Summer Down Under

by Pensy, Alison

  She approached the dogs, calling softly to them before she arrived at their kennels so they would know it was her and, hopefully, not bark. Well, that was her theory, anyway, and, thankfully it worked, this time.

  Both dogs greeted the friendly girl with wagging tails. She didn’t care what Mr. Miller said, she petted them both fervently, and they lapped up the attention.

  “Okay, Jess,” she said, scratching the dog behind her ears. “We need to shape you up and make a sheep dog out of you. I have no idea how I am going to accomplish this task, but I always enjoy a challenge. One thing’s for sure, if I have to kidnap you myself, I will not let that nasty man shoot you.”

  She unclipped the excited dog from the chain attached to her kennel and clipped a leash to her collar. For the next hour, they went through some basic things. Sit, stay, come, etc. Jess picked them up so quickly, Sam didn’t think she should have any problems with more complicated things, like rounding up sheep.

  “Well, I think our lesson is over for this evening,” Sam said, patting the young trainee on the head and attaching her kennel chain to her collar. “I wouldn’t want anyone to notice I’m missing and come looking for me. That wouldn’t do either of us any good.”

  “It’s a bit late for that,” a voice whispered from behind a nearby tree.

  Sam whipped around, startled. “How long have you been standing there?” she demanded.

  “Long enough to see that you have a knack with dogs,” Daniel replied. “Dad would kill you if he knew you were trying to train one of his dogs.”

  “Well, we better make sure he doesn’t find out then, hadn’t we?” Sam retaliated in her best threatening manner, which she had to admit was not very convincing. “Coz your dad will kill this dog over my dead body.”

  Daniel raised his hands in defeat. “Steady on, girl. You’re secret is safe with me. I’m not going to say anything to Dad.”

  “Well, then, will you help me?” Sam asked, after calming down from being startled. “I don’t know the first thing about training a dog to work sheep, but I’m guessing you do.”

  He leaned against the tree and gave her a thoughtful look.

  “Please,” she pleaded, “Please, help me. You don’t want to see Jess get the bullet any more than I do.”

  “Okay. I’ll help you.” He sighed. He had to admit she was right. He didn’t want to see Jess get the bullet, either.

  “Thank you. You won’t regret this, I promise.”

  Sam stepped over to where he was standing and gave him a hug. It was an automatic response, but no sooner had she wrapped her arms around his chest, she tensed when she realized just how good it felt. She breathed in the wonderful scent that was uniquely him. A second later, she shook her head and took a step back, avoiding looking at the man in front of her.

  She felt a hand coax her chin up.

  “Why won’t you let me near you?” he whispered.

  Sam brought her eyes up, his gentle gaze searching her. She wished she could let him in, but self-preservation took over.

  “It’s not personal,” she said, voice so soft it was almost a whisper. “I can’t let anyone near me, ever again.” With that, she gently pulled away and headed back towards the house. One solitary tear forced its way from her eye and dropped to the ground to be stepped on by her footfall.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The next morning started off just as the one before it, being awakened by the delicious smell of breakfast wafting down the hall from the kitchen.

  This time, however, Sam did not bump into Daniel outside the bathroom. In fact, he was already seated and deep in conversation with his father by the time she entered the dining room. They saw her and rose from their seats.

  This was something she could get used to, but then she looked down at what she was wearing and smiled. It was just not the right setting to be that chivalrous. It made her feel obliged to find a corset and a long dress, instead of her scruffy work shirt, jeans and scuffed boots. But it did make her feel very special, something that she hadn’t felt in a long time.

  Sam got to her chair and Daniel pushed it in as she sat, although, the warm smile she had become accustomed to was replaced with a look of cool indifference. She started to analyze the feeling of being robbed that was taking hold in her gut. She felt like something precious had been stolen from her. She decided to ignore the feeling; it would probably make things a lot less complicated, anyway. She started a conversation instead, something she always did when nervous.

  “So, what are we doing today, then?” she asked, as bright and cheery as she could muster.

