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‘How’s your mother?’ Such a mundane question, but she had to start somewhere. And when she saw his face shut down before he spoke, it felt as if she’d used a key to a door she hadn’t known existed.
‘Fine. She’s getting married.’
‘Oh,’ she said, feeling blank. Though she was a very attractive woman, Pauline West hadn’t even seen a man since Jared’s father’s death sixteen years ago. ‘When?’
‘Six weeks.’ Jared’s voice was flat. ‘His name’s Michael Anglesey. He’s another failed farmer—she must have a thing for them. They want to marry at Mundabah Flats, and take up running the place again. She wants me to give her away—and she’s asked for enough money to start the place going again.’
‘Well, what’s the problem? We can afford it,’ she replied without thinking. Reverting to thinking of them as Jared and Anna, King and Queen of Jarndirri, was just so easy.
In the tic at his jaw she saw another multi-hued silence, resonating like glass about to shatter. Resisting the urge to touch his hand—so much tension in him, he’d never returned to the West property of Mundabah since his father had died, even though he’d poured money hand over fist to make the property thrive—she stuck to the simple questions. ‘How do you feel about her marrying, and them running Mundabah?’
‘I don’t want the place. Someone might as well run it.’ He shrugged. ‘We land soon.’ Shutting the door on her again, as always.
‘Fine,’ she said tightly. ‘I’ll go sit in the back with Melanie.’
Jared made a harsh sound as she unbuckled her seat belt again, needing distance. ‘What do you want me to say, Anna?’
‘Nothing.’ She forced blandness into her tone, as if she wasn’t burning with the betrayal of his unconscious rejection. ‘I don’t want anything from you but a few lies.’ Nothing you’ve ever been willing to give. ‘We pretend we’re back together until Melanie’s either back with Rosie or the adoption has gone through, and then I’m gone.’
‘That’s not the deal.’
She sighed, standing between the two front seats. ‘You’re not going to say it, are you? You want me to say it for you, make life easy, just as I always have?’
‘I want you to talk, Anna,’ he said quietly. A double-edged sword in six words. Saying everything and nothing at all.
‘Yeah, well, we all want someone to talk to us,’ she mocked, ‘and some of us had it, and some of us got nothing.’ Silence greeted her taunt, and she snapped. ‘Fine, I’ll talk, but I doubt you’ll want to hear it. You want me back in your bed until I leave. You want me to pretend for the sake of the workers and our neighbours I’m back for good, that I’m madly in love with you, and we’re going to make a family with Melanie. Okay, whatever.’ She snorted out a laugh, and shrugged. ‘I can put on a show—I might even enjoy the sex, it always was a good stress relief when you drove me crazy with your silence—but that’s all it will be. If you’re expecting to make me love you again, forget it. It’s dead, Jared—dead.’
She forced her gaze to stay on him, her chin up. Did her hammering heart show the truth: the lady doth protest too much? She might not love him any more—only heaven knew how she felt about anything but Melanie right now—but on a purely physical level she still wanted him, ached for his touch. She hadn’t wanted it at all after the hysterectomy—it felt too much like a farce, trying to pretend she was a normal woman still. But some time in the past five months since she’d left him, her body had awoken again.
Probably with that first kiss he’d planted on her when he’d come to Broome.
As if he’d heard her thoughts, he said coolly, ‘You keep telling yourself that—but you kissed me back yesterday. And the time before that, and the time before that.’
A sigh came out from between clenched teeth. ‘It’s been over a year since I slept with anyone, and you’re the only man I’ve been with—you made sure of that. What else do I know but you? What else can I compare you to? I’m the Mrs West. I’ve been untouchable in the eyes of almost everyone in the Kimberleys from the time I was fifteen.’
Slowly, as if he’d thought about her words before they’d come, he said, ‘And I’ve been the Mr Curran since I was eighteen.’
She sighed. ‘As usual, you’ve taken my point and changed its direction to suit you. Tell me, did you always equate sex with love, Jared? Did you ever know me at all? In all the years you took my love for granted, from fifteen to now, did you ever ask yourself if I was happy, or if the life you wanted and planned for us both was what I wanted out of life?’
