Читать книгу The Australians' Brides - Lilian Darcy - Страница 10

“Saturdays and Sundays we don’t have school,” Lockie told Jac. He added, “It’s the weekend,” as if maybe Americans didn’t know what weekends were.

His explanation covered the wilder-than-usual behavior of both boys this morning, which Carly had latched on to within minutes of waking at six. They kept early hours at Arakeela Downs. This was Jac’s fourth awakening on the vast cattle station, and she had discovered that the dawns here were magical.

And chilly.

There was something satisfying about it. She would beat the predawn bite in the air by scrambling into layers of clothes, along with Carly, and head straight for the smell of coffee luring her toward the kitchen. Lockie, Josh and Callan would already be there, making a big, hot breakfast. Toast, bacon and fresh eggs with their lush orange yolks, or oatmeal and brown sugar, with hot apple or berry sauce.

They’d start eating just as the sun slid up over the horizon, and the colors of the rugged hills Jac could see from the kitchen windows would almost make her gasp. She and Carly would go out into the day as soon as they could. “To feed the chooks” was the excuse—Carly constantly referred to the hens as chooks, now; she’d be speaking a whole different language by the time they got back to the U.S.—but in reality, Jac just couldn’t bear to miss the beauty of this part of the day.

The bare, ancient rock glowed like fire, slowly softening into browns and rusts and purples as the sun climbed higher. Dew drenched the yellow grass, the vegetable garden, the fruit trees, and made spiderwebs look like strings of diamonds. Flocks of birds in pastel pinks and whites and grays, or bright yellows, reds and greens, rose from the big eucalyptus trees in the wide creek bed and wheeled around calling their morning cries. The air was so fresh, she felt as if simply breathing it in would be enough to make her fly.

When Lockie had managed to sit down at the table, after teasing the dogs along with Carly and Josh at the back door, Jac asked him, “So what happens at weekends?”

“We get to go out with Dad. Riding boundary, checking the animals and the water.”

Callan was listening. “Except today it’s not work, it’s a picnic,” he said. “We’re going to show Jacinda and Carly the water hole.”

“Can we swim?” Lockie asked. “Can we get yabbies?”

“Yeah!” Josh’s face lit up, too.

“Yabbies? What kind of a disease is that?” Jac asked the boys, grinning. It did sound like a disease, but from their eagerness she knew it couldn’t be.

“A really nasty one!” Lockie grinned back. “Don’t you have yabbies in America?”

“We’re pretty advanced over there. Doctors have already found a cure.”

“Yabbies you catch in the water hole and you cook them and eat them,” Josh said. He was a little more serious than his big brother, a little more prickly and slower to warm to the American visitors, with their accents that belonged on TV and their ignorance regarding such obvious things as yabbies.

“Like big prawns,” Callan said.

Setting silverware on the table, Jac looked up at him. “Shrimp?”

“Big freshwater ones.” He poured the coffee into two big mugs and added a generous two inches of hot milk to each. The two of them liked their coffee the same way. It was one of the simple, reassuring things they had in common. Not important, you wouldn’t think, but nice. “Yes, guys, we can swim and fish for yabbies,” he said. “If you and Carly want to go on a picnic, Jacinda, that is.”

He looked for her approval, courteous as always. They’d been over-the-top polite to each other since Tuesday night, and over-the-top careful about respecting each other’s space. Which was dumb, really, because space hadn’t been trespassed upon in any major way during those hours of moonlit talking on the veranda.

“If that’s not interfering with your routine.” Jac whacked the politeness ball right back over the net at him. She didn’t know quite why they were both doing it. For safety, obviously, but she didn’t really understand the source of the danger. “We’d love it.”

Carly was nodding and clapping her hands.

“Doing something different on a Saturday is our routine,” Callan said. “I like to check the water holes pretty often. Sometimes you get tourists leaving garbage, and you don’t want that, or a dead animal fouling the water. Good drinking water’s too important for the cattle and the wildlife out here.”

“That makes sense.” She found it interesting when he told her this kind of stuff, but also suspected that when he slipped into the tour-guide routine, it was another safety valve.

