Outback Husband

by Jessica Hart

Cal frowned as he set the empty bottle on the side. ‘Then who tells them what to do every day?’

  ‘No one,’ said Juliet bitterly. ‘I didn’t have much choice but to tell them to carry on with whatever they would normally be doing until the new manager arrived, but I know they thought I was stupid to have sacked the last man in the first place. For all I know they’ve just been lying around for the last couple of weeks.’

  She set the pan on the cooker and turned on the element, then wiped her hands on her apron, trying to make Cal understand. ‘I’m pretty much tied to the house with the twins,’ she said. ‘I can’t leave them here on their own, and it’s too far to take them with me if I wanted to go and check up on the men—even if I knew where they were and what they were supposed to be doing in the first place.’

  ‘You’ve been here over three years,’ Cal pointed out. What he had seen of Wilparilla so far hadn’t left him in any mood for sympathy. He had sold a thriving property and had come back to find that all his hard work had been thrown away and the station left to crumble into disrepair. ‘You must have had some idea.’

  ‘My husband never involved me in the station side of things.’ Hugo had never involved her in anything, thought Juliet dully. She looked down at her hands, unable to meet Cal’s eyes directly. ‘When we first came here, he was taken up with the idea of turning Wilparilla into a place that would attract the kind of tourists who want to see the outback but who want a bit of luxury too. There was a nice little homestead here before, but Hugo said it wouldn’t be big enough or smart enough, so he knocked it down and built this one.’

  Juliet looked around her at the state-of-the-art kitchen, with its view out onto the wide, shady verandah that ran completely round the house. Everything had been done with a designer’s style, but it still made her angry to think of how much money Hugo had poured into the house when the station around it was neglected and falling inexorably apart. She had tried to remonstrate with Hugo, but he had brushed her objections aside. It was his money, he had said, and he knew what he was doing.

  ‘I went to Darwin to have the twins in hospital, and I ended up staying there nearly a year while the homestead was being rebuilt. I wanted to come back earlier, but Hugo said I would find it impossible with two babies.’

  Juliet stopped as she realised that the bitterness in her voice was telling Cal a little too much about the state of her marriage. ‘The point is that I haven’t been able to spend the last three years learning about Wilparilla,’ she told him. ‘Even after I came back, I had my hands full with the twins. They were only just two when Hugo was killed last year. Looking after two toddlers doesn’t leave you much time to learn how to run a cattle station.

  ‘Everything’s so far away out here,’ she sighed. ‘It takes so long to get anywhere. There’s no toddler group when it takes two hours to get to the nearest town, and no handy babysitter when your neighbours live eighty miles away. I haven’t even had the time to make the most basic of social contacts.’ The blue eyes were defensive as she looked back at Cal. ‘I had no choice but to rely on the manager Hugo had appointed.’

  Cal’s mouth turned disapprovingly down at the corners. ‘Judging by what I’ve seen so far, he wasn’t much of a manager,’ he said.

  ‘I know,’ snapped Juliet. ‘I’ve got eyes. I only see a tiny fraction of the property, but even that looks run down. But I couldn’t do anything about it when Hugo was alive, and when he died…’ She trailed off. How could she explain what a terrible financial and emotional mess Hugo had left behind him? ‘Well, it wasn’t a very good year,’ she went on after a moment. ‘It was all I could do just to keep things as they were.’

  It was the first time Cal had thought what it might have been like for Juliet since her husband’s death, and he was conscious of a stirring of shame that he had never considered the matter from her point of view. It couldn’t have been easy for her, isolated, and far from home, bringing up two small children alone.

  She could have sold, though, he reminded himself. He had offered a good price for the station. She could have gone back to England a rich woman and made things easy on herself, but she hadn’t. She had chosen the hard way.

  ‘I’ll go and have a word with the men now,’ he said, exasperated by the momentary sympathy he had felt for Juliet. ‘They’re going to start work tomorrow, and they’d better be ready for it.’

  ‘Should I come and introduce you?’ Juliet asked doubtfully

  ‘There’s no need for that,’ said Cal, a grim look about his mouth as he thought about the men who had let his property fall into disrepair. ‘I’ll introduce myself.’