‘Sit down and strap in, Anna, we’re approaching the runway,’ was his only answer, as he began pushing the wheel forward, leading by the nose.
The plane lost altitude, making her sit abruptly. She looked out over the wide red land with its patches of cultivated grass for the animals, brown and dry from early summer, not yet green with the drenching of the Wet. The house, creamy yellow with the rust-red tin roof, sat like a proud island of beauty in the wild, arid surrounds. It sat there in pride and defiance against the odds and the elements.
Jarndirri: home and yet not, a place where happiness had always seemed to elude her. Always trying to be perfect, and always failing. How could she have lived here almost all her life, miss it so much when she wasn’t here, and yet always return with such a feeling of conflicted fatalism? Had the stones judged her unworthy of a normal life here?
‘Look, Anna. Look at the beauty, the perfection,’ Jared said as she clipped herself in. He swept his hand around the intense, wild beauty. ‘How could you not be happy here? What else did you—what more could you want from life than what we have?’
Intense loneliness filled her at the incredulity in his question. That was it, the conflict that lay between them. Jarndirri was everything to him; how could she want more, apart from raising a family? To him there was nothing more. Jared loved Jarndirri, would have loved Adam, had he lived. But he’d never loved her. She was The Curran, the means to the life he wanted … especially once she’d responded to his kiss, after Lea hadn’t.
‘What I wanted then is immaterial,’ she said over the roar of the landing plane, refusing to indulge in self-pity. ‘What I want now also seems immaterial.’
He waited until he’d slowed the engine speed to a crawl before he spoke. ‘It’s immaterial to me, you mean?’
She shrugged. ‘It doesn’t matter. If I have Melanie, I can put up with the rest.’
The plane moved gently into the open hangar. ‘Would you like to spell out what “the rest” is?’ he asked, in a tone bordering on dangerous: his don’t go there voice. But he was asking—and she felt reckless. Too many years wasted, playing the Golden Girl, first for Dad and then for Jared. Being what everyone wanted, until she no longer knew who she was.
Now she didn’t have to. She’d lost everything she’d ever wanted.
It was time to take back, to have a life that belonged to her, not hemmed in and surrounded by the expectations or happiness of others.
‘Life in a house with people who expect me to be The Curran, just like my father. Life on a property so isolated the loneliness became my only friend, the only one I could talk to.’ She turned away from the look in his eyes, as hard as coal crystallising into a diamond, and just as black. ‘Being tied to a man who wants things I can never give, and has never given me the one thing I truly want.’
‘There’s one thing you want, asleep behind us,’ he replied in a voice so cold she shuddered beneath the ice he poured on her. ‘If Rosie doesn’t come back, I’ll be committing perjury to give you what you want, despite the sugar coating you put on it. Little white lies are worth prison time if anyone finds out.’
‘Yes,’ she managed to say, feeling small and almost sick at his ruthless ripping apart of her delusions. ‘But while I’m truly grateful, I don’t want to sleep with you again.’
‘I don’t remember saying I expected that—or that I wanted it.’
At his cool, amused tone, a heat far drier than the steam-room kind seeping into the plane now the engine was off scorched her cheeks. ‘You kissed me like that. I guess I assumed it’s what you wanted.’
He lifted one shoulder: his I couldn’t care less shrug. ‘I thought you wanted to come back. Jarndirri’s half yours—and you’re the real Curran. Kissing used to make you happy.’
Swallowing the unexpected lump in her throat, she closed her eyes and willed control. Why did she ever bandy words with him, or expect to get her point across? His few words could always slay her into silence. ‘All right, Jared. You win,’ she said wearily. ‘You always do.’
Jared swore with efficient fluency, rough and angry. ‘Anna, that isn’t what I wanted.’
Too numb to get into an argument she knew she’d only lose, she muttered, ‘Then why won’t you look me in the eye when you say it?’
Silence met her reluctant challenge.
