In Her Husband's Image

“The starting date will be up to me—or maybe you.” Zac reached for another slice of bread. “I’d just like to draw breath here for a few days first, maybe help you out a bit…”

A few days now, not just one or two! She felt her stomach knot as she realized that the longer Zac stayed, the more likely he’d be to find out that Mikey was four, not three, as she’d let him think.

But that still needn’t mean he’d suspect the humiliating truth. For all Zac knew, her husband could have made her pregnant at around the same time as Zac’s brief, ignominious visit.

Zac need never know that Adrian had been rushed to a hospital with acute appendicitis the day after Zac’s late-night visit, and that he’d caught an infection and hadn’t felt up to having sex for a month after he’d come home—by which time she’d known she was already pregnant. She’d delayed telling Adrian and been deliberately vague about the due date, hoping that her first baby would arrive late, which Mikey conveniently had.

Adrian had never suspected the mortifying truth, and Zac mustn’t, either. It was inconceivable to think of Zac Hammond, the irresponsible, unprincipled black sheep of the family, as Mikey’s father. Adrian had been the reliable, steady, home-loving brother, the kind of man any woman would have been proud to have as the father of her child. At least—

“Tell me what happened, Rachel.” Zac’s voice intruded, softly compelling.

“Happened?” Her throat tightened. Did he mean four years and nine and a half months ago, after she’d ordered him to leave Yarrah Downs and never come back? She could still remember Zac’s cold, flat words as she’d turned away from him before he could glimpse any other emotion in her eyes than anger—anguish, yearning or even regret. I’ll stay out of your life, Rachel, you can count on that. You and your husband have nothing to fear from me.

“All I’ve heard is that he was killed in a tractor accident.” Zac spoke gently, jolting her back to reality. He must have assumed, by her choked silence, that she was thinking of her late husband, not, thankfully, of him. “How the hell could that have happened? Adrian was the most safety-conscious man I ever knew. He never took risks.”

Rachel’s heart settled back into place. Of course Zac would want to know about her husband’s fatal accident. He was Adrian’s twin, after all.

“Not normally, no,” she agreed. She’d often wondered if Adrian had had something on his mind that day, some niggling doubt about what he was about to do that had diverted his attention for a fatal second. A second was all it had taken.

“He’d hired a bulldozer—it wasn’t a tractor—and had taken it up to Bushy Hill to do some work there. Apparently he was working on the steep lower slope of the hill when the bulldozer hit a huge wombat hole and tipped over. He was thrown out and…and crushed.” Cute and furry as the burrowing native wombats were, they did a lot of damage with their holes.

“What was he doing up at Bushy Hill with a bulldozer?” Zac was frowning, she noticed. He looked more angry than pained or sympathetic. “It’s supposed to be an animal and bird sanctuary and to be left untouched, in its natural state.”

She raised her brows. She’d known there was a lot of native wildlife in the thick scrub and eucalyptus forest of the big sloping hill, but a sanctuary? This was the first she’d heard of it. All she knew was that kangaroos and other animals had a habit of jumping or climbing under the fence skirting the cattle paddock below to drink at the small dam there, and that Adrian had been forever mending the fence.

“Adrian wanted to turn the hill into a vineyard,” she told Zac. “He said it was ideally positioned to grow vines—facing the right way and that kind of thing. He’d gone up there to start clearing the trees and undergrowth—”

“He intended to turn Bushy Hill into a vineyard?” Zac’s expression turned thunderous. “Our father made it quite clear to us that the hill was to be left as an animal and bird sanctuary. How much bush had Adrian cleared before his accident? Had he knocked down any trees? Have you gone ahead with it?”

She bristled. What right had Zac Hammond to come back after all these years and start bawling her out for something that was no business of his? He’d never even been interested in the family property, according to Adrian.

“No, I haven’t.” She snatched up Zac’s empty plate and whisked it away without asking if he wanted more. “Nobody’s touched the hill since. We couldn’t afford to, for a start—”

“You’re saying you still intend to go ahead with the vineyard when you can afford it?”

She glowered at him. “I didn’t know it was a sanctuary…or that it was meant to be kept as a sanctuary. Naturally, if that’s true—”

“Adrian never told you?”

She clamped her lips together. It didn’t feel right to be talking about her husband’s failings when he was no longer here to defend himself.

Zac swore softly. “I’ll need to see how much damage has been done. If he’s destroyed that hill and driven the birds and animals out…”

“What do you care about Yarrah Downs or what we do with the place?” she flung back. “Adrian said you couldn’t get away from here fast enough.”

