A Mother To Make A Family

Rose nodded.

‘How does it work? School of the air I’m familiar with, but that’s about it for schools out our way.’

‘We have several teachers on staff covering everything from kindergarten through to high school and we have several classrooms. If children can make it to the classrooms they attend there but we can also teach them in their beds.’

‘And Lila can join in?’

‘Yes. Any child who is going to be in hospital for longer than a couple of days or is admitted frequently can be enrolled and we work closely with their regular school to make sure what they are learning is relevant.’

‘Why is this the first I’m hearing about this?’

Rose smiled. ‘I would guess Annabel has been trying to tell you, and if you’d called her back you would know.’

‘Touché,’ he said, before taking another sip of his coffee. ‘Lila would probably enjoy being in a classroom and having other kids her age around instead of just her younger brothers. How do I organise this?’

‘You’ll have to email Annabel and she can put a request in on your behalf,’ Rose explained.

Mitch pulled out his phone, asked for Annabel’s email address, and sent an email off straight away. He copied Rose in to the email and her phone beeped as the email hit her inbox. She glanced at her screen. Mitch’s signature on the bottom of the email included the contact details for the station.

Emu Downs.

It sounded so romantic. ‘Emu Downs. That’s a beautiful name.’

Mitch smiled and Rose’s heart soared. It was crazy how she reacted to his simple gestures. She’d spent months telling herself she wasn’t ready for a relationship yet this man, virtually a complete stranger, was able to make her body spring to life.

‘You’re imagining huge mobs of emus running across the land, aren’t you?’ Mitch’s question interrupted her fantasy.

Emus? She hadn’t been imagining anything of the sort! But she couldn’t tell him the truth—that she was feeling such a strong pull of attraction that she was amazed he hadn’t noticed. She couldn’t tell him the truth so she fibbed. ‘I was. Are there lots?’

‘Not any more. The dingoes and the drought have wiped a lot of them out.’

‘It’s a cattle station, is that right?’

Mitch nodded.

‘Has it always been in your family?’

‘It belongs to my wife’s family.’

The dead wife. That brought her back down to earth with a thump. This man with the gorgeous eyes and kind smile had children and a dead wife. He ran a cattle station out back of nowhere and he’d told her he had a lot on his plate. Hooking up with a random girl was probably not high on his agenda.

But Rose couldn’t shake the feeling that fate had brought him to her. That they were supposed to meet, that there was something between them and that he was going to be important to her in some way.

Or maybe she was going to be important to him. He looked a little distracted, lost in his memories, and Rose instinctively wanted to help. She had a tendency to feel other people’s pain. Perhaps because she’d suffered a major loss, the death of her father, at a young age, it had fine-tuned her empathy but she definitely felt as though she was the one who could help him. But how?