The Australians' Brides: The Runaway and the Cattleman

He grinned, and some of that easy, familiar humor between them came creeping back. “Are you applying for the position?”

So they looked at the letters together, and she helped him with his replies. Kerry brought them each a mug of tea and offered her opinion of a woman who stressed the importance of Callan being “visually literate.”

“Whatever that means! Give her a discouraging answer!”

“Want to draft some replies, Mum?” Callan offered.

“Oh, no, thank you! I’ll leave you to it!” She quickly disappeared.

In the next letter they opened, a woman announced that if she and Callan became involved, she was “prepared to live in the wilderness for up to two years before we renegotiate a move to a more urban environment.”

This one received one of the polite “Thanks for your interest, but I’m not looking for anything right now” replies that Callan had become impressively fluent with by now.

A few letters later, a girl called Tracey “hadn’t had much luck with men, because I’m shy, which I know is my fault. I have a good family—two brothers and a sister, my mum and dad—and we’re close, but I’d move away from Ballarat for the right man. I’d want to take things slow, though. I think marriage, or any relationship, is too important to get wrong because you haven’t thought it through.”

“She sounds nice,” Jacinda said. “You should write her a good letter.”

“She looks nice, too,” answered Callan, showing her a simple snapshot of a slightly chunky woman of around twenty-five or so, with a tomboy smile and light brown hair.

Jac leaned closer to see the picture better, and her arm brushed Callan’s. Turning instinctively, she found him looking at her and could read his face like a book.

She looks nice, but right now you’re the woman I want. It’s too complicated so I’m not going to give in to it, but you’re definitely the woman I want.

“Maybe we’ve done enough secretarial work for tonight,” he said on an uncomfortable growl. “I’ll write something back to her tomorrow.”

Jac nodded. “This is more words than I’ve strung together in—well, a while.”

Frustrated, she knew she needed something more, something other than drafting polite lines to people that neither she nor Callan really knew—and, yes, she included her brothers in that. A need was building inside her, demanding release and expression. It made her scared and it made her twitchy, and she’d only ever known one way to get the feeling under control.

She needed to … really, genuinely, seriously … write.

“I’m going to check on Carly,” she told him, even though she knew Carly was asleep. She wanted to see if by some faint chance she had writing materials in a forgotten outer sleeve of one of her suitcases.

“Callan, would you have a legal pad or a notebook I could use?” Jacinda looked a little tense about asking the question.

A lot tense, in fact. Meeting in front of the waistband of her jeans, her fingers zipped back and forth as she rubbed her nails together, making a buzzing, clicking sort of sound that gave out way too much of a clue as to her state of mind. She didn’t seem to notice that she was doing it.

“Even just some scrap paper?” she added, as if she only had a shopping list to write.

“One of the boys’ old school notebooks?” Callan suggested. He pretended he hadn’t noticed the tension, or the sound and movement of the fingernails, even though his gaze kept pulling in that direction. “They get a new set every year and some of the ones from last year still have a lot of blank pages. Would that work?”

“It’d be great.”

She looked relieved that she’d managed to ask the question, that he hadn’t asked too many questions of his own in response, and that she’d gotten an easy answer. Her hands dropped to her sides, but the thick denim waistband of the jeans stood out a little from her tightly drawn in stomach, showing the weight she must have lost in recent months, and Callan kept looking there, at the place where the clicking fingernails had been, for just a second or two too long.

“Let me dig one out,” he said, dragging his eyes upward, trying to forget how clearly he’d pictured himself seated in a squashy armchair. He would have grabbed her as she went by. He would have wrapped his arms around that willowy waist of hers, and hugged the tension out of those drawn-in stomach muscles.

He wanted to tell her to put the weight back on so that she filled out the lean lines of the jeans. He wanted to apologize again about coming down too hard on her tonight about going for a walk with no water. He hadn’t exaggerated the potential danger in this country, but he could have skipped the anger, because the anger was far more about … something else.

He wanted to thank her for helping him with the letters. He knew it must have been hard at first, despite the way she’d relaxed into it. Yes, and he wanted to tell her exactly how he came to understand so much regarding her tension and fear about the whole writing thing, even though he’d hadn’t tried to write a poem or a story since high school.

“I’m sorry, if it’s too much trouble at this hour it can wait until morning,” she said quickly, ready to backtrack on the whole writing idea at the slightest excuse.

“It’s fine.”

True, he was about to head off for bed. It already felt overdue after the long day working on the new mustering yard with Lockie and Pete, and the heart-pumping but mercifully short-lived interval when he’d feared that Jacinda might be lost. But he was still racked with guilt and regret about what had happened down at the water hole last night. They should have simply been tracking down Lockie’s Game Boy and getting the hell out of there, instead of watching for wildlife and exchanging life stories and—

Yeah.

Guilt and regret and awareness rushed through him, none of it helped by having sat with her in his office writing polite rejection letters to other women for almost an hour.

It wasn’t Jacinda’s fault.

It was totally, utterly him.

Had he managed to get that across to her? Could finding an old schoolbook of Lockie’s for her, without asking her what she wanted to use it for, in any way make up for the way he’d turned away from her down at the creek, and then again back at the house? Make up for the way he’d barely been able to look at her this morning, hadn’t introduced her to Pete, and was almost sinfully grateful that she’d slept in so that they hadn’t needed to confront each other over breakfast? For the way he’d been angry at her tonight, the moment that first flood of relief at her safety had ebbed away?

Why the heck had he let last night’s kiss happen at all? He’d known it would end that way.

Only maybe he hadn’t known.

Maybe he’d been kidding himself all along.

In his office, he dug out the cardboard file box where he kept the boys’ old schoolbooks. He didn’t know why he hung on to them. Because it was easier than throwing them out? He wouldn’t have said he was the nostalgic type, and yet he did have a problem with change, didn’t he?

Mum had talked about it a couple of times since Liz’s death. Mum’s attitude had been helpful rather than accusing, but there’d been the hint of criticism all the same. He’d never wanted to go away to school, as a twelve-year-old, and it had taken him months—had taken hooking up with Dusty and Brant—for him to settle into Cliffside.

And now here were these stupid schoolbooks he put away every year like a pack rat, because something inside him wouldn’t allow them to get thrown away.

He took out a stack of them and flipped through, finding worksheets about the ocean and weather, and words with sh in them that gave him a little twist inside because of the fact that Liz, who would have been so proud and so interested, had never seen them.

Was that why he kept them? Some stupid, illogical, subconscious, impossible belief that if he kept them long enough, her benign spirit would pay a visit and take a look?

Brrr, shake it off, Callan.

How much working space did Jacinda need? He didn’t want to slight her writing ability with just three pages, or scare her with a whole blank book. He thought he understood too much about her fears.

Jacinda looked nothing like Liz. He’d told himself lately that he’d been looking too hard for Liz in those other two women, three years ago, and maybe he’d seriously believed last night, down at the creek, that with her long dark hair and olive skin, Jacinda looked different enough to cure the problem.

The Problem.

A cure?

Maybe it was only getting worse. A man hit his sexual peak by twenty. At thirty-four, things could easily have started to slide. The level of need. The frequency. Had losing Liz pushed him so far away from his natural potency that he’d never claw back the lost ground?

Everything had been fine … fantastic … powerful … intense … while he and Jacinda had kissed last night. The chemistry between them was huge, not something you could explain or trace to its source but something animal and instinctive. Water on a thirsty day. A completion. She had tasted so good.

He loved the way she moved. Loved how at first she’d been happy just to wait and feel those motionless, paralyzed lips of his against her neck while he gathered his courage and gloried in his unexpected and almost shocking need.