The Australians' Brides: The Runaway and the Cattleman

Chapter Five

“Saturdays and Sundays we don’t have school,” Lockie told Jac. He added, “It’s the weekend,” as if maybe Americans didn’t know what weekends were.

His explanation covered the wilder-than-usual behavior of both boys this morning, which Carly had latched on to within minutes of waking at six. They kept early hours at Arakeela Downs. This was Jac’s fourth awakening on the vast cattle station, and she had discovered that the dawns here were magical.

And chilly.

There was something satisfying about it. She would beat the predawn bite in the air by scrambling into layers of clothes, along with Carly, and head straight for the smell of coffee luring her toward the kitchen. Lockie, Josh and Callan would already be there, making a big, hot breakfast. Toast, bacon and fresh eggs with their lush orange yolks, or oatmeal and brown sugar, with hot apple or berry sauce.

They’d start eating just as the sun slid up over the horizon, and the colors of the rugged hills Jac could see from the kitchen windows would almost make her gasp. She and Carly would go out into the day as soon as they could. “To feed the chooks” was the excuse—Carly constantly referred to the hens as chooks, now; she’d be speaking a whole different language by the time they got back to the U.S.—but in reality, Jac just couldn’t bear to miss the beauty of this part of the day.

The bare, ancient rock glowed like fire, slowly softening into browns and rusts and purples as the sun climbed higher. Dew drenched the yellow grass, the vegetable garden, the fruit trees, and made spiderwebs look like strings of diamonds. Flocks of birds in pastel pinks and whites and grays, or bright yellows, reds and greens, rose from the big eucalyptus trees in the wide creek bed and wheeled around calling their morning cries. The air was so fresh, she felt as if simply breathing it in would be enough to make her fly.

When Lockie had managed to sit down at the table, after teasing the dogs along with Carly and Josh at the back door, Jac asked him, “So what happens at weekends?”

“We get to go out with Dad. Riding boundary, checking the animals and the water.”

Callan was listening. “Except today it’s not work, it’s a picnic,” he said. “We’re going to show Jacinda and Carly the water hole.”

“Can we swim?” Lockie asked. “Can we get yabbies?”

“Yeah!” Josh’s face lit up, too.

“Yabbies? What kind of a disease is that?” Jac asked the boys, grinning. It did sound like a disease, but from their eagerness she knew it couldn’t be.

“A really nasty one!” Lockie grinned back. “Don’t you have yabbies in America?”

“We’re pretty advanced over there. Doctors have already found a cure.”

“Yabbies you catch in the water hole and you cook them and eat them,” Josh said. He was a little more serious than his big brother, a little more prickly and slower to warm to the American visitors, with their accents that belonged on TV and their ignorance regarding such obvious things as yabbies.

“Like big prawns,” Callan said.

Setting silverware on the table, Jac looked up at him. “Shrimp?”

“Big freshwater ones.” He poured the coffee into two big mugs and added a generous two inches of hot milk to each. The two of them liked their coffee the same way. It was one of the simple, reassuring things they had in common. Not important, you wouldn’t think, but nice. “Yes, guys, we can swim and fish for yabbies,” he said. “If you and Carly want to go on a picnic, Jacinda, that is.”

He looked for her approval, courteous as always. They’d been over-the-top polite to each other since Tuesday night, and over-the-top careful about respecting each other’s space. Which was dumb, really, because space hadn’t been trespassed upon in any major way during those hours of moonlit talking on the veranda.

“If that’s not interfering with your routine.” Jac whacked the politeness ball right back over the net at him. She didn’t know quite why they were both doing it. For safety, obviously, but she didn’t really understand the source of the danger. “We’d love it.”

Carly was nodding and clapping her hands.

“Doing something different on a Saturday is our routine,” Callan said. “I like to check the water holes pretty often. Sometimes you get tourists leaving garbage, and you don’t want that, or a dead animal fouling the water. Good drinking water’s too important for the cattle and the wildlife out here.”

“That makes sense.” She found it interesting when he told her this kind of stuff, but also suspected that when he slipped into the tour-guide routine, it was another safety valve.

“So we’ll ride there, give the horses some serious exercise, take lunch, yabby nets, the whole kaboodle, light a fire, make a day of it. I’ll see if Mum wants to come, but she’ll probably stay at home.”