“So we’ll ride there, give the horses some serious exercise, take lunch, yabby nets, the whole kaboodle, light a fire, make a day of it. I’ll see if Mum wants to come, but she’ll probably stay at home.”

“She’s pretty amazing, your mom.”

“Yeah, and I spend half my time trying to get her to be less amazing.” He grinned, and relaxed. “Last flying doctor clinic we went to, that’s what the doc told her. You need to cut down on the amazing, Mrs. Woods, it’s pushing your blood pressure too high.”

The kitchen timer beeped, which meant their boiled eggs were ready, and the five of them sat down to breakfast.

Like a family, Jacinda decided.

No, she guessed it, really.

She’d never been part of a family in that way.

Callan somehow read this information like a teleprompter, directly from her forehead, because as they ate he asked her, over a background of kid noise, “So where did you grow up? Where is your family from? Did you live your whole life in L.A.?”

“No, New Jersey, until I was twelve. Very different from L.A. but just as urban. I’ve never been in a place like this.” She deliberately chose to focus on the geographical element of his questions, ignored the mention of family.

It didn’t work.

“Why did you move?” Callan asked next.

Uhh … “When my mom died.”

“Your dad didn’t want the memories in New Jersey?”

“No, Dad stayed. I was the one who moved.”

Okay, she was going to have to talk about it now, after giving him that revealing answer. It wasn’t so terrible. She believed in honesty and didn’t know why she was always so reluctant to unload this stuff. Because it made her sound too much like a stray mongrel puppy who’d never found the right home?

She hadn’t thought of it quite like this before, but it made a connection.

Kurt had treated her like a stray puppy. He’d scooped her up, after they’d met at a script-writing seminar when she was still incredibly naive and raw. He’d had her professionally groomed, house-trained her himself, put a diamond collar round her neck, spoiled her rotten …. And then he’d lost interest when she still didn’t perform like a pedigreed Best in Show.

Callan was waiting for her explanation.

“Dad didn’t believe he could raise a teenage daughter on his own, you see,” she said. “I have two brothers, but they’re much older. They were eighteen and sixteen when I was born. Dad’s seventy-eight now, and lives in a retirement home near my oldest brother, Andy.”

She’d had a very solitary childhood. Her parents had both been in their forties when she was born, unprepared for their accidental return to diapers, night feeds, noisy play and bedtime stories. They’d expected her to entertain herself and she’d mostly eaten on her own, in front of a book. And then Mom had died ….

“So Dad sent me to Mom’s younger sister, because she had daughters and he thought she would know what to do.” She pitched her voice quietly. Carly wasn’t ready to hear about her mom’s lonely childhood yet. Fortunately, she and the boys were keeping each other well entertained, vying for who could make the weirdest faces as they chewed.

Seated to Jac’s left, around the corner of the table, Callan looked at her. He took a gulp of his coffee. She liked the way he held his mug, wrapping both hands around it in appreciation of the warmth. “But he was wrong about that? Your aunt didn’t know what to do?”

“I was a bit different,” Jac admitted. “I mean, don’t go imagining Cinderella and her wicked stepmother, or anything. She tried very hard. And my cousins tried … only not quite so hard. They were three and five years older than me, beautiful, blonde and busy, both of them. They were into parties and dates and modeling assignments and dance classes. They had a whole … oh … family style that I had to slot into and mesh with. Frantic pace. Drive-through breakfasts and take-out dinners in front of TV, or on the run. Modeling portfolios and salon appointments and endless hours stuck in traffic on the way from one class to another. And I just didn’t. Mesh with it, I mean. I’d grown up almost as an only child, with a very quiet life. I liked to read and think and imagine. I dreamed about horses and learning to ride. I was the polar opposite of cool. And even after the four years of ballet I took with my cousins, you would not want to see me dance!”

He nodded and stayed silent for a moment, then added with a tease in his voice, “But I’d like to see you ride.”

She smiled at him, happy that he’d dropped the subject of family. “It’ll be great to ride. But what will we do about Carly? She’s been on a three-foot-tall Shetland pony a handful of times at Kurt’s ranch, around and around on a flat piece of grass with someone holding the pony on a rope. She couldn’t ride a horse of her own out here.”

