Outback Husband

by Jessica Hart

  ‘And I’ll sack you,’ she was saying, ‘if you forget for one minute that I’m the boss round here. This is my property. I’m prepared to pay whatever it takes for someone to help me, but I’m sure as hell not going to pay to be patronised!’

  The expression in Cal’s grey eyes was hard to read. If he felt embarrassed or ashamed or intimidated by her outburst, he was certainly giving no sign of it. He wasn’t the kind of man she could imagine being intimidated by anything, Juliet thought with an inward sigh.

  ‘I just thought we should know where we stood,’ she finished lamely, when Cal didn’t say anything. ‘It’s better to be clear about things from the beginning.’

  Cal looked at her. ‘The only thing that’s clear to me is that you want a manager, a miracle-worker, a slave and a teacher all rolled into one,’ he said sardonically. ‘I could tell just driving along the track how much work needs to be done here. If I’m going to run this place properly, I won’t have time to explain everything to you.’

  ‘I’m not asking for a minute by minute account,’ said Juliet. ’I won’t be able to spend much time with you with two small children to look after. But I want to know what’s going on, and I want to learn what I can.’

  ‘And when you’ve learnt what you can?’

  ‘Then you’ll be out of a job,’ she said with a direct look. ‘But I’m not a fool. I know how long that will take me, so the job is secure for a while yet, if that’s what’s worrying you.’

  It wasn’t security that was worrying Cal, it was the realisation that Juliet Laing was going to be trickier to deal with than he had anticipated. He had expected a spoilt, helpless widow, all ready to be persuaded—in the nicest possible way—that her only option was to sell up and go back to England where she belonged, but the more he looked at Juliet, the less persuadable she seemed. There was a wilful set to that lovely mouth, a stubborn tilt to her chin, a steadiness in the deep blue eyes that was almost unsettling.

  Well, he didn’t have a reputation for handling difficult horses for nothing, Cal thought. At least he was here, in the best position to influence her to give up and to step forward with the money to buy his station back when she finally accepted the inevitable. He would have to be careful not to antagonise her too much at this stage. It might go against the grain to kow-tow to a woman like Juliet Laing, but she had already sacked one manager, and he wouldn’t put it past her to replace him with another man who might be quick to spot the advantages of the situation. Attractive, single women with half a million acres at their disposal weren’t that easy to come by. Who was to say some other manager might not decide that he might as well make his position permanent by marrying Juliet and getting a cattle station thrown in as part of the bargain?

  Cal’s mouth set into a hard line at the thought. He would never get Wilparilla back if that happened. No, he would have to grit his teeth and take Juliet’s orders for now, but he would make sure she understood how hopeless her situation was, and with any luck she would soon be gone.

  ‘All right,’ he said at last. ‘As long as you don’t want a detailed report in triplicate every day, I’ll let you know what’s going on.’

  Anyone would think he was doing her a favour! Juliet suppressed a sigh. It was hardly the most gracious acceptance of her terms, but she suspected that it was all she was going to get. ‘OK,’ she said.

  ‘So, have I passed the interview?’ Cal asked, and she stiffened at the sarcastic edge to his voice. She would have loved to have told him to go back to Brisbane, but she was desperate for a manager, and Cal knew it. It could take weeks to find another manager, and she couldn’t afford to wait any longer. The station was already falling apart before her eyes as it was. And although he might rub her up the wrong way, there was no denying that he looked reassuringly capable and competent. Now he would have to prove it.

  ‘You’ve passed the interview, yes,’ she told him with a cool look. ‘We’ll see how things work out over the next three months. Needless to say, the trial period we agreed works both ways. If you don’t like working for me, you’re free to leave whenever you like.’

  So she didn’t think he’d last the course, did she? Cal smiled grimly to himself as he picked up his hat and got to his feet. Juliet Laing might be tougher than she looked, but they would see who left Wilparilla first!

  ‘Whatever you say,’ he drawled, and then added after a pause that made the word sound somehow insulting, ‘boss.’