“She’s pretty amazing, your mom.”

“Yeah, and I spend half my time trying to get her to be less amazing.” He grinned, and relaxed. “Last flying doctor clinic we went to, that’s what the doc told her. You need to cut down on the amazing, Mrs. Woods, it’s pushing your blood pressure too high.”

The kitchen timer beeped, which meant their boiled eggs were ready, and the five of them sat down to breakfast.

Like a family, Jacinda decided.

No, she guessed it, really.

She’d never been part of a family in that way.

Callan somehow read this information like a teleprompter, directly from her forehead, because as they ate he asked her, over a background of kid noise, “So where did you grow up? Where is your family from? Did you live your whole life in L.A.?”

“No, New Jersey, until I was twelve. Very different from L.A. but just as urban. I’ve never been in a place like this.” She deliberately chose to focus on the geographical element of his questions, ignored the mention of family.

It didn’t work.

“Why did you move?” Callan asked next.

Uhh … “When my mom died.”

“Your dad didn’t want the memories in New Jersey?”

“No, Dad stayed. I was the one who moved.”

Okay, she was going to have to talk about it now, after giving him that revealing answer. It wasn’t so terrible. She believed in honesty and didn’t know why she was always so reluctant to unload this stuff. Because it made her sound too much like a stray mongrel puppy who’d never found the right home?

She hadn’t thought of it quite like this before, but it made a connection.

Kurt had treated her like a stray puppy. He’d scooped her up, after they’d met at a script-writing seminar when she was still incredibly naive and raw. He’d had her professionally groomed, house-trained her himself, put a diamond collar round her neck, spoiled her rotten …. And then he’d lost interest when she still didn’t perform like a pedigreed Best in Show.

Callan was waiting for her explanation.

“Dad didn’t believe he could raise a teenage daughter on his own, you see,” she said. “I have two brothers, but they’re much older. They were eighteen and sixteen when I was born. Dad’s seventy-eight now, and lives in a retirement home near my oldest brother, Andy.”

She’d had a very solitary childhood. Her parents had both been in their forties when she was born, unprepared for their accidental return to diapers, night feeds, noisy play and bedtime stories. They’d expected her to entertain herself and she’d mostly eaten on her own, in front of a book. And then Mom had died ….

“So Dad sent me to Mom’s younger sister, because she had daughters and he thought she would know what to do.” She pitched her voice quietly. Carly wasn’t ready to hear about her mom’s lonely childhood yet. Fortunately, she and the boys were keeping each other well entertained, vying for who could make the weirdest faces as they chewed.

Seated to Jac’s left, around the corner of the table, Callan looked at her. He took a gulp of his coffee. She liked the way he held his mug, wrapping both hands around it in appreciation of the warmth. “But he was wrong about that? Your aunt didn’t know what to do?”

“I was a bit different,” Jac admitted. “I mean, don’t go imagining Cinderella and her wicked stepmother, or anything. She tried very hard. And my cousins tried … only not quite so hard. They were three and five years older than me, beautiful, blonde and busy, both of them. They were into parties and dates and modeling assignments and dance classes. They had a whole … oh … family style that I had to slot into and mesh with. Frantic pace. Drive-through breakfasts and take-out dinners in front of TV, or on the run. Modeling portfolios and salon appointments and endless hours stuck in traffic on the way from one class to another. And I just didn’t. Mesh with it, I mean. I’d grown up almost as an only child, with a very quiet life. I liked to read and think and imagine. I dreamed about horses and learning to ride. I was the polar opposite of cool. And even after the four years of ballet I took with my cousins, you would not want to see me dance!”

He nodded and stayed silent for a moment, then added with a tease in his voice, “But I’d like to see you ride.”

She smiled at him, happy that he’d dropped the subject of family. “It’ll be great to ride. But what will we do about Carly? She’s been on a three-foot-tall Shetland pony a handful of times at Kurt’s ranch, around and around on a flat piece of grass with someone holding the pony on a rope. She couldn’t ride a horse of her own out here.”

“We’ll work something out.”

“She can ride with me,” Lockie said. “I’ll show you how to gallop, Carlz. I’ll show you Tammy’s tricks. You wait!”