  He didn’t say anything about Natalie, so when he had gone Juliet gave her something to eat with the boys. She could hardly leave the child just sitting there, and judging by the way Natalie gobbled it all up she was starving. Afterwards, Natalie helped her wash up, drying each plate with painstaking care.

  ‘You’re very well trained, Natalie!’ said Juliet, keeping a wary eye on a glass.

  ‘Dad always makes me do chores,’ Natalie admitted with something of a sigh. ‘I have to dry up and sweep the floor and tidy my bedroom every day.’

  ‘Oh? Is he very strict?’

  ‘Sometimes,’ said Natalie. ‘And sometimes he’s funny. We do good things together.’

  Hugo had never wanted to do anything with his sons. ‘Does he look after you all by himself?’ asked Juliet, uneasily aware that she shouldn’t be pumping the child, but, given Cal’s uncooperative attitude, it seemed to be the only way she would ever find out anything about him.

  ‘Most of the time,’ said Natalie, untroubled by any fine sense of ethics. ‘We used to have housekeepers, but they all fell in love with Dad so we don’t have them any more. Dad doesn’t like it when they do that.’

  ‘I can imagine,’ said Juliet dryly. All those housekeepers must have been brave women to fall in love with a man like Cal Jamieson. He wasn’t exactly encouraging. But perhaps he had smiled at them…

  She pulled herself up short. Was that why Cal was so hostile? she wondered. Was he afraid she was going to be tiresome and fall in love with him as well? Juliet felt quite ruffled at the very idea. She had no intention of falling in love again, least of all with a man who patently disliked her and was one of her employees to boot! Love had hurt too much the first time round. Juliet had learnt the hard way how fragile her heart was, and she wasn’t going to let it be broken again.

  Natalie helped her bathe the twins and put them to bed, and then, when there was still no sign of Cal, Juliet let her choose where she would like to sleep. Puzzled, she watched as Natalie looked in every room, as if expecting to find something. ‘Why not have this room next to the twins?’ she suggested, when Natalie only looked disappointed. She pointed at the door opposite. ‘Dad can sleep across the hall there.’

  ‘OK.’

  Juliet made up the bed, and helped her unpack her suitcase. Natalie took out a framed photograph of Cal and a pretty blonde girl holding a toddler on her knee. ‘That’s Dad, and that’s me when I was a baby, and that’s Mum,’ she said, showing Juliet the picture.

  ‘She was very pretty, wasn’t she?’ said Juliet, and, when Natalie nodded, added gently, ‘Do you miss her?’

  Natalie considered. ‘I don’t remember her very well,’ she said honestly. ‘But Dad says she was very nice so I think I do.’

  She could only have been three when her mother had died—the same age as the twins. Poor Natalie, thought Juliet. Poor Cal.

  She wondered again about him as she made up the bed. She didn’t know what to make of him. He had seemed so taciturn and hostile at first, but he was so different when he played with the children, and Natalie had made him sound like a different man again. It was odd, Juliet thought idly, how clearly she could picture him already, almost as if she had always known those cool, quiet eyes and that cool, cool mouth.

  Smoothing down the bottom sheet, Juliet found herself imagining him lying there, lean and brown and tautly
muscled. Her palm tingled, as if she were running her hand over his skin instead, and she swallowed. When Natalie cried ‘Dad!’ she spun round as if she had been caught in the act itself.

  ‘Dad, look, we’re making a bed for you!’

  ‘So I see,’ said Cal, but his grey eyes rested on Juliet’s flushed face, and he raised one eyebrow at her guilty expression. She was sure that he could see exactly what she had been thinking about.

  ‘We…I just thought…since you weren’t here…’ Juliet realised that she was floundering and forced herself to stop. This was her house and she had a perfect right to be here. She didn’t have to explain anything to anyone, least of all to Cal, who was (a) her employee, and (b) late.

  ‘It’s very kind of you,’ said Cal coldly, ‘but there was no need. I’ll finish it off.’

  Juliet felt dismissed. ‘I’ve…er, I wasn’t sure what you wanted to do about eating, but I’ve made supper if you’d like to eat later,’ she said awkwardly.

  ‘Thank you.’

