The Australians' Brides: The Runaway and the Cattleman. Lilian Darcy

      What’sthebookLockiewhat’sthebookLockiewhat’sthebookLockie …

      The words echoed in Jacinda’s head like a dinning bell for several seconds after she spoke them.

      I can do this, she thought.

       It would be insane if I couldn’t do this.

      But she’d had trouble even filling in the passenger arrival card coming in to Sydney’s airport on the plane. She’d bought some postcards three days ago—twelve hours before her frantic call to Callan—and she’d left them behind at Lucy’s, unable to face what they did to her well-being. She’d picked up a pen at one point, on the day she’d bought them, stared at the rectangle of card and teetered on the edge of a full-fledged panic attack.

      It was just like the panic attack that was boiling up inside her now, like thunder clouds boiling on a humid summer horizon. Only this time, there was no teetering on the edge. The panic attack descended and she had no power to fight it off.

      The computer screen was so familiar. That slightly shimmery white space with its edging of Microsoft Word icons and line numbers, the bright royal blue band across the top, not much darker than the awesome blue sky above Callan’s land.

      BOOK REPORT Lockie had typed, centered on the page like the words REECE and NAOMI. The heading vibrated and blurred and shouted at her.

      She couldn’t breathe. Words tangled in her head, a nightmarish mix of dialogue lines from Heartbreak Hotel scenes she’d written months ago and lines that Kurt had delivered to her in person—those velvety threats, and pseudocaring pieces of advice and upside-down accusations. A black, cold, reasonless pit of fear and dread opened in her stomach and flight was the only possible response.

       Out of here, out of here, out of here.

      Dimly aware that Lockie was talking to her, answering her question about the book, she fled the room, out through the screen door, past a startled Carly, down the steps, out across the wide, hard-baked piece of red ground to a stand of trees grouped around a shiny metal windmill and an open water tank. She came to a halt, gasping, blood thundering in her ears.

      The black pit inside her slowly closed over, leaving a powerful memory of her fear, but not the fear itself. She grasped one of the trailing branches of the willowy tree and felt a trickle of tiny, dusky pink spheres fall into her hand. Fruits? They were dry and papery on the outside and, when she rubbed them between her fingertips, they smelled like pepper.

      A breeze made the top of the windmill turn. It was shaped like a child’s drawing of a flower, with a circle of metal petals like oars, and it turned with just enough force to pump an erratic stream of water up from the ground and into the tank, whose tarnished sides felt cool and clean in the sliver of midday shade.

      Jac began to breathe again, but she was still shaking.

      “What happened, Jacinda?” Callan said behind her. She’d heard the screen door and his footsteps, but hadn’t really taken in the sounds of his approach. “He wasn’t rude, was he?”

      “No, no, nothing like that.” She turned away from the tank’s cool side. “It was me. My fault, completely.”

      “So what happened?” He stepped closer—close enough to see the tiny, convulsive shudders that vibrated her body. “Hey ….”

      He touched her arm, closing his fingers around the bones just above her wrist. His hand felt heavy and strong and warm, and before she knew it, she’d pulled her own hand around to grab him in the same place—a kind of monkey grip.

      They stayed that way, too close to each other. He could easily have rested his jutting chin on the top of her bent head, could have hugged her or breathed in her ear.

      “Lately I’ve been having panic attacks,” she said. “Please apologize to Lockie. He was in the middle of telling me about the book and I just … left.”

      “Bit more dramatic than that, Jacinda.”

      “I can’t even remember how I got out of the room.” Without planning to, she pushed her forehead into Callan’s shoulder, somehow needing to be in contact with his rocklike steadiness. She smelled hot cotton, and the natural fragrance of male hair and skin.

      He held her gently and made shushing sounds, the kind he’d have made to a frightened animal—which was exactly what she was, she thought. There had certainly been no human rationality in her flood of fear.

      When he made a movement, she thought he was letting her go, and the cry of protest escaped her lips instinctively. She wasn’t ready yet. He felt too good, too right. The air between them had caught fire with shared awareness, sucking the oxygen from her lungs. Again, it was animal, primal, physical. Her body craved the contact, needed it like warmth or food. You couldn’t explain it, plot out the steps that had led up to it; it was just suddenly there.

      She could feel his breathing, sense his response and his wariness. Grabbing on to his hands and kneading them with her own, she gabbled something that was part apology, part explanation, and didn’t make much sense at all. Then she felt him push her away more firmly.

      “Carly’s worried about you,” he murmured on a note of warning. “She’s coming down the steps now. And Mum’s behind her.”

      “I’m sorry.”

      “No. Will you stop that? The apologizing?”

      “You can let me go, now. I’m fine.”

      “Not sure if Mum’s going to stop Carly from coming over here. This must look pretty, um, private.”

      He’d felt it, too. The awareness. She knew he had.

      But he didn’t like it any more than she did.

      “Yes,” she said. “Okay. Yes. Let me talk to them.”

      “Wait, though. Listen, I don’t want to push, but I really can’t afford … don’t want … for my mother to get the wrong idea.” He stepped back, making it clear what kind of wrong idea he meant. “Jacinda, when you can, as soon as you can, please, you have to give me some idea of why you’re here.”

       Chapter Four

      “Mum’s giving the kids some lunch,” Callan reported. “I’ve told her you and I needed to talk.”

      “Thanks. We do. I don’t want to keep you in the dark about what’s been going on.”

      “Sit on the bench. No hurry. Are you hungry? Thirsty?”

      “I’m fine. I can wait.”

      He’d brought her out to the garden, and it was beautiful. She’d never realized herbs and vegetables could look so pretty. There were borders of rosemary and lavender and thyme, beds of young, fist-size lettuces set out in patterns of pale green alternating with dark greenish-red, orange-flowered marigolds like sentinels at the end of each row. Shade cloth stretched overhead protected some of the beds from the harshness of the midday sun, while brushwood screens kept out the dusty wind.

      The soil looked rich and dark, nothing like the red- and ocher-hued earth of the surrounding country, so it must have been trucked in from elsewhere. Beyond the garden there was a chicken run, and she could see several rusty-brown and glossy black birds scratching happily, watched over by a magnificent rooster. Carly would love a newly-laid egg each morning.

      Jac whooshed out a preparatory breath, knowing she couldn’t spend the next hour admiring plants and hens. “Where to begin,” she said.

      “You had a bad divorce,” Callan prompted. “But I thought that was over. Property settlement, custody, all set.”

      “So did I, but Kurt has other ideas. He wants Carly.” Did he really? She still wasn’t sure what game he was playing. “Or he wants to terrorize me with the idea that he wants Carly,” she revised. “Which is working,