Adopted: Outback Baby

A car horn blasted beside them and Jacob realised he’d swerved dangerously close to the next lane. Teeth gritted, he corrected the steering. And then he repeated his question. ‘Why did Tegan have to ask you for my name?’

He sent another sharp glance in Nell’s direction and, despite the obscuring sunglasses, he saw that her cheeks were flushed, her mouth contorted, embarrassed.

‘That’s because your name—’ The stain in her cheeks deepened. ‘Your name wasn’t on the records. You—you weren’t listed on Tegan’s birth certificate.’

‘What?’ The word exploded from him, making Nell flinch.

Too bad, if he’d upset her. She’d upset him. Twenty years of physical exclusion and now the news that there had never been any recognition of his link to Tegan. Father unknown. Anger roiled through him, gathering force, an avalanche of emotion.

Beside him, Nell clutched her handbag against her stomach and sat very straight. ‘Jacob, we shouldn’t discuss this sort of thing while you’re driving.’

She was probably right, but his only response was an angry hiss. Jaw clenched, he checked the rear-vision mirror, switched lanes in readiness for the Williamstown exit, and tension, as suffocating as smoke, filled the car’s interior.

Five minutes later, Nell directed him into a quiet street a block back from the waterfront.

‘My house is the little one over there with the blue door,’ she said, pointing.

His anger gave way to bafflement as he pulled up outside a quaint but modest colonial cottage with a front hedge of lavender, a flagstone path and yellow roses over the door. It was the kind of old-fashioned cottage and garden his mother adored, but he’d never dreamed that Nell Ruthven and her husband would live in a place like this.

‘Thanks for the lift,’ Nell said quietly.

‘My pleasure.’ Jacob couldn’t keep the brittle note out of his voice.

Her fingers sought the door catch.

‘Shall I pick you up tomorrow morning to go to the Brownes’?’

After a slight hesitation, she said, ‘Thank you. I suppose it makes sense if we travel together.’

‘We should talk, Nell.’ His mind was still seething with angry questions.

Her eyes met his and he saw a heart-wrenching mixture of sorrow and bewilderment and something deeper he couldn’t quite pinpoint.

‘After all this time, we have things to say to each other,’ he said.

‘I can’t talk now, Jacob. There’s no point in even trying to talk today. We’re both too upset and tense.’

Although he was desperate to get everything out in the open, he had to admit that he felt wrung out. And Nell looked far worse.

She pulled the catch, the door clicked open and the scent of lavender drifted in to him on a light sea breeze. In the distance he could hear a seagull’s cry.

‘It must be very pleasant living here,’ he said in a more conciliatory tone.

‘Yes, I love it.’ She turned to speak over her shoulder, without quite looking at him. ‘Why don’t you come early tomorrow? We can talk before we go to the Brownes’?’

‘Great idea. We can go for coffee somewhere in the city.’

‘We can talk here if you like.’

Jacob frowned. ‘Are you sure your husband won’t mind?’

He was watching her profile carefully, saw her mouth curl into a complicated, off-kilter smile. ‘That won’t be a problem. There will only be the two of us. What time would you like to come?’

‘Nine? Half past?’

‘Make it half past. I’ll see you then.’

Nell got out and closed the door behind her and Jacob watched her through the passenger window as she crossed the footpath and opened the front gate. A sudden breeze gusted up the street, shaking the heads of the lavender and, as she walked up the path, the wind teased a bright strand of her hair from its braid and lifted the collar of her jacket against her neck. Her high heels made a tapping sound on the paving stones.

Framed by cream and yellow roses, she stood on her front porch in her neat, dark suit and fished in her handbag for her door key, and she looked beautiful and citified and completely removed from the horse-riding country girl he’d known for two months of one summer twenty years ago.

Tomorrow.

Tomorrow he would be entering that house, talking to Nell at last, discovering the truth he both longed for and feared.

He flipped the key in the Mercedes’s ignition so hard he almost snapped it in two.

CHAPTER TWO

TWO o’clock in the morning found Jacob awake in his unfamiliar hotel bed.

A picture of Tegan had been displayed at the funeral—his first, his only sight of his daughter—and it haunted him.

She’d been dancing on a sunlit beach and wearing a blue cotton dress that was a perfect match for the bright summer sky. Her feet had been bare and sandy, her tanned arms uplifted, her skirt billowing behind her in the wind. She’d been laughing and her long brown hair had streamed like a dark ribbon. Her eyes had sparkled with the sheer joy of being alive.

Jacob had been startled by how intensely and immediately he’d felt connected to her. The bond had gone beyond the uncanny likeness to his family in the darkness of her hair, the strong lines of her cheekbones, her straight, dark eyebrows. He’d felt it deep in his bones, in his blood, in his breath.

He had, of course, seen Nell in Tegan, too. She’d been there in the tilt of the girl’s head, in the slender shapeliness of her long legs. And that led him to thinking about Nell Ruthven née Harrington, about their meeting today. After so long.

He’d been way too tense. Everything about it had been wrong.

So many times during the past twenty years, he’d imagined a parallel universe in which he’d met Nell again. He had never deliberately sought her out, not once he’d learned she was married, but he’d imagined a scenario where they would bump into each other quite by chance. They would drop whatever they had planned for that day and go somewhere just to talk.

They’d smile a lot and chat for ages, catching up. Their reunion would be so poignant that time and Nell’s marriage to another man would become meaningless.

‘I want to go on seeing you,’ he’d say.

She’d smile. ‘I’d love that.’

Problem was, this fantasy was based on the twenty-year-old assumption that Nell had been wrong about her pregnancy, that it had simply been a case of a late period. Jacob knew through gossip his mother had passed on that Nell’s adult life had never included a child and he’d never dreamed their baby had been given away for adoption.

Tomorrow was going to be difficult. He had questions that demanded answers, but it would also be his one chance to enter that parallel universe, to reconnect with Nell’s world. And, even if it was only for a day, he didn’t want to get it wrong.

It would be easier to stay calm if he wasn’t plagued by bitter-sweet memories of their amazing, devastating summer at Half Moon, if he couldn’t still remember painful details of those two short months with Nell, right back to his first sight of her.

Home from university, she had been riding Mistral, a grey mare, and she’d come into the stables where he’d been working. Her cheeks had been flushed from the wind, her eyes bright and she’d been dressed like a glamorous, high-society equestrian in a mustard velvet jacket, pale cream jodhpurs and knee high, brown leather boots.

The fancy clothes had fitted her snugly, hugging the roundness of her breasts, cinching her waist and accentuating the length of her legs. Her pale hair had rippled like water about her shoulders and her eyes had been as blue and clear as icy stars. She had been beautiful. So incredibly beautiful…