Outback Husband

He hadn’t realised that she would be so young. She couldn’t be much more than twenty-five, Cal thought, eyeing her unsympathetically. Much too young to own a property like this. A station needed someone who knew the outback, not this girl with her brittle smile and her careful manners.

She was prettier than he had expected, too, Cal admitted grudgingly to himself. Very slender, almost thin, she had dark hair, exquisite cheekbones and wide eyes of so dark a blue they seemed almost purple. He might even have described her as beautiful if it hadn’t been for the bruised look about her. There were shadows under her eyes and she held herself warily. She reminded him of a racehorse, skittish and trembling with nerves before a big race. Cal didn’t have anything against racehorses, but they didn’t belong in the outback. This was brumby country, a place for tough, half-broken horses that could work. They might not be beautiful, but at least they were useful.

Looking at Juliet Laing, Cal doubted if she had ever been of use to anyone other than herself.

‘Yes, I’m Cal,’ he said in his deep, slow voice, and, because he had little choice, he took her outstretched hand. He had had plenty of time on the long drive from Brisbane to wonder if he was making a terrible mistake coming back to Wilparilla, but now that he had met Juliet for himself he was sure that he had done the right thing after all. This nervy, fragile-looking woman would never last out here. She would run back to England as soon as things got difficult and he would be back where he belonged at long last.

Her handshake was surprisingly firm, though. Cal looked down into her eyes and then wished he hadn’t. They were extraordinary eyes, the kind of eyes that could seriously interfere with a man’s breathing, and they held besides an expression that gave him pause. There was nothing weak or nervous about the look in Juliet’s eyes. It was steady and stubborn.

For a long moment they measured each other, and it seemed to Juliet that an unspoken challenge was issued between them. Quite what the challenge was, she couldn’t have said, but she knew that Cal Jamieson thought she didn’t belong here. Well, if he thought she was going to turn tail and run, he had another think coming!

‘Shall we talk on the verandah?’ she asked coolly.

Cal raised his brows. ‘Talk?’ He made it sound as if she had made an indecent proposal.

‘It wasn’t much of an interview on the phone,’ said Juliet, trying to keep the defensiveness from her voice.

‘It’s a little late for an interview, isn’t it?’ said Cal. ‘We agreed that I should come for a trial period as manager.’

What did he mean, we agreed? thought Juliet crossly. She had agreed to employ him on a trial basis.

‘I’ve been driving for the last four days to get here and do just that,’ he was saying, unaware of her mental interruption. ‘What happens if I don’t pass this “interview”? Do you expect me to turn round and go straight back to Brisbane?’

‘Of course not.’ Juliet set her teeth. This was going to be worse than she had thought. She hadn’t been imagining that undercurrent of hostility when she’d spoken to him on the phone. Not that he was aggressive. No, he just stood there looking calm and quiet and utterly implacable.

‘Look,’ she said, making a big effort to sound reasonable, ‘Pete Robbins has vouched for you, but all I know is that you’ve come from Brisbane and that you need a job. All you know about me is that I need a manager. Given that we’re going to be working so closely together, I think we should find out a little more about each other.’

He knew a lot more about her than that, Cal thought grimly. He knew that she and her husband had come out from England and bought this place on a whim. He knew that they’d alienated their neighbours, sacked the experienced stockmen and neglected the property he had worked so hard to build up, and that now, when her husband was dead and she had no reason to stay, she was stubbornly refusing all offers to buy the station from her. Holding out for more money, he decided in disgust, as if she didn’t have more than enough already. She was a spoilt, silly woman, and she was in his way.

Cal didn’t need to know any more about Juliet than that, just as she didn’t need to know exactly what he was doing here.

He would humour her for now, Cal thought as he shrugged an acceptance and followed Juliet up the steps to the verandah. Let her think that he was desperate for a job if that was what she wanted.

He sat down in one of the cane chairs and laid his hat on the floor, glad that Pete Robbins had warned him about the changes the Laings had made to the old homestead. Hugo Laing’s mad scheme had apparently been the talk of the district. Instead of pouring badly needed money into the property, he had squandered thousands on rebuilding the homestead from scratch. The idea had been to create the kind of luxurious accommodation that would attract a higher class of tourist, but as far as Cal knew no visitor had ever stayed in it.

The stark contrast between the pretentious style of the homestead and the state of the station, crumbling with neglect around it, made Cal angry, but in other ways he was glad. Seeing someone else living in the simple homestead he had shared with Sara would have been hard, and at least now he wouldn’t be confronted with the ghosts of the past whenever he came to the house—which wouldn’t, he hoped, be that often.

Now Cal looked at Juliet, who had sat on the other side of the cane table. There was an unstudied elegance about her that made her look as if she were posing for a lifestyle spread, in spite of her jeans and simple sand-coloured shirt.

‘What kind of things do you want to know?’ he asked her.

The bored resignation in his voice grated on Juliet’s nerves. He wasn’t even trying to be pleasant! She had envisaged a casual chat so that they could sum each other up, but Cal made it sound as if she was preparing an interrogation, and, of course, now that they were sitting down, she couldn’t think how to begin. She was so tired the whole time that even a simple conversation was beyond her.

‘Well, how long have you been in Brisbane, for instance?’ she asked at last, horribly conscious of how inane the question sounded.