  “We have to separate the sheep. We’ll put ewes with lambs, then separate wethers and rams,” said Mr. Miller.

  “What are wethers, and why do we do that?”

  Mr. Miller tsked at his trainee jillaroo. Sam brushed the annoyance aside and held her gaze steady. She’d never worked on a farm before. She didn’t know what wethers were, or why you need to separate the sheep.

  “Wethers,” continued Mr. Miller, somewhat impatiently, “are male sheep that have been neutered. We have to separate them because they have different types of wool. The lambs need to stay with the ewes until they are weaned, and the rams need to be taken out of the flock because they have done their job for this year.”

  “Oh,” Sam said, raising her eyebrows. She chuckled, garnering her a glare from her grouchy employer.

  Daniel didn’t say a word to her through breakfast, and something was stopping her from even looking at him. Sam knew all too well what it was, but wasn’t strong enough to confront it yet.

  They finished eating and all headed to the holding pen where the sheep were left the night before. On closer inspection, it was a fairly intricate puzzle of pens and gates, and right in the middle of it all was the shearing shed.

  Sam soon learned how it all worked. They had to encourage the sheep down a narrow chute, which opened up into two separate pens at the end. A gate could be moved from side to side between each opening, thus being able to separate the sheep as they ran down the chute towards the pens. Simple idea, she thought. Getting them to go down the chute in the first place was quite a different matter.

  Daniel and Sam started making all kinds of whooping noises, urging the sheep on. The dogs were helping, too, by zigzagging behind the flock. As soon as the first sheep plucked up the courage to go, they all followed suit. As long as the two of them kept the flock moving forward, it became easy to keep the line going.

  They did that for several hours. Sam thought it was almost hypnotizing to watch Mr. Miller moving the gate from side to side as the sheep ran through. She couldn’t work out how on earth he could tell the difference between the sexes. They were all just big balls of wool with legs to her untrained eyes. Except of course, for the lambs that were little balls of wool, but he wasn’t sorting them, so that didn’t matter.

  They took a short lunch, not a minute too soon. Mrs. Miller had packed some sandwiches, and they all sat in the shade of the shearing shed. The flock had kicked up a minor dust storm in the holding pen. Sam shook her hair and dirt rained down. She didn’t dare think of the state she must be in, but considering the state Daniel was in, she had a pretty good idea of what she looked like. Her skin probably looked several shades darker now, that was for sure. Sam dusted her clothing off before sitting on the floor and leaned against the metal wall of the building. It felt good to sit down for a bit.

  A little while later, after lunch, they had finished sorting the sheep into the two pens. The dust was almost unbearable by this time and it had started to get hot. Sam looked over at Daniel. His face and hair was covered in dust, which made the liquid blue of his eyes stand out even more. He cast her a quick glance, the blank expression he wore earlier was still there.

  “So, how do you separate the rams from the wethers?” Sam asked Mr. Miller as they were all leaning on the railing, looking over the pipe rail at the sheep.

  “Well, funny you should ask that,” he replied, h
is lips curving into a mischievous smile aimed directly at his young ranch hand. “You have to get in there and walk them out.”

  “Yeah, right,” Sam scoffed, thinking he was joking. Her expression changed from one of jest to utter disbelief when he looked back at her with his critical eye.

  “You’re not joking, are you?” she mumbled.

  “I don’t joke about work,” he said sternly.

  Should’ve known that was coming, she thought with chagrin.

  “So, Sam. Let’s see how good of a ram catcher you are.” He pointed to the sheep. “In you go.”

  Sam’s eyebrows just about took flight from her forehead.

  “Me?” Sam squeaked, looking over at the huge male sheep with long, curly, very dangerous looking horns. “Surely, you don’t expect me to get in there and catch rams, do you?” she asked, trepidation prevalent in her voice.

  “Absolutely, I do.” Mr. Miller made a dismissive gesture with his hand. “Go on. Let’s see what you’re made of.”

