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Sarah moved across the room to pick up the notebook. Scrawled in a loopy, slanted hand on the front of the faded red cover were the words Anne’s Diary. Private. Keep Out. This means you!
Sarah smiled. The handwriting was more rounded and immature than nowadays, but it was definitely Anne’s. “Did you read it?”
Luke looked offended she would even ask. “Says right on the cover that it’s private. Anyway, I don’t have time to read girls’ diaries.”
Sarah flipped through the closely written pages and found herself tempted. Don’t even think it. She returned the diary to the dresser. “I’ll take it to her. She might find it amusing after all these years.”
“Right. Well, I’ll let you get settled.” He backed out of the room and shut the door.
Sarah put her clothes away, then flopped on the bed with her cell phone. She replaced the old batteries with the spares from her suitcase and dialed her mother’s number.
“Hi, Mom,” she said, disappointed when she got the answering machine. “I’m here. My God, what a trip! It’s so hot. How come you never mentioned the flies? And the lake that’s not a lake. But the homestead is beautiful. By the way, Luke found your old diary. Oh, and I’ve already met Len. What’s the deal with him? I’m going to rest now, but I’ll call you later. Love you. Bye.”
LUKE PACED the front veranda, his frowning gaze on the dirt track that cut across the Downs toward Murrum. The wide western sky was bloodred with the setting sun, yet still no cloud of dust heralded Abby and Becka’s arrival.
“Where do you suppose they are, Wal?”
The dog, who was never far from Luke’s side, pressed his cold nose against his master’s palm.
Luke heard a movement behind him and turned to see Sarah standing in the doorway. She’d put on a sleeveless cotton-knit dress, which hugged her curves and showed plenty of leg. Her damp auburn hair fell in long wispy spikes around her bare shoulders. His dormant libido stirred like a bear after a long winter, ravenous and on the prowl.
“Is something wrong?” She came forward, bringing with her the subtle fruity scent of her shampoo.
“It’s almost seven o’clock. Abby hasn’t brought Becka back yet.” Back in your cave, Sampson.
Sarah stooped to pat Wal. “Maybe she’s on her way.”
“Abby won’t drive out here in the dark. It’s too easy to stray from the track and get lost. She said she’d have Becka back in time for tea.”
“Tea? Oh, you mean dinner.” Sarah glanced down the track and stepped behind the screen of bougainvillea, her fingers brushing the glossy dark green leaves. “Maybe her car broke down or she got caught up in something.”
Luke strode back into the house to ring Abby again, realizing belatedly that he’d just walked off without a word. He wasn’t used to informing others of his movements. First Becka, and now Sarah.
“Hello?” Abby sounded pleasant, unconcerned.
“Why aren’t you here?” he demanded. “Is Becka okay?”
Outside the kitchen window, dozens of snowy white corellas screeched as they flapped home to roost in the river gums.
He listened to Abby’s excuses— “Low on petrol, the station’s closed for the night, tried to call you earlier.” She was unapologetic, unrepentant, plausible. He wanted to rant and rave and tell her how worried he’d been, but that would be overreacting.
“Okay. Okay,” he said, reassuring himself rather than her. “I’ll pick Becka up tomorrow.” He wasn’t taking any chances on more excuses.
He found Sarah on the side veranda, watching the corellas perform acrobatics in the branches, swinging upside down and cracking gum nuts between their strong hooked beaks as they squabbled among themselves. Luke’s attention, though, was drawn to the curve of Sarah’s neck, lengthened by her upturned face and repeated in her wide smile as she turned her delighted gaze upon him. “Aren’t they gorgeous!”
“Yeah,” he grunted. “Want something to eat?”
“Yes, please.” She followed him back inside. “Did you get hold of Abby?”
Luke smoothed his face into an expressionless mask. “Becka’s staying overnight. I’ll pick her up tomorrow.”
Sarah’s green eyes probed his. “Are you all right with that?”
No, he was not “all right” with that. He’d barely had his daughter with him a week before she was back at Abby’s. What really rankled was that he’d had no choice but to let Becka stay, unless he wanted to make the long trip back into Murrum. Abby must have known he’d be reluctant to do that on Sarah’s first night. He felt bamboozled by Abby and oddly uneasy about leaving Becka.
“She’ll be okay,” he assured Sarah, but the catchall phrase was meaningless in the present context. “Come and have some tucker. Hope you like steak and potatoes.”
“Steak! I haven’t had a steak since 1989.”
