The Australian. Diana Palmer

did you come back?” he asked, and there was a note in his voice that chilled her.

      “Why don’t you do what you just told me to and mind your own business?” she challenged.

      His head turned, and his eyes glittered at her. “You’ll never fit in here,” he said, letting his gaze punctuate his words. “You’re too much the sophisticate now.”

      “In your opinion,” she returned with faint humor. “Frankly, John, your opinion doesn’t matter beans to me these days.”

      “That goes double for me,” he told her.

      So it was war, she thought. Good. This time she was armed, too. She ran a hand through her short hair. “Does it look like it’ll be a dry year?” she asked, changing the subject.

      “No. They’re predicting a good bit of rain when the Wet comes. The past two years have been good to us.”

      “That’s nice to know.”

      “Yes, there have been some lean times...look out!” He braked suddenly for a kangaroo. The tawny beast bounded right into the path of the car and stared at its occupants, with a tiny baby in its pouch. John had stopped only inches from it, cursing a blue streak, and the kangaroo simply blinked and then hopped off to the other side of the highway.

      “I’d forgotten about the ’roos.” Priss laughed, grateful that she’d been wearing her seat belt. “They’re bad pedestrians.”

      “That one bloody near met its maker,” he returned on a rough sigh. “Are you all right?” he asked with obvious reluctance.

      “Of course.”

      He started off again, and Priss stretched lazily, unaware of his eyes watching the movement with an odd expression in their azure depths.

      He seemed content to sit there smoking his cigarette, and Priss kept her own silence. She wondered at her composure. Several years ago riding alone in a car with John would have been tantamount to backing the winner in the Melbourne Cup race. Now she was so numb that only a trickle of excitement wound through her slender body. Perhaps even that would go away in time.

      Eventually they came to Providence, which looked very much the same, a small oasis of buildings among the rolling grasslands with the hazy ridges of the Great Dividing Range in the distance behind them and eternity facing them. John turned off the main bitumen road onto a graveled track that led past the Sterling Run on the way to Priss’s parents’ home. She tried not to look, but her eyes were drawn helplessly to the big sprawling house with its wide porches and colonial architecture. The driveway was lined with oleanders and royal poinciana and eucalyptus trees, which everyone called simply gum trees. Streams crisscrossed the land. They mostly dried up in the nine months preceding the Wet, which came near Christmas, but when the Wet thundered down on the plains, it was possible to be confined to the house for days until the rains stopped. Once she and her parents had had to stay with the Sterlings or be drowned out, and their small house had suffered enormous water damage.

      “The house looks as if it has just been painted,” she remarked, noticing its gleaming white surface.

      “It has,” he said curtly.

      She loved its long porches, where she had sat one spring with John’s mother and watched the men herd sheep down the long road on their way to the shearing sheds. That would be coming soon, she recalled, along with dipping and vetting and the muster of the cattle that supplemented John’s vast sheep herds.

      Beyond the house and its grove of eucalyptus trees were the fenced paddocks where the big Merino sheep grazed. They’d just been moved, she imagined, because the paddocks looked untouched. She noticed that the fences looked different.

      “There’s so little wire,” she remarked, frowning.

      “Electrified fencing,” John said. “Just one of the improvements we’re making. It’s less expensive than barbed wire or wooden fences.”

      “What if the power goes out?” she asked.

      “We have backup generators,” he returned. He glanced at her. “And men with shotguns...” he added with just a glimpse of his old dry humor.

      But she didn’t smile. The days were gone when she could do that with John. She only nodded.

      Soon they were at her parents’ house, deserted because Adam and Renée apparently hadn’t come home yet.

      “They’ll be back by dark, they said,” he told her.

      She nodded, staring at the lovely little bungalow, with its high gabled roof and narrow long front porch and green shutters at the windows. It was set inside a white picket fence, and Priss loved the very look of it, with the gum trees towering around it. Behind it was a stretch of paddock and then another grove of gum trees where a stream ran hidden, a magic little glade where she liked to watch koala bears feed on eucalyptus leaves and wait for lorikeets and other tropical birds to alight briefly on their flights.

      “It looks just the same,” she remarked softly.

      He got out and removed her bag from the trunk. She followed him onto the porch, and as she looked up her green eyes suddenly flashed with the memory of the last time they’d been alone together at this house.

      He searched her eyes slowly. “It was a long time ago,” he said quietly.

      “Yes,” she agreed, her face clouding. “But I haven’t forgotten. I’ll never forget. Or forgive,” she added coldly.

      He stuck his hands into his pockets, staring down at her from his formidable height. “No,” he said after a minute, and his voice was deep and slow. “I could hardly expect that, could I? It’s just as well that it’s all behind us. You and I were worlds apart even then.”

      Her knees felt rubbery, but she kept her poise. “Thank you for bringing me home,” she said formally.

      “I won’t say it was a pleasure,” he returned. “For my part, I wish you’d never come back.”

      He turned, and she glared after him with her heart going wild in her chest. She wanted to pick up something and throw it at him! But she stood there staring after him furiously and couldn’t even think of a suitable parting shot. She stood on the porch and watched him turn the car and drive away in a cloud of dust. Then she turned and read the welcoming note on the door before she turned the knob and went inside.

      It took only a minute to regain her familiarity with the comfortable furnishings and warm feeling of the house. She thought she even smelled freshly baked apple pie. Her bedroom was still the same, and her eyes lingered helplessly on the bed. If only she could forget!

      She dressed in a pair of designer jeans and a yellow sweater Aunt Margaret had given her as part of her graduation present, a complete new wardrobe. Then, determined to exorcise the ghosts, she walked out behind the house over the grassy deserted paddock down to the wooden fence that separated her father’s property from John’s.

      With a long sigh, she leaned against the old gray wood. She could still see herself as a teenager, in those long-ago days when she’d haunted this spot, hoping for a glimpse of John Sterling. How carefree she’d been. How full of love and hope and happy endings. Happy endings that had never come.

      Chapter Two

      It was an Australian spring day when Priss went speeding across the empty paddock toward the fence that separated her father’s small holding from John Sterling’s enormous cattle station. She was flushed with excitement, her long silvery blonde hair fanning all around her delicate features as she ran, her green eyes sparkling.

      “John!” she called. “John, I got it!”

      The tall blond man on the big black gelding wheeled his mount, frowning impatiently for an instant at the sight of Priscilla risking life and limb. Barefoot, for God’s sake, in a white sundress that would have raised a young man’s