Wanted: Outback Wife

‘Do we have enough ice?’ he asked, tidily avoiding the question. ‘I can run into town to get more.’

‘We have plenty of ice,’ Elena said. Her patting stopped. ‘Though I’m sure it won’t occur to Cameron to thank you, he appreciates you holding Marissa’s wake here. And when you took over for him during the eulogy, oh, that fair broke my heart then and there. You’re a good kid, Heath.’

‘A thirty-six-year-old kid,’ he reminded her. ‘Which makes you—’

‘A lady of indiscriminate age,’ Elena said, cutting him off quick smart. ‘So when are we going to get to use this big old place for more than Christmas parties, local community meetings and funerals? When do we all get to come here to celebrate your wedding?’

‘Ha! I’m surprised you and the Crabbe sisters haven’t lined Cam and me up for a double wedding by now.’

As soon as the words left his mouth he regretted them. They were cruel and hurtful and born of the fact that he barely believed the words even as he said them. He stood and moved to the edge of the veranda, wrapping his hands around the wooden railing until a bunch of splinters poked deep enough to hurt.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘That was out of order.’

‘And completely understandable, considering. Does the thought of settling down frighten you that much?’

Settling down? That was what she thought had kept him from the altar all this time? He had settled down a decade ago. What scared him was that if one day he settled down at Jamesons Run with someone else it meant that he would never leave. But now, on this tragic day, it no longer seemed the biggest problem in his life.

‘What if I told you that right this moment I am feeling the very opposite?’ he said. He turned and leant his backside against the railing and folded his arms and stared his big sister down.

‘Well, kid, I would say thank the gods.’ She stood and grabbed him by the arms, giving him a big kiss on the cheek. ‘Is there a particular woman who has brought about this change of heart?’

One woman? Absolutely. But she was gone now. Not just gone from his life, but gone from all life. And it had taken a shock of that magnitude to knock him from the path of his life.

‘None in particular,’ he said. His reasons were his to wrangle alone. ‘So what do you think? Should I go and give the Crabbe sisters the fright of their life by proposing to one of them right now?’

The Crabbe girls were as sensible a choice as any. He knew from past experience of country-dance bottom-pinching, all instigated by one or the other of them, that they would not have been immune to such an idea. But no matter how hard he tried to picture himself in the role of doting husband with a good little country wife by his side, he found he in all good conscience could not. It felt like too much of the same.

And what he craved so deeply was change.

‘No need,’ Elena said, reaching into her purse for a pile of yellowed, creased A4 paper. ‘I’ve already signed you up to some dating websites, just in case.’

‘Websites?’ Heath parroted back. ‘Aren’t they all just fronts for three-hundred-pound, sixty-year-old Russians looking to relocate?’

Elena’s responding sigh was melodramatic. ‘I’ll have you know over half all new relationships forged by people in their thirties come from meeting over the Internet.’

After a pause, Heath said, ‘You just made that up.’

‘I did. But it sounds good, don’t you think? Now I’ve found some girls I like, and some I know you’ll like. All are Melbourne women. Twenty-seven to thirty-five. Single. Looking for love, not just fun.’ She glanced at him through narrowed eyes.

He took the pages, skimming through pictures and vital statistics of a dozen perfectly attractive young women.

One page about halfway through had stuck to another with a glob of baby food. It caught his eye for the fact that it had a big red cross through it. Why, he had no idea, for the woman in the picture looked absolutely worth investigating.

She was laughing so hard he could almost feel the energy radiating from the page. Something about the angle of the photo made him feel kind of dizzy, as if he were about to tip over if he didn’t plant his feet.

Behind the smile was English-rose skin. Huge jade-green cat’s eyes. Long curling eyelashes. A fine chin and a nice straight nose. And she had a seriously sexy stash of strawberry-blonde waves. She barely looked twenty but there was something steely behind her pretty green eyes that had Heath thinking that she was older.

A bulleted list below the photo told him she hated chocolate, her favourite colour was yellow, she cooked a mean plate of fettuccini carbonara, and she lived for mascarpone.

Considering he couldn’t go a day without chocolate, he wasn’t entirely sure he had a favourite colour, he couldn’t eat starch and didn’t even know what a mascarpone was, it seemed that they were likely the least-suited pair on the planet. Maybe that was why Elena had crossed her out.

