The Bridesmaid's Best Man. Barbara Hannay

an abrupt halt. Went cold all over.

      This wasn’t real.

      ‘Mark, I’m so sorry.’ There were tears in her voice.

      He dragged in a desperate breath, tried to stem the rising cloud of dismay. He couldn’t think what to say.

      Behind him the cook yelled, ‘Dinner’s up!’ The ringers began to move about. Chatter resumed. Boots shuffled, and cutlery clinked against enamel plates. Someone laughed a deep belly chuckle.

      Around Mark, the red and gold plains of the Outback stretched all the way to the semicircle of the blazing sun fast slipping out of sight. A rogue breeze stirred the grass and rattled the tin roof on the cook’s shelter. A flock of white cockatoos flapped heavy wings as they headed for home.

      The rest of the world continued on its merry way, while a girl in England began to cry, and Mark felt as if he’d stepped into an alternate reality.

      ‘I—I don’t understand,’ he said, and then, hurrying further from the camp, he lowered his voice. ‘We took precautions.’

      ‘I know.’ Sophie sniffed. ‘But it—something mustn’t have worked.’

      He closed his eyes.

      The very thought that he and the gorgeous English bridesmaid had created a new life sent him into a tailspin. He couldn’t take it in, was too stunned to think.

      ‘You’re absolutely certain? There’s no chance of a mistake?’

      ‘I’m dead certain, Mark. I went to a doctor yesterday.’

      He wanted to ask Sophie how he could be sure that this baby was his, but couldn’t bring himself to be so blunt when she sounded so very upset.

      ‘How are you?’ he asked instead. ‘I mean, are—are you keeping well?’

      ‘Fair to middling.’

      ‘Have you had a chance to—’ The line began to break up again, the crackling louder than before.

      Sophie was saying something, but the words were impossible to make out.

      ‘I’m sorry. I can’t hear you.’

      Again, another burst of static. He walked further away, fiddled with the setting and caught her in mid-sentence.

      ‘…I was thinking that maybe I should come and see you. To talk.’

      ‘Well…yes.’ Mark looked about him again, dazed. Had he heard correctly? Sophie wanted to come here, to the Outback?

      He raised his voice. ‘I’m stuck out here, mustering for another week. But as soon as I get back to the homestead I’ll ring you on a landline. We can make arrangements then.’

      There was more static, and he wondered if she’d heard him. And then the line went dead.

      Mark cursed. Who the hell had let the damned battery get flat? He felt rotten. Would Sophie think he was deliberately trying to wriggle out of this conversation?

      It was almost dark.

      A chorus of cicadas began to buzz in the trees down by the creek. The temperature dropped, as it always did with the coming of night in the Outback, but that wasn’t why Mark shivered.

      A baby.

      He was going to be a father.

      Again he saw pretty, flirtatious Sophie in her pink dress, remembered the flash of fun in her eyes, the sweet curve of her smile, the whiteness of her skin. The breathtaking eagerness of her kisses.

      She was going to be a mother. It was the last thing she wanted, he was sure.

      It’s the bullet you don’t hear that kills you.

      He gave a helpless shake of his head, kicked at a stone and sent it spinning across the parched earth. Being haunted by memories of a lovely girl on the other side of the world was one thing, but discovering that he’d made her pregnant felt like a bad joke.

      Was she really planning to come out here?

      Sophie, the elegant daughter of Sir Kenneth and Lady Eliza Felsham of London, and a rough-riding cattleman from Coolabah Waters, via Wandabilla in Outback Australia were going to be parents? It was crazy. Impossible.

      

      Sophie hugged a glass of warming champagne and hoped no one at her mother’s soirée noticed that she wasn’t drinking. She couldn’t face questions tonight.

      She couldn’t allow herself to think about her parents’ reaction when they learned that their grandchild was on the way. No grandchild of Sir Kenneth and Lady Eliza should have the temerity to be born out of wedlock. And it was so much worse that the baby’s father was a man their daughter barely knew, a man who lived with a few thousand cattle at the bottom of the world.

      Sophie shuddered as she pictured her parents’ faces.

      Some time soon they would have to know the worst, but not tonight. It was too soon. She was feeling too fragile.

      Fortunately, her father was busy in the far corner, deep in animated conversation with a Viennese conductor. Her mother was equally occupied, relaxed on a sofa, surrounded by a gaggle of young opera hopefuls listening in wide-eyed awe as she recounted highly coloured stories of life backstage at Covent Garden and La Scala.

      All around Sophie, corks popped and glasses clinked, and well-bred voices made clever remarks while others laughed. The large room was awash with elegant, brilliant musicians in party mode, and Sophie wished wholeheartedly that she hadn’t come.

      But her mother had insisted. ‘It will be so good for your business, darling. You know you always get a rash of new clients after one of my soirées.’

      Sophie couldn’t deny that. Besides, this week had been dire enough without getting her mother offside. So she’d come. But already she was regretting her decision.

      She was feeling ill and tired, and more than a tad miserable, and Freddie Halverson, a dead bore, was heading her way. Without question, it was time to make a hasty exit.

      Slipping out of the room, Sophie hurried up the darkened back stairs to the second floor, and then down the passage to the far end of the house to the little room that had been her bedroom until she was nineteen.

      She set the champagne flute on a dresser and flopped onto the window seat, pressed her flushed cheek against the cool pane, and looked out at the faint silhouettes of the rooftops of London, and at the street below that glistened with rain. For the hundredth time, she tried to imagine where Mark Winchester had been when she’d telephoned him this morning.

      What was a mustering camp, anyway? Cowboy films had never been her thing.

      Twelve long hours had passed since her phone call, but she still felt wiped out and exhausted. Their conversation had been so very unsatisfactory, even though she’d been reassured to hear Mark’s voice.

      She’d almost forgotten how deep and warm and rumbly it was. It had reverberated inside her, resounding so deeply she could almost imagine it reaching his baby, curled like a tiny bean in her womb.

      But then static had got in the way just when they’d reached the important part, and she’d started to blub! How pathetic. After she’d got off the phone, she’d wept solidly for ten minutes, and had washed her face three times.

      Now Sophie turned from the window and threw her shoulders back, determined there would be no more crying. She wasn’t the first woman in history to find herself in this dilemma.

      Problem was, she didn’t only feel sorry for herself, she felt sorry for landing this shock on Mark. And she felt sorry for the baby, too. Poor little dot. It hadn’t asked to be conceived by a dizzy, reckless girl and a rugged, long-legged stranger with a slow, charming smile. It wouldn’t want parents who lived worlds apart, who could never offer it the snug, secure family it deserved.

      Just the same,