Baby At Bushman's Creek

Beyond thinking up any more objections, or even thinking at all, she let him pull back the cover and sit her down on the bed before he carried Alice over to the window to pull the blinds.

‘Get some sleep,’ he said gruffly, but when he turned to close the door behind him, Clare was still sitting there, watching him in a daze, too tired even to lie down.

Gray hesitated, then went back and set Alice down on the bed beside her. He bent and took off Clare’s sandals before easing her back onto the pillow and lifting her legs up onto the bed. Covering Clare with the sheet, he picked up Alice once more and for a moment they looked down at her as she lay there like a child, looking back at them with great, blurry grey eyes.

Dimly, Clare knew that she ought to thank him, but all she could manage was a wavering smile, and by the time Gray and Alice had reached the door she was asleep.

When Clare woke, several hours later, it was to find herself lying in a strange room and a strange bed. Disorientated, she lay for a while, blinking at the unfamiliar ceiling and trying to disentangle dreams from reality in the swirl of unconnected images in her head. She was in Australia, she remembered eventually. She was at Bushman’s Creek, in Gray Henderson’s bed.

Gray…It was disconcerting to discover just how clearly she could picture a man she had only met for the first time that morning. Clare turned her head on the pillow as if to dislodge the memory of the creases around his eyes, the brown, competent hands, the way his uncompromising mouth had relaxed into such an unexpected smile. She had a nasty feeling Gray’s smile had played an overlarge part in her dreams.

Frowning slightly as reality returned, Clare pulled herself up on the pillows. Gray hadn’t wanted her to come, but he had accepted Alice in the end. He had even been kind, offering to let her sleep, closing the blinds, even taking off her shoes.

She had a vague memory of smiling up at him and seeing the oddest expression in his eyes, but that was probably a dream, she decided. Gray wouldn’t have been looking down at her with a mixture of tenderness and desire. No one would look at a housekeeper like that, and a housekeeper was all she was and all she would ever be as far as Gray was concerned.

As far as I’m concerned too, said Clare firmly to herself as she pushed back the sheet and swung her legs to the floor. She wasn’t here to wonder about Gray Henderson and how he would look at a woman he really wanted to be lying in his bed. She was here for Alice, and if that meant being a housekeeper, that was what she would be.

CHAPTER THREE

CLARE was horrified to discover when she looked at her watch that she had slept for nearly five hours. Her first impulse was to rush out and find Alice, relieving Gray of the responsibility, but one look in the mirror was enough to make her change her mind. Her hair was tangled, her skin puffy and pasty and her linen dress irretrievably crushed. If Gray had coped with Alice all afternoon, he could surely cope for ten minutes longer. She had to have a shower!

Dressing quickly in narrow stone-coloured trousers and a white shirt, Clare felt able to face Gray Henderson once more. That sleep had done her the power of good. She felt much more like herself, she decided as she combed her wet hair behind her ears and fastened the belt of her trousers. It was time to show Gray the real Clare Marshall, crisp and capable and very different from the exhausted woman who had been too tired to take off her own shoes.

Outside, all seemed very quiet, but when Clare walked into the living area she could hear Alice’s incomprehensible chatter, and she followed the sound to a room on the far side, where a door stood open. Through it, she could see Alice sitting on the floor, surrounded by an assortment of objects, as if Gray had ransacked the homestead to find anything safe that she could play with only to find his offerings discarded out of hand.

Gray himself was hunkered beside Alice, proffering a wooden spoon, and Clare was amused to note that he was looking a lot less imperturbable after five hours with his small niece. He wasn’t exactly pulling his hair out, but she thought that there was a distinctly frazzled edge to the way he smiled at Alice. Unnoticed in the doorway, she watched as Alice grasped the spoon and stuck one end straight in her mouth.

‘There you are,’ said Gray, levering himself cautiously to his feet. ‘You play with that for a while, and I’ll—’ He broke off as Alice, having given the spoon a cursory suck, dropped it disdainfully.

‘Gah!’ she said in no uncertain terms.

‘And I’ll find you something else to play with,’ he finished with a sigh.

Alice’s eye fell on Clare just then, and her face split into a huge, welcoming grin. Gray had been bending to retrieve the spoon, but at her smile he glanced behind him, to see Clare standing in the doorway, looking trim and pretty. The strange, silvery-grey eyes were clear, and she was smiling lovingly back at Alice.

There was an odd little silence as he straightened and turned. ‘Hullo,’ he said, and there was a note in his voice that Clare couldn’t identify. ‘You look better.’

‘I feel better,’ she told him honestly, but for some reason she found she couldn’t look at him directly, and it was a relief to be able to turn her attention to Alice, who was holding up her arms and babbling a greeting. The words might not make any sense, but it was clear that she wanted Clare to pick her up now!

Swinging her up into her arms, Clare gave her a kiss. ‘Have you been good?’ she asked.

‘She’s been…fine,’ said Gray with a little reserve.

Clare glanced down at the objects scattered across the floor, and then at the desk, where an area out of the reach of baby arms had obviously been cleared. ‘How much paperwork did you get done?’ she asked innocently.

