Outback Husband

by Jessica Hart

  Cal Jamieson had been dour, if not downright hostile, ever since he’d arrived

  Not that the children seemed to find him nearly as intimidating as she did. They were still squealing with laughter as he showed them his favorite trick.

  Then, unable to keep a straight face at the twins’ delight any longer, Cal smiled.

  Who would have guessed that cool mouth could crease his face with such charm, that the steely look could dissolve into warmth and humor?

  Juliet didn’t want him to be attractive. Somehow it was easier to think that he was always cold and hostile than to know that he was nice to children. But she couldn’t help wondering. Would he ever smile at her the way he smiled at them?

  Jessica Hart had a haphazard career before she began writing to finance a degree in history. Her experiences ranged from waitress, theater production assistant and outback cook to newsdesk secretary, expedition assistant and English teacher, and she has worked in countries as different as France and Indonesia, Australia and Cameroon. She now lives in the north of England, where her hobbies are limited to eating and drinking and traveling when she can, preferably to places where she’ll find good food or desert or tropical rain.

  Books by Jessica Hart

  HARLEQUIN ROMANCE®

  3511—BIRTHDAY BRIDE

  3544—TEMPORARY ENGAGEMENT

  3581—KISSING SANTA

  Outback Husband

  Jessica Hart

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ONE

  ‘MUMMY, someone’s coming!’

  Wiping her hands on her apron, Juliet came out of the kitchen and shaded her eyes against the glare as she watched the tell-tale column of red dust that signalled a vehicle speeding towards them along the dusty track.

  ‘Who is it?’ asked Kit, secure in a three-year-old’s belief that his mother would know everything.

  Andrew looked up at that. ‘It’s a car,’ he said scornfully, and returned to the toy digger that he was pushing through the dust at the bottom of the verandah steps. Like his twin, he was a sturdy little boy, with Hugo’s angelic blond hair and her own dark blue eyes, but Juliet knew that the identical looks concealed quite different personalities. Andrew was single-minded, stubborn, happy to play the same game for hours while quicksilver Kit was easily distracted, always asking questions and much more inclined to lead his twin into trouble.

  ‘It is,’ Juliet agreed as Kit opened his mouth to object, ‘but there’s someone in it, so Kit’s right too.’ She watched the dust cloud moving closer, a slight frown between her brows. ‘Perhaps it’s the new manager,’ she said slowly.

  ‘What’s a manager?’ That was Kit again, of course, stumbling over the unfamiliar word.

  ‘He’s going to help us run the station.’

  If there was one thing she needed, it was help, but Juliet couldn’t help wondering if she had made the right decision. On the face of it, Cal Jamieson had sounded ideal. ‘Cal?’ the owner of the neighbouring station had said, when she had rung to ask him for a reference. ‘You won’t find anyone who knows more about running a property like yours. He’s a good man.’

  Cal Jamieson might know what he was doing, but whenever Juliet remembered their telephone conversation she was conscious of a faint feeling of disquiet. He had heard that she was looking for a manager, he had said, and he was looking for a job. What was there in that to make her uneasy?

  He had sounded brusque, but Juliet had learned not to expect outback men to ooze charm, and in any case Hugo had made her wary of superficial charisma. No, it was something about the way he had taken charge of the conversation. Of course, she had wanted to know that he was competent, but surely it had been up to her to suggest that he came out for a trial period? And there had been something more than competence in that deep Australian voice. Looking back, Juliet couldn’t pick on any one thing, but she had been left with the uncomfortable feeling that there was a hostile undercurrent to everything he had said.

  It was probably just her imagination, Juliet tried to reassure herself. She had never met the man, so what reason could he possibly have to dislike her?

  Her eyes rested on the two little boys playing in the dust below her, and, as always, she was conscious of a surge of love so intense that it tightened her throat. Her boys. They were worth every aching bone, every day fighting tears of sheer exhaustion, every sleepless night spent worrying about their future. Wilparilla was their inheritance and she would fight to keep it for them. She didn’t care how hostile Cal Jamieson was as long as he helped her to do that.