“We’ll work something out.”

“She can ride with me,” Lockie said. “I’ll show you how to gallop, Carlz. I’ll show you Tammy’s tricks. You wait!”

“Carlz” looked up at him, round-eyed and awestruck. “Yeah?” she breathed.

“Uh, Lockie, let’s save the galloping and tricks for another time, okay?” Callan said. He got a glint in his eye when he saw how relieved Jac looked, then he dropped his voice and said to her, “Nice little friendship going between those two, though.”

“Yes, and I think it’s really good for her, Callan. I appreciate it.”

Carly hadn’t sleepwalked since that first night. Possibly because with all the activity generated by boys and dogs and chooks, horses to feed, gates to swing on, trees to climb and a million places to hide, by bedtime she was just too worn out to stir. This morning, as soon as she’d eaten her breakfast, she was off with the boys, who’d been dispatched to catch the horses, bring them to the feed shed where their tack was stored and get them ready.

“But Carly stays outside the paddock and outside the shed, okay?” Callan said, as all three kids fought to be the first one out the door. “She’s too little, she doesn’t know horses and they could kick if she spooks them.”

“Will they remember?” Jac asked.

“Yep. They’re good kids.”

Jac liked his confidence, and after almost four days here, she trusted it. Given more responsibility and physical freedom than any child she’d ever met … let alone the child she’d once been, herself … the boys knew their boundaries and stayed within them. They understood the dangers in their world, and respected the rules Callan gave them to keep them safe. They’d keep Carly safe, also.

“… while we get the rest of the gear together,” Callan said.

By the time they were ready to leave, the temperature had begun to climb, in tandem with the sun’s climb through that heavenly, soaring sky. It would probably hit eighty or even ninety degrees by midafternoon, Jacinda knew. Everyone had swim gear under their clothes, and water bottles and towels in their saddlebags, as well as their share of picnic supplies. On a pair of medium-size, sturdy horses whose breed Jac didn’t know, the boys also had yabby nets, bits of string and lumps of meat for bait.

Kerry was staying home, and Carly was riding right in front of Callan on his big chestnut mare, Moss, her little pink backpack pressing against his stomach. She looked quite comfortable and happy up there. Her mommy was a little nervous about it, but Josh’s old riding helmet and Callan’s relaxed attitude helped a lot.

It was a wonderful ride. The dogs were wildly jealous, but Kerry wanted them at home with her for company. Their barks chased after the four horses and five humans for several minutes until the trail that followed the fence line cut down toward the dry creek bed and the hill between creek and homestead cut off the sound, at which point, “They can bark all they want but we don’t have to hear,” Callan said.

He let the boys lead the way and brought up the rear himself, with Jacinda in the middle. It felt good to know that he was behind her, that he would see right away if something went wrong and he’d know what to do about it.

Not that you could imagine anything going wrong on a day like today. A breeze tempered the sun’s heat, and the stately river gums spread lacy patterns of shade over the rapidly warming earth. They startled a mob of red-coated kangaroos who’d been sleeping in some dry vegetation and the ’roos bounded away, over the smooth-worn rocks and deep sand of the creek bed. On the far side of the creek, there were cattle grazing on coarse yellow grass. Some of them looked up at the sound of the horses, but soon returned to browsing the ground.

“When does the creek actually flow?” Jacinda asked, craning around to Callan in her saddle. It was a different style from the ones on Kurt’s ranch, not so high in front. “In winter?”

“Only when we’ve just had rain,” Callan answered. He nudged Moss forward to close the distance between them a little. Carly sat there, so high. Her little body rocked with the motion of the horse’s gait like she was born to it, and her helmet looked like a dusty white mushroom on top of her head. “It doesn’t stay running for long. A couple of days. Enough to top up the water holes. Fortunately we have a string of good deep spring-fed ones in the gorge, and a couple more downstream.”

“Does the creek water ever get to the sea?”

“Nope. It drains into Lake Frome, east of here.”

“Which is dry, too, most of the time, right? A salt pan?” She’d been looking at a map and some books with Carly while the boys did schoolwork during the week.

