Outback Bride

by Jessica Hart

  'It doesn't sound as if you were prepared to make any compromises,' commented Mal, with an unexpectedly harsh note in his voice, and Copper's angry resentment collapsed abruptly.

  'That's what Glyn said.' She took off her hat and combed her fingers dispiritedly through her hair. 'Anyway, it doesn't matter any more. I'd been in Singapore for ten days, and when I got back Glyn said he wanted to talk to me. I made a joke about it at first, said I'd have to consult my diary to see if I could arrange an appointment, but he was dead serious. He said he was fed up with coming home to an empty house and that he didn't feel there was any point in us pretending to be a couple any longer when he spent most of his time on his own. And then he said that he'd been seeing a lot of Ellie, who's a good friend of mine. Her husband left her earlier this year, and they were both lonely, and…'

  Copper tried to shrug carelessly but the memory still hurt. 'Well, in the end he said he was going to move in with her. It was all very amicable. Glyn has always been one of my friends and so has Ellie. We're all part of the same crowd. I couldn't avoid seeing either of them if I wanted to keep my friends, so we were very civilised and talked it through together.'

  'And you had your job to comfort you,' Mal reminded her ironically.

  'Yes, I had my job,' she said in a flat voice. What had she expected? That he would be sympathetic?

  Mal leant forward, linking his fingers loosely between his knees. 'So when you said you were in love with this Glyn yesterday, you weren't telling the truth?'

  'Oh, I don't know…' Copper turned her hat listlessly between her hands. 'I do love Glyn. He's a great person. We even talked about getting married once, but we never got round to it. I never got round to it,' she corrected herself. 'There was always too much else to do. And now I think it was all for the best. Copley Travel is too important to me to give up, and if it's meant giving up Glyn instead, well, I think he probably didn't really love me either, if he wanted me to change that much.'

  Mal said nothing. It was impossible to tell whether his silence was sympathetic or contemptuous. 'Anyway,' she went on brightly after a while, 'at least you know now why I'm not in any hurry to go back to Adelaide. I really don't mind seeing Glyn and Ellie together, but it seems to make everybody else feel awkward when we're all together. If I'm away for a while, it'll give everyone a chance to get used to the situation.'

  'It sounds to me as if this Glyn had a lucky escape.' Mal was watching his daughter playing happily in the sand, but his mouth was twisted as if with bitter remembrance. 'It must have been a shock for him to realise that you were prepared to put your business before everything else.

  'My wife was like you,' he went on after a moment. 'She thought she could have everything. When I met her, she had her own chain of shops in Brisbane. I never thought she'd be prepared to give it all up to live out here, but Lisa liked the idea of being mistress of a huge outback station. She always thought big, and Birraminda was that all right. Of course, I made sure that she spent some time out here before we were married, so that she could see exactly what was involved, but no! Lisa knew what she wanted-and what Lisa wanted, Lisa got.'

  'Why did you marry her if she was like that?' asked Copper, more sharply than she had intended. She had been prepared to be jealous of Mal's dead wife, but she hadn't expected to resent being compared to her!

  'I didn't realise what she was like until it was too late,' he said. 'And she was very beautiful…' He trailed off, as if conjuring up an image. 'You'd have to have known her to understand what she was like,' he went on finally. 'She could charm the birds off the trees when she wanted to, but she had a will of iron and she never had any doubt where her priorities lay. At first she thought she could run her business from out here, so I paid a fortune to equip a special office for her.

  'You should go in there some time,' he added, with a glance at Copper. 'It's got telephones, a computer, a fax machine, a photocopier-everything you need to run a business. But it wasn't enough for Lisa. She wasn't interested in cooking or cleaning, although I had a whole new kitchen put in for her as well, to help her adjust, and she was easily bored if she didn't have anything she wanted to do, so she was always nagging at me to fly her to Brisbane so that she could check up on the accounts or visit designers or negotiate some special deal or other. Oh, she was an astute businesswoman, all right.'

