the supermarket just round the corner from her London house. That was a three minute walk, max. ‘Isn’t there anywhere closer?’

  ‘No,’ said Hal. ‘Whyman’s Creek is as local as it gets. We don’t come in unless we absolutely have to.’

  ‘I can see why,’ said Meredith. She couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to go to Whyman’s Creek if they could possibly avoid it. Bill had made it sound as if a trip into town was a regular Saturday night jaunt for the stockmen at Wirrindago, but what on earth did they do when they were there? There was nothing to see, nothing to do, just the crushing heat and the flies and the fine red dust that seemed to settle over everything.

  Presumably the pub was the draw, although its appeal was rather lost on Meredith.

  One thing, she surely wouldn’t have any problems persuading Lucy to leave with her, Meredith consoled herself. If anything could have cured her sister of her romantic ideals, it would have to be working for a man like Hal Granger in this awful, empty place.

  ‘The outback’s beautiful,’ Lucy had raved. ‘I can’t wait to get out there and find some real men! Outback men, Lucy had assured her sceptical elder sister, were universally strong and silent. They rode horses and wore hats and checked shirts, and they were all slow quiet charm and rangy grace.

  Meredith’s mouth quirked as she glanced sideways at Hal Granger. He was rangy, yes, and he had a hat, she’d give him that, but he was clearly short in the charm and grace department. Of course, he might look different if he smiled, she conceded to herself, but he didn’t look as if he did that very often. He might smile at Lucy though, Meredith reminded herself. Men usually did.

  Not that Lucy was likely to be impressed if he drove this clapped-out truck instead of riding a wild stallion. He didn’t even have the decency to wear a checked shirt. Poor Lucy’s illusions must have been shattered, thought Meredith, amused. If she were Lucy, she would leap at the chance to escape.

  But if she were Lucy, she would be the one Richard wanted to see and she wouldn’t be here at all.

  Meredith’s smile faded at the thought of Richard. She wished she knew how he was. She hadn’t been able to get a signal to call his mother that morning. It seemed weeks since she had stood by that hospital bed and promised to find Lucy, but it couldn’t have been more than two-three?-days ago. Tiredly, Meredith wiped the dust from her cheek with the flat of her hand. She had been through so many time zones she had lost track of the days completely.

  Hal heard her sigh and glanced at her. She looked tired, he thought with a touch of compunction. Judging by the pallor of her skin, she was fresh off the plane from London and she was probably exhausted.

  He should have been more helpful, he thought. He wasn’t normally that ungracious. It was unfortunate that she’d got him on a bad day.

  Everything seemed to be going wrong recently. Someone only had to look at a piece of machinery for it to break at the moment. They hadn’t had enough rain. Fences were down and bank charges up, and on top of that he had the kids to deal with…Meredith’s glossy assurance as she’d stood at the top of the pub steps, literally looking down on him, had caught him on the raw. At first glance, she had seemed to represent everything that Hal least liked and least trusted.

  But she wasn’t complaining, he noticed with grudging respect, even though she was obviously not enjoying herself. Her mouth-that surprisingly lush mouth that didn’t seem to go at all with the astringency of her personality-was turned down at the corners as she surveyed the road ahead, evidently profoundly unimpressed by the road that cut across the vast plain of unvarying dust and scrub to a huge, empty horizon.

  ‘You’re not very like your sister, are you?’ he said abruptly and she turned to look at him with a resigned sigh.

  ‘It’s been said before,’ she told him. ‘Lucy’s the pretty one. I’m the clever one,’ she explained, a sardonic edge to her voice. ‘Or so we’ve always been told.’

  ‘Lucy doesn’t strike me as stupid,’ he said and Meredith laughed.

  ‘You know, you missed your chance there to say, Oh, but you’re pretty too, Meredith!’

  Disconcerted by how much prettier she did look when she smiled, Hal returned his gaze firmly to the road ahead. ‘Would you have believed me if I had?’

  ‘Probably not,’ Meredith agreed. Who was she kidding? Of course not. She would have despised Hal if he’d pretended that he thought she was pretty when she patently wasn’t, so she was glad that he’d at least had the decency to be straight with her.

  Honestly, she was glad. And it wasn’t as if she cared whether he thought she was pretty or not in any case.

  ‘That’s not what I meant, anyway,’ said Hal. ‘I wasn’t talking about looks when I said that you weren’t like Lucy. I was thinking about the way Lucy loves the outback. She loves Whyman’s Creek. She loves Wirrindago and the fact that we’re so isolated. If she were here now, she’d be hanging out of that window with a big smile on her face.’

  Meredith’s heart sank. She told herself it was because her sister had clearly not yet outgrown her romantic ideals. Lucy’s enthusiasms normally waned after a couple of months, but if she were still as starry-eyed about the outback as Hal suggested, Meredith might have a harder time persuading her to leave than she had anticipated.