“That’s right. Salt and clay. Flat, as far as the eye can see. I like these mountains better.”

“Well, yeah, because you own these mountains.”

She couldn’t keep the satisfaction out of her voice, and he picked up on it. “You really like that, don’t you?”

Yes.

A lot.

The safety of it.

The strength.

“Almost as much as you do, Callan Woods.”

He didn’t answer, just did that lazy, open grin of his, which she could barely see beneath his brimmed stockman’s hat. Correction—she could see the mouth, but not the eyes. Didn’t matter. She already knew what the eyes looked like. Kept seeing them in her mind when she twisted back the right way in her saddle, bluer than this sky, brighter than sun on water.

It was midmorning when they reached the deep water hole lodged in the mouth of the red rock gorge. Callan and the boys led the horses down to drink, then tethered them in the shade on the creek bank, where they found tufts of coarse grass to chew on.

“Swim first?” he said.

“Is it really safe?”

“If you’re sensible.”

“So you mean it’s not safe?” She imagined crocodiles.

“It’s deep in parts, and it’s cold.”

“But no crocodiles?”

He laughed. “Not a one. But it’s colder than you would think, especially once you go a few feet below the surface. Keep Carly in the shallows. See, it’s like a beach. The sand’s coarser than beach sand but it shelves down nice and easy.”

“Mmm, okay.” She could see for herself the way the water darkened from pale iced tea to syrupy cola. “Why is it that color?” she asked.

“It gets stained from the eucalyptus leaves. In some lights, it looks greener. The boys and I like to jump and dive in a couple of spots off the ledge on the far side, there, but we always check the places out first. I’ve been swimming in this water hole my whole life, but you can get tree branches wedged in the rocks that you can’t see from the surface, and you don’t want to get caught or hit your head.”

“I’ll stick with Carly in the shallows.”

He was right. It was cold. Enough to make her gasp when she stepped into it from the warm sand. And it had a fresh, peaty kind of smell that she liked. Carly splashed and ducked and laughed, while Jac watched the boys and their dad swimming across an expanse of water that looked black from this angle, toward the rock ledge. They trod water back and forth, scoping out the depths for hidden dangers, then having determined that it was safe, no hidden snags, they hauled themselves out onto the rock, climbed to the high point, gave themselves a good long run-up and started to jump.

After fifteen minutes, Carly’s teeth began to chatter. She lay on a towel in the sun for a short while, but soon warmed up again, put a T-shirt over her semidry swimsuit and was ready to make canal systems and miniature gardens in the sand. Lockie had had enough of the water, also. He swam back to the beach to get his towel, but Callan and Josh were still jumping and whooping, their voices echoing off the rock walls of the gorge behind them, the only human sound for miles around.

“Swim over and give it a go,” Callan called out to Jacinda. He stood at the edge of the highest part of the ledge, a good twelve feet above the waterline.

Not in a million years, Jac thought.

“I’m watching Carly,” she called back.

“Lockie’s with her now. She’s dressed. She’ll be fine.”

“No, really …”

“I’m going back to the sand, Dad,” Josh said. He and Callan did one last whooping jump from the ledge together, with legs kicking wildly in the air and arms turning like windmills, then they swam toward the stretch of beach.

“She’ll be fine with the boys,” Callan repeated when he approached Jacinda, as if there’d been no break to the conversation. “She’d have to go in pretty far to get out of her depth here.”

He touched bottom and stood waist-deep, then began to stride toward the beach, the water streaming from his body as he got closer and shallower. He reached Jacinda, his skin glistening and his dark, baggy swim shorts hanging low on his hips. He wasn’t self-conscious about his body, just took it for granted.

Jac didn’t. She saw hard bands and blocks of muscle, a shading from tan to pale halfway down his upper arm, a neat pattern of hair across his chest, and the way the cold and wet made every inch of his skin taut.

Standing calf-deep, he gestured behind him. “See, there’s about six meters of sand all the way along this side, before it starts to shelve down. She’s safe without you. And you’d be safe, too, if you came for a jump off the ledge. It’s so much fun, Jac.”