  Why did he have to make it sound like an insult? wondered Copper, who was recognising more of herself in Lisa than she really wanted to. What was wrong with being energetic and intelligent?

  'If she was that astute, she wouldn't have married you unless she really wanted to be with you,' she said after a moment.

  Mal shook his head. 'That was what I thought. Of course, I had what you would call a stupidly romantic idea about marriage, but Lisa's attitude was much more practical. Marriage to me gave her a sort of position, an image of someone equally at home in the outback as in the city, but she never really liked it out here and she ended up spending more and more time back in Brisbane.'

  'But what about Megan?'

  'Megan was the result of a doomed attempt to save a doomed marriage,' said Mal stonily. 'It didn't work, of course. Lisa saw pregnancy as an excuse to escape permanently to the city. She said that she needed to be near a hospital, that Birraminda was no place for a baby, so she went to Brisbane and she never came back. She didn't even ring me until after the baby was born.' His mouth set in a bitter line. 'She told me her labour came on unexpectedly and that there hadn't been time to call me and tell me to come to the hospital, but it wasn't true. I was supposed to be grateful that she even let me see my own child.'

  His voice was very controlled but Copper could see the rigidity in his jaw. She understood now what had put that shuttered look in his eyes and carved sternness into his face. No wonder Mal had changed. The birth of his daughter ought to have been a joyful occasion, but instead he had been excluded, rejected, denied the emotional intensity of seeing his child come into the world.

  Copper wished she knew how to offer him sympathy. If she had been another girl she might have been able to take his hand, or put her arms around him, but she wasn't another girl. She had condemned herself as a girl who put her job first, just like his wife, and she was afraid that Mal would flinch from her touch.

  So she only clenched her hands around the rim of her hat and said nothing.

  After a while Mal went on, as if the words were being forced out of him but he needed to finish the story. 'We both knew that there was no point in pretending that the marriage was going to work after that,' he said. 'It was a relief in a way, but the divorce settlement crippled me financially. All my money's in land, and I'm still struggling to get back to the way things were before. The worst thing was leaving Megan behind, but everyone said she needed to be with her mother.'

  His expression was closed, refusing pity. 'I believed it myself until I saw how she was handed over to a succession of nannies while Lisa went back to working fifteen-hour days in her business. I flew down to see her as often as I could, but the child had no chance to get to know me. When Lisa was killed in a car accident and I went to bring Megan home, she was terrified. She was only two and it must have seemed as if she was being handed over to a complete stranger.'

  Copper's eyes rested on Megan, squatting by the water. Her hands were full of mud, her face grubby and absorbed, and she was chattering away to herself, oblivious to the two adults watching her. 'She seems happy enough now.'

  'I think so too, when I see her like this, but she's too used to playing on her own.' Mal sighed. 'She doesn't remember much about Lisa, but she misses having a mother. It might be different if I could get a housekeeper to come out here and stay for a year or so, but these girls who come and go are just unsettling for her. She needs some security.'

  'You're her security,' said Copper gently, but he shook his head.

  'I'm not enough,' he said. 'I can't be around the homestead the whole time. Megan needs more attention than I can give her. Too of
ten she has to sit on a fence where I can see her and keep out of the way. She's learning plenty about how to run a cattle station but she isn't learning enough about being a child.'

  Mal's eyes rested on the curve of his daughter's back. 'Of course, what I really need is a new wife,' he said with a mirthless smile. 'But I don't think I can go through another marriage like that again.'

  Copper hesitated. 'It doesn't need to be like that,' she said quietly. You didn't need to be a romantic to believe that marriage didn't have to be a battleground of conflicting interests, as Mal's had been.

  'Doesn't it?' said Mal. 'Where am I going to find a woman who'd be prepared to give up everything and come and live out here? No friends, no shops, no restaurants, no interesting job-just heat and dust and hard work.'