  Sam looked at Daniel to see if he was going to jump to her defense. But then again, why should he? She had made it clear to him that all she was was an employee of his parents. She wasn’t really surprised when his expressionless eyes eventually looked at her and said nothing. Her stomach dropped and she swallowed hard.

  Well, this was just great, she thought as she put a foot up on one of the rails. She resigned herself to the fact that she was going to make a complete idiot of herself in front of two men. No change there then. She took a deep breath, swung her leg over the fence, and started to push her way through the sea of four-legged puffballs.

  As she was walking away from the guys, she could hear Mr. Miller’s condescending voice say to Daniel. “This should be good for a laugh, hey, son?”

  She didn’t hear Daniel reply.

  The clumsy blonde looked around the pen and counted four rams in amongst all the wethers. They weren’t hard to pick out due to the dangerous looking curly things protruding from either side of their heads.

  The sheep scurried all around her, trying as best as they could to get out of her way. The ram she was approaching, however, was slightly bolder and did not run away as she moved closer. It was now or never she decided, and made a dash for it. She wasn’t sure how she did it, but the next thing she knew, she had a hand on either horn and was straddling a poor unsuspecting ram.

  “I did it!” she shouted in victory, thrusting her hands in the air as you do when you’ve just triumphed over adversity. It didn’t take long for her to realize this was possibly not the best course of action to take. The ram saw its chance for freedom and took it. Sam grasped for his horns, again, trying desperately to rectify the foolish mistake she had just made, but it was too late. The hapless jillaroo caught one of his horns just as he made a bolt for freedom through her legs, pulling her off balance and face first in the dirt. The air was forced from her lungs with a resounding “oomph.”

  Sam fleetingly thought that at this juncture, any normal person would have let go, but for some unknown reason she didn’t. She started to get dragged through the dirt and other sheep by the ram that turned out to be much stronger than he looked.

  “Let go!” she heard someone cry in the distance. Her brain must have been a tad befuddled because, for some inexplicable reason, she was still holding on.

  “Sam, for God’s sake. LET GO!” It was Daniel.

  As she was being dragged around the corner in the pen, she vaguely remembered the ram’s foot making contact with her mouth. She heard a crack, saw stars. She let go.

  Uh-Oh, was about all her befuddled brain allowed her to think, as she lay face down in the dirt, her jaw starting to throb. She managed to roll over onto her back and slowly pushed herself to a sitting position.

  “Oh, cwap,” she moaned as she sat up holding her chin.

  Daniel leapt over the fence and steamrollered his way through the sheep towards her. Within seconds, he was crouching in front of the wounded jillaroo, worry written all over his face.

  “Made a bith of a pigth ear of that, didn’t I?” she spluttered looking up into his eyes, which were filled with concern. She felt something trickle down her chin and brought her fingers to her mouth. She knew what she would see when she pulled her hand away, she could already taste the coppery tang of blood on her tongue.

  Eyes wide, she looked up at Daniel. “That’s not good.”

  “Sam, don’t move, let me check you out,” Daniel whispered, gently pushing the hair out of her eyes. “Can you open your mouth?” She tried, grimaced and shook her head.

  His words started to sound like they were off in the distance somewhere. She looked up at him and noticed that there were now two gorgeous, dust covered faces looking down at her. She blinked really hard several times. But, no. He still had two heads. She giggled.

  “Sam?”

  “Daniel,” she let out another giggle. “You’ve got two heads, did you know?”

  “Sam, sweetheart. Stay with me.” Daniel’s warm voice reverberated through her head, caressing her throbbing skull. She became aware of the ground disappearing beneath her and felt a warm hard chest next to her ear.

  Did he just call me sweetheart? It went black.

  ***

  “Mum, will she be all right?”

  “Daniel, she’ll be fine. She just took a knock to her jaw, that’s all. Will you stop pacing up and down, it’s not like she’s not about to have your baby.”

  There was silence for a minute.