He used the same tone that some men might reserve for attempting to get a woman into bed, and it was the first time he’d called her Jac, even though she’d asked him to three days ago.

“Mmm …”

That’s not an answer, she realized. I can’t believe I’m even considering this.

“Hey?” he cajoled. “Thinking about it? The rush as you race forward and hit the air? It’s so good. And you have to yell, that’s a requirement. Lockie first did it when he was five. Promise you’ll yell?”

Live a little, said his eyes. There was a contained eagerness coming from him. He was like Carly about to give Mommy a special piece of artwork from preschool. How could you not respond just exactly the way those eyes begged you to?

“Callan, I’m not even promising to—”

“You need a reason to yell in life, sometimes, and this is the best one I know.”

“Yeah?”

I don’t believe this.

I am considering it.

I’m seriously thinking about it.

The yelling idea is incredibly attractive.

Her heart started beating faster. She could smell horse on her body, dust in the air, creek water in Carly’s wet hair. She was eight thousand miles from the place she called home, on six hundred thousand acres of land.

And she was seriously wondering if she might be brave enough to run and jump, while yelling, into a deep, creepy water hole.

Just do it.

“Gotta earn those yabbies.” Callan held out his hand, ready to pull her up. Behind him, Lockie had started putting lumps of meat inside old stocking feet and tying them with string. Under his direction, Josh was searching for good long sticks of eucalyptus to act as fishing poles.

“This is way outside of my comfort zone!” Jacinda warned as Callan’s grip locked with hers.

A moment later, she reached a standing position and they came face-to-face, confronting Jac with something else that was way outside of her comfort zone. His hard, wet body, his slightly quickened breathing, his exhilarated grin. All of it was too close and too real when they stood just inches apart like this.

Feeling it, too, and clearly not liking it, he let her go and told her in an awkward way, “Strip, before you chicken out.”

She was only wearing a T-shirt over her two-piece tank-style animal print swimsuit. She crossed her arms, peeled the T-shirt over her head and dropped it on a patch of dry sand safely distant from the kids’ messy play. She discovered Callan looking over at the kids. His lean, strong neck looked too tight and twisted. It wasn’t a natural angle. He’d been—what?—averting his eyes while she stripped?

In her animal print, she felt like Jane to his Tarzan. But had Tarzan been that much of a gentleman?

“I’m coming as far as the ledge, but I don’t promise to jump,” she said.

His head turned again, back to her, and a frown dropped away, replaced with a twinkle in the depths of those eyes. “We’ll see,” he drawled.

He grabbed her hand and galloped her into the water. Getting deeper in two seconds than she’d gone with Carly in fifteen minutes, she gasped again. He was right, the deeper you went, the colder it got. “Let me go!”

“Swim,” he said, and struck off ahead of her with a powerful stroke.

She followed, terrified. The water felt so different to California pool water or salty ocean. So smooth. Sooo deep. How far down did it go? She had to fight away images of creatures lurking down there.

Before her imagination got out of control, they reached the lower part of the ledge and she hauled herself up onto the warm rock, copying Callan’s fluid movement with a more awkward one of her own. Her body tingled all over and she panted for breath.

“You did great,” he told her. “You’re a good fast swimmer.”

“Only because things were chasing me.”

“Bunyips?”

“Wha-a-at? There is something down there! I knew it! What the heck are bunyips? Oh sheesh, I’ll never get back to the beach, now! I’ll have to go the long way around, over the rocks.”

Which didn’t look easy.

“Don’t panic. Bunyips are mythical. Kind of an Australian version of the Loch Ness monster.”

“You know, Callan, there are people who don’t think the Loch Ness monster is just mythical. I don’t think these things should be dismissed. I’ve read articles about it, and there’s also that in-some-ways-quite-credible urban myth about alligators in the New York—”

He wasn’t listening. He’d somehow gotten hold of her hand again and they were climbing to the higher part of the ledge, over the rough shelves of rock that acted like steps. At the top, he turned away from the water and led her back into the shade of the gorge’s overhanging sides. He had her in a kind of monkey grip now. He was holding her forearm in the circle of his fingers, and she held his forearm the same way. It was so strongly muscled that her fingers went barely halfway around.

