Читать книгу The Australians' Brides: The Runaway and the Cattleman - Lilian Darcy, Lilian Darcy - Страница 6

“So we’re going to pay Nuala back how, for coming up with this dream scheme?” Dusty drawled to Brant, almost six months later.

The Birdsville Races had been held on the first weekend in September. This was a Friday night in late February. Their horses had had a couple of promising wins during the spring season. Brant’s property had received higher than average rain, while Dusty’s had sweltered in the intense Queensland summer heat. Kerry Woods had talked again to both men about how worried she was about Callan.

“You were the one who said you didn’t care if it was crazy, as long as there was a chance it might help Callan, you’d do it,” Brant reminded him, a little defensive on his sister’s behalf, even though he’d had a few payback fantasies himself over the past couple of weeks, since the appearance of the February issue of Today’s Woman magazine.

“And I’m here, aren’t I?” Dusty retorted. “I did do it. I had my photo in that damned magazine. I had to list my hobbies and my background, and—” he hooked his fingers in the air to show the quote marks coming up “—what I’m looking for in a woman and why I believe love can last. And then the magazine didn’t use a quarter of what I’d said.”

“You did a better job with all those questions than I did,” Brant said.

Dusty shrugged and grinned. “I was more honest.”

“Yeah, mate, don’t you have any self-protective instincts?”

“Plenty of ’em. I’m just not a very good liar. Does your sister really think Callan’s going to find what he’s looking for this way?”

Both men looked around the room. It was just after six in the evening, and the air-conditioning in this elegant waterfront venue battled against Sydney’s lingering summer heat. The metropolitan beaches would be crowded with sleek, tanned bodies and sandy children. On the tangled city streets, traffic and exhaust fumes would still be thick, mingled with the blasts of restaurant smells evoking the cuisine of many nations. This was an attractive setting for a cocktail party, however, with its views over Darling Harbour, including a distant glimpse of the Harbour Bridge beyond the restored and remodeled shipping piers.

It was light-years away from the varied landscapes around Brant’s, Dusty’s and Callan’s homes.

There had to be around fifty people in the room, Brant decided. They appeared to consist of twenty single outback men and twenty single urban women, as well as some journalists and photographers from the magazine and a handful of catering staff who were gliding around with drink trays and fiddly little morsels of fashionable food that looked way too scary to eat.

“Not find what he’s looking for, find out what he’s looking for, according to Nuala,” he said to Dusty in clarification.

“Nuala, who has recently announced her engagement to a man she’s known since she was, what, three?” Dusty pointed out. “Oh, yeah, she’s a real expert on this relationship stuff.”

“Getting Nuala’s input on all this was your idea, I seem to recall. And she hasn’t been going out with Chris since she was three,” Brant said, in defense of his baby sister’s credentials in the field. “She wouldn’t look at him after she left school. She went to Europe for three years.”

“She had boyfriends then?”

“Their names have been permanently blacked out of the Nuala Jane Smith archival records, she says, but, yeah, she had a few.”

“So she really thinks—?”

“You want me to quote her?” Brant ticked his sister’s arguments off on his fingers. “This will get Callan to focus on what he wants and what’s missing from his life. It’ll remind him that there are still some decent women in the world even without Liz in it. It’ll show him he’s not the only one whose heart is in—”

He stopped. Pieces he was going to say, but suddenly, they were no longer alone.

“Hi! Who do we have here? Dustin, right?” The overenthusiastic American woman discreetly consulted some notes on a clipboard, while a photographic flash went off in a man’s hands, right next to her. Magazine people, both of them.

The flash made Dusty blink. If Dusty had been one of their own racehorses, Brant thought, the man would have shied and stepped a big hoof on the American’s foot, including her spike heel. He would have broken several of her bones. “Call me Dusty,” he said.

“Dusty ….” The American beamed artificially. Her eyelids fluttered and she barely looked in his direction. She had sleek hair, a wide mouth and a distracted manner. Nice legs, too, Brant saw as he stepped back out of range. Owning racehorses gave a man a deep appreciation of good female legs. Dusty gave them an interested glance, also. “Now, you’re here to meet Mandy tonight, Dusty, and here she is!” the American said.

Ta-da!

