Baby At Bushman's Creek

In response, Gray reached out and took hold of her hands. Turning them over, he ran his thumbs consideringly over her palms. ‘It doesn’t look as if you do very much rough work.’

His touch was quite impersonal, but Clare was disconcerted to feel her skin tingling. His hands were strong, cool and callused and very brown against the paleness of her English skin. It was as if his fingers were charged with electricity, sending tiny shocks shivering all the way up her arm, and she snatched her hands away, furious to find herself blushing.

‘Herding a few cows around is easy compared to looking after a baby for twenty-four hours a day,’ she snapped, to cover her confusion. ‘I’m used to getting my hands dirty.’

‘You’re not used to the heat and the dust and the flies and the boredom,’ Gray pointed out, apparently unperturbed by the way she had pulled her hands out of his. ‘I’m not sure you realise how tough things can be out there.’

Not quite sure what to do with her hands now that she had freed them, Clare folded her arms in an unconsciously defensive pose. ‘I’m tougher than I look,’ she said.

Gray was unimpressed. ‘I’m talking about physical toughness, and right now you don’t look very tough to me.’ He eyed Clare critically. ‘You look as if you’re about to collapse.’

‘I’ve got jet-lag,’ she said, wondering why she could still feel her hands burning where he had touched her. ‘We only arrived in Australia yesterday morning, and I haven’t been able to rest much since then. I’ll be fine after a good night’s sleep.

‘Look,’ she went on persuasively, seeing that Gray still looked unconvinced, ‘I may not be your ideal housekeeper, but you said yourself that you haven’t the time to find anyone else, and I’m prepared to work hard in return for accommodation. I won’t get in your way. To be honest, I’d rather have something to do to keep my mind off things.’

She hesitated. ‘You’ve been very frank about the conditions on the station. I can’t say I’m going to like it out there—I’m not like Pippa; I’ve never enjoyed roughing it—but I’ll do whatever I have to to get to Bushman’s Creek.’

‘Why are you so keen to get there if you don’t think you’re going to like it?’ he asked.

‘Because I can’t afford to do anything else,’ said Clare, pushing her hair wearily behind her ear. ‘Because I want to see the place that meant so much to Pippa. If conditions are as unsuitable as you say, it may be that I’ll have to take Alice home with me, but I need to see for myself. If, on the other hand, I think it’s somewhere she could grow up safely and happily, I could make sure that she’s settled by the time Jack gets back. And, to be perfectly frank,’ she finished, ‘because I just want to stop for a while. I want to stop travelling, stop thinking, just…stop.’

‘If I let you come, I don’t want you to take anything for granted,’ Gray warned, but she could see that he was relenting. ‘Jack will have to make a decision about Alice when he gets home. Nobody else can do it for him.’

‘I know.’ Clare tried a smile. ‘Please…?’

‘Oh, all right,’ he said almost irritably. ‘You can come—but on one condition.’

Clare would have agreed to anything just then. ‘What is it?’

‘Alice’s relationship to Jack has to remain secret until he chooses to tell people about it. I don’t want him coming home to find that everyone knows that he’s supposedly a father except him. As far as anyone else you meet there is concerned, you’re just at Bushman’s Creek as a housekeeper. You rang me up last night to ask if there might be a job, and I’ve come in to pick you up.’

Clare thought about it. It seemed fair enough, under the circumstances. ‘All right,’ she agreed. It sounded a little grudging. She couldn’t blame Gray for being cautious and wanting to protect his brother’s interests, but at least he hadn’t rejected Alice out of hand.

‘Thank you,’ she said gratefully, and she smiled at him.

Something flickered in the brown eyes, and he looked away as he put his hat on his head. ‘If you’re coming, you’d better come now,’ he said in a brusque voice. ‘I need to get back to the yards.’

Clare was too relieved at his agreement to object to his lack of enthusiasm. ‘I just have to pack a few things,’ she said hastily. ‘I won’t be more than a few minutes.’

Scooping Alice out of her chair, she sniffed at her cautiously. ‘At least she doesn’t need her nappy changing,’ she said in some relief. She glanced hesitantly at Gray. ‘It would be quicker if I could leave her with you,’ she suggested.

After the tiniest of pauses, Gray nodded, and Clare handed Alice to him. Her hands brushed against his and she had to resist the temptation to pull them away. ‘I hope she’ll be OK,’ she said, a little worried now as she stood back. ‘She’s getting to the stage where she doesn’t really like being handed over to strangers.’

She lingered, uncertain whether to leave them together or not, watching as Gray held Alice at arm’s length and man and baby regarded each other dubiously. Gray’s eyes were intent, and Clare wondered if he were searching Alice’s small, round face for signs of a resemblance to his brother.

She was about to suggest that she took Alice with her after all when, as if at some unspoken signal, the two of them broke into simultaneous smiles. Clare was used to the way Alice’s beaming smile twisted her heartstrings, but she was unprepared for the effect of Gray’s. It transformed him from a brown, expressionless stranger into someone younger and warmer, someone disturbingly, unexpectedly attractive, and Clare felt oddly jolted.

