A Girl's Guide to the Outback

by Jessica Kate

  His lips curved. “You’re forgiven. Again.”

  That look on his face—the hint of a smile that seemed to be reserved just for her, the brightness of his eyes—rewound the clock, and she was eighteen again, sitting in the shed with Mick, alternately fixing his motorbike together and kissing.

  She broke eye contact, focusing on the dog and keeping the man in her peripheral vision.

  Mick’s smile widened, though he could not possibly have read her thoughts—could he? “Come on, Jules, let’s be friends again.”

  Don’t be a chicken. She forced herself to meet his gaze and shove aside any and all thoughts of making out. “Okay. How’s the Gold Coast? Any churchgoing bikini models there?” Sam had flatted with Mick on the Goldie for a while before he went to the US, and she’d heard plenty about just how true the coastal stereotypes were.

  “Jules.”

  “What? I can’t ask? Friends are interested in other friends’ love lives.”

  Mick acquiesced with a reluctant nod. “I haven’t met any churchgoing bikini models.”

  “That’s not what I was really asking.”

  He rolled his eyes. “Yes, I’m seeing a girl. No, she hasn’t met my mum. Yes, I will skin you alive if you tell my parents.”

  Intriguing. Jules raised an eyebrow. “Why?”

  He stared at her with a mutinous expression. She stared back. He huffed a sigh. “She’s a mining company lawyer. The same company that’s been plundering Queensland’s best farms for years. According to my dad, at least.”

  Jules laughed. “Oh man, you know how to pick ’em. You just can’t help but antagonize your family, can you?”

  “She also has a great sense of humor, a love for God, and a soft spot for vets.”

  A hiss sounded from somewhere out back. Probably another feral cat Glen had patched up. Jules narrowed her eyes. “How soft?”

  He grinned. “Jealous?”

  “Of course not. Just making sure she appreciates what she’s got.” And judging whether I need to scratch her eyes out or not.

  Mick ran a hand over his hair. “Well, it’s still new, so . . . yeah. What about you?”

  “Do you see any studly men getting about on my farm?”

  “Besides myself and your brother, no.”

  She flipped her braid over her shoulder. “That answers the question.”

  “I guess there’s not an abundance of decent blokes under fifty around here.”

  “Don’t forget Jacko Saunders.”

  Even Meg gave a yip of disgust.

  “He still stealing cars on Saturdays and playing the organ on Sundays?”

  “Yup.”

  “I wish you both every happiness.” He adjusted Meg’s drip.

  Jules’s throat ached at the sight of her dog lying there limp. “She gonna make it?”

  Mick pursed his lips. “We’ll keep her on fluids overnight to reduce the risk for her liver and kidneys.” He glanced around. “Glen’s got a swag here somewhere. I’ll stay overnight to make sure she’s okay. Moving her now could cause problems.”

  Jules scanned the room, too, but didn’t spot the swag—an Aussie term she’d had to explain to Kimberly the other day. The canvas sleeping bags with thin mattresses were a staple for those who loved camping. Glen probably had his stashed in that fire hazard he called an office.

  She caught Mick’s gaze and held it. Only a true friend would camp on the floor of the vet’s overnight just to make sure her dog was okay. “Thanks.”

  The word didn’t express enough, but for now it would have to do.

  Chapter 16

  “So, what would you do if—” Kimberly paused her sentence as she stretched to reach the leaking copper pipe high in the dairy’s rafters without losing her balance. Which was hard when Sam—who had his arms wrapped around her legs as he boosted her up—wobbled. Such things were necessary when the farm’s only ladder had somehow disappeared. Jules had spent most of yesterday and today in town with Meg—and Mick—and texted them hourly with doggy updates but hadn’t responded to their ladder question. “Hold still!” She grasped the pipe with one hand, wincing at the cobwebs, and wrapped plumbing tape around the leak they were attempting to repair.

  Or, at the very least, redirect so it wasn’t dripping on some exposed wiring Jules hadn’t gotten around to fixing.

  Sam steadied, his cheekbone hard against her knee, as she finished the job. And her question. “So, what would you do if you had no constraints? Money was no issue, I wasn’t at Wildfire, the world was your oyster?” These probing questions had become their little game in the past twenty-four hours since they’d agreed to work together on a plan for the farm. Sam had finally shown a crack in his defenses, and she planned to jam the biggest crowbar into it she could.