“Repeat after me, Jac,” he said. “Bunyips are mythical.”

“Bunyips are mythical. But I have a very powerful imagination, I’m telling you.”

“Okay, louder. Bunyips—are—mythical.”

“Bunyips—are—mythical. And if they’re not, you know how to scare them away, right?”

“Bunyips are mythical. And plus they’re very friendly.”

“Callan …”

“Right, now, let’s go, but this time we’ll yell it. Ready?” He didn’t give her a chance to tell him she wasn’t. Hand in hand, they sprinted forward, with Callan yelling at the top of his lungs. “Bunyips … are …”

Jac joined him on the last word, screaming it, whooping it, as they came to the end of the ledge and hit the air, legs still working wildly, arms flung high but still joined. “Mythical!” The word echoed off the gorge walls, bouncing like a ball, and she heard it come back to them while they were in midflight. Their voices seemed to claim this whole place.

She whooped again.

Felt a surge of utter exhilaration.

Hit the water.

Callan still had her hand. They went down, down into the icy darkness and she kicked frantically to bring herself back up, just as he was doing. She broke the surface gasping and laughing. “Get me out of here! I know there’s a bunyip down there!”

“Wanna do it again?”

“Unnhh,” she whimpered. “Unnhh!”

Do I?

Could I?

“Yes!”

They jumped together four more times, whooping and yelling and laughing, until Lockie complained, “Dad, you’re scaring the yabbies! We haven’t caught a single one.”

“Try for them in that reach of water behind the rocks where it gets muddy,” he called back to his son. “Are we done, Jacinda?”

“I think so,” she said, breathless and starting to shiver.

The contrast between the cold water and the hot sun on the rocks felt wonderful with each jump and climb, but she’d had enough, and Carly must be getting hungry. They were cooking sausages and lamb chops for a midday barbecue, and Callan still had to light the fire. They swam back, side by side, no bunyips in sight, nothing nipping at her toes.

Walking through the shallows, she confessed, “I was so scared, Callan, you have no idea!”

“It’s a healthy kind of scared, though, isn’t it? You push the fear back with yelling, and then you feel great.”

“How would you know? You said you’d been doing it your whole life. You can’t ever have been scared here.”

“I haven’t been scared of here—of the water hole.”

“Or bunyips.”

“Or bunyips.” He paused. “But I’ve been here, scared.” Paused again. “I’ve come here a few times to try and yell it away, and it’s always worked.”

“Scared of what, then, if not the water hole?” She said it before she thought, shouldn’t have needed to ask.

“After Liz died.” His voice went quiet and his body went still, reluctant and stiff. “Scared of—”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry. You don’t need to spell it out. I understand.”

He gave a short nod. “Yeah, there was nothing unique about it.”

“I’m sorry,” she said again, but she didn’t show that he’d heard.

“I got given some, you know, brochures at the hospital in Port Augusta,” he said. “Information leaflets. About bereavement. And they had lists of things I might be feeling, and I was. Feeling those things. All of them. It’s stupid. I hated having my whole gutful of emotions put onto a bloody list. There were lists of things you could do about the emotions, too. Ways of getting help, ways to help get yourself through it.”

“But those lists didn’t have yelling and jumping into the water hole?”

“Nope.”

And that was good, Jac understood, so Callan had jumped into the water hole a lot.

She felt privileged, sincerely privileged, that he’d wanted to push her to do it, and very glad that she had. She was pretty sure he didn’t offer the same opportunity for terror and yelling to just anyone. She was very sure he was right to think that she needed it.

Bunyips were mythical.

And Kurt’s power games were a long way away.

“Got one! Got one! Got one!” Josh shrieked out.

About twenty seconds later, Carly screamed, “Mommy, I got one, too!”

“Let Lockie put it in the bucket for you, Carlz,” Callan warned her quickly. “It might nip you with its claw if you touch it. Lockie—?”

“I’m helping her, Dad, it’s okay.”

“Let’s get that fire going.”