But there was something in those flinty green eyes that kept him staring at her picture. ‘What’s wrong with this one?’ he asked.

Elena glanced at the page and screwed up her nose. ‘That one wasn’t meant to be there.’ She reached out to take it back, but Heath moved it just out of her way.

‘Why not?’

‘She is the star turn on a website called www.ahusbandinahurry.com. I don’t think that bodes well.’

‘Don’t you think that’s what many of these women are after? At least she’s honest,’ he said. And if he was honest, it was what he wanted too. Now. As soon as possible. A wife. A partner. Someone else with whom to share his space, his time, his life. It was time for him to stop playing it safe. It was time for him to take a risk.

Elena shrugged, obviously not pleased that it hadn’t gone all her way. Likely she had picked out a bunch of women who enjoyed cross-stitch and watching car racing on TV so that if all went well she could have a new friend as well as a sister-in-law.

But that one, as Elena called her, was different. Behind the pretty green eyes Heath knew there was fire. And though all week he had been wishing for rain, suddenly fire held a heck of a lot more possibilities. Change was in the air. Barely there, but there all the same. Enough that he could taste it—sweet and welcome on his tongue.

‘Heath, are you out here?’ a male voice called from inside. His youngest brother, Caleb.

‘Out here, buddy.’

‘Someone knocked over the punch bowl and there’s pineapple pieces swimming all over the dining-room floor.’

He let out a long slow breath and bit back the suggestion that Caleb could have cleaned the thing up himself. But the kid was spoilt. All of his siblings were. And it was his fault.

But inside there were worse things afoot than pineapple on the floor. His brother Cameron was doing his best to keep himself from shattering into a million pieces while trying to help his two little daughters understand why their mummy was not coming home. And big brother Heath was hiding outside.

Well, not any more. ‘I’m coming, Caleb.’

‘To save the day as always, bro,’ Caleb said, slapping Heath on the back, but Heath was sure the kid had no notion of how true that was.

On a balmy Saturday night, two weeks later, Jodie angled her beloved twenty-year-old car, aptly nicknamed Rusty, into an empty car park in a side street off Flinders. She threw a handful of coins into the parking meter as she spied a gap in Saturday-night traffic cruising the length of the grand old train station. She hitched her black sparkly halter an inch higher and tugged her tight jeans an inch lower and ran as fast as her borrowed high heels would carry her.

She was late, as an hour before she could still have been found sitting on the couch with Louise in her pyjama bottoms, Chelsea Football Club T-shirt and slippers, as she hadn’t entirely been planning on turning up that night.

Over the past two weeks, Jodie had met twelve different guys that she and Mandy had chosen from the responses to her website. An actor, a vet, a guy who sold mobile phone contracts door-to-door, and a funeral director whose massive Adam’s apple slid up and down in his throat with such vigour Jodie had found it hard to look anywhere else. And she would have put every cent she owned on the fact that most had come for a good time, not a long time.

What was she doing interviewing prospective husbands? Really? When Jodie reached the safety of the footpath, she closed her eyes and visualised waving goodbye to Mandy and Lisa, getting on the jumbo plane, landing in Heathrow, catching the tube, knocking on the front door of the tiny flat she had shared with her mother for twenty-five years…No, if she was to have any sort of life, she had to stay the course.

Jodie pushed open the heavy carved door nestled into the underbelly of the train station and rushed down the carpeted steps.

Lisa, the maître d’ at the popular restaurant, grimaced as she came into view. ‘Another minute and I would have given away your table.’

‘I probably would have thanked you if you had,’ Jodie muttered. ‘Is he here yet?’

Lisa shook her head. ‘But Mandy is prowling in your corner. Go settle her before she frightens away my customers.’

Jodie gave her a quick pat on the arm before skimming through the tables to the private table for two in the corner. When she saw Mandy sitting in a chair, her stiletto tapping nervously against the floor, Jodie was torn between staying or making a run for it to the ladies’ room, squeezing out the tiny window and dropping atop the Dumpster a floor below.

‘Nice of you to show,’ Mandy said as Jodie slipped quickly into the cool seat across from her.