  Cal had evidently decided to put an end to the discussion, thought Juliet, vaguely resentful, but as she could hardly order him to sit down again, she stood up too and forced a smile.

  ‘Now we’ve got over the formalities, would you like a beer?’

  He settled his hat on his head. ‘I think we’d better go and settle in first.’

  ‘We?’ said Juliet idly, thinking that he must have brought his dog with him.

  Cal nodded over to the dusty four-wheel drive parked in the shade of a huge gum tree. ‘My daughter’s with me,’ he said.

  For a moment Juliet wondered if she had heard right. ‘Your daughter? You didn’t say anything about bringing a daughter!’

  ‘I didn’t see what difference it would make to you,’ Cal told her, quite unperturbed. He gestured out at the distant horizon. ‘It’s not as if you don’t have the room.’

  ‘But…how old is she?’

  ‘Nine.’

  Juliet stared at him. ‘You can’t bring a nine year-old girl out to a place like this! What about her mother?’

  ‘My wife died six years ago.’

  ‘I’m very sorry,’ said Juliet, thrown by the bald statement, ‘but it still doesn’t seem a very suitable arrangement. Wouldn’t she have been better off staying in Brisbane?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Natalie stays with me.’

  Juliet refrained from pointing out that in that case he should have stayed in Brisbane too. ‘What were you planning to do with her while you were out during the day?’ she asked instead.

  ‘You said yourself that this is just a trial. She can come with me to begin with, and if it works out I’ll arrange for my own housekeeper to keep an eye on her while she does her schoolwork. Natalie’s a sensible child, she knows what life is like out here.’

  ‘And am I expected to accommodate all these extra people?’ Juliet demanded angrily.

  If rumour was correct, there were enough rooms in the homestead for three times as many people, but Cal had no intention of staying with her. ‘There’s a perfectly adequate manager’s house,’ he said. ‘Or so Pete Robbins told me when he said you were looking for a manager,’ he added quickly, before Juliet could wonder how he was so well-informed about the accommodation.

  ‘There is a house used by managers in the past,’ Juliet agreed, ‘but it’s in no fit state for a child, and I doubt if you’d get a housekeeper anywhere near it!’

  Cal frowned. ‘What do you mean? You didn’t mention a problem about the house on the phone.’

  ‘That’s when I thought you would be on your own. I’m afraid the last manager left it in a terrible state, and I haven’t had a chance to go and clear it up. I didn’t think you’d mind sleeping in the stockmen’s quarters until then, but you can’t take a little girl there. Go and see for yourself if you don’t believe me,’ she said, when Cal looked unconvinced.

  ‘I will,’ he said grimly. It had never occurred to him that there would be a problem with the manager’s house. It was small, just two bedrooms, and not what Natalie was used to, but he had only ever thought of it as a temporary measure until Juliet sold him the station and they could move back into the homestead. Now what was he going to do?

  ‘You’d better bring…Natalie, is it?…over,’ said Juliet, as if answering his unspoken question. ‘She can stay with me while you go and look at the house.’

  Cal hesitated, then nodded briefly. ‘All right,’ he said.

  Natalie had short curly brown hair, brown eyes and a shy, solemn face. Juliet smiled at her. ‘Hello, Na
talie. Welcome to Wilparilla.’

  Natalie murmured a shy greeting, and Juliet took her over to meet the twins. ‘The grubby one on the left is Kit,’ she told the little girl, ‘and the even grubbier one beside him is Andrew. They’re nearly three.’

  ‘How do you tell them apart?’ whispered Natalie, eyes wide as she looked from one to the other, and Juliet smiled.

  ‘I always know which one is which, but it’s difficult for everybody else. I make sure they’re wearing different clothes, so that makes it easier. Kit’s got the blue top on and Andrew’s is yellow.’ She glanced down at Natalie. ‘You must be thirsty after your long drive. Would you like a drink while Dad goes to look at the house?’

  Kit scrambled up at that. ‘Mummy, my want a drink!’