Cal made no effort to disguise the fact that he thought so too. ‘Nearly four years.’

About the same time that she had been out here, Juliet thought. A lifetime. ‘What have you been doing there?’ she persevered, forcing herself to sound pleasant and relaxed, although something about the way Cal sat there looking completely at home was making her tense. This was her home, and he had no right to make it look as if he belonged there and she was the stranger.

Cal hesitated. ‘I had my own company,’ he said eventually, hoping that she wouldn’t ask any more. If she found out how successful it had been, she would wonder what he was doing looking for a job as a manager.

Juliet misinterpreted his hesitation. The company couldn’t have been very successful if he was so desperate for a job that he was prepared to come out here and work for her. He obviously didn’t want to talk about it, anyway.

‘Peter Robbins said that you were originally from this area,’ she said instead. ‘What made you go to Brisbane in the first place?’

‘Personal reasons,’ said Cal, taciturn.

‘So…er…how do you feel about coming back?’

He stared at her. ‘What do you mean, how do I feel?’

‘I mean, how do you feel?’ snapped Juliet. ‘Are you happy to be back? Are you sad to leave friends behind in the city? Are you worried about working for a woman?’ She sighed. ‘You’re not very forthcoming, are you?’

What did she think this was, a cocktail party? ‘I don’t see that it matters,’ said Cal, equally exasperated. ‘If I were looking for a station manager, I wouldn’t waste my time asking him how he felt, I’d want to know what he could do. If we have to go through this farce, why don’t you try asking me something relevant?’

‘I’ve been trying to find out something about your experience,’ said Juliet angrily.

‘Experience of what?’ he asked with an impatient shrug. ‘A station manager’s got to be able to do more than sit in an office and manage.’

‘OK,’ she said, tight-lipped. ‘What would you ask, since you seem to know so much about it?’

‘If I was employing a manager? I’d want to know if he could fly a plane and drive a road-train. Could he build a dam and fix a generator and sink a bore? Did he understand accounts? And that’s before all the obvious stuff like mustering, roping cattle, catching bulls, castrating, branding, dehorning, building fences—’

‘All right, all right!’ Juliet interrupted him. ‘You’ve made your point. Do I take it you can do all that?’ she went on, not without some sarcasm, and he looked her straight in the eye.

‘You’ll find that out over the next three months, won’t you?’

Juliet’s dark blue eyes kindled dangerously, and her chin went up as she glared back at him. ‘I don’t see any point in having a trial at all if your attitude doesn’t change,’ she said sharply. ‘You have made absolutely no effort to be co-operative, or even courteous, since you arrived. Instead you’ve made it plain that you think I know nothing about running a station.’

Cal opened his mouth, but she swept on before he had a chance to speak. ‘Well, that may be true, but one thing I do know is that I’m not prepared to pay good money for a manager who’s going to talk to me as if I’m stupid! I’m an intelligent woman trying to deal with an extremely difficult situation. I want a manager who can build this station up, run it efficiently and take the time to explain to me what he’s doing and why, so that I can learn eventually to run it myself.

‘Now, the last manager here couldn’t be bothered to do that. He made the mistake of thinking that my opinion didn’t count,’ Juliet went on grimly, ‘so I sacked him.’ She fixed Cal with a look, and he was annoyed to find himself noticing how the temper flashing in her eyes had banished that wary, nervous look, leaving her suddenly vivid. Roused out of her brittle poise, she was a force to be reckoned with—and more attractive than he had realised.

‘And I’ll sack you,’ she was saying, ‘if you forget for one minute that I’m the boss round here. This is my property. I’m prepared to pay whatever it takes for someone to help me, but I’m sure as hell not going to pay to be patronised!’

The expression in Cal’s grey eyes was hard to read. If he felt embarrassed or ashamed or intimidated by her outburst, he was certainly giving no sign of it. He wasn’t the kind of man she could imagine being intimidated by anything, Juliet thought with an inward sigh.

‘I just thought we should know where we stood,’ she finished lamely, when Cal didn’t say anything. ‘It’s better to be clear about things from the beginning.’

Cal looked at her. ‘The only thing that’s clear to me is that you want a manager, a miracle-worker, a slave and a teacher all rolled into one,’ he said sardonically. ‘I could tell just driving along the track how much work needs to be done here. If I’m going to run this place properly, I won’t have time to explain everything to you.’

‘I’m not asking for a minute by minute account,’ said Juliet. ’I won’t be able to spend much time with you with two small children to look after. But I want to know what’s going on, and I want to learn what I can.’

‘And when you’ve learnt what you can?’

‘Then you’ll be out of a job,’ she said with a direct look. ‘But I’m not a fool. I know how long that will take me, so the job is secure for a while yet, if that’s what’s worrying you.’

It wasn’t security that was worrying Cal, it was the realisation that Juliet Laing was going to be trickier to deal with than he had anticipated. He had expected a spoilt, helpless widow, all ready to be persuaded—in the nicest possible way—that her only option was to sell up and go back to England where she belonged, but the more he looked at Juliet, the less persuadable she seemed. There was a wilful set to that lovely mouth, a stubborn tilt to her chin, a steadiness in the deep blue eyes that was almost unsettling.