  Still, there was no point in letting him think he could walk all over her. Juliet had no intention of repeating the mistake she had made with the last manager. She would make sure right from the start that Cal Jamieson knew just who was boss!

  Pulling off her apron as she went, Juliet went back into the homestead to splash cold water on her face and run her fingers through her dark hair. She grimaced at her reflection in the bathroom mirror. The stress of the last year and the aching exhaustion in her bones had left her looking much older than her twenty-five years and hardly capable of bossing a three-year-old around, let alone a man as tough and self-assured as Cal Jamieson had sounded on the phone. If it came to a contest of vigour, competence and sheer bravado, the much-squeezed tube of toothpaste sitting on the edge of the basin would probably put up a better show than she could at the moment!

  For an incongruous moment, she allowed herself to remember the girl she had been in London, so pretty, so vivacious, so certain that everything would work out for the best. That had been before she married Hugo, of course. Now here she was, on an isolated cattle station on the other side of the world, and the only thing she was certain of was that she would do whatever it took to keep Wilparilla safe for her boys. Even if it meant dealing with the unknown Cal Jamieson.

  ‘Mummy, Mummy, the manager’s here!’ cried Kit, running into the bathroom and bursting to use the new word that he had learnt.

  ‘Well, we’d better go and say hello, then,’ said Juliet. Now that the moment had come, she felt ridiculously nervous. Wilparilla’s future rested with the man waiting outside, but she mustn’t let him realise how desperately she needed someone to help her.

  Kit rushed self-importantly ahead of her onto the verandah and down the steps to find his twin. A man was hunkered down next to Andrew, apparently engaged in serious conversation. All Juliet could see of him as she followed Kit more slowly through the screen door was that he was wearing moleskins and a dark blue shirt. His face was mostly hidden by his hat, but as he turned his head to smile at Kit’s eager arrival she caught a glimpse of white teeth beneath the shadow of its brim.

  It seemed like such a nice smile that her hopes lifted, but when he glanced up and saw her watching him, it switched off so abruptly that Juliet felt as if she had been slapped. He straightened and took off his hat. ‘Mrs Laing?’

  Her first impression was of a rangy, quiet-looking man, with a lean face, a cool mouth and cool grey eyes. No, not cool, Juliet corrected herself. Those eyes were cold, icy even, and something in their expression made her want to turn on her heel and bolt back into the homestead.

  Mustering a smile from somewhere, she walked down the steps towards him instead. He was even taller than she had thought when she got close to him, and she was conscious of being at a disadvantage as she looked up at him. ‘Juliet, please,’ she said, and held out her hand. ‘You must be Cal Jamieson.’

  ‘Juliet, please
,’ Cal mimicked her crystal-clear English voice to himself. It sounded just as it had on the telephone, so composed, so self-assured, with that nerve-grating suggestion of superiority, but otherwise she wasn’t at all as he had imagined her. That voice didn’t seem to belong to the girl who stood before him.

  He hadn’t realised that she would be so young. She couldn’t be much more than twenty-five, Cal thought, eyeing her unsympathetically. Much too young to own a property like this. A station needed someone who knew the outback, not this girl with her brittle smile and her careful manners.

  She was prettier than he had expected, too, Cal admitted grudgingly to himself. Very slender, almost thin, she had dark hair, exquisite cheekbones and wide eyes of so dark a blue they seemed almost purple. He might even have described her as beautiful if it hadn’t been for the bruised look about her. There were shadows under her eyes and she held herself warily. She reminded him of a racehorse, skittish and trembling with nerves before a big race. Cal didn’t have anything against racehorses, but they didn’t belong in the outback. This was brumby country, a place for tough, half-broken horses that could work. They might not be beautiful, but at least they were useful.

  Looking at Juliet Laing, Cal doubted if she had ever been of use to anyone other than herself.

