Outback Boss, City Bride

Great. Meredith’s heart sank. So much for her magic carpet, she thought, brushing at her trousers in a futile attempt to clean them. It looked like being an uncomfortable journey.

Not that that would probably bother Hal Granger. Comfort didn’t seem to be very high on his agenda. The truck was basic, to say the least. Meredith was used to cars with comfortable bucket seats separated by a gear stick. Here, the gear shift was set oddly in the steering wheel column and the seat was a single hard bench, its plastic covering torn in places and oozing some mean brownish foam.

Still, perhaps she was lucky there was any padding at all, Meredith reflected. She’d thought bench seats like this went out in the Sixties before seat belts were enforced. Weren’t these the kind of car seats just made for making out on? Not that she had ever been the kind of girl who was taken out for a date that ended in a clinch in some secluded parking spot, but she’d read plenty of novels where teenagers got carried away and took advantage of the lack of obstructions to get horizontal.

Meredith sighed. Typical that her only experience of turbulent teenage passion was through books.

Or of roaring-towards-thirty-verging-on-middle-age-ifshe-wasn’t-careful passion, come to that.

She glanced at Hal Granger as he put the truck into gear and wondered if he had ever put the bench seat to good use. He must have been a teenager once, although it was hard to imagine now that he was all grim, solid man and, anyway, where would he have found a heavy date living out here in the middle of nowhere?

Presumably people did meet and marry, though. Hal might even be married himself. It was a thought that made Meredith pause. Was he married? He was a few years older than her—pushing forty, she guessed—so it wasn’t beyond the bounds of possibility, although she couldn’t quite picture it, somehow. He seemed so closed and stern, it was impossible to think of him happy and smiling, falling in love, making love…

Which was a shame, really, with a mouth like that.

The thought came out of nowhere, like an unexpected poke in the stomach, and Meredith was so shocked by it that she actually gasped. It was little more than an indrawn breath, in fact, but the next instant she found herself skewered by Hal’s cold, oddly light, grey gaze as he turned his head to look directly at her.

‘Are you OK?’ he asked, frowning, his hand stilling on the gear shift.

To her horror, Meredith found herself blushing. ‘Yes, fine,’ she said quickly. ‘I’m just…a bit hot, that’s all.’

Oh, God, what had she said that for? She had made it sound faintly suggestive, and if it had seemed like that to her, what would Hal have made of it?

‘I’m fine,’ she added again, ridiculously flustered.

To her intense relief, Hal didn’t seem to notice anything amiss. ‘There’ll be a bit of a breeze once we get going,’ he said.

‘A bit of a breeze’, Meredith discovered as they bowled along the tarmac, was his way of describing the constant buffeting of the air through the open windows. In no time at all it had snarled her hair into an impenetrable tangled mess and deposited what felt like an inch-thick layer of red dust on her face. When she lifted her hand to touch her cheek it felt like sandpaper and she grimaced.

‘How long will it take us to get to Wirrindago?’ she asked, raising her voice above the sound of the rushing air.

Hal shrugged. ‘Couple of hours,’ he suggested.

‘A couple of hours?’ Appalled, Meredith stared at the tarmac, stretching remorselessly straight ahead until it vanished into the shimmering heat haze. ‘I didn’t realise it would take so long,’ she confessed.

‘Two hours is a good trip.’ He glanced at her as she struggled to keep her dark hair from blowing about her face. ‘It can take a lot longer in the Wet when there’s water in the creeks,’ he told her. ‘Sometimes we can’t get across at all and have to fly in and out.’

‘It seems a long way to go for some shopping,’ Meredith commented, thinking longingly of the supermarket just round the corner from her London house. That was a three minute walk, max. ‘Isn’t there anywhere closer?’

‘No,’ said Hal. ‘Whyman’s Creek is as local as it gets. We don’t come in unless we absolutely have to.’

‘I can see why,’ said Meredith. She couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to go to Whyman’s Creek if they could possibly avoid it. Bill had made it sound as if a trip into town was a regular Saturday night jaunt for the stockmen at Wirrindago, but what on earth did they do when they were there? There was nothing to see, nothing to do, just the crushing heat and the flies and the fine red dust that seemed to settle over everything.

Presumably the pub was the draw, although its appeal was rather lost on Meredith.

One thing, she surely wouldn’t have any problems persuading Lucy to leave with her, Meredith consoled herself. If anything could have cured her sister of her romantic ideals, it would have to be working for a man like Hal Granger in this awful, empty place.

‘The outback’s beautiful,’ Lucy had raved. ‘I can’t wait to get out there and find some real men! Outback men, Lucy had assured her sceptical elder sister, were universally strong and silent. They rode horses and wore hats and checked shirts, and they were all slow quiet charm and rangy grace.