Mandy stepped forward. She was around five foot four and her legs were pretty ordinary, but she had dark eyes and an eager smile. She was also totally thrilled with herself for correctly matching Dusty’s personal details to his photograph and winning herself a place at the party tonight.

Dusty looked a little bewildered at her attitude, but when he answered the question she asked him and she listened with those big eyes fixed so intently on his face … Yeah, Brant thought he would probably have felt the ego stroke, too. It was nice when a woman was genuinely interested. He went in search of a drink, wondering with a faint stir of curiosity which of the as-yet-unpaired women in the room had been earmarked for him.

Passing Callan, he couldn’t help but notice that his friend, the object of this whole outlandish exercise, was mentally miles away.

“Why am I here?” Jacinda Beale muttered to herself.

As always, she had reacted to this dressed-up, extravagant, city cocktail party like an animal caught in a searchlight. She didn’t know a soul. She hadn’t yet been introduced to the man she was supposed to meet.

The woman who was supposed to do the introducing—and who had introduced herself to Jacinda as Shay-from-the-magazine—flitted around looking almost as stressed out as most of the guests, many of whom were clearly too shy to mingle easily.

Why are you here, Jac?

Well, go ahead and pick an option, replied the cynical and panicky running commentary in Jacinda’s brain. You’re a scriptwriter, after all. Choosing between different character motivations is one of the skills of your trade.

There were several such options to choose from, some of which were more honest than others.

Because I gave in to an insane impulse and thought this might be fun … or, failing that, good for me.

Because Today’s Woman magazine is running a series of stories called “Wanted: Outback Wives,” and I happened to a) guess correctly which Outback Wife-hunter’s description of himself matched with which Outback Wife-hunter photo—it wasn’t that hard!—and b) write a sufficiently appealing and correctly spelled letter outlining in three hundred words or less why I should get to meet him.

Yes, believe it or not, an invitation to this cocktail party was meant to be a kind of prize.

Because I’m desperate, and I’ll open any door that looks like it has a handle.

Because I’m a writer, so it’s research.

That last one scared her, adding to the already powerful panicky feeling. Writers could claim that pretty much anything was research, and in the past for Jacinda, the claim had always been true. In the name of research, she’d tried on expensive jewellery, combed through a stranger’s trash can, taken a ride on a seriously terrifying roller coaster, eaten in two or three of America’s most famous restaurants … The list went on.

But was she really a writer anymore?

Heartbreak Hotel’s head scriptwriter, Elaine Hutchison, still thought that she was.

“You’re blocked, Jac,” she’d said six weeks ago. “You have good reasons to be blocked, and you need a break. Take that gorgeous daughter of yours, cross an ocean, and don’t come home for a month. By then, you’ll be raring to go and I can give you Reece and Naomi’s storyline because you are the only one I trust to make their dialogue remotely believable.”

“Which ocean?” Jac had asked, because her initiative had also evaporated, along with her TV soap opera dialogue-writing skills.

“Any ocean, honey. Just make it a big one. Know what I’m saying? Know why I’m saying it?”

Elaine hadn’t mentioned any names but, yes, Jac had known what she was saying, and why. She should put some distance between herself and Kurt until she was stronger, better equipped to move forward. She should recognize that despite Elaine’s genuine friendship, she had divided loyalties because Kurt had the power to scuttle Elaine’s own career as well as Jacinda’s.

And the Pacific Ocean was the biggest ocean around—it conveniently washed ashore in California, too—so here she was on the far side of it, in Australia, at the bottom of the world, at the bottom of a glass, at a cocktail party she wasn’t enjoying any better than she’d enjoyed all those dozens and dozens of cocktail parties with Kurt.

Even when she and Kurt had been in love.

Thud, went her heart.

Yes, she had been naive enough to love him once.

But their marriage had given her Carly, her precious daughter, so the news wasn’t all bad.

“Jacinda?” said a woman’s voice, in an American accent that matched Jac’s own.

She turned to the energetic chestnut-haired magazine editor who’d greeted her on arrival. “Shay, hi ….”

Introduction time.