  ‘Please may I have a drink,’ Juliet corrected him automatically.

  ‘Please my want a drink,’ said Kit obediently, and Natalie giggled behind her hand as Juliet sighed and settled for that.

  ‘Come on, Andrew, you can have a drink too,’ she said and turned to tell Cal how to find the manager’s house. But he had ruffled Natalie’s hair in farewell and was already striding away. She watched him for a moment, puzzled by the way he seemed to know exactly where he was going, but then shrugged and forgot about it as she ushered the three children through the screen door.

  Natalie had lost her shyness entirely with the twins by the time Cal came back. She was sitting at the kitchen table showing them how to blow bubbles in their drinks when he walked into the kitchen. Juliet, leaning by the sink and watching the children indulgently, straightened abruptly as he appeared and her heart gave an odd jump.

  Cal was tight-lipped with anger. ‘The house is disgusting,’ he said furiously, without any preliminaries. ‘I wouldn’t ask a dog to live in there! How was it allowed to get into that kind of state?’

  ‘I never even went there until last week.’ Juliet was immediately on the defensive. ‘Hugo—my husband—always dealt with the men.’ Not that he had been around to do much dealing, she remembered bitterly, and when he had been there all he had done was set the men’s backs up, until all the good ones had left and only the men who didn’t care were left at Wilparilla.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said helplessly, ashamed but tired, too, of apologising for Hugo’s mistakes.

  Cal took an angry turn around the kitchen. ‘Natalie can’t stay there,’ he said. ‘And the men’s quarters aren’t much better. I checked.’

  ‘That’s what I tried to tell you before,’ Juliet pointed out. She paused, desperately trying to think of an alternative, but there simply wasn’t anywhere else for a child to go. ‘Look, I think the best thing you can do is to stay here at the homestead,’ she said eventually. ‘There are plenty of spare rooms.’

  Cal hesitated, raking his fingers through his brown hair in frustration. The last thing he wanted was to be beholden to Juliet Laing, and if it had been just him he would have slept in his swag under the stars, but Natalie couldn’t do that. He didn’t have any choice, he realised heavily.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said with evident reluctance, adding quickly, ‘It will just be until we can fix up the house. We’ll go as soon as we can.’

  CHAPTER TWO

  ‘THERE’S beer in the fridge if you’d like one,’ Juliet said rather hesitantly as Cal came in from unloading the car. She knew that the offer sounded rather ungracious, but Cal hadn’t been particularly gracious about staying in the homestead. It didn’t seem to have occurred to him that she might not be that thrilled at the thought of sharing her home with him either.

  If Cal resented her lukewarm tone, he gave no sign of it. Nodding his thanks, he took a bottle from the fridge and pulled off the top. Juliet, preparing vegetables in the sink for the children’s supper, tried not to watch him, but her eyes kept sliding sideways to where he stood, leaning casually against the worktop, his head tipped back as he drank thirstily.

  She hadn’t thought to ask him how old he was, but she guessed that he was in his thirties. He had the toughness and solidity of maturity, but his face wore a guarded expression that made it hard to be sure of anything about him. He could hardly have been more different from Hugo, Juliet reflected. Hugo had been volatile, swinging from breezy charm to sullen rage with bewildering speed. Cal was, by contrast, coolly self-contained. It was impossible to imagine him shouting or waving his arms around wildly. Even the way he stood there and drank his beer suggested an economy of movement, a sort of controlled competence that was at once reassuring and faintly intimidating.

  His presence seemed to fill the kitchen, and Juliet was suddenly, overwhelmingly aware of him as a man: of the muscles working in his throat, of the brown fingers gripped around the bottle, of the dust on his boots and the creases round his eyes and the coiled, quiet strength of his lean body. She couldn’t tear her eyes off him. It was as if she had never seen a man before, had never been struck by the sheer physicality of a male body before that moment.