She shrugged. ‘It doesn’t matter. You always end up getting everything you want, one way or another. I don’t think you could stand to lose at anything.’ When he turned to look at her then, moving closer as if to touch her, hold her—knowing it always softened her—she shook her head. ‘Can you please see if it’s clear to go into the house?’ she whispered, fighting tears with everything she had. She’d shed enough for a lifetime.
After a moment that hung between them like a corpse, he swore again and climbed out of the cockpit, stalking to the house across the half-acre of yard that had once been her little veggie patch in dry season.
To her surprise, Jared walked in the straight lines of the plough, because her little patch of ground wasn’t dead. There were green shoots of carrots, the lumps for potatoes and onion, and full heads of broccoli and cabbage everywhere.
She was surprised someone had cared enough to plant more. It was probably Mrs Button, who appreciated that they didn’t have to fly in vegetables every week.
Lifting Melanie out of the car seat, she cuddled the baby and waited in the shadows of the hangar until Jared returned. She wasn’t in a hurry to go back to the house: the beautiful pale yellow homestead with double-glazed windows and wide verandahs that had been her mother’s and grandmother’s and great-grandmother’s home before her, but had never felt like hers.
So many Currans had lived at Jarndirri, with so much history—so much of it forever unspoken. Strong women had married tough, silent men who had worked the land, struggled against the elements and illness, women who’d borne their children in the rooms inside that house because doctors hadn’t existed out here. The Curran women were the perfect complements for their men. Even her mother had taken six long years to surrender to the breast cancer that had killed her, and had only taken to her bed after four of those years. Until then she’d worked the land, run the house, looked after their staff and cared for her daughters, even given birth to her, Anna—she’d been given the breast cancer diagnosis when she’d been pregnant.
And she, the last Curran woman, had only ever felt like a fake. Less than a woman, less than strong, bonded to the land in a love-hate relationship because it had taken the only thing she’d ever wanted from her. She’d even risked her life to try one final time for a child when the doctors had advised against it, because Jared needed a son.
‘They’ve all gone.’
Jared’s voice soaked into her consciousness like the history of this, the land she loved and loathed—and she wondered when he’d become a part of that love and loss and hate. She nodded. ‘Go and do what you have to. I’ll get the bags once Melanie’s settled.’ Words as dead and emotionless as her heart felt.
As she walked past him, holding Melanie against her like a shield and bulwark against the enemy, he said, low and fierce, ‘I didn’t want to win, Anna.’
For a moment she almost turned back. He touched her shoulder, and she shuddered with her body’s betrayal of her heart. ‘Then why does talking to you, touching you, always feel like a contest I’ve already lost?’
When he didn’t answer, she moved out of the hangar into the bright-and-darkness of the heavy-clouded air, thick like soaked cotton wool, glistening with diamond-bright moisture and a touch of sunlight breaking through in tiny slivers.
Coming home again felt like a farewell. The beginning of the end … and this time goodbye would be for ever. She couldn’t go through this again—and after Melanie’s life was settled, one way or the other, she hoped to have the strength to leave Jared and Jarndirri for ever, and, finally, never yearn to come back.
CHAPTER FIVE
JARED took his time feeding the animals in the massive sheds on the high ground, and making sure the gates were securely closed and the electric alarms on—the storm was closing in hard now—before returning to the homestead. He kept trying to think of what to do to get things back to the way they used to be with Anna; but even after all the years of being her lover and husband, and after everything they’d been through together, he felt as if he was locked inexorably in square one.
Her words kept chiming in his head like a bell tolling. Talking with you always feels like a contest I’ve already lost. Well, he knew how it felt now. That was how he’d felt every time she’d thrown him out of her place at Broome. And if he hated it, if he couldn’t stand being in last place with her, how had always losing made her feel? In his driving need to do it all, be it all, to win at any cost, had he left her behind, left her out in the cold and, worse, not even noticed?
Maybe it’s time things changed. Maybe it’s time we both won.