  He didn’t say ‘you may go’, but that was what it felt like. He stepped out of the doorway and Juliet sidled past him and slunk back down to the kitchen. Behind her, she could hear Natalie excitedly telling him about Kit’s bedtime story, and how Andrew had splashed in the bath, and she felt a great wash of loneliness sweep through her. She had no one to tell about her day. How long was it since she had had anyone to talk to in the evenings?

  A long time.

  She had hoped that she would have been able to make some friends amongst her neighbours after Hugo had died, but everyone lived so far away, and she soon discovered that he had left her a legacy of distrust and disapproval. On the few occasions she had made the laborious journey to the nearest town, her attempts to be friendly had been met with politeness but no warmth, and she had been too tired and depressed to persevere. Rebuffed, she had retreated into herself, and relied on letters and phone calls to friends in England for support instead. She had told herself that she wasn’t lonely as long as she had the twins, but she had been.

  In an effort to cheer herself up, Juliet showered and changed into a cool cotton dress. She had bought it in London years ago, and the deep turquoise colour always made her feel more positive. Kit and Andrew were happy and healthy, she reminded herself, and with Cal as manager she had taken the first step towards saving Wilparilla. That was what mattered.

  Her equilibrium restored, she made her way back to the kitchen, where she found Cal looking out through the windows towards the creek. He swung round at the sound of her footsteps and stared at her. Juliet had the oddest feeling that he had forgotten her existence until that moment.

  Cal was, in fact, thrown more than he wanted to admit by the sight of Juliet standing in the doorway. The kitchen had been very quiet when he had come in, and he had been standing there, remembering the simple room it been before all the polished wood and gleaming chrome. He had spent long, long evenings alone in here after Sara had died, while Natalie slept down the corridor, torn between his instinct to stay at Wilparilla and the promise he had made to his dead wife.

  Now, suddenly, he was no longer alone, and Juliet was there, warm and vibrant in a blue dress, but with that wary look on her face. Irrelevantly, he found himself wondering what she would look like if she relaxed and smiled for a change.

  He lifted his hand to show the bottle. ‘I helped myself to a beer. I hope you don’t mind.’ He thought his voice sounded odd, but Juliet didn’t seem to notice anything wrong.

  ‘Of course not,’ she said, very formal.

  There was a pause. ‘Is Natalie in bed?’ she asked at last, and Cal nodded.

  ‘She’s tired. It’s been a long journey for her.’ He hesitated. ‘Thank you for looking after her. She seems to have had a good time.’

  ’She was very helpful,’ said Juliet. ‘She’s a nice little girl.’ She would have liked to ask about Natalie’s schooling. Presumably she would do her lessons with the School of the Air. But Juliet suspected that Cal would interpret any questions as criticism, and, since they seemed to be being polite to each other for now, it was a shame to spoil it.

  Instead, she went over to the oven and took out the supper. ‘How did you get on with the men?’ she asked as she set it on the table.

  Cal pulled out a chair and sat down. ‘I think they know who’s boss now,’ he said, grimly remembering the scene in the stockmen’s quarters. He had been down to the stockyards before he went to see them, and had been so angry at the way everything had been neglected and allowed to fall into disrepair that he had been in no mood to make allowances.

  ‘And who is boss?’ enquired Juliet in a frosty voice as she took a seat opposite him.

  ‘As far as they’re concerned, I am. As far as I’m concerned, you are.’ Cal met her look evenly. ‘Is that a problem?’

  ‘Why is it so hard for them to accept that this is my property?’ she asked, disgruntled. ‘Is it because I’m a woman? Because I’m English?’

  ‘It’s because you don’t know anything about running a cattle station,’ said Cal flatly. ‘You admitted as much yourself. Yes, you’ve got a bit of paper that says you own Wilparilla, but these men aren’t interested in that.’

  He nodded his head in the direction of the stockmen’s quarters. ‘They’re only going to work if they know that the person giving them orders understands what they’re doing, and in this case that’s me. Now, you can go down and give them a little lecture on property rights if you like, but you’re paying me to get them organised and get some work done on this station again, and I’ll only be able to do that if they think of me as boss for the time being. If you’re not happy with that, you’d better say so now.’

  ‘I don’t have very much choice but to be happy with it, do I?’ said Juliet a little bitterly.