There was a man hovering at Shay-from-the-magazine’s elbow. Better looking than in his magazine photo, he appeared far less comfortable, however. The photo had shown him in his native element, with one long, jeans-clad leg braced against a rust-red rock and his dusty felt hat silhouetted against a sky the color of tinted contact lenses. He’d had his fingers laced in the fur of a big, tongue-lolling cattle dog—also rust-red—and a smile that narrowed his brim-shaded eyes so much you couldn’t even see them.

Jac could see them now, however, and they were, oh, unbelievable. Blue and deep and smoky with a whole lot of emotions that thirty seconds ago she might have thought would be too complex for a down-to-earth South Australian cattle rancher.

Yes, Today’s Woman hadn’t confused the issue by laying any false clues. The outback sky, the cattle dog and the fierce-looking lizard on the rock, which Jac’s Australian friend Lucy had identified as a bearded dragon, had strongly suggested that the man was Callan Woods, cattle rancher, not Brian Snow, opal miner, or Damian Peterson, oil rigger, or any of the other seventeen Outback Wife-hunters, whose photos and biographical details had appeared in the February issue of the magazine.

There were a lot of lonely outback men in Australia, Today’s Woman claimed. It was a big country, where such men ran free in their far-flung and sometimes lonely occupations, but had trouble finding the right woman.

Jac wasn’t going to be that, she knew.

Not for this man.

But now wasn’t the time to tell him so.

“Callan, meet Jacinda,” Shay-from-the-magazine said brightly.

“Hi. Yeah,” was all he said.

He didn’t look happy to be here … which gave them one thing in common, at least.

“Would you believe how Jacinda matched you with your photo, Callan?” Shay gushed. “She actually identified the species of lizard sitting on the rock! Can you believe that?”

“Yeah? The bearded dragon?” A stirring of interest appeared in those incredible eyes as he belatedly reached out to shake Jac’s hand. He had a firm, dry grip, which he let go of a little too soon, as if he really, seriously, didn’t want her to get the wrong idea.

“The lizard was the reason I chose you as the one I wanted to meet,” Jac confessed. “My daughter thought he looked so cute.”

Too late, she realized that it wasn’t a very tactful line. Callan was supposed to be the cute one, not the reptilian wildlife on his land.

But Callan didn’t seem to care about her gaffe. Seemed relieved about it, in fact. “Yeah, my son Lockie loves them,” he said, his eyes getting brighter as he mentioned his boy. “He had one for a pet, but then he couldn’t stand to see it caged.”

“So you have kids, too?” Jac asked. She grabbed on to the subject immediately, since it might be the only conversational lifeline they could come up with together. “My daughter is four.”

Then she listened as Callan Woods told her, “I have two boys. Lockie’s ten. Josh is eight. We lost …” He stopped and took a breath. “That is, my wife died four years ago. I’m sorry. I should tell you that up front.” He lowered his voice and glanced at Shay, who was already moving on to her next introduction, as if tonight’s schedule was impossibly tight.

“It’s okay,” Jac told him.

He might not even have heard her reassurance. “I’m not really a … what was it … Wild Heart Looking For Love.” He parodied the words from the magazine so that Jac could almost see them spelled with capitals. “Couple of my mates wanted to take part in this and they roped me in, too, for a bit of support.”

He glanced over his shoulder and caught sight of two tall men. One of them was looking down at a short brunette who had her hand pinned to his arm. Callan gestured at the two men for Jac’s benefit. They were his “mates.” She knew the Australian expression by this time. “I’m doing it for them,” he said. “For Brant and Dusty. I’m not seriously looking for anyone. I should be up front with you about that.”

The mates were staring this way.

At Callan.

Jac was good at character motivation. She saw the anxious frowns on their faces and the way they assessed both their friend and Jac herself, and she recognized the truth at once, now that this man had told her about his loss.

Callan was doing it for them?

No, it was the other way around. Brant and Dusty were doing it for him.

She heard him swear under his breath and understood the painful way his own words must be echoing in his head. My wife died four years ago. She hated saying it, too. Kurt and I are divorced now. It felt as if you were ripping open your clothing to show total strangers your surgical scars.

“It’s okay,” she repeated quickly to Callan Woods. “This is a very artificial situation, isn’t it? Anyone would be crazy to hold out serious hopes of meeting the right person, no matter how much they were looking for it. But I don’t think that makes it a pointless exercise. You know, just to get a bit of practice … or … or validation, maybe. I’m divorced. And it was a horrible divorce.” See, I have scars, too. “I actually can’t think when I last talked to a man I don’t know, purely for the pleasure of making some contact.”