He strode in through the back verandah to the kitchen. After a spare breakfast and no lunch, he was more than ready for dinner—but there was nothing cooking. Anna was no cook, but she could do a steak and salad when Mrs Button was sick, so why hadn’t she …?
Distant cries gave him his answer. He followed the wailing sound to the spare room where she’d slept for so many months. Anna’s bags were on the floor, unopened, but the baby’s things were strewn all over.
So she was still resisting coming back to their room? He squashed the urge to grab her bags and take them where they belonged—for now. He’d change her mind soon enough. He’d make her melt for him.
Then he forgot his needs, his plans. Holding the baby, jiggling her in an awkward attempt at comfort, Anna was striding the floor, totally frazzled as the baby wailed without let-up.
He knew better than to offer help with the baby right now. ‘Should I make our dinner, or warm a bottle for her?’ He took care to not sound superior or triumphant. This isn’t a contest between us, Anna—and whatever it is, I haven’t won in a long time.
‘She’s had a bottle, had her nappy changed. She doesn’t have a fever or anything. I’ve tried playing with her, singing to her—I don’t know what to do,’ Anna all but wailed.
He frowned, looking at the baby. She seemed more angry than exhausted, and she’d slept really well on the plane. A thought occurred to him. ‘How old do you think she is?’
Anna wheeled around on him, flushed and pretty in her dishevelment, and needing him … at least for now. And she was holding a baby in her arms … but it wasn’t his baby son, his Adam.
Jared ached, thinking of what could have been—if the baby was Adam he’d have the right to hold him, to kiss her better, to walk him at night—anything to lighten Anna’s load. He’d look into his son’s eyes and feel that love, that bond—the sense of future, of destiny fulfilled.
Adam …
‘Rosie started coming around three months ago, and she was …’ She frowned down in anxiety at the baby, whose face was mottled and her wails upgrading to ear-piercing shrieks. ‘She must be about six months—why?’
‘At that age, babies eat stuff like mashed bananas and vegetables,’ he said gruffly, still locked into the pain of useless longing for his son, his child, and for the loving wife he’d somehow lost. You always end up getting what you want. ‘Cereals too. Mum gave us all cereal.’
‘I fed her this morning,’ she replied in clear impatience. ‘There was cereal in her bag.’
‘Mum always fed the babies at night, too—usually vegetables or cereal with banana or mashed apple in it. She said they slept better. If the baby’s used to that, not eating would make her cranky.’
‘But she threw out the teething rusk I gave her and screamed louder,’ she retorted, looking like she was about to tear her hair—or already had, by the looks of her. Apart from the lack of chocolate smears, she looked as she had the day he’d first kissed her, all mussed and kissable …
But lustful thoughts weren’t going to help either of them now. She was trying to get this right on her own and failing—and he had minutes to help her before she turned away from him.
So he grinned at her to lighten her lack of knowledge. ‘Have you ever tasted those things?’
She caught the smile, and her eyes glimmered in return, her mouth slowly curving. ‘Obviously not for too long a time. So it’s cereal and banana?’
His heart soared at the first real smile she’d given him for over a year. ‘Yes, so long as the bananas are ripe enough. Come on, let’s see.’ He led the way into the kitchen, resisting the urge to do anything stupid like touching her, no matter how badly he wanted to, or how easily he could make her want it. He’d made too many mistakes with her, it seemed.
He just wished he knew what all his mistakes were, so he didn’t repeat them. Now she was finally back where she belonged, he couldn’t afford to blow it again.
‘How ripe is ripe enough?’
He hid the grin this time; she sounded as touchy as anxious, hating it that he knew more about babies than she did. ‘They need to be soft and sweet, but not bruised. Don’t worry, Anna, we can steam an apple if the bananas are too hard or soft.’
‘They’re all spotted—that’s overripe,’ Anna grumbled over the screams, rocking the baby on her hip in a futile attempt to soothe her. ‘What else can go wrong today?’
‘Don’t worry.’ Jared grabbed a red apple and a peeler. ‘I’ve done this hundreds of times for my brothers and sisters. Five minutes and I guarantee she’ll be happy.’