  It would be hard, Copper thought. There was no doubt about it. And yet Mal's wife would have other things. She would have the creek and the gums and the diamond bright air. She would be able to reach out and touch Mal whenever she wanted. His lean, brown body would be as familiar to her as her own. She'd have long, sweet nights in his arms, and when she went to sleep she would know that he would be there in the morning when she woke. What kind of woman had Lisa been to walk away from all that?

  A woman like her? Something cold touched Copper's heart. 'None of that would matter if she loved you,' she said, in a voice that was not quite steady.

  'If there's one thing I learnt from my marriage, it's that love isn't enough,' said Mal bleakly. 'Lisa loved me-or she said she did-and look where that got me. And look at you. You love Glyn, but not enough to give up the things that really matter to you. Why should it be any different for the next woman I marry? Always supposing I could find one wandering around the bush! No,' he said, getting to his feet and beginning to untether Megan's pony, 'I'm not getting married again. Megan will be all right if I can find a decent housekeeper. All I can do is keep hoping that one will turn up sooner or later.'

  He glanced over his shoulder at his daughter. 'Come on, Megan. We're going home.'

  CHAPTER FOUR

  'I'M not getting married again.' Again and again, over the next few days, Copper found herself brooding over Mal's words, although she could never satisfactorily explain to herself why they grated in her memory so much.

  After all, Mal and his daughter weren't her business. It was a shame that his marriage had been such a disaster, of course, but Copper couldn't help resenting the way he had lumped her in the same category as Lisa. She hadn't walked out on a marriage, or deprived a father of his child. Glyn was the one who had walked out on her. All she had done was care about the work she did. What was so wrong with that?

  At least she understood now the guarded way Mal treated her. He was polite but watchful, and, although he patently found her amusing in an exasperating kind of way, he rarely smiled-and if he did it was as if the smile had been surprised out of him against his will. Sometimes Copper felt his eyes resting on her with an expression that she could never identify, but which made her edgy and nervous, and she wanted to shout at him and tell him that she wasn't like Lisa.

  At times, Copper hated Lisa for turning the intriguing man she remembered into this cool, reserved stranger. And at other times, like now, lying awake in the dark, she was disgusted to find herself envying her. Lisa had been beautiful, Mal had said. He must have loved her very much. He had married her and brought her to Birraminda and done everything he could to make her stay.

  Which meant that it hadn't taken long for him to forget her. Megan was four and a half now, so he must have married Lisa at least five years ago, six if one took into account the fact that the marriage had gone wrong long before the baby was conceived. And that meant that a year after their idyllic encounter on that Mediterranean beach Mal had dismissed her from his mind and married someone else.

  Copper turned over irritably. The knowledge that he had so quickly forgotten left her feeling a fool for having remembered him so clearly, even when all hope of ever seeing him again had gone. It was just that the three days they had spent together had felt so utterly right that it was impossible to believe that it hadn't been meant to last for ever. She had used to invent endless excuses as to why Mal had never got in touch with her in London, as he had promised, but never once had she thought that he would simply carry straight on and fall in love with someone else.

  Perhaps he had never really been in love with her at all. Perhaps she had just been another girl on another beach. The thought twisted in Copper like a knife.

  At least it made it easier for her to pretend that she didn't care about the fact that Mal had obviously dismissed her as an obsessive career woman. Copper told herself that if he wanted to waste his life being suspicious, of every woman he met, that was his loss. She just had to persuade him to let Copley Travel use Birraminda as their base and then she would be more than happy to go back to Adelaide and forget him properly this time!

  But as the days passed, and a week turned into ten days, Copper began to almost forget why she had come to Birraminda in the first place. She had rung her father to explain that she would be staying on to argue their case properly, but she had stuck to her word and hadn't tried to tackle Mal on the subject.

  Most afternoons he took her and Megan for a ride or a drive to more distant parts of the station. For the first few days she rushed around with a clipboard, taking notes and measurements and inspecting the landing strip where Mal kept a small plane, but after a while there seemed to be too much else important to do.

