The Australians' Brides. Lilian Darcy

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