Meredith’s mouth quirked as she glanced sideways at Hal Granger. He was rangy, yes, and he had a hat, she’d give him that, but he was clearly short in the charm and grace department. Of course, he might look different if he smiled, she conceded to herself, but he didn’t look as if he did that very often. He might smile at Lucy though, Meredith reminded herself. Men usually did.

Not that Lucy was likely to be impressed if he drove this clapped-out truck instead of riding a wild stallion. He didn’t even have the decency to wear a checked shirt. Poor Lucy’s illusions must have been shattered, thought Meredith, amused. If she were Lucy, she would leap at the chance to escape.

But if she were Lucy, she would be the one Richard wanted to see and she wouldn’t be here at all.

Meredith’s smile faded at the thought of Richard. She wished she knew how he was. She hadn’t been able to get a signal to call his mother that morning. It seemed weeks since she had stood by that hospital bed and promised to find Lucy, but it couldn’t have been more than two—three?—days ago. Tiredly, Meredith wiped the dust from her cheek with the flat of her hand. She had been through so many time zones she had lost track of the days completely.

Hal heard her sigh and glanced at her. She looked tired, he thought with a touch of compunction. Judging by the pallor of her skin, she was fresh off the plane from London and she was probably exhausted.

He should have been more helpful, he thought. He wasn’t normally that ungracious. It was unfortunate that she’d got him on a bad day.

Everything seemed to be going wrong recently. Someone only had to look at a piece of machinery for it to break at the moment. They hadn’t had enough rain. Fences were down and bank charges up, and on top of that he had the kids to deal with…Meredith’s glossy assurance as she’d stood at the top of the pub steps, literally looking down on him, had caught him on the raw. At first glance, she had seemed to represent everything that Hal least liked and least trusted.

But she wasn’t complaining, he noticed with grudging respect, even though she was obviously not enjoying herself. Her mouth—that surprisingly lush mouth that didn’t seem to go at all with the astringency of her personality—was turned down at the corners as she surveyed the road ahead, evidently profoundly unimpressed by the road that cut across the vast plain of unvarying dust and scrub to a huge, empty horizon.

‘You’re not very like your sister, are you?’ he said abruptly and she turned to look at him with a resigned sigh.

‘It’s been said before,’ she told him. ‘Lucy’s the pretty one. I’m the clever one,’ she explained, a sardonic edge to her voice. ‘Or so we’ve always been told.’

‘Lucy doesn’t strike me as stupid,’ he said and Meredith laughed.

‘You know, you missed your chance there to say, Oh, but you’re pretty too, Meredith!’

Disconcerted by how much prettier she did look when she smiled, Hal returned his gaze firmly to the road ahead. ‘Would you have believed me if I had?’

‘Probably not,’ Meredith agreed. Who was she kidding? Of course not. She would have despised Hal if he’d pretended that he thought she was pretty when she patently wasn’t, so she was glad that he’d at least had the decency to be straight with her.

Honestly, she was glad. And it wasn’t as if she cared whether he thought she was pretty or not in any case.

‘That’s not what I meant, anyway,’ said Hal. ‘I wasn’t talking about looks when I said that you weren’t like Lucy. I was thinking about the way Lucy loves the outback. She loves Whyman’s Creek. She loves Wirrindago and the fact that we’re so isolated. If she were here now, she’d be hanging out of that window with a big smile on her face.’

Meredith’s heart sank. She told herself it was because her sister had clearly not yet outgrown her romantic ideals. Lucy’s enthusiasms normally waned after a couple of months, but if she were still as starry-eyed about the outback as Hal suggested, Meredith might have a harder time persuading her to leave than she had anticipated.

She would rather her heart was sinking because of that than at the realisation that even the dour Hal Granger was not immune to her sister’s sunny charm.

‘Yes, well, Lucy’s always been a romantic,’ she said.

‘And you’re not?’

She turned away to look out of the window once more. Her eyes were hidden behind her sunglasses, but Hal guessed that they were as cool as her voice. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I’m not.’

‘Just as well,’ he said. ‘The outback can be a harsh place. Romantics don’t tend to last very long.’

There was a distinctly dismissive note in his voice and Meredith found herself leaping to her sister’s defence. ‘Lucy’s been here a while now,’ she pointed out.

‘A couple of months.’ Hal brushed the idea aside with a gesture. ‘I’m talking about a lifetime. In the long run, a sensible person like you would probably last longer out here than someone like Lucy with a head full of romantic ideas.’

‘Frankly, I can’t understand how anyone sensible would want to spend a lifetime here,’ said Meredith, looking at the dreary landscape, the mile upon mile of nothingness unrolling towards the horizon. ‘Is it all this…empty?’