  Without daily contact with her office, the business had become increasingly unreal. Real was the dazzling outback light and Megan's face screwed up in concentration. It was the sound of the birds squabbling in the trees and the sway of the saddle and the way Mal creased up his eyes as he scanned the wide, empty horizon.

  Copper hated getting up early, and couldn't say that she had learnt to love housework, but she did enjoy being with Megan. She taught her how to write her name and she read her stories and played endless imaginary games, and slowly the little girl began to blossom. It was not all plain sailing, of course. Megan was a bright, funny child, but she had a wilful streak and was prone to tantrums if crossed. She soon discovered, though, that Copper's will was even stronger than her own, and that she could only go so far. Every night Copper would tuck her into bed and kiss her goodnight before Mal came in, and Megan's arms would hug her neck, and that was enough for Copper to feel that the long, exhausting day had been worthwhile.

  'Look, Dad, I'm having my hair washed!' Megan stood up in the bath one evening to show off her halo of shampoo and waved her hands excitedly at her father.

  Copper had been crouching by the bath, but at that she jerked round, annoyed to find that after ten days her heart still hadn't learnt not to cartwheel crazily whenever Mal appeared unexpectedly. She had been entertaining Megan by singing with a plastic beaker clamped over her nose, and she was so busy trying to get her breathing under control that she forgot all about it until Mal lifted an enquiring eyebrow. Flushing ridiculously, she snatched the beaker off her face. Why was it that when she tried so hard to be cool and business-like Mal always seemed to find her making a fool of herself?

  'You're early,' she said, almost truculently.

  'I know,' said Mal with infuriating calmness. 'I thought this might be a good time for you to put your case for a campsite.'

  'Oh.' Copper sat back on her heels and pushed her tousled hair behind her ears. Her sleeves were pushed up to her elbows and the beaker had left a faint red mark across the bridge of her nose. 'Now?'

  'I'll just have a shower and then I can finish putting Megan to bed while you get your papers together. We could have a talk after that.'

  'Fine.' Trust Mal to wait until she had forgotten all her carefully rehearsed arguments and then expect her to convince him with just half an hour's notice!

  Well, if he was going to have a shower, she was going to have one too. There was no way Copper was going to face him looking hot and crumpled
after a day running round after a four-year-old. This was her big chance and she mustn't blow it.

  Copper stood under the streaming water and tried to gear herself back into executive mode. She thought about her father, anxiously awaiting news of Mal's decision, and she thought about Copley Travel's falling bookings. They badly needed a successful new idea to capture people's imagination, and the Birraminda tours could put them back as market leaders in exclusive holidays. There were other properties they could try if Mal refused to be convinced, but her father had his heart set on Birraminda-and anyway, it would take too long to go back to square one at this stage. Mal had to say yes!

  Copper dressed carefully in a soft cream-coloured outfit made up of a swirling panelled skirt and a neat, cropped top. When she looked at herself in the mirror she thought she looked cool and business-like, more like herself, somehow, but not too smart to alienate Mal before she started. She could hear him putting Megan to bed next door as she left her room with her files under one arm. That meant there would be time for her to go and check the roast.

  'You look stunning!' Brett came whistling into the kitchen as she bent down to put the beef back in the oven.

  It was impossible not to like Brett. He was selfish and careless and irresponsible, but he flirted outrageously and made Copper laugh even when she most wanted to disapprove. Every time she saw him she was struck by how handsome he was, but his sudden appearance never had the slightest effect on her breathing, and her heart just kept placidly beating-which was strange, considering the ridiculous way it behaved whenever she saw Mal.

  Next to Brett, he looked austere and understated, as if deliberately underplaying the warmth and humour that Copper remembered so well from Turkey, and yet there was no doubt who held the authority. Brett might tease his brother, or grumble at his orders, but he never challenged him, and when the men rode out in a group there was something indefinable about Mal that marked him out as leader, although he was never loud or aggressive, nor did he make any effort to draw attention to himself.