  ‘Yes, I’m Cal,’ he said in his deep, slow voice, and, because he had little choice, he took her outstretched hand. He had had plenty of time on the long drive from Brisbane to wonder if he was making a terrible mistake coming back to Wilparilla, but now that he had met Juliet for himself he was sure that he had done the right thing after all. This nervy, fragile-looking woman would never last out here. She would run back to England as soon as things got difficult and he would be back where he belonged at long last.

  Her handshake was surprisingly firm, though. Cal looked down into her eyes and then wished he hadn’t. They were extraordinary eyes, the kind of eyes that could seriously interfere with a man’s breathing, and they held besides an expression that gave him pause. There was nothing weak or nervous about the look in Juliet’s eyes. It was steady and stubborn.

  For a long moment they measured each other, and it seemed to Juliet that an unspoken challenge was issued between them. Quite what the challenge was, she couldn’t have said, but she knew that Cal Jamieson thought she didn’t belong here. Well, if he thought she was going to turn tail and run, he had another think coming!

  ‘Shall we talk on the verandah?’ she asked coolly.

  Cal raised his brows. ‘Talk?’ He made it sound as if she had made an indecent proposal.

  ‘It wasn’t much of an interview on the phone,’ said Juliet, trying to keep the defensiveness from her voice.

  ‘It’s a little late for an interview, isn’t it?’ said Cal. ‘We agreed that I should come for a trial period as manager.’

  What did he mean, we agreed? thought Juliet crossly. She had agreed to employ him on a trial basis.

  ‘I’ve been driving for the last four days to get here and do just that,’ he was saying, unaware of her mental interruption. ‘What happens if I don’t pass this “interview”? Do you expect me to turn round and go straight back to Brisbane?’

  ‘Of course not.’ Juliet set her teeth. This was going to be worse than she had thought. She hadn’t been imagining that undercurrent of hostility when she’d spoken to him on the phone. Not that he was aggressive. No, he just stood there looking calm and quiet and utterly implacable.

  ‘Look,’ she said, making a big effort to sound reasonable, ‘Pete Robbins has vouched for you, but all I know is that you’ve come from Brisbane and that you need a job. All you know about me is that I need a manager. Given that we’re going to be working so closely together, I think we should find out a little more about each other.’

  He knew a lot more about her than that, Cal thought grimly. He knew that she and her husband had come out from England and bought this place on a whim. He knew that they’d alienated their neighbours, sacked the experienced stockmen and neglected the property he had worked so hard to build up, and that now, when her husband was dead and she had no reason to stay, she was stubbornly refusing all offers to buy the station from her. Holding out for more money, he decided in disgust, as if she didn’t have more than enough already. She was a spoilt, silly woman, and she was in his way.

  Cal didn’t need to know any more about Juliet than that, just as she didn’t need to know exactly what he was doing here.

  He would humour her for now, Cal thought as he shrugged an acceptance and followed Juliet up the steps to the verandah. Let her think that he was desperate for a job if that was what she wanted.

  He sat down in one of the cane chairs and laid his hat on the floor, glad that Pete Robbins had warned him about the changes the Laings had made to the old homestead. Hugo Laing’s mad scheme had apparently been the talk of the district. Instead of pouring badly needed money into the property, he had squandered thousands on rebuilding the homestead from scratch. The idea had been to create the kind of luxurious accommodation that would attract a higher class of tourist, but as far as Cal knew no visitor had ever stayed in it.

  The stark contrast between the pretentious style of the homestead and the state of the station, crumbling with neglect around it, made Cal angry, but in other ways he was glad. Seeing someone else living in the simple homestead he had shared with Sara would have been hard, and at least now he wouldn’t be confronted with the ghosts of the past whenever he came to the house—which wouldn’t, he hoped, be that often.

  Now Cal looked at Juliet, who had sat on the other side of the cane table. There was an unstudied elegance about her that made her look as if she were posing for a lifestyle spread, in spite of her jeans and simple sand-coloured shirt.

  ‘What kind of things do you want to know?’ he asked her.