“Carlz” looked up at him, round-eyed and awestruck. “Yeah?” she breathed.

“Uh, Lockie, let’s save the galloping and tricks for another time, okay?” Callan said. He got a glint in his eye when he saw how relieved Jac looked, then he dropped his voice and said to her, “Nice little friendship going between those two, though.”

“Yes, and I think it’s really good for her, Callan. I appreciate it.”

Carly hadn’t sleepwalked since that first night. Possibly because with all the activity generated by boys and dogs and chooks, horses to feed, gates to swing on, trees to climb and a million places to hide, by bedtime she was just too worn out to stir. This morning, as soon as she’d eaten her breakfast, she was off with the boys, who’d been dispatched to catch the horses, bring them to the feed shed where their tack was stored and get them ready.

“But Carly stays outside the paddock and outside the shed, okay?” Callan said, as all three kids fought to be the first one out the door. “She’s too little, she doesn’t know horses and they could kick if she spooks them.”

“Will they remember?” Jac asked.

“Yep. They’re good kids.”

Jac liked his confidence, and after almost four days here, she trusted it. Given more responsibility and physical freedom than any child she’d ever met … let alone the child she’d once been, herself … the boys knew their boundaries and stayed within them. They understood the dangers in their world, and respected the rules Callan gave them to keep them safe. They’d keep Carly safe, also.

“… while we get the rest of the gear together,” Callan said.

By the time they were ready to leave, the temperature had begun to climb, in tandem with the sun’s climb through that heavenly, soaring sky. It would probably hit eighty or even ninety degrees by midafternoon, Jacinda knew. Everyone had swim gear under their clothes, and water bottles and towels in their saddlebags, as well as their share of picnic supplies. On a pair of medium-size, sturdy horses whose breed Jac didn’t know, the boys also had yabby nets, bits of string and lumps of meat for bait.

Kerry was staying home, and Carly was riding right in front of Callan on his big chestnut mare, Moss, her little pink backpack pressing against his stomach. She looked quite comfortable and happy up there. Her mommy was a little nervous about it, but Josh’s old riding helmet and Callan’s relaxed attitude helped a lot.

It was a wonderful ride. The dogs were wildly jealous, but Kerry wanted them at home with her for company. Their barks chased after the four horses and five humans for several minutes until the trail that followed the fence line cut down toward the dry creek bed and the hill between creek and homestead cut off the sound, at which point, “They can bark all they want but we don’t have to hear,” Callan said.

He let the boys lead the way and brought up the rear himself, with Jacinda in the middle. It felt good to know that he was behind her, that he would see right away if something went wrong and he’d know what to do about it.

Not that you could imagine anything going wrong on a day like today. A breeze tempered the sun’s heat, and the stately river gums spread lacy patterns of shade over the rapidly warming earth. They startled a mob of red-coated kangaroos who’d been sleeping in some dry vegetation and the ’roos bounded away, over the smooth-worn rocks and deep sand of the creek bed. On the far side of the creek, there were cattle grazing on coarse yellow grass. Some of them looked up at the sound of the horses, but soon returned to browsing the ground.

“When does the creek actually flow?” Jacinda asked, craning around to Callan in her saddle. It was a different style from the ones on Kurt’s ranch, not so high in front. “In winter?”

“Only when we’ve just had rain,” Callan answered. He nudged Moss forward to close the distance between them a little. Carly sat there, so high. Her little body rocked with the motion of the horse’s gait like she was born to it, and her helmet looked like a dusty white mushroom on top of her head. “It doesn’t stay running for long. A couple of days. Enough to top up the water holes. Fortunately we have a string of good deep spring-fed ones in the gorge, and a couple more downstream.”

“Does the creek water ever get to the sea?”

“Nope. It drains into Lake Frome, east of here.”

“Which is dry, too, most of the time, right? A salt pan?” She’d been looking at a map and some books with Carly while the boys did schoolwork during the week.

“That’s right. Salt and clay. Flat, as far as the eye can see. I like these mountains better.”

“Well, yeah, because you own these mountains.”

She couldn’t keep the satisfaction out of her voice, and he picked up on it. “You really like that, don’t you?”