Anna reached up to the hanging ladder that had served as a pot rack for a century, and grabbed a small saucepan. ‘How much water do you need?’
Busy peeling the apple as fast as possible, he said, ‘Half an inch, and turn the heat down as soon as it’s boiling. In the meantime … ‘He reached into his precious store of childhood favourites, his arrowroot biscuits, and handed one to Anna. ‘She can have this—it’s what the cereal’s made of.’
She grinned as she took the semi-sweet cookie. ‘You must be desperate for quiet to give up your night-time treats.’
How she managed to do insane things to his body with a grin when she looked like an extra on a horror film, he had no idea. But she did it as no other woman ever had or would, and he accepted it. She was his woman.
‘Desperate,’ he agreed, smiling back at her, wondering if he looked as incredibly aroused and needing as he felt. ‘The kid’s louder than a city street.’
‘Not now,’ she said softly, as the baby grabbed the arrowroot from her hand, and gurgled over the biscuit, slobbering in a chattering ecstasy only babies and children knew how to show. ‘Thanks for the biscuit. It was inspired.’
He shrugged, feeling like a total idiot. She was thinking about the baby while he was thinking of how to get her into bed. ‘I was the oldest of five kids. I had to mind them a lot.’
‘That’s a definite advantage right now.’ She cocked her head towards the stove. ‘The water’s boiling.’
‘Oh. Right.’ He turned back from his rapt contemplation of the picture before him: a messy Madonna smiling for the first time in a year, holding a yabbering baby who was covered in milk and chewed biscuit. As he peeled and pared the apple and dropped slices into the water, he made a vow—he’d do whatever it took to give Anna the motherhood that had brought her back to life: the life he’d never been able to give her, despite spending over a hundred thousand on IVF implantations and specialist visits.
He’d had all his dreams come true, thanks to the Currans—especially because of Anna. He knew what he had—he’d never taken it for granted. He’d worked day and night to make life perfect for her, without the financial fears that had turned his mum grey before her time, and sent his father into the downward spiral that ended with a noose and debts that had taken him, Jared, ten years to pay off.
Even when her fertility problems meant frequent trips to Perth and massive cheques to cover the treatments, he’d made sure Anna was never burdened with the feelings of negativity and fear that his dad had pushed on his mum. Anna had never once had to worry where the next meal was coming from or how they’d pay the next round of bills, as his mum had had to for as long as he could remember.
But somehow all his hard work, everything he’d done to make their lives secure hadn’t been enough to make her happy or want to stay with him. And worse still, he couldn’t see how to make this fantastic life, the only life he wanted, enough for a woman like Anna.
No. I’ll find the way. I’ll make her happy this time. I’ll work harder, tell any lie, even play daddy to this kid, if it keeps that smile on her face.
‘Can you find the strainer?’ he asked abruptly. Hiding the emotion as she’d accused, yeah, but at least he didn’t carry on like his father had, dumping all his problems and feelings onto her. He still remembered the way Mum had tried to shut Dad up at the dinner table. Not in front of the children, Rob! He still remembered the low-voiced arguments over money at night, his mother’s weary Well, what do you want me to do, Rob, wave a magic wand for you?, and his father’s alternate pleading love and despairing coldness.
A family with cracks in it as wide as the dried-out red land before the Wet, the Wests had patched it together with more children, more bank loans, until the shaky edifice had collapsed around them. Then his dad had taken the easy way out. Overwhelmed with the sudden load alone, Mum had asked Bryce to take him; the next oldest, Sam, had gone to their grandparents. She raised the three little ones, Nick, Andie and Dale at his Aunty Pat’s place in Perth until she’d sold off enough of the pieces of Mandurah they’d still owned to buy a house in the suburbs.
Now his mother was coming back, Nick and this bloke she was marrying coming with her.
‘Why do you need a strainer?’ Anna broke into his morbid reverie, her tone like his mother’s had been, withdrawn and hard.
Damn, he’d done it again, broken the fragile accord just as she’d started to smile at him at last—either that or she really hated knowing nothing about babies.