  The bored resignation in his voice grated on Juliet’s nerves. He wasn’t even trying to be pleasant! She had envisaged a casual chat so that they could sum each other up, but Cal made it sound as if she was preparing an interrogation, and, of course, now that they were sitting down, she couldn’t think how to begin. She was so tired the whole time that even a simple conversation was beyond her.

  ‘Well, how long have you been in Brisbane, for instance?’ she asked at last, horribly conscious of how inane the question sounded.

  Cal made no effort to disguise the fact that he thought so too. ‘Nearly four years.’

  About the same time that she had been out here, Juliet thought. A lifetime. ‘What have you been doing there?’ she persevered, forcing herself to sound pleasant and relaxed, although something about the way Cal sat there looking completely at home was making her tense. This was her home, and he had no right to make it look as if he belonged there and she was the stranger.

  Cal hesitated. ‘I had my own company,’ he said eventually, hoping that she wouldn’t ask any more. If she found out how successful it had been, she would wonder what he was doing looking for a job as a manager.

  Juliet misinterpreted his hesitation. The company couldn’t have been very successful if he was so desperate for a job that he was prepared to come out here and work for her. He obviously didn’t want to talk about it, anyway.

  ‘Peter Robbins said that you were originally from this area,’ she said instead. ‘What made you go to Brisbane in the first place?’

  ‘Personal reasons,’ said Cal, taciturn.

  ‘So…er…how do you feel about coming back?’

  He stared at her. ‘What do you mean, how do I feel?’

  ‘I mean, how do you feel?’ snapped Juliet. ‘Are you happy to be back? Are you sad to leave friends behind in the city? Are you worried about working for a woman?’ She sighed. ‘You’re not very forthcoming, are you?’

  What did she think this was, a cocktail party? ‘I don’t see that it matters,’ said Cal, equally exasperated. ‘If I were looking for a station manager, I wouldn’t waste my time asking him how he felt, I’d want to know what he could do. If we have
to go through this farce, why don’t you try asking me something relevant?’

  ‘I’ve been trying to find out something about your experience,’ said Juliet angrily.

  ‘Experience of what?’ he asked with an impatient shrug. ‘A station manager’s got to be able to do more than sit in an office and manage.’

  ‘OK,’ she said, tight-lipped. ‘What would you ask, since you seem to know so much about it?’

  ‘If I was employing a manager? I’d want to know if he could fly a plane and drive a road-train. Could he build a dam and fix a generator and sink a bore? Did he understand accounts? And that’s before all the obvious stuff like mustering, roping cattle, catching bulls, castrating, branding, dehorning, building fences—’

  ‘All right, all right!’ Juliet interrupted him. ‘You’ve made your point. Do I take it you can do all that?’ she went on, not without some sarcasm, and he looked her straight in the eye.

  ‘You’ll find that out over the next three months, won’t you?’

  Juliet’s dark blue eyes kindled dangerously, and her chin went up as she glared back at him. ‘I don’t see any point in having a trial at all if your attitude doesn’t change,’ she said sharply. ‘You have made absolutely no effort to be co-operative, or even courteous, since you arrived. Instead you’ve made it plain that you think I know nothing about running a station.’

  Cal opened his mouth, but she swept on before he had a chance to speak. ‘Well, that may be true, but one thing I do know is that I’m not prepared to pay good money for a manager who’s going to talk to me as if I’m stupid! I’m an intelligent woman trying to deal with an extremely difficult situation. I want a manager who can build this station up, run it efficiently and take the time to explain to me what he’s doing and why, so that I can learn eventually to run it myself.

  ‘Now, the last manager here couldn’t be bothered to do that. He made the mistake of thinking that my opinion didn’t count,’ Juliet went on grimly, ‘so I sacked him.’ She fixed Cal with a look, and he was annoyed to find himself noticing how the temper flashing in her eyes had banished that wary, nervous look, leaving her suddenly vivid. Roused out of her brittle poise, she was a force to be reckoned with—and more attractive than he had realised.