  Mrs. Miller suspended her ministrations on the injured jillaroo for a moment. From where she sat, perched on the edge of Sam’s bed, she turned and looked up at her son, eyes narrowed. “She’s not about to have your baby, is she?”

  “No, of course not!” Daniel snapped, affronted at his mum’s question.

  Under his mother’s scrupulous stare, he dropped his gaze to the floor.

  “But you care for the girl, don’t you?” Mrs. Miller asked.

  Silence.

  “Daniel?”

  Daniel brought his up eyes to meet his mother’s and cast her a wary glance. He sighed. “Yes, Mum. I really care about her, but she doesn’t want anything to do with me. Please, don’t tell Dad, though. You know what he’s like.”

  “Of course, I won’t tell your Father,” Mrs. Miller agreed, turning back to work on her patient’s battered face. “Anyway, don’t you worry about him, he’ll have a lot more to think about when I get my hands on him. What was he thinking putting her in a pen full of sheep? She has no experience handling sheep, yet. Come to think of it, why did you let her get in a pen full of sheep? That was totally irresponsible, Daniel, and you know it!” she chastised.

  “I didn’t think,” he replied weakly. “She acts so gutsy, I thought she’d be fine.”

  “Daniel, you only met her two days ago and you feel this way about her already?” Mrs. Miller questioned.

  There was another silence. Daniel dropped his worried gaze to the floor.

  “Oh, you didn’t just meet her two days ago, did you?”

  Silence again.

  “Daniel?” Mrs. Miller’s voice was pointed.

  “No.” Daniel sighed. “She sat next to me on the flight from London. This is the Sam from Bali I told you about. And, no, we didn’t have a fling. I made that up. Like I said, she won’t let me near her.”

  “Why on earth would you make up a thing like that?” his mum asked.

  “I don’t know, wishful thinking I guess. I haven’t stopped thinking about her since then. I can’t get her out of my head. I kept turning up uninvited to spend time with her in Bali. She probably thought I was some kind of creepy stalker guy. Anyway, it doesn’t matter now. I told you she doesn’t want anything to do with me.”

  “No wonder, after the way your father blurted out your supposed affair, the poor girl probably thinks you’re only after one thing,” she scolded. “I thought I taught you better than that!”

  “Oh,” he mumbled “I hadn’t thought of that
, but then I didn’t think I’d ever see her again, either.”

  “Actually, come to think about it, why didn’t she say anything when your father mentioned it?”

  “I begged her not to when we were in the restroom.”

  “Ahh, well, it seems to me that she must care about you a little or she wouldn’t have taken this job, would she? Maybe fate wants you two together. What are the odds that out of all the jobs in Australia, she would pick here to come and work? Giving you both a second chance.” Daniel thought his mum was sounding strangely philosophical at this point, not a common occurrence.

  “It was Sophie.” Daniel explained.

  “What has Sophie got to do with this?”

  “Sam was staying at the backpackers Sophie runs and told her about meeting me in Bali. Sophie didn’t let on to Sam that she knew our family and persuaded Sam to come and work for us when you told her mum we were looking for a jillaroo.”

  “Trust Sophie to try and play matchmaker.” Mrs. Miller sighed. “Well, the thing you have to do now, if you really do care for her, is show her that you do and that you’re not just trying to get in her knickers.”

  “How do I do that?” he asked.

  Mrs. Miller shot her son an incredulous look. “You can start by watching over her tonight. When she comes around, she’ll need to be observed every hour to make sure there is no concussion. You’ll also need to keep ice on her jaw for twenty minutes every couple of hours. Because, in the very least, if she goes running for the hills as soon as she is well enough to leave, she might at least thank you for not having a lump the size of Ayers Rock sticking out of the side of her face.”

  ***

  The sound of voices was like a recording playing in Sam’s head. That sounds like Daniel and his mum talking. She thought. Ooh, I can think that means I’m alive! Yay! Then she became aware of the slamming pain that was pounding against her jaw and skull and wished she could go back to that blissful darkness where she couldn’t feel anything. She groaned, it was about all she could manage.