Outback Boss, City Bride. Jessica Hart

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?’

      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