The Bridesmaid's Best Man

The coffee table in Sophie’s lounge was strewn with travel brochures, flight schedules and maps of Australia, as well as flyers advertising her sisters’ next concerts.

Sophie stared at an elegant black and white head-shot of her eldest sister, Alicia, and sighed. Both her sisters were musically gifted, like their parents, and both had launched brilliant careers. Neither of them would have landed in a mess like Sophie’s.

As the youngest Felsham daughter, Sophie had often been told she was pretty, but she’d been too given to daydreaming and too impulsive to ever be called brilliant. She’d never been able to stick at music practice the way Alicia and Elspeth had, had never felt driven to be a high achiever like her famous parents.

Emma had suggested once that Sophie had stopped competing with her sisters because she was afraid of failure, and Emma was probably right, but Sophie figured she’d failed often enough to justify her choice.

Oliver’s rejection—her most recent and spectacular failure—had been one too many.

Now her unplanned pregnancy would cement her position as the family’s very, very black lamb.

Sophie shook her head to clear her mind of that thought. Somehow she had to turn this latest negative into a shining positive. She owed it to her baby.

Of course, she was scared—she’d never had much to do with babies—but she was strangely excited, too. She wanted to be really good at motherhood, was determined to be a perfect mum. Her own mother had always been so terribly busy, especially by the time her third daughter had arrived.

Sophie would be loving and patient, happy to let her baby grow into a little individual, free from the pressures of great expectations.

And for the first time in her life Sophie would be doing something that Alicia and Elspeth hadn’t done already and done better than she ever could. She would care for her baby so brilliantly that no one in her family would dare to utter a single ‘tut tut’.

Cheered by that thought, she picked up a brochure about the Australian Outback. Her instincts had urged her to go straight to Mark as soon as she’d found out about the baby.

OK, OK, so maybe her instincts had also nudged her clear away from her parents. But, family aside, surely she owed Mark a visit?

Or was she crazy to even think of going all the way Down Under, to face the possibility of being rejected and hurt yet again?

Closing her eyes, she pictured Mark—remembered his hard, lean body, the tan of his skin, the crinkles at the corners of his eyes, his unhurried smile—and she felt a sudden, thudding catch in her heart. In every way, Mark was very different from Oliver.

Her fingers traced a light circle over her tummy, and she couldn’t help smiling. She was carrying a little boy or girl who might look like its daddy, who might walk like him, or smile like him. A whole little person whose future happiness rested in her hands.

And Mark’s.

Was Emma right? Did she owe it to her baby to go to Australia, to find Mark in the Outback? But, if she did, what then? What if she fell deeply in love with Mark, only to have him reject her and send her packing? It would be like Oliver all over again only a hundred—no, a thousand—times worse.

Sophie doubted she was brave enough to sacrifice her dignity on that particular altar. But would she be any safer if she stayed here in London to endure the dismayed gaze of her family while she grew fat with this pregnancy?

Wouldn’t it be better to take a gamble on Mark?

CHAPTER THREE

THERE was nobody home.

Sophie stared in consternation at the peeling paint and tarnished brass knocker on the front door of the sprawling timber homestead. She read the name plate again: Coolabah Waters. This was definitely Mark Winchester’s home.

But no one answered her knock. Where was he?

It had never occurred to her that Mark wouldn’t be here. He’d said he would be back before now. Would phone. When she’d called his caretaker to tell him of her plan to fly out here, he had confirmed that Mark was due home any day. But now there was no sign of either of them.

She knocked again, called anxiously, ‘Hello!’ and ‘Anybody home?’

She waited.

There was no answer, no sound from within the big house. All she could hear was the buzz of insects in the grass and the distant call of a lone crow.

She sent a desperate glance behind her, squinting in the harsh Outback sunlight. The mail truck that had brought her from Wandabilla was already a cloud of dust on the distant horizon. Even if she ran after it, jumping and waving madly, the driver wouldn’t see her.

She was alone. Alone in the middle of Australia, surrounded by nothing but miles and miles and miles of treeless plains and bare, rocky ridges.

Why wasn’t Mark here?

She’d thought about him constantly through the long, long flight from England, another flight halfway across Australia to Mount Isa, and then a scary journey in a light aircraft no bigger than a paper plane over endless flat, dry grassland to Wandabilla, near the Northern Territory border. Finally, after getting advice from a helpful woman in the Wandabilla Post Office, she’d cadged a lift to Coolabah Waters on the mail truck.

Now she didn’t know what to do. She was exhausted to the point of dropping, and her decision to come all this way to talk to Mark felt like a really, really bad idea—even crazier than inviting him back to her flat on the night of the wedding.

It had been Tim, Emma’s husband, who had finally convinced her that she must make the trip Down Under.

‘Of course you need to talk to Mark face to face,’ he’d insisted. ‘He’s that kind of guy. A straight shooter. He won’t muck you about. And you’ll love it in Australia. There’s no place like it in the world.’

Well, that was certainly true, Sophie thought dispiritedly, looking about her. But she didn’t think she could share Tim’s enthusiasm for endless dry and dusty spaces.

She hadn’t expected Mark’s home to be so very isolated. She’d understood that the Australian Outback would be vast and scantily populated, but she’d thought there’d be some kind of a village nearby at least.

Fighting down the nausea that had been troubling her more frequently over the past fortnight, she tiptoed to a window and tried to peer inside the house. But the glass was covered by an ageing lace curtain, and she could only make out the shape of an armchair.

The window was the sash kind that had to be lifted up. Feeling like a criminal, Sophie tried it, but it wouldn’t budge.

Another glance at the road behind her showed that the mail truck had completely disappeared. She was surrounded by absolute stillness, no background noise at all. No comforting hum of traffic, no aircraft, no voices. Nothing.

If she wasn’t careful, the silence would rattle her completely.

I mustn’t panic.

Sophie sat on her suitcase and tried to think.

Was this her biggest mistake yet?

The family failure strikes again?

Mark could be anywhere on this vast property. She knew there’d been a muster, but she had no idea what other kinds of work cattlemen did. She supposed they kept busy doing something. They couldn’t simply lounge about the house all day with their feet up, while their cattle ate grass and grew fat.

But, if Mark was off working somewhere on his vast cattle station, where was his caretaker? When she’d spoken to him on the phone, he’d sounded rather nice, with a warm Scottish brogue that had made her feel very welcome.

The abandoned house, however, didn’t look particularly welcoming. The veranda was swept, but the floorboards were unpainted and faded to a silvery grey, and the ferns in the big pottery urns were brown-tipped and drooping. The house in general needed a coat of paint, and the garden—well, you couldn’t really call it a garden—was a mere strip of straggling vegetation around the house, full of weeds and dried clumps of grass.

Sophie looked at her watch and sighed. It was only ten in the morning, and Mark might be away all day. It was midnight at home. No wonder she felt so exhausted and ill.

Leaving her bags near the front door, she went down the front steps and tottered over the uneven, stubbly grass in her high heels.

Back in London, high heels and a two-piece suit had seemed like a smart idea. She’d wanted to impress Mark. Huh! Now, twenty-six hours and twelve thousand miles later, she felt positively ridiculous. No wonder the fellow in the mail truck had looked amused. She’d probably been his week’s entertainment.