  Cal was unaware of her gaze at first. The beer was very cold. To Cal, hot, frustrated and tired after a long day, it tasted like the best beer he had ever had. He lowered the bottle to thank Juliet properly, only to find that she was watching him with a dark, disturbingly blue gaze, and as their eyes met he was conscious of a strange tightening of the air between them, of an unexpected tingling at the base of his spine.

  Juliet felt it too. He saw her eyes widen, and a faint flush rose in her cheeks before she turned away and concentrated almost fiercely on peeling a potato.

  Oddly shaken by that tiny exchange of glances, Cal levered himself away from the units and, a faint frown between his brows, took his beer over to the table where Natalie was entertaining the twins. She was normally a shy, quiet child, more comfortable with animals than people, but she had obviously taken to the twins immediately, and her face was lit up in a way that he hadn’t seen for years now.

  Not since they had left Wilparilla, in fact. Cal shook off the unsettling effect Juliet’s eyes had had on him and sat down next to his daughter, remembering how she had wept into her pillow and begged to be taken home. He had done the right thing bringing her back, even if things weren’t working out quite as he had planned.

  ‘Dad!’ Natalie tugged at his sleeve. ‘Show Kit and Andrew that trick you do.’

  At the sink, Juliet could hear the noise behind her, and she turned, potato in one hand, peeler in the other, to see the twins convulsed with laughter, Natalie giggling and Cal, straight-faced, turning his hand back and forth as if looking for something. ‘Again!’ shouted Kit, clambering excitedly over Cal as if he had known him all his life.

  Juliet’s smile was rather twisted as she watched them. At times like these it hurt to realise how much the boys missed in not having a father. Did Cal ache this way when he saw his daughter without a mother?

  Natalie seemed a nice little girl. She obviously adored her father, but from what Juliet had seen of him so far she thought he must be a formidable figure for her. He had been dour, if not downright hostile, ever since he had arrived. Not that the children seemed to find him nearly as intimidating as she did, Juliet had to admit. They were still squealing with laughter as he confounded them each time with whatever he was concealing in his hands.

  It was then that Cal, unable to keep a straight face any longer, gave in and smiled at the twins’ delight, and Juliet nearly dropped her potato. Who would have thought that he could smile like that? Who could have guessed that cool mouth could crease his face with such charm, that the steely look could dissolve into warmth and humour, that the cold grey eyes could crinkle so fascinatingly?

  Juliet was disturbed to discover how attractive Cal was when he smiled. She 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, and to wonder why it was that he would never smile at her the way he smiled at them.

  As if to prove her point, Cal looked up, and his smile faded as he saw the peculiar look on Juliet’
s face. Probably waiting to point out that she had employed him as a manager, not a children’s entertainer, he thought with an edge of bitterness.

  He drained his beer and pushed back his chair. ‘When do the men finish for the day?’ he asked Juliet, ignoring the children’s disappointment. If she wanted an efficient manager, that was what he would be.

  ‘About now.’ As if suddenly realising that she was still clutching a potato and peeler, Juliet turned back to the sink. Why should she care if he wouldn’t smile at her? she asked herself, refusing to admit that she was hurt by the way his attitude changed so completely whenever he looked at her.

  ‘I think I heard the ute go by a few minutes ago,’ she added, glad to hear that her own voice sounded just as cool as his. ‘They should be back in their quarters by now.’

  ‘How many men are down there?’

  ‘Four at the last count.’ Juliet dropped the last potato in the saucepan and filled it with water. ‘I haven’t had much to do with them. The last manager brought them in when he’d succeeded in getting rid of all the experienced stockmen who were here when we arrived. His wife used to cook for them. I offered to give them meals up here when she left, but they obviously didn’t want to sit down with me every evening, so they take it in turns to do their own cooking.’

  Juliet tried hard to keep the loneliness and rejection out of her voice. It had been so long since she had had anyone to talk to that she would have welcomed the company of even the dour and taciturn men who so clearly disliked her. ‘I only ever see them when one of them comes up to ask for more flour or sugar or whatever. They don’t seem to require much in the way of fresh vegetables,’ she added with a would-be careless shrug.