Outback Husband

Well, he didn’t have a reputation for handling difficult horses for nothing, Cal thought. At least he was here, in the best position to influence her to give up and to step forward with the money to buy his station back when she finally accepted the inevitable. He would have to be careful not to antagonise her too much at this stage. It might go against the grain to kow-tow to a woman like Juliet Laing, but she had already sacked one manager, and he wouldn’t put it past her to replace him with another man who might be quick to spot the advantages of the situation. Attractive, single women with half a million acres at their disposal weren’t that easy to come by. Who was to say some other manager might not decide that he might as well make his position permanent by marrying Juliet and getting a cattle station thrown in as part of the bargain?

Cal’s mouth set into a hard line at the thought. He would never get Wilparilla back if that happened. No, he would have to grit his teeth and take Juliet’s orders for now, but he would make sure she understood how hopeless her situation was, and with any luck she would soon be gone.

‘All right,’ he said at last. ‘As long as you don’t want a detailed report in triplicate every day, I’ll let you know what’s going on.’

Anyone would think he was doing her a favour! Juliet suppressed a sigh. It was hardly the most gracious acceptance of her terms, but she suspected that it was all she was going to get. ‘OK,’ she said.

‘So, have I passed the interview?’ Cal asked, and she stiffened at the sarcastic edge to his voice. She would have loved to have told him to go back to Brisbane, but she was desperate for a manager, and Cal knew it. It could take weeks to find another manager, and she couldn’t afford to wait any longer. The station was already falling apart before her eyes as it was. And although he might rub her up the wrong way, there was no denying that he looked reassuringly capable and competent. Now he would have to prove it.

‘You’ve passed the interview, yes,’ she told him with a cool look. ‘We’ll see how things work out over the next three months. Needless to say, the trial period we agreed works both ways. If you don’t like working for me, you’re free to leave whenever you like.’

So she didn’t think he’d last the course, did she? Cal smiled grimly to himself as he picked up his hat and got to his feet. Juliet Laing might be tougher than she looked, but they would see who left Wilparilla first!

‘Whatever you say,’ he drawled, and then added after a pause that made the word sound somehow insulting, ‘boss.’

Cal had evidently decided to put an end to the discussion, thought Juliet, vaguely resentful, but as she could hardly order him to sit down again, she stood up too and forced a smile.

‘Now we’ve got over the formalities, would you like a beer?’

He settled his hat on his head. ‘I think we’d better go and settle in first.’

‘We?’ said Juliet idly, thinking that he must have brought his dog with him.

Cal nodded over to the dusty four-wheel drive parked in the shade of a huge gum tree. ‘My daughter’s with me,’ he said.

For a moment Juliet wondered if she had heard right. ‘Your daughter? You didn’t say anything about bringing a daughter!’

‘I didn’t see what difference it would make to you,’ Cal told her, quite unperturbed. He gestured out at the distant horizon. ‘It’s not as if you don’t have the room.’

‘But…how old is she?’

‘Nine.’

Juliet stared at him. ‘You can’t bring a nine year-old girl out to a place like this! What about her mother?’

‘My wife died six years ago.’

‘I’m very sorry,’ said Juliet, thrown by the bald statement, ‘but it still doesn’t seem a very suitable arrangement. Wouldn’t she have been better off staying in Brisbane?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Natalie stays with me.’

Juliet refrained from pointing out that in that case he should have stayed in Brisbane too. ‘What were you planning to do with her while you were out during the day?’ she asked instead.

‘You said yourself that this is just a trial. She can come with me to begin with, and if it works out I’ll arrange for my own housekeeper to keep an eye on her while she does her schoolwork. Natalie’s a sensible child, she knows what life is like out here.’

‘And am I expected to accommodate all these extra people?’ Juliet demanded angrily.

If rumour was correct, there were enough rooms in the homestead for three times as many people, but Cal had no intention of staying with her. ‘There’s a perfectly adequate manager’s house,’ he said. ‘Or so Pete Robbins told me when he said you were looking for a manager,’ he added quickly, before Juliet could wonder how he was so well-informed about the accommodation.

‘There is a house used by managers in the past,’ Juliet agreed, ‘but it’s in no fit state for a child, and I doubt if you’d get a housekeeper anywhere near it!’

Cal frowned. ‘What do you mean? You didn’t mention a problem about the house on the phone.’

