Claiming His Family

What exactly was our problem?

Erin lay staring at the ceiling, desperate for sleep, while Luke’s question echoed in her head.

How could Luke pretend not to know the answer? Their problem had been clear as day. Right from the start it had been there in letters ten feet high for everyone to see—everyone, that was, except the two of them, blinded by foolish, foolish passion.

Luke’s parents and the Mannings’ neighbours and the ranch hands—they had all known that Luke’s Yankee bride was wrong for him. Her taste in clothes, her accent, her complexion, her attitude—everything was wrong.

The people at Warrapinya were friendly enough, but they had shown Erin, with varying degrees of subtlety, that she didn’t fit in. Even the contract fencing team, who had spent a few weeks on the property repairing barbed wire fences, had looked at her with puzzled smiles and she knew they’d joked about her behind her back.

Even so, she felt so terribly, terribly guilty because the things that had ended their marriage were so small really. Luke hadn’t gambled or drunk excessively or beaten her. But the little problems had snowballed till they loomed too large.

And that had been before Joey was born and her real problems started.

Everything had become completely clear once she had been safely back in NewYork. How could she ever have been so idiotic as to think she could live anywhere else?

CHAPTER THREE

THE scratch of a key turning in a lock woke Erin, but although she heard the sound quite distinctly she felt too drugged by sleep to respond.

She lay very still, drifting slowly up and up from the murky depths of deep slumber, aware of sounds…the rattle of the door opening and the thud of it closing. Then silence. Lovely. She could sink back into the mattress. She could…

Her eyes flashed open. Something was wrong. The silence was wrong. Was someone tiptoeing about in her room? An intruder?

Squinting through semi-darkness she saw unfamiliar furniture. The windows were covered by heavy curtains, but glimmers at either ends of the fabric indicated dazzling daylight outside.

Then she heard a loud whisper. ‘Do you think she’s awake yet?’

Joey.

Erin lurched upright, her heart racing as she remembered she was in a hotel in Sydney. How long had she slept? Oh, God, how long had Joey been awake? What had he been doing? Who was he talking to?

She flung the bedclothes aside just as two figures appeared at the door to her bedroom, one very tall, the other small.

‘Mommy, you’re awake!’ A small, Joey-shaped torpedo launched across the carpet towards her. ‘You’ve been asleep all day.’

‘All day? I can’t have.’

‘Only half a day.’ Luke’s voice came from the doorway. ‘It’s just gone noon.’

Noon. Erin groaned. This day was the last time she had with Joey before he left for North Queensland. And she’d wasted half of it. Why hadn’t she factored jet lag into her planning?

‘We’ve already had breakfast and lunch,’ Joey announced. ‘’Cause I was starving.’ With a happy grin, he threw himself beside her on the bed. His cheeks glowed pink, as if he’d been running and playing outdoors. ‘Guess what we had for lunch?’

Erin was super-aware of Luke watching from the doorway. Joey was sitting on top of the sheets so she couldn’t use them to cover her bare legs. She tried to pull her yellow silk nightdress higher to cover the tops of her breasts. She hated to think how her hair must look. It would be a fright. She focused on Joey. ‘I give up. What did you have for lunch?’

‘Fish and chips,’ he exclaimed excitedly. ‘Dad and me had a picnic down near the water. We had these hot and crunchy pieces of fish with salty French fries and they were all wrapped up in paper.’

‘Wow, that sounds…neat.’

‘It was. It was excellent. And I fed some seagulls with little bits of my fish. And Dad and me had a soda too.’

With one hand holding her nightdress against her chest, Erin looked from her son to Luke. His eyes were bright and a smile lurked. She sensed a light-heartedness about him that she hadn’t seen yesterday and she felt a perverse need to dampen it. ‘You shouldn’t have let me sleep in,’ she accused.

‘You were dead to the world.’

The happy light in his eyes flustered her and she switched her attention back to Joey. ‘So how did all this happen? When did you wake up?’

Joey shrugged. ‘I heard Dad knocking on the door, so I opened it and let him in. And then Dad gave you a shake.’

‘He what?’

Heat suffused her as she pictured what must have happened—Luke approaching her bed, leaning over her, touching her while she slept. Once more she flicked a hasty glance his way. He was still standing in the doorway, one shoulder resting casually against the frame, and she was annoyed to see a hint of amusement lurking in the depths of his smoky eyes.

Joey must have sensed her tension and he frowned. ‘It was just a little shake, Mommy, but you didn’t move. So Dad said we should leave you to sleep. He helped me to find some clothes and he wrote you a note and then we went out for breakfast.’

A note? It was then that Erin saw the page of hotel stationery on her nightstand and a message in Luke’s sharp, spiky handwriting.

‘So the two of you have spent the whole morning together,’ she said. ‘I guess I should thank you, Luke.’

‘Are you going to get up now?’ prompted Joey. ‘Dad said if you want, we can go to Taronga Park zoo.’

‘Only if you’re interested,’ added Luke quickly.

Joey bounced excitedly, making the mattress rock beneath Erin. ‘You want to go, don’t you, Mommy? Dad said the zoo’s on the other side of the harbour and we can get there on a ferry.’

Dad said, Dad said. Clearly Joey’s adoration of Luke wasn’t going to wane any time soon.

‘You’ll have to give me time to take a shower.’

‘And you’ll need coffee and something to eat,’ added Luke, but his words were almost drowned out by Joey’s cheers. ‘Can I order something for you?’

Of course she said yes. She said yes to everything. There was no way she was going to let her dissent spoil this last afternoon with Joey. She even acquiesced when, as they left the hotel, Joey insisted on walking between them, holding her hand and Luke’s as if the three of them were a regular family.

It was a beautiful day. As they boarded the bus bound for Circular Quay, Erin saw that yesterday’s dull, threatening weather had cleared. The air was crisp and sparkling, the sky was a clean, bright blue and the sunshine had turned Sydney Harbour into a dazzling sea of sapphires. Although there was a nip in the air and they needed warm jackets, it was hard to remember that it was winter.

Joey found everything thrilling—even lining up to buy ferry tickets—and his happiness and excitement were catching. By the time the boat pulled away from the dock, Erin felt more at ease than she had in weeks. Perhaps, for one afternoon, she could keep her mind free from anxiety. She could aim to be as innocent and carefree as Joey.

Luke was in a better mood too, so perhaps they could all relax. She decided to try very hard. She would live in the moment and immerse herself in the simple enjoyment of the sunshine, the sparkling harbour and the freshness of the salty breeze skimming across the water.

For just one afternoon, they could all pretend that everything was okay.

It was a nice theory.

It couldn’t work, of course.

The happy-family charade was too fragile to withstand the test of an entire afternoon. Minute by minute—while Erin and Luke laughed at the antics of the monkeys, while they waved to Joey as he rode an elephant on a merry-go-round, while they shared his admiration of the lions and tigers and his amusement over the cute little meerkats—the tension between them mounted.

Whenever Joey let go of their hands and danced ahead of them, Erin walked carefully apart from Luke, taking excessive pains not to touch him or bump him. And they were both excruciatingly careful to pay attention to Joey and to show an intense fascination with the animals on display. They took the same care to pay little or no attention to each other.