‘Not a lot,’ he admitted, and then, when Clare lifted her brows, he gave a reluctant smile. ‘All right, I didn’t get any done! I didn’t realise one small person could restrict your activities so much!’

‘Oh, Alice!’ said Clare, trying not to smile. ‘Have you been keeping him busy?’

‘She’s been busy,’ he told her. ‘I put her in the backpack and took her down to the yards, so she’s met the men and seen her first cattle.’

‘Wasn’t she frightened?’ Clare asked a little dubiously. Alice had never seen anything like a cow before, she realised, and she would have thought it would be quite alarming to be introduced to a thousand at once.

‘We didn’t get that close,’ Gray reassured her, ‘but she didn’t seem to be. She never stopped talking the whole time!’

Clare tickled Alice on the nose. ‘Yes, she’s chatty, isn’t she?’

‘Can you make any sense of it?’ he asked curiously.

She laughed. ‘No, it doesn’t mean anything. She’s just making sounds—but she can usually make herself understood when she wants something! It looks as if she managed to convince you that she didn’t want to sit quietly in her chair all afternoon, for instance,’ she added, amused.

‘Oh, yes, she got that message across all right,’ said Gray with feeling. ‘I tried doing some work with her sitting on my lap, but she kept throwing papers on the floor, and in any case it wasn’t that easy to concentrate on figures with her chatting away, so I gave up after a while. I wasn’t sure where you had packed her toys so I had to see what I could find around the homestead, but she didn’t seem to be interested in anything for more than two seconds.’

‘I only brought a couple of toys with me,’ said Clare. ‘She doesn’t really play with anything at the moment. Everyday objects are just as fascinating to her right now, but she was probably enjoying your attention more than anything else.’ She hesitated, then said almost shyly, ‘I’m sorry you had to give up your afternoon when you’re so busy, but I really am grateful. That was the best sleep I’ve had in a long time. Thank you so much for looking after her.’

‘That’s all right,’ he said gruffly. ‘It was quite an education. I’ve done a lot, but I’ve never had to change a baby’s nappy before.’

Clare stared at him. ‘You changed her nappy?’

‘With some help,’ he confessed, a little shame-faced. ‘I had to get Joe to show me how to do it. He’s got children, but they’re grown up now, and I don’t think he was much of a hands-on father anyway, so he wasn’t much help. In the end there were four of us standing around the bed, scratching our heads and looking from the baby to the nappy and back again. We worked it out in the end, though,’ he added. ‘Or we think we did! You might have to check.’

Clare couldn’t help laughing at the idea of four grown men puzzling over such a simple task. ‘You could have told them, couldn’t you, Alice?’ she smiled, swinging Alice up until she laughed too with glee.

Her laughter was so infectious that after a moment Gray gave in and laughed too. Clare’s smiling glance went from Alice’s merry face to his, and her heart seemed to stumble, and when her eyes met his she found her laugh faltering for some reason.

It was as if they had both realised at the same time that they were relaxed and laughing together like old friends, when they ought to be remembering that they were virtual strangers with conflicting interests and nothing in common but one small baby. Their smiles faded simultaneously, and Clare’s gaze slid away from his face.

‘You should have woken me,’ she said awkwardly, settling Alice on her hip.

‘I looked in on you after an hour, but you were sound asleep, and I thought it would be better to leave you,’ he said.

Clare didn’t know whether to be glad or sorry that the impersonal note was back in his voice. It was impossible to tell what he had thought as he’d looked down at her, sprawled in sleep in the middle of his own bed.

‘Well…thank you,’ she said, ‘and don’t worry, I won’t ask you to do it again!’

He shrugged slightly. ‘We managed.’

‘I know, but…well, the idea wasn’t that you would spend your time looking after Alice while I caught up on my sleep.’ She paused, choosing her words with care. ‘I do appreciate what you’ve done today, Gray. This isn’t an easy situation for you either. You’ve got no way of knowing whether Alice really is your niece or not, and I would have understood if you’d refused to let us come here at all, let alone give up an afternoon to entertain Alice.’

Clare took a breath and went on. ‘I just want you to know that I’m grateful, and that I won’t take anything for granted. You’ve been very kind to Alice—and to me—this afternoon, but I know it doesn’t mean that you’ve accepted Alice as your niece. From now on, we’ll try not to interfere with you.’ She wished she could gauge how Gray was reacting. He was just standing there, watching her with that unreadable expression, and she could feel herself babbling like Alice, and probably making just as much sense. ‘With any luck, you’ll forget we’re here,’ she finished with a bright smile.

Gray looked at her. ‘I don’t think that’s very likely, somehow,’ he said in his slow voice. ‘I’m not sure how much use you’ll be as a housekeeper if you spend your time keeping out of my way!’

‘I didn’t mean that.’ Clare pushed her hands through her hair in frustration. At home, she was a calm, articulate administrator, with a reputation for sorting out communication problems in the office, but there was something about Gray’s brown dispassionate gaze that turned her into a stammering idiot. ‘I just meant…well, that I won’t make any more demands on you.’

‘Fine.’

Gray was straight-faced, but there was an unsettling gleam of mockery in his brown eyes and Clare’s lips tightened. She was only trying to be polite and reassuring. He might at least make the effort to pretend that he took her seriously in return!