There was a strange expression on Gray’s face as he drew Alice into his chest and held her against him, his strong hands absurdly big on the little body. His gaze slid past the baby to Clare, who was watching them as if transfixed.

‘Alice will be fine with me,’ he said.

CHAPTER TWO

THE hotel was the only two-storey building in town, but its refinements went no further than a serviceable flight of stairs. There was certainly no truck with any namby-pamby nonsense like lifts or porters. Clare dragged her heavy case along the corridor and paused for breath at the top of the stairs, looking down at the scene in the entrance hall below.

Alice was looking quite at home in Gray Henderson’s arms, and he was managing to carry on a conversation with the hotel manager while she explored his face with fascination, testing the texture of his skin and hair, patting his cheek and pulling at his lips.

Clare was conscious of a faint twinge of envy as she watched. It must be nice to be Alice, to be able to relax against a shoulder as firm as Gray’s and to feel his hands holding her safe and secure. What would it be like to run her fingers over his face, as Alice was doing, to lean against that lean, hard body?

A slow shiver snaked its way down Clare’s spine at the thought, and she swallowed, disconcerted by her own reaction. How odd, she found herself thinking, that the first man she should feel even a twinge of awareness for since Mark should be someone so completely different. Mark had been dark and intense and passionate. Gray didn’t look as if he even knew what passion meant!

Except…Clare’s gaze rested for a moment on his mouth. She was going to spend the next few weeks alone with this man, she realised, as if for the first time, and the shivery feeling intensified into a tight knot at the base of her spine.

Hastily, she bent to pick up the case. She was being ridiculous. There was no question of being physically attracted to Gray Henderson! Any amateur psychologist would tell her that his appeal was obvious. She was tired and vulnerable with the strain of coping alone for so long, and there was something very reassuring about his air of quiet strength. He might not have the looks to set her pulse racing, as Mark had, but right now the sense that he could deal calmly and competently with any situation that might arise was more appealing than any handsome face!

The hotel manager gave them a lift out to the airport in his truck. Clare was taken aback to see her things tossed unceremoniously into the back, while she was expected to squeeze into the front seat with Alice between the two men. ‘How far are we going?’ she asked nervously, remembering Pippa’s stories about long, bumpy drives across the outback.

‘Only to the airport,’ said Gray, resting his arm along the back of the seat behind her head. ‘It’s quicker to fly than to drive, and there’s usually someone around to give me a lift in to town from there.’

‘Oh.’ Clare was pleased to discover that she wasn’t going to have to spend the next two or three hours trying not to notice the strength of his thigh pressed against hers. Not that Gray seemed to find the situation at all uncomfortable. He was talking easily across her, and Clare might as well have been a bag of shopping on the seat between them for all the notice he took of her.

It was a relief when they reached the airport and she could move away from him, although she was not impressed by the single runway set for some reason in the middle of nowhere. Clare could turn around completely and see nothing but flat brown scrub stretching off to the horizon in every direction. It was like a toy airport, she thought disparagingly, with a windsock hanging limply in the midday heat and the ‘terminal’ no more than a hut offering shelter from the sun.

Gray seemed to know everybody. Even as they drove along the road, she had noticed the two men lifting fingers in greeting to the passing cars, and now, having exchanged words with the few passengers waiting for an incoming flight, he led the way across the tarmac to where a tiny plane with a propeller on its nose was parked.

‘We’re not going in that?’ said Clare involuntarily.

‘We certainly are.’ Gray patted the plane affectionately. ‘This old girl’s more reliable than any car over this kind of country, and she’s done this flight so often she could practically take herself home.’

Clare wasn’t sure that the great age and experience of the plane was that reassuring, and in spite of her belief in Gray’s competence she couldn’t help closing her eyes as they sped along the airstrip, propeller blurring, and lifted lightly off the ground. She felt the plane bank and continue climbing until after a couple of minutes they levelled off.

‘You can open your eyes now,’ said Gray in a dry voice.

Very cautiously, Clare unscrewed her eyes. ‘I’ve never been in such a small plane before,’ she confessed. She touched the door as if afraid it would fall off. ‘There doesn’t seem to be much keeping us up here.’

‘You’re safe as houses,’ he said. ‘Relax and enjoy the view.’

What view? Clare wanted to ask. Spread out below them, the land stretched out to the distant horizon, as flat and featureless as a piece of sandpaper, and almost exactly the same rusty-brown colour. The sky was a huge blue glare, arching over a vast expanse of nothingness. Clare looked down at it and wondered what on earth Pippa had found to love in such barren, intimidating country.

‘Is it all this…’ she searched for a tactful word ‘…this empty?’

‘It’s not empty at all,’ said Gray. ‘It just looks that way from up here. You’d be surprised how different things are when you’re on the ground. There’s lots to see—you just have to learn to look at it in the right way.’

‘Oh, yes?’

Her voice dripped polite disbelief, but Gray was unperturbed. ‘You can tell you’ve never been outback before,’ he said.

‘No,’ Clare sighed in agreement. This wasn’t her kind of place at all. ‘Municipal parks are the wildest places I usually see.’