He grabbed his towel and dried himself with the vigor of a dog shaking its wet coat, then dragged his T-shirt and jeans over his still-damp body, hauled on his sturdy riding boots and went to work unpacking backpacks and saddlebags, while Jac was slower to cover her damp swimsuit with her clothes. She couldn’t help watching Callan as she dressed.

There was a circle of big river stones in the shade near the creek bank. The remnants of charcoal within it, as well as the blackened sides of the stones themselves, told Jac that the circle was another detail to this place that Callan had known his whole life.

“Want to find some bark and sticks?” he said.

She gathered what he’d asked for, while he broke thicker wood into short lengths with a downward jerk of his foot. He had a fire going within minutes, with water heating in a tin pot that he called a billycan. Out here in the middle of the day, the light was so bright you could barely see the flames, but you could feel the heat and the water was soon steaming.

Jac checked on the yabby tally. The kids had twelve in their red plastic bucket, but the yield seemed to be slowing and interest had waned. “The bait meat’s losing its flavor,” Josh said.

“And yabbies aren’t stupid. They’re on to us,” Lockie decided. “Twelve’ll have to be enough.” He stood up, leaving the bucket behind, and wandered in the direction of the horses.

“They’re our appetizer,” Jac said, without thinking.

“We’re going to eat them?” Carly wailed. “We can’t eat them!”

They were kind of cute, in a large, shrimpy sort of way, Jac conceded, with blue and black and green markings that would turn red and pink when they were cooked. Too cute to eat?

“Nah, it’s okay. They won’t know it’s even happening,” Josh told Carly in a matter-of-fact voice.

“How come they won’t know?” she asked.

Over by the fire, Callan called out, “Lockie, can you grab the tea bags while you’re there?” Lockie was still with the horses, looking for something in a saddlebag.

“Dad drops them into the boiling water and they don’t even have time to feel it. If I was a yabby, I’d way, way rather be eaten by a human than anything else.”

“Why, Josh?” Carly asked seriously.

“Because anything else would be eating me alive.”

“Eww! Yeah! Alive! Are you listening, yabbies?” Carly spoke seriously to the scrabbling contents of the red bucket. “We’re nice, kind humans. We’re not going to eat you alive.”

Which seemed to deal with the whole too cute issue, thank goodness.

Ten minutes later, Carly was eating a hot yabby sandwich, with butter, pepper and salt.

Jac ate one, too, and it sure tasted good. “This is one of those moments when I blink and shake my head and can’t believe I’m here,” she told Callan, hard on the heels of the last mouthful, her lips still tasting of butter and salt.

“Yeah?” Callan waved pungent blue smoke away from his face.

He had a blackened and very rickety wire grill balanced on the stones over a heap of coals. It looked as if someone had fashioned it out of old fencing wire, but it held the lamb chops and sausages just fine, and they smelled even better than the yabby sandwich had tasted.

In a little pan, also blackened, he had onions frying in the froth from half a can of beer. The other half of the can he drank in occasional satisfied gulps, while Jacinda sipped on a mug of hot tea.

“I’ve just eaten something that a week ago I’d never even heard of,” she said. “I’ve swum in terrifying water, chock-full of bunyips. I’ve let you tell me about snakes in the house without screaming.”

“I noticed you didn’t scream.” He gave her his usual grin. “I was impressed.”

“Thank you. Meanwhile, there’s a road faintly visible over there that you claim leads eventually to Adelaide, but there hasn’t been a car on it since we got here, what, an hour ago? In fact, have I seen or heard a car since Tuesday? I don’t think so.”

“There have been cars.”

“I haven’t noticed them. I’ve been too busy. It’s incredible here. Carly is—Carly will—I hope Carly never forgets this. It’s going to change who she is.”

And “Carly” is code for “Carly and me.”

It’s going to change who I am, even more, but there are limits to my new yelling-and-jumping-induced bravery, and I’m not prepared to say that out loud.

“Wouldn’t be surprised if it changes the boys, too,” Callan answered.

He flipped a couple of lamb chops with a pair of tarnished tongs, drained the last of the beer and looked at her with those steady blue eyes, and she suspected … decided … hoped … that “the boys” was code, also.