  She would rather her heart was sinking because of that than at the realisation that even the dour Hal Granger was not immune to her sister’s sunny charm.

  ‘Yes, well, Lucy’s always been a romantic,’ she said.

  ‘And you’re not?’

&n
bsp; She turned away to look out of the window once more. Her eyes were hidden behind her sunglasses, but Hal guessed that they were as cool as her voice. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I’m not.’

  ‘Just as well,’ he said. ‘The outback can be a harsh place. Romantics don’t tend to last very long.’

  There was a distinctly dismissive note in his voice and Meredith found herself leaping to her sister’s defence. ‘Lucy’s been here a while now,’ she pointed out.

  ‘A couple of months.’ Hal brushed the idea aside with a gesture. ‘I’m talking about a lifetime. In the long run, a sensible person like you would probably last longer out here than someone like Lucy with a head full of romantic ideas.’

  ‘Frankly, I can’t understand how anyone sensible would want to spend a lifetime here,’ said Meredith, looking at the dreary landscape, the mile upon mile of nothingness unrolling towards the horizon. ‘Is it all this…empty?’

  Hal’s gaze followed hers. ‘I don’t see emptiness,’ he said. ‘I see space. I see a big sky and no crowds. I see good grazing ground if we had a bit more rain.’ He paused. ‘I see home.’

  ‘I thought you weren’t a romantic?’ she said with a curious glance and Hal shrugged, half embarrassed by his eloquence.

  ‘I’m not,’ he said curtly. ‘I’m under no illusions about how difficult life in the bush can be.’

  He was braking as he spoke and Meredith looked around in surprise. There seemed no reason to slow down on a dead straight road like this. ‘Where’s this?’

  For answer, Hal indicated a tyre that had been cut in half and set on the corner between a dirt track and the sealed road. ‘Wirrindago’ had been painted around the curve of the tyre in white.

  Meredith brightened and sat up straighter. ‘We’re here already!’ she exclaimed in relief. A glance at her watch showed her that they had been driving for less than thirty minutes. ‘That’s much quicker than I expected. I thought you said it would take a couple of hours.’

  ‘It will-to the homestead,’ said Hal, half shaking his head at her ignorance as he swung the truck off the tarmac and on to the track.

  ‘So this isn’t your drive?’ said Meredith, deflated, but reluctant to let go of her fantasy that they were almost there.

  Hal thought of the track that ran across the plain, through the scrub, up into the low hills, across the creeks and paddocks and led finally to the heart of Wirrindago. He suspected Meredith’s idea of a driveway was somewhat shorter.

  ‘In a manner of speaking it is,’ he told her. ‘It’s not a sealed road and it only goes to Wirrindago.’

  That sounded promising. Meredith relaxed a little. ‘Oh, well…’

  ‘I wouldn’t get your hopes up,’ said Hal, seeing her imagine an early arrival. ‘You might as well make yourself comfortable,’ he added. ‘There’s a long way to go yet.’

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE truth of this was demonstrated barely seconds later as the truck jolted over a deep rut and Meredith found herself flung against Hal. Instinctively, she put out a hand to brace herself and realised too late that she was clutching his thigh.

  ‘You’ll have to hang on,’ he told her briefly as the truck crashed into another rut.

  ‘Hang on to what?’ snapped Meredith, snatching her hand away, more ruffled than she cared to admit by the feel of his hard body, and even crosser to realise that the unexpectedly close encounter had made absolutely no impression upon Hal. He had brushed her away as if she were one of those millions and millions of annoying flies that swarmed around you the moment you stopped anywhere out here.

  Flushed with a mixture of embarrassment and indignation, Meredith grabbed on to the open window and tried to brace her feet against the floor to stop herself skidding back across the seat to Hal again, but it was hard work when the truck was bouncing and lurching from side to side.

  ‘Is it like this the whole way?’

  Hal sent her a sideways glance. She looked hot and uncomfortable and her hair was sticking to her head in wind-blown clumps. Her smart outfit was covered in dust and her jaw was clenched with the effort of holding on, but she still had a certain style about her, he thought with grudging respect.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘you can’t expect all the roads out here to be as good as this one, you know.’

  Meredith’s jaw dropped and she stared at him in appalled disbelief. ‘Good?’ she echoed, her voice rising. ‘This is a good road?’

  Then she saw a faint dent at the corner of his mouth. He was obviously amused by her ignorance of the outback. Well, let him laugh. She wasn’t trying to be accepted. She didn’t want to belong here. She just wanted to find Lucy and leave him to his heat and his dust and his horrible roads as quickly as possible.

  ‘Very funny,’ she said sourly.