He nodded, but didn’t make a direct reply. Maybe he was better at talking to his rust-colored dog. After a few seconds of silence, he said, “You’re not Australian.”

“No. The accent’s a giveaway, isn’t it?” She smiled, but he didn’t smile back.

“But you’re living here?” he said.

“No, again. On vacation. Staying with an Australian friend I met in California a few years ago. Lucy. She’s great. She’s babysitting my daughter tonight. She was the one who suggested I try that photo-matching thing in the magazine, just for fun. Most of them were pretty easy.”

“I guess it made sense, added more interest, having the magazine turn it into a kind of contest.”

“And, yes, it was fun,” Jac agreed. “I’m not sorry I did it.”

Oh.

Really?

Since when?

She’d spent the first twenty minutes of the cocktail party feeling deeply sorry that she’d given in to such an insane impulse at Lucy’s prompting, but at some point very recently that had changed. The blue eyes? The lizard? The fact that Callan Woods wasn’t serious about this, either?

“No,” Callan agreed. “I wouldn’t have done it, except for my mates, but, yeah, so far it’s turned out not to be as bad as I thought.”

Jac saw the expression in his eyes. Definitely relief. An after-the-dentist kind of relief that she understood and shared, and it felt nice to share the same emotion with a man again, even if it was a man she didn’t know.

“When do you fly home?” he asked.

“Tuesday. Three days from now. We’ve been here a month, and I can’t believe the time has flown so fast. I’ve loved all of it, and so has Carly.”

“Tuesday.” He relaxed a little more. “So you’re obviously not serious about tonight, either.”

“No.”

“Thank heavens we got that established nice and early!”

They grinned at each other, grabbed a canapé each from a passing tray and somehow kept talking for the next two hours without quite noticing how quickly the party went by.

“Mine? A washout,” Brant said over a state-of-the-art weekend urban café brunch the next morning, in answer to Dusty’s question. “A total washout. She had a chip on her shoulder so big I’m surprised she could stand straight. When I told her that being single didn’t bother me all that much, she acted as if I’d personally insulted her. She gave every one of my questions a one-syllable answer and couldn’t come up with a single bit of small talk when it was her turn. Thank the Lord you didn’t get her, Call.”

“Why me?” Callan asked.

Brant frowned. “Why you, what?”

“Why is it good that I didn’t get her? You think I’m particularly incapable of dealing with women with big shoulder chips and no small talk? Why?”

“Mine was great,” Dusty cut in before Brant could answer, but not before he and Brant had exchanged a strange, uneasy, lightning-fast look. “A genuine, decent woman who knows what she wants and doesn’t mind saying so. There’s a good chance we’ll stay in touch. I’m telling you, it was a heck of a lot better than I expected, the whole thing.” He added quickly and awkwardly, “And, you know, I thought it was a promising idea from the start, so …”

Hang on a minute.

Dusty had a look on his face that Callan recognized. It spoke loudly of his awareness that he wasn’t a very good liar, but what was he lying about?

Callan began slowly, putting the puzzle pieces in place as he spoke, “So you don’t mind that you’re single, Brant, and you’re suddenly pretending you thought this was a promising way for an isolated outback cattleman to meet a future wife, Dusty, even though four seconds ago you pretty much stated the opposite ….” He paused, watched the guilty expressions on his mates’ faces. “Can one of you tell me the real reason we put ourselves through this?”

He wasn’t stupid.

He didn’t really need their answer.

Which was good, because they both stumbled through some garbled piece of bull dust and didn’t actually give him one.

While the stumbling thing was still happening, he thought about whether he was angry with them—whether he wanted to be angry, whether he even had the energy.

Brant and Dusty had set him up in the worst way. They’d conspired behind his back. They’d conned him into putting his picture and his life story and his heartfelt feelings in a national women’s magazine. Why? In the hope that he might meet someone? Or … or … start to believe in the possibility of someday meeting someone? Or … or … even just enjoy himself for a night and get a bit of an ego tickle from the bunch of eager women’s letters the magazine had started sending him?

Angry about it?