“We eat the odd one around here. You a vegetarian?” He was amused that the owner of a cattle station might not like beef.
“No, I just don’t usually eat big chunks of meat.”
“I reckon we can find you a knife.” But first he opened the bottle of cabernet sauvignon he’d been saving for a special occasion. He twisted the cork off, not even wanting to think about what was prompting him to serve his best wine.
“That’s an interesting corkscrew,” Sarah said, examining the implement. The handle was fashioned out of a cow’s horn, with a large nail driven through and twisted into a tight spiral.
“My grandfather made it. He made or grew just about everything he owned and used. He was so self-sufficient he even made his own coffin and dug his own grave.”
She grinned. “And this is something you aspire to?”
“Self-sufficiency, yes, but I’m not turning the sod just yet.” His answering smile felt rusty through disuse. He hadn’t exactly wanted her to come here, but at least she was taking his mind off Abby and Becka.
After dinner they carried their coffee out to the side veranda. Luke settled into a creaking slung canvas squatter’s chair. Before Sarah’s arrival he’d wondered what kind of a person she would be and what arguments he could use to convince her to sell him her half of the station. It had never occurred to him that he might find himself attracted to her. He propped his booted feet high against the pillar and tried not to dwell on it. She wasn’t even that pretty, he told himself. Her nose had a slight bump and her jaw was a touch strong….
Sarah remained standing, her hands wrapped around her cup. “It sure is quiet.”
“You think so? Sounds pretty noisy to me, what with the cicadas down by the creek and the possums crashing around in the gums….”
“Doesn’t it get lonely out here all by yourselves?”
Only at night, going to a solitary bed.
“There’s a difference between being alone and being lonely,” he said. “Anyway, we get plenty of visitors passing through. I catch up with friends at race meetings or dances.”
Luke rubbed a thumb around the rim of his cup. Compared with town, it was isolated. He was used to it, but Becka wasn’t. If only she were an outdoor sort of kid she might be happier at spending time with him out on the cattle run. Abby had turned her into a townie.
He glanced up to see Sarah sip her coffee and grimace. “Coffee okay?”
“Fine.” She smiled brightly. “Just fine.”
Like hell, he thought, but it was the best he had. Suddenly he wished he had something better to offer. But she was a townie; probably nothing would seem good enough. “What do you do back in Seattle?”
“I’m a computer programmer. I design educational software for a large company. Are you on the Internet?”
Luke snorted. “I’d rather cross the Simpson Desert than venture into cyberspace.”
“Really?” Sarah paced down the veranda. “I don’t know how you stand all this emptiness.”
“It’s not empty. It’s full of life if you know where to look. I’d go off my nut cooped up in a city.”
She wandered back and leaned against a pillar, gazing down at him. “What did you do before you came to Burrinbilli?”
“I was a stockman in far north Queensland on a station owned by a large pastoral company.”
“And before that?”
“Did some traveling. Before that I was a jackaroo on my uncle’s station near Hughenden. That’s where I grew up.” In the deep dusk of the gum trees a kookaburra made its laughing call. Another chimed in, and another. You don’t hear that in the city. “I had a friend as a kid, an aboriginal from the local community. He and I would go out in the desert. His grandfather taught him how to track and find water and hunt. And he taught me.”
Her eyes widened. “Did you, like, eat grubs and things?”
“That’s right.” He couldn’t resist teasing her. “Moreton Bay bugs are my favorite. We’ll have them sometime while you’re here.” He smiled, knowing it was too dark for her to see the twinkle in his eyes.
She shuddered. “Ugh. I guess I’d eat bugs if I were starving, but only then.”
He laughed. Then drained his coffee and got to his feet. “Reckon I’ll turn in. Sunrise comes pretty early.” He paused at the doorway. “You planning on staying up awhile?”
“Well…”
“Because if you go for a stroll at night, mind you take a torch. Brown snakes usually go to sleep at sundown, but death adders and mulgas are out and about.”
“Death adders? Mulgas? Those are poisonous, right?”
“Most snakes in Australia are.”
Sarah scrambled to her feet. “Actually, I’m feeling pretty tired after my long trip.”
“Thought you might be.”
As she went past him into the house the overhead light illuminated her bare freckled shoulder and the scent of her warm skin reached his nostrils, reminding him it had been a long time since he’d held a woman in his arms.
It would be a while longer, he thought, sliding the door shut behind him.
And it wouldn’t be this woman, tempting though she was.
Pity.