  ‘It’ll get better in a minute,’ Hal offered by way of an apology.

  ‘Better’ was a matter of opinion, Meredith decided. The track did indeed flatten out, but instead of jolting slowly up and down the ruts, Hal put his foot down and sent the truck juddering over the corrugations at alarming speed.

  ‘Do we have to go this fast?’ she asked nervously, clinging to the window.

  ‘It’s easier at speed,’ he told her. ‘If you go fast enough you skip over the top of the corrugations rather than going up and down each one. Believe me, it’s a lot more comfortable this way.’

  ‘I’ve forgotten what comfortable means,’ sighed Meredith. Her back was aching and her arms and legs were stiff from being braced at awkward angles and, as for her backside…Even its admittedly substantial padding hadn’t protected it from the effects of being slammed up and down on the hard seat! She would be black and blue tomorrow.

  She would never get the tangles out of her hair, she thought morosely, and that dust got everywhere. It was in her ears, under her nails, making her eyes gritty and insinuating itself into places she would rather not think about. The thought of sinking into a deep bath and soaking herself clean was so alluring that she found herself sighing again, until she caught Hal’s eye.

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ she said tartly, ‘Lucy would be loving this!’

  The dent in his cheek deepened. Didn’t he ever smile properly? Meredith wondered irritably.

  ‘She probably would,’ he agreed, and then he slanted her another of those disconcertingly keen looks. ‘What about you? What do you love? Not the bush, obviously.’

  ‘No.’ She clutched her laptop to her as she looked out of the window. There were some sparse, spindly trees breaking the monotony of the low scrub and an occasional termite mound soared out of the ground but she couldn’t understand how anyone could love this landscape. It was all so bare. So brown. So empty.

  It was just dust and glare and silence. What was there to love about that?

  ‘No,’ she said again. ‘I’m a city girl. I like buildings and pavements and lights and people and noise. And I love my house,’ she added, remembering it wistfully.

  If only she could be there now. She could have a bath, pull the curtains in her pretty bedroom, snuggle under the duvet and sleep for a week. Bliss.

  ‘This…’ She took a hand off the dashboard to wave vaguely at the land stretching out interminably in every direction around them. ‘This is just…alien.’

  ‘What are you doing here, then?’ Hal heard the harshness in his own voice and was alarmed to realise that he sounded almost disappointed.

  It wasn’t as if he was surprised. She had city girl written all over her, and an English city girl at that. It would be hard to find anyone who would look more out of place out here than she did.

  Still, she was a stranger, and a stranger who had foisted herself upon him at that. After all that determination to get herself to Wirrindago, she could at least pretend to be interested in it.

  ‘I told you,’ she said. ‘I need to see Lucy.’

  ‘Is she expecting you? She didn’t mention anything about you coming.’ Hal frowned. Lucy might be a bit scatty, but he was pretty sure she would ha
ve told him if her sister was on her way.

  Meredith was shaking her head, though. ‘She doesn’t know,’ she told him. ‘I’ve tried to get in touch with her, of course, but there’s never any reply on her phone and she hasn’t responded to any of the messages I’ve left.’

  ‘Her phone won’t work at Wirrindago,’ said Hal as if it were something any fool knew. ‘There’s no signal out here.’

  ‘What, none at all?’

  Meredith tried to imagine life without a mobile phone, but it was like trying to imagine a thousand square kilometres. It was a different world out here, that was for sure. Her laptop felt like the only bit of normality, and she held it protectively against her side as the truck juddered over the bumpy road.

  ‘Well, that explains why I haven’t heard from Lucy for so long,’ she said. ‘I was getting worried.’

  ‘Worried enough to fly all the way out to Australia?’ asked Hal incredulously. ‘Lucy’s a little old for you to be checking up on her just because you haven’t heard from her for a few weeks, isn’t she?’

  ‘I’m not checking up,’ said Meredith, slightly on the defensive. ‘I was just concerned in case something was wrong.’

  Hal was unimpressed. ‘Lucy’s…what? Twenty-four? Twenty-five? I can’t believe you’ve come chasing to the other side of the world just because she hasn’t dropped you a postcard for a couple of months!’

  ‘It’s not just that.’ Meredith bit her lip. ‘A friend of ours was badly injured in a car accident about ten days ago. I wanted to tell her. I tried ringing, but I didn’t realise mobile phones wouldn’t work out here, and when I didn’t get a reply to any of my messages, of course I began to worry.’

  ‘So you’ve come all this way just to give Lucy some bad news?’ Hal frowned. ‘Couldn’t it have waited till she got home? I dare say she’ll be sorry, but there’s not much she can do about it out here.’

  ‘But there is,’ said Meredith. She turned her head slightly, as if looking out of the window so that he couldn’t see her face. ‘Richard needs her.’