‘That’s when I thought you would be on your own. I’m afraid the last manager left it in a terrible state, and I haven’t had a chance to go and clear it up. I didn’t think you’d mind sleeping in the stockmen’s quarters until then, but you can’t take a little girl there. Go and see for yourself if you don’t believe me,’ she said, when Cal looked unconvinced.

‘I will,’ he said grimly. It had never occurred to him that there would be a problem with the manager’s house. It was small, just two bedrooms, and not what Natalie was used to, but he had only ever thought of it as a temporary measure until Juliet sold him the station and they could move back into the homestead. Now what was he going to do?

‘You’d better bring…Natalie, is it?…over,’ said Juliet, as if answering his unspoken question. ‘She can stay with me while you go and look at the house.’

Cal hesitated, then nodded briefly. ‘All right,’ he said.

Natalie had short curly brown hair, brown eyes and a shy, solemn face. Juliet smiled at her. ‘Hello, Natalie. Welcome to Wilparilla.’

Natalie murmured a shy greeting, and Juliet took her over to meet the twins. ‘The grubby one on the left is Kit,’ she told the little girl, ‘and the even grubbier one beside him is Andrew. They’re nearly three.’

‘How do you tell them apart?’ whispered Natalie, eyes wide as she looked from one to the other, and Juliet smiled.

‘I always know which one is which, but it’s difficult for everybody else. I make sure they’re wearing different clothes, so that makes it easier. Kit’s got the blue top on and Andrew’s is yellow.’ She glanced down at Natalie. ‘You must be thirsty after your long drive. Would you like a drink while Dad goes to look at the house?’

Kit scrambled up at that. ‘Mummy, my want a drink!’

‘Please may I have a drink,’ Juliet corrected him automatically.

‘Please my want a drink,’ said Kit obediently, and Natalie giggled behind her hand as Juliet sighed and settled for that.

‘Come on, Andrew, you can have a drink too,’ she said and turned to tell Cal how to find the manager’s house. But he had ruffled Natalie’s hair in farewell and was already striding away. She watched him for a moment, puzzled by the way he seemed to know exactly where he was going, but then shrugged and forgot about it as she ushered the three children through the screen door.

Natalie had lost her shyness entirely with the twins by the time Cal came back. She was sitting at the kitchen table showing them how to blow bubbles in their drinks when he walked into the kitchen. Juliet, leaning by the sink and watching the children indulgently, straightened abruptly as he appeared and her heart gave an odd jump.

Cal was tight-lipped with anger. ‘The house is disgusting,’ he said furiously, without any preliminaries. ‘I wouldn’t ask a dog to live in there! How was it allowed to get into that kind of state?’

‘I never even went there until last week.’ Juliet was immediately on the defensive. ‘Hugo—my husband—always dealt with the men.’ Not that he had been around to do much dealing, she remembered bitterly, and when he had been there all he had done was set the men’s backs up, until all the good ones had left and only the men who didn’t care were left at Wilparilla.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said helplessly, ashamed but tired, too, of apologising for Hugo’s mistakes.

Cal took an angry turn around the kitchen. ‘Natalie can’t stay there,’ he said. ‘And the men’s quarters aren’t much better. I checked.’

‘That’s what I tried to tell you before,’ Juliet pointed out. She paused, desperately trying to think of an alternative, but there simply wasn’t anywhere else for a child to go. ‘Look, I think the best thing you can do is to stay here at the homestead,’ she said eventually. ‘There are plenty of spare rooms.’

Cal hesitated, raking his fingers through his brown hair in frustration. The last thing he wanted was to be beholden to Juliet Laing, and if it had been just him he would have slept in his swag under the stars, but Natalie couldn’t do that. He didn’t have any choice, he realised heavily.

‘Thank you,’ he said with evident reluctance, adding quickly, ‘It will just be until we can fix up the house. We’ll go as soon as we can.’

CHAPTER TWO

‘THERE’S beer in the fridge if you’d like one,’ Juliet said rather hesitantly as Cal came in from unloading the car. She knew that the offer sounded rather ungracious, but Cal hadn’t been particularly gracious about staying in the homestead. It didn’t seem to have occurred to him that she might not be that thrilled at the thought of sharing her home with him either.

If Cal resented her lukewarm tone, he gave no sign of it. Nodding his thanks, he took a bottle from the fridge and pulled off the top. Juliet, preparing vegetables in the sink for the children’s supper, tried not to watch him, but her eyes kept sliding sideways to where he stood, leaning casually against the worktop, his head tipped back as he drank thirstily.