LATE THE FOLLOWING afternoon Sarah was in her room, going over the list of items she wanted to buy for the house. Now that she was part owner she ought to do her bit to take care of the place—if Luke let her. Real money needed to go toward machinery or a bull, but fresh paint and new fabric could make a big difference for relatively little expense. She’d found an old sewing machine on the floor of the linen closet and although she was no seamstress she could manage curtains and cushion covers.
She heard the sliding door to the kitchen open and checked her watch. Five o’clock. Luke was in from the cattle run to go and get Becka. He’d asked Sarah this morning if she wanted to go with him and look over the property. Maybe tomorrow, she’d answered, not meeting his eye.
Sarah went down the hall and paused in the kitchen doorway. Luke had stripped off his shirt and was bent over the kitchen sink, sluicing hot soapy water over his head and arms. She’d never been one for westerns, and the popular appeal of cowboys escaped her, but the sheer physicality of his broad shoulders, lean muscled back and strong arms left her blinking like a cursor on a blank screen.
He reached blindly for a towel and blotted the water from his face and hair. Opening his eyes, he saw her and for an instant froze, towel clutched against his chest. “G’day.”
“Hi.” She folded and refolded her list. “Are you going to get Becka?”
He nodded and reached for his shirt, bunching it in his fist. “Want to come?”
“No. Thanks.” She noted the odd, intense light in his eyes and wondered if it was obvious she found him attractive. “I thought I’d make dinner if you would show me how to work the woodstove.”
“Nothing wrong with the electric stove.”
“Let’s just say the woodstove inspires me. Mind if I raid the pantry?”
One corner of his mouth lifted as he slicked back his damp sun-streaked hair. “Go for your life.”
LUKE PULLED INTO Abby’s driveway and jumped out of the car. Doors were never locked in Murrum and friends and family didn’t wait for a formal invitation, so he knocked once on the front door and went in. “Abby? Becka?”
No answer.
He wandered through the kitchen and looked out the window into the backyard. Becka and Abby were on their knees in the vegetable patch, staking up tomatoes. Stepping out the back door, he called, “G’day.”
Abby glanced up and pushed a strand of gray hair off her forehead. “Hello, Luke. We’re almost done.”
He glanced eagerly at Becka, ashamed at how much he longed for her to run to him the way she used to. Daddy, Daddy, see what I did.
Now she only glanced up without smiling before going back to the tomatoes. Any encouragement at all and he would have given them a hand. But he might as well not have been there for all the notice they took of him.
“Don’t mind me,” he muttered, and retreated into the house.
He helped himself to a glass of water from the tap and sat at the kitchen table. There was the usual clutter: a stack of paid bills, Becka’s hair ribbons, a half-done crossword puzzle. At the end of the table, above the salt and pepper shakers and the tomato sauce bottle, hung one of Caroline’s watercolors of a desert landscape. A mutual love of the desert had brought them together, but it hadn’t been enough to bind them. Nor had his love.
The painting reminded him that this house had been hers before she’d died. Abby had taken it over, as she’d taken Becka over.
Idly, he flipped open the photo album. There were Caroline and her parents, Caroline and Abby…He turned the page to see old photos of Abby as a young woman. She wasn’t unattractive really, although her one brown eye and one blue eye were disconcerting. Too bad she’d never married and had children of her own since she loved them so much. He seemed to recall Caroline’s saying something about her being in love with Len and never getting over it.
He flipped the pages. Caroline painting. Caroline pregnant. They hadn’t planned to have a baby, but when she’d gotten pregnant he’d thought they would be a family. Turned out she’d wanted to travel, not settle down.
Luke flipped another page, to find an unsealed envelope tucked into the crack. He slipped out the photo that was inside—one taken of Caroline in the hospital after she’d had Becka. He frowned. Something was odd about this. He peered closer, hardly believing his eyes.
Caroline’s face had been cut out of the photo and a picture of Abby inserted in its place.
Oh, God. He dropped the photo and jumped to his feet. Though the room was stifling, a chill swept over his body. He couldn’t seem to catch his breath.
Unbelievable. Impossible.
He looked again.
It was true. He thought he was going to be sick right here on Abby’s kitchen floor.
Voices at the door. He crammed the photo back in the envelope and slammed the album shut.
Abby came through, smiling, scraping the red earth from her feet. “All done. Time for a cuppa before you go?”
His mouth was dry. He couldn’t say a word. Abby, humming, ran water into the electric kettle. She was so familiar, yet suddenly a stranger.
Becka. His baby. All blond ponytail and coltish legs under her shorts. What lies had Abby told her?
