Marriage At Murraree. Margaret Way

      

      I was ready for hostility, anger, bitter resentment, even blame, thought Casey.

      Instead it was like they all knew she was going to turn up one day. Kindness and generosity seemed to emanate from Darcy. Her big sister?

      “You’re too nice to me,” Casey said abruptly.

      “Who could deny a goddess?” Troy pressed back in his chair, smiling his bold, tantalizing smile.

      “It’s settled, then,” Darcy said, eyes sparkling. “Give us a call when you want to come home.”

      Never had Casey been so glad she had her sunglasses on. She, who never cried except on increasingly rare occasions when she was flooded by her nightmares, felt the sting of tears.

      Home? Did she have a home? If she hadn’t been such an undemonstrative person she would have put her arms around Darcy and hugged her.

      Margaret Way takes great pleasure in her work and works hard at her pleasure. She enjoys tearing off to the beach with her family on weekends, loves haunting galleries and auctions and is completely given over to French champagne “for every possible joyous occasion.” She was born and educated in the river city of Brisbane, Australia, and now lives within sight and sound of beautiful Moreton Bay.

      Marriage at Murraree

      Margaret Way

      The McIvor Sisters

      MILLS & BOON

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      CONTENTS

      CHAPTER ONE

      CHAPTER TWO

      CHAPTER THREE

      CHAPTER FOUR

      CHAPTER FIVE

      CHAPTER SIX

      CHAPTER SEVEN

      CHAPTER EIGHT

      CHAPTER NINE

      CHAPTER TEN

      EPILOGUE

      CHAPTER ONE

      IF SHE hadn’t landed on planet Mars, she didn’t know where she was. The heat and the blinding glare! The colour of the desert sand was unbelievable, fiery-red, burnt-orange. It glowed like a furnace under the rich blue sky. The very vastness stunned her. The plains ran out to the horizon without anything to connect them to humans. It must seem the same to a sailor adrift on a great ocean she thought. Her trip was turning into quite an experience. The lack of anything except the land in all its savage glory was amazing. Space. Pure air. Freedom. In a place like this she might be able to regain her soul. These desert areas—and she realised she was only on the desert fringe—were seemingly barren except for the eternal porcupine grasses, the Spinifex. It had covered huge areas of her journey into Queensland’s vast Outback. The legendary name, The Never Never was right on. She had never seen such a surreal landscape outside of a painting.

      Brilliant red earth, cobalt vault, totally cloudless, large rounded clumps of Spinifex like giant pincushions scorched to a dull gold. In the distance the baffling mirage danced in waves, conjuring up alluring green oases with lots of lovely water. She could well understand how the early pioneers had followed it, never catching up. This had to be somewhere near the place the English explorer, Captain Charles Sturt had battled his way with horses in search of the inland sea. What had he called it? The Iron Region. Or maybe that was the Stony Desert named after him. Either way it was awesome country, with enormous drawing power.

      Casey pulled off the dead straight road that went nowhere. Goodness knows why, she thought wryly, no one else was on it. She’d been travelling for days yet she’d hardly seen a soul. She turned off the ignition of her battered old ute and consulted her map again, resting it on the steering wheel. To be landed in this immense empty wilderness could turn out to be extremely hazardous. One wouldn’t need to have a breakdown or run out of water. The glare alone was soporific. It had damned nearly put her to sleep. Of course the ancient ute had no air-conditioning and it was blazingly hot.

      It was well she was tough. She had to be. No one had looked after her. She had lived hard. Born in a shack on the outskirts of a tropical town. Reared by a mother who hardly knew how to look after herself let alone a child. Then after her mother had died of a drug overdose, The Home. Bad, bad days. She’d endured that until she was sixteen when she left with nothing but searing memories. Truth was she had never had a real home anywhere.

      You’ve got a lot to answer for, Jock McIvor.

      Casey reckoned he’d be in hell and deservedly so.

      There was nothing else to do but drive on, hoping Old Faithful would make it into the Three Rivers Country. For years she had heard mention of the Channel Country in the State’s far South-West on the weather report. She hadn’t taken much notice except to register it was darn hot! To her mind it sounded like the end of the earth. Only very recently had she learned it was the legendary home of the nation’s cattle kings. The domain of men like Jock McIvor.

      She had never known who her father was. The kids at school had given her hell about that. Her poor little mother had been a joke, the butt of many a sick prank. Kids were so cruel. Pretty as a picture but so overwhelmed by life her mother had eventually sought solace first in alcohol, then in drugs. She had once confessed to Casey she didn’t want to live.

      She hadn’t. She’d OD’d at the grand old age of thirty-six. Casey had always blamed herself for not being able to protect her mother but then she was only a kid at the time. At eleven she’d been put into The Home. Plenty of kids there didn’t have fathers or mothers, either. It wasn’t unusual for parents to dump their kids or make life so unbearable for them even The Home was preferable.

      Casey drove on. She figured she was two hundred kilometres west of her last stop, the bush town of Cullen Creek. She hadn’t seen any creek, just a dry sandy bed someone told her in times of flood turned into a raging torrent. Hard to believe! As she’d gone in search of something to eat, the townspeople had stared at her like she’d stepped off a UFO that had landed in the main street. But at least they had given her a decent cup of tea and a plate of sandwiches made with freshly baked bread and plenty of ham and salad filling. A big apple and cinnamon muffin to follow and lots of advice about always letting someone know where she was heading in the Outback.

      She hadn’t told them where she was going. Her appearance alone had magnetised them. Probably her height and her red hair. Both had made her a target as a kid. “How’s the weather up there, Agent Orange?” Even her mother had seemed to blame her for looking the way she did. At least her formidable height had saved her from a few batterings in The Home. She was good with her nails and her fists and her high kicking legs. The world was a dangerous place. She had found that out early.

      Then six weeks ago, a blast from the past. An old friend of her mother’s came into her life. Not by chance. Judith Harrison had gone to a great deal of trouble to track down first Casey’s mother, then learning of her premature death, her only child. Judith Harrison it turned out had grown up with her mother and knew all about the family “tragedy”.