  Cal just shook his head in exasperation and applied himself to his meal. In a way, he was glad she was being unreasonable. It was much easier to find her irritating, to remember how perversely she was standing in way of all he wanted, than to notice how smooth and warm her skin looked, how her dark hair gleamed in light, how even when her lips were pressed together in a cross line, like now, her mouth hinted at a fiery, passionate nature beneath that brittle cool.

  Why was she so obsessed about being boss anyway? She had no idea about Wilparilla. She didn’t know the land. She didn’t know the creeks and gullies the way he did. She had never ridden all day through the heat and the dust, or slept out under the stars while the cattle shifted their feet restlessly in the darkness.

  She would never be the boss of Wilparilla, Cal vowed to himself. She didn’t belong on a cattle station. All she knew was this homestead. She probably wouldn’t even recognise a cow if she saw one, he thought contemptuously. Look at her! Sitting there like some exotic bird that had lost its way and found itself in the desert instead of the hot-house environment where it belonged. What was the point of wearing a dress that curved over her breast like that? A dress that let him glimpse the hollows at the base of her throat and made him wonder about the soft material whispering over her skin as she moved?

  ‘You don’t like me, do you?’ His face didn’t give much away, but Juliet could feel his dislike as clearly as if he had stood up and shouted it.

  Cal took a pull of his beer and looked across the table at her. He might have known she would prove to be one of those women who wanted to be up front about their feelings. No, he didn’t like her, but he was damned if he was going to indulge her by admitting it. She would only start asking ‘why not?’ and before they knew what had happened they would be picking over emotions as if any of it mattered.

  On the other hand, why should he make things easy for her by denying it? ‘I don’t think this is the right place for you,’ he temporised at last.

  ‘Why not?’

  He had known that was coming! ‘I would have thought it was obvious,’ he said, irritated at having fallen into the same old trap. Why did women always have to know the reason? Why couldn’t t
hey just accept things for what they were?

  ‘Not to me,’ said Juliet, who had hoped to put Cal out of countenance and was annoyed to find that he didn’t even have the grace to look embarrassed at being confronted with his hostility.

  Cal sighed. Well, if she was so anxious to know what he thought, he would tell her. ‘This is a working cattle station. Life out here is rough and dirty. It’s not a place where you put on a pretty dress and pretend you’ll never have to get mud under your fingernails.’

  ‘You’ve had a shower and changed your clothes,’ Juliet pointed out, dangerously sweet.

  ‘Yes, but not into the kind of clothes I’d wear to a smart restaurant.’

  ‘So I’m not allowed to wear anything but torn jeans and a checked shirt, is that it?’

  Cal looked impatient. ‘It’s not a question of allowing,’ he said irritably. ‘I’m just saying that you’re not wearing the right clothes if you want to belong.’

  ‘But I do belong,’ said Juliet, pushing her plate aside. ‘This is my house,’ she told him deliberately, ‘and I can wear whatever I like in it. I advise you not to forget that.’

  The haughty note in her voice made Cal’s lips tighten. It was almost as if she knew how much he hated her reminding him that Wilparilla belonged to her, and was taunting him deliberately. Yes, it had been his choice to sell, but the Laings hadn’t cared for the land. He was the one who had built Wilparilla up into a successful station, and in Cal’s heart it was still his.

  Across the table, his eyes met Juliet’s challenging gaze. ‘I don’t think there’s much chance of me forgetting that,’ he said, and his voice was very cold.

  They finished the meal in silence, constrained on Juliet’s part, apparently unconcerned on his. Afterwards, she had half expected him to make his excuses and leave, but instead he found a tea-towel and without being asked began to dry the dishes as she washed up.

  It was strange for Juliet to have someone to help. She wasn’t used to anyone else being with her in the kitchen. Few people came out to the station, and anyone with business on the station had eaten with the manager and stayed in the stockmen’s quarters. It was certainly quicker with Cal there, but Juliet half wished that he had left her to do it on her own. She was very aware of him standing beside her, not saying anything, looking through the window at the darkness, absorbed in his own thoughts, not caring if she was there or not. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see his hands moving, unhurried and competent, and she found herself watching them as if fascinated. They were brown and strong, and there were fine golden hairs at his wrist.