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Dear Reader,
It is with much pleasure that I welcome you to my four-book miniseries, MEN OF THE OUTBACK. The setting moves from my usual stamping ground, my own state of Queensland, to the Northern Territory, which is arguably the most colorful and exciting part of the continent. It comprises what we call the Top End and the Red Center—two extreme climatic and geographical divisions. This is what makes the Territory so fascinating. The tropical, World Heritage–listed Kakadu National Park, with crocodiles and water buffalo to the Top, and in the Center the desert—the “dead heart” that’s not actually dead at all—only lying dormant until the rains transform it into the greatest garden on earth.
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Then a blow that made her double over. Who could have dreamed such a charming young man could be capable of such behaviour? Cushioned in normality, the love of her father and brother and then Blair. In a single day everything changed.
What have I got to do, Belle, to make you love me? For all the very public displays of loving and remarked generosity Blair was what her grandmother would have called “a home devil.” Correction. Blair had been a home devil. Blair was dead and a lot of people blamed her. Probably they always would. Certainly his family, especially his mother, Evelyn, who had bitterly resented being ousted as the number one woman in her only son’s life. But then, she was to blame. How could anyone think otherwise? Maybe things in her own past—her mother’s destruction of a marriage and the childhood trauma she had suffered had played a part in the calamity of Blair’s death. Maybe her mother had passed on her destructive genes to her? This feeling was especially strong in her. A sense of guilt. Yet it could be argued she was being very unfair to herself. She used to be such a positive person. Not now. Being with Blair had poisoned her. She had never told a soul of his psychological cruelties, the little mind games, much less the unpredictable rages when he had resorted to physical blows, trying to pummel her until she found the courage to fight back. Sometimes it happened he came off second best. She reminded herself she was a Sunderland. She told him it had to stop. It was so demeaning. She wouldn’t tolerate it. She would leave him.
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