To his own surprise he found himself grinning, after a moment. When all was said and done, they were his best friends. They meant well. They would never let him down. They were idiots, and he liked them.

“Serves you bloody right if yours was a washout, Branton Smith. Serves you right, Dustin Tanner, if you never hear from yours again. Me, like a prize con victim, thought I was helping you out, going along for the ride. Turns out I wasn’t, and I’m not looking for anything beyond … yeah … keeping my boys happy, but I had a good time last night, talking to Jacinda.”

He knew it couldn’t go anywhere. He didn’t want it to, and neither did she. That was probably the only reason they’d been able to talk to each other so freely in the first place—because of the safety valve of her imminent departure and the glaring nature of his loss and her divorce.

She looked nothing like Liz, and that was a big plus, also. Where Liz had been compact and strong, Jacinda was long and willowy. She had big, luminous gray eyes, not twinkling, sensible green ones. She had wild dark hair, in contrast to Liz’s neat, silky waterfall of medium blond, and an even, magnolia-olive skin tone, instead of fairness and freckles. Voices, accents, backgrounds, all of it was different and therefore much safer. Safe enough for him to feel as if Jacinda could be a friend, a new kind of friend, if he ever needed one.

This was how he saw her this morning—someone he might turn to, sometime in the future, for advice about his boys, or for a city woman’s perspective.

He even had the address of Jacinda’s friend Lucy in Sydney, and Jacinda’s e-mail address back in America, and she had his, but he wasn’t going to tell Brant and Dusty that. He just gave them another grin—a more teasing and evasive grin this time—and started talking about what they might do today, in each other’s company, before heading out of Sydney and back to land and animals and family tomorrow.

And he felt better—easier in his heart—than he had in quite a while.

Jac honestly hadn’t expected to see Callan again, even though they’d exchanged addresses.

His timing wasn’t great. He showed up at seven in the evening, when she was in the middle of getting her daughter ready for bed. She and Carly had eaten, her friend Lucy was out tonight and now Carly was tired. She was tired enough to make a fuss about getting out of the bath even when her skin had gone wrinkly, so that Jac was wet all down her front when she encountered Callan at the apartment door. A minute or two later, Carly was suddenly not too tired to want to investigate the gift he’d brought for her immediately.

“It’s just a little thing,” Callan told Jac quietly, as Carly sat on the floor in her pink-stripes-and-teddy-bears pajamas and ripped at the bright paper. For Jac herself, Callan had brought flowers—a huge, gorgeous bunch of Australian things whose names she didn’t know. “A paint-your-own-boomerang kit. Hope it’s not more trouble than it’s worth!”

“Could be, if she wants to sit down and paint it right now.” She smiled to soften the statement. He had kids. He should understand. She added in a lower tone, “You didn’t have to do this.”

“I know, but I woke up this morning and—” He stopped and tried again. Came up with just three words. “I wanted to.”

“You woke up this morning, but it’s seven in the evening, now. Did it take you all day to make up your mind that you wanted to?” she teased. She’d decided last night that he had a sense of humor, but wanted to test this perception in a cooler light.

“Yep,” he answered. “That’s about right.” His blue eyes glinted with amusement like sunshine on water. “Look, I guess it is getting late, but we could still eat somewhere, if you want.”

So she had to tell him about Lucy being out, and Carly needing bed, and that she and her daughter had eaten already anyhow.

He nodded. “I should have called. You’re right. I did leave it too late.”

She thought about asking if he wanted coffee or a drink, but chickened out. Pick a character motivation. She didn’t want to kiss him and discover she liked it—or discover she didn’t. She didn’t want to learn the hard way that they had nothing left to talk about, after those two easy hours last night. She definitely didn’t want to send the wrong message about how lucky he might get by the end of this evening.

No!

“Thank you,” she said instead. “The flowers are beautiful, and the gift for Carly. I really must get her into bed, now, or she’ll be a mess tomorrow. She was up before six.”

He looked at her wet front and her messy hair. She saw at once from his face that he’d read the situation correctly, and that he wasn’t the kind of man to argue. Instead, he just gave her his courteous hope that she and Carly would have a good flight home, told her that if she ever needed anything—needed him, needed to write or phone—that she shouldn’t hesitate.

“I mean that.”