Zac shrugged, drawing her reluctant gaze to the breadth of his shoulders. The same shoulders she’d once kneaded with feverish fingers and dug her fingernails into with frenzied yearning. She flinched and snapped her gaze away.

“Yarrah Downs couldn’t have two bosses,” he said mildly. “Especially two bosses who disagreed on most things. My father left the property to Adrian because being a cattleman was all he’d ever wanted to be, while I wanted to see and do other things before I thought of settling down in one place. And my brother was good at his job. He had the skill and experience a cattleman needs, even if he lacked judgment in certain areas.”

“While you were never interested!”

“Not true. I lived here for most of my life. I spent my childhood here and all my vacations. It was only when my father died and left the property to Adrian that I stopped coming back—except for that one time, a few months after he married you. He’d written to tell me about the happy event. It seemed a good time to finally shake hands and let bygones be bygones.”

His eyes caught hers and she flushed, remembering his short-lived visit five years ago. What had happened between them had put an abrupt halt to any happy brotherly reunion. And she couldn’t put all the blame on Zac. She’d virtually seduced him!

To cover her embarrassment she blurted, “You must have resented the fact that Adrian inherited everything. Is that why you’ve always been so jealous of your brother and so hostile toward him?”

“Where did you get that idea? From Adrian? I was never jealous of him. We just didn’t get on. Too different. Chalk and cheese. I assure you I haven’t been seething with resentment all these years. I didn’t miss out. My father left me a generous cash pay-out and a bundle of blue-chip stock that’s grown over the years. I’ve also made a lot of money from documentary films and feature articles. I can afford to help you, Rachel.”

Her eyes sparked. “To help Yarrah Downs, your old home, don’t you mean? You don’t want to see it go under, and you think it will, now that I’m in charge. A woman! What’s your secret agenda, Zac Hammond? Are you trying to sweeten me up so you can buy me out if I sell, like everyone expects? Though why you’d want the place…”

Her voice trailed off as she became aware of a dog barking outside. “It’s Buster,” she said, glad of the diversion. “Mikey must be back. Excuse me… I have things to do out in the yard.”

“I’ll come out with you. Mind if I borrow a motorbike, Rachel?”

She paused, frowning. “What for?” Did he want to check up on the state of the cattle and the paddocks to see what a mess she was making of the place? So he could criticize her some more, undermine her confidence some more?

“I want to see what damage has been done to Bushy Hill and if there’s anything I can do to salvage it.”

“Anything you can do?” She tried to sound withering—what right had he?—but how could she blame him for wanting to check? This had been his home once and the animal and bird sanctuary clearly meant a lot to him. And if his father had specified that it be kept as a reserve…

Funny that Adrian had never mentioned it. Had he thought she might try to stop him from planting his vineyard there? She probably would have tried if she’d known about the sanctuary. The thought of her husband keeping things from her was sobering. But hadn’t she kept far worse secrets from him?

She hadn’t been back to Bushy Hill since Adrian’s fatal accident. She wasn’t sure how much clearing her husband had done. She’d simply told Vince to stay away from the hill until she decided what to do with it. They had more-urgent priorities. But the truth was, to have squashed the idea of the vineyard outright would have felt like crushing Adrian’s dream.

Only now that she knew the facts…

“Quiet, Buster!” she shouted over the dog’s barking, wondering why he was making such a din. What was Mikey doing to him?

But when she stepped outside, Mikey was nowhere in sight. The yard was empty. “Where’s Mikey?” she cried as Buster’s barking grew even more frenzied at the sight of her. He started to run off, then wheeled back, whining and pawing at her, before scampering off again.

She got the message and broke into a run. “Something’s happened to Mikey!” The words whipped over her shoulder at Zac. “Find him, Buster!” she urged the cattle dog. “Take me to Mikey!”

Chapter Two

As she rushed across the yard in Buster’s wake, she heard faint screams—a child’s petrified screams.

“Mikey!” she cried out. Where was he?

She faltered, her blood running cold. Ahead, down past the sheds, stood the big windmill, its glinting blades whirling in the warm May breeze. A small dark shape was huddled way up near the top, crouched on the uppermost rung of the narrow steel ladder, dangerously close to the rotating blades.

Oh, dear God. Mikey!

She felt Zac’s hand on her arm, steadying her, his touch, even in her panicked state, bringing a tingling heat to her skin.

“Try to be calm,” he rasped in her ear. “Don’t let him see how scared you are. You don’t want him to panic.”

Biting down on her lip, she covered the remaining ground at a sprint, managing not to scream at the terrified boy. Buster reached the windmill first, his barking giving way to whimpers and whines as he circled the foot of the steel ladder.