And Jac believed him. Didn’t plan to put her trust in his words to the test, but found that the simple fact of believing him felt good—better, after Kurt, than she would have imagined possible.

Two days later, Jacinda and Carly’s plane touched down at Los Angeles International Airport and reality kicked into their lives once more.

Jac had allowed herself and her daughter a day to get over the worst of their jet lag, but then Carly was back in full-day preschool, and Jac was back on the script-writing production line for her soap. The moment she walked into the writers’ conferencing suite, a month on the opposite shore of the Pacific Ocean seemed to shrink to the size of a drop in that same ocean and she felt as if she’d never been away.

She didn’t want to write.

She couldn’t write.

Why the hell had she thought that she’d be able to write?

She’d picked up the mail held for her at the post office on her way in, and among the bills and credit card solicitations were two birthday cards from Kurt, one for herself and one for Carly, since they’d both been February babies and had celebrated while they’d been away. His handwriting on the envelopes, alone, would have been enough to paralyze her, let alone what he’d written to her inside.

Jacinda, sweetheart, don’t spend Carly’s birthday out of the country next year, please. Trust me, you can’t afford that kind of statement. Emotionally, financially. You just can’t, and you should know that. I’m going to be pretty busy this spring, and I’ll need Carly in my life to give me some balance. The network is rethinking its programming, and I’ll be micromanaging certain areas.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking I’m too busy to catch my own shows, even when they’re no longer my day-to-day concern. Reece and Naomi have some great scenes coming up—taut, edgy dialogue written while you were away by a young male writer who’s incredibly fresh. Elaine will be taking a good look at them with me. She’s been wanting to juggle the team for a while now.

Happy thirty-second birthday. Hope you’ve used the break as an opportunity to clarify your priorities. Deepest regards, Kurt.

This was what blocked her so badly. This kind of communication from Kurt. All the time. Phone calls, e-mails, letters from his lawyer, and even innocent comments from Carly after she’d spent an afternoon with him and his new wife. The threats were always so carefully veiled that they almost sounded like reassurances.

He changed his mind about what he wanted, and then the threats changed, as if to suggest that Jacinda should have been two steps ahead of his thinking all along. The reminders of his power and control, and his ability to wreak both personal and professional consequences pricked at Jacinda like poisoned barbs.

She had custody of Carly now, yes, because so far it had suited Kurt to utter lines such as, “All I want is my daughter’s best interests,” but she knew that if he wanted the situation to change, he’d stop at nothing to achieve his goal. She also knew that even if he had no intention of ever suing for custody of their child, he’d hang the possibility over her head like a sword on a fraying thread purely because of the power it gave him.

She read the card over again, to convince herself that the sinister tone was all in her head, but it didn’t work. She knew Kurt. She’d been married to him for seven years. He’d risen higher and higher in the universe of network television, and yet she knew he would never be too big or too important to let go of any of the dozens of chains of control that he loved to yank. Her own chain, Carly’s, Elaine’s …

Jacinda saw Elaine’s concerned look in her direction, and quickly brought up the Reece and Naomi file on her computer. She had a summary of the scene she was supposed to write this morning. “Reece and Naomi meet at their favorite restaurant and argue over whether to continue their affair.”

She centered REECE near the top of the page, pressed Enter, then Tab, then typed the word Hi. She managed to get NAOMI to say hi, also, but for an hour after that, the screen stayed blank, while the words taut, edgy and fresh, in Kurt’s spiky handwriting, floated in front of her eyes. She felt ill to the pit of her stomach, and when Elaine took her for a pep talk over lunch, she couldn’t eat a bite.

Elaine didn’t do much better. “I have to be honest with you, Jac,” she said, sounding tense. “I can’t run this kind of interference for you much longer. You know Kurt.”

“Yes, I do.”

“He has me walking on quicksand, and he knows it. We have the mortgage, we have school fees …”

There was an awkward pause, and Jac knew what she had to say.

So she said it. “Elaine, don’t ruin your own career trying to protect mine.” And she saw the relief in the senior writer’s eyes.

When she got back to her computer, she discovered that there was an e-mail from Callan Woods waiting for her. Until she caught sight of her daughter’s smile of greeting at preschool three hours later, it was the only pleasurable, decent, safe moment in her entire day.