  “I have no idea,” Sam mumbled against her shinbone.

  She wrapped the last of the tape around the pipe and dropped her hands to his shoulders. “Done.”

  He loosened his grip so she slid through his arms to the ground. She landed lightly on her toes, her face inches from his. Heat exploded into her cheeks, and she took a step back. Boy, the sensation of his arms and chest gliding over her body had been—well, not unpleasant.

  Not at all.

  And that wasn’t acceptable. “I, um, need to go get the cows.” She spun on the rubber heel of her gum boot and power-walked out of the dairy, jumped on the newly repaired four-wheeler, and sped away.

  What was wrong with her? She and Sam were just starting to get along. She’d finally been able to give Steph a kind-of-positive progress report. Any stupid emotions or hormones or whatever they were could not get in the way. She gave herself a stern talking-to over the next hour as she chased the cows from their paddock, puttered along behind the slow-moving herd, and then locked the gates behind the stragglers. When she tied a plastic apron around her waist and stepped down into the dairy pit, Sam turned straight to her. “What would you do?”

  “What?”

  “If you had no limits? What would you do?”

  That didn’t even require thought. “What I’m doing now. I mean, at home. Working with Wildfire to help it reach its full potential.”

  Sam pulled a disbelieving face. “Really?”

  She frowned. What was he implying? “Yeah.” She picked up the closest set of cups and held the first cup up to a cow’s teat. It slurped on, and she moved to the next.

  Sam worked beside her, leaning in her direction to be heard over the dairy noise. “So, if you had a gazillion dollars, the brains of Einstein, and the wisdom of Solomon, you would work at Wildfire the exact way you are now?”

  Her brain scrambled for an answer that revealed more—but not that much more. “No. I’d also pay someone to run my sugar-free food empire, and I’d freelance as their taste tester. The Wildfire drop-in center has shockingly poor nutrition levels.” She hesitated for a moment. Was it the right time to probe Sam about Wildfire? “And I’d use my piles of money to convince you to stay.”

  Her heart lodged in her throat. Would he close the door on this forever? The work they’d done together at Wildfire had given her a purpose she’d never known while consulting for start-ups in LA, but without Sam’s spark the drop-in center felt less like a home away from home for these kids and more like a tutoring center. They needed their leader back.

  Embarrassing as it was to admit, the image she pictured as she drifted off to sleep each night was her and Sam at Wildfire again, running the expansion program together. If they were still talking dream scenarios, she’d eventually add some consulting back in on the side, tackle projects that stretched her, like Greg’s offer at Potted Plants 4 Hire. But she’d always have Wildfire to come home to.

  So first she had to get Sam back.

  Sam slid the next set of cups onto a cow, his movements quick with the confidence of hundreds of hours of practice. “You think you’d need piles of money to convince me?”

  A spark of hope flamed to life. He hadn’t laughed in her face, at
least. But what was the key that’d unlock whatever held him back?

  She attempted to attach the metal cup in her hand to the next cow’s teat. It didn’t suction properly, and the beast slammed the kick bar. Kimberly flinched, both from instinct and the muck now splattered on her cheek. The entire dairy reverberated with the impact. She opted for honesty. “Giving it three years didn’t work.”

  Sam went silent for a moment, his hands busy fitting the metal-and-rubber milking cups onto a cow. Kimberly watched him from the corner of her eye. What was he thinking? She didn’t mean to imply he was in it for the money—that thought was laughable, and they both knew it. Maybe it hadn’t been a great idea to refer to his dislike of working with her. The past days had been new territory for them both. It was obvious that Sam was making a real effort. If she had just screwed that up with some ill-timed humor . . .

  This was why she tended to get tongue-tied.

  She turned her attention back to the cows. Whatever his thoughts were, they looked serious. Maybe it was better she didn’t know.

  * * *

  Sam sprayed iodine disinfectant on the newly milked teats of the cattle, screwing up his eyes as the breeze blew the orange-brown concoction back onto him, and pondered Kimberly’s answer to their what-if question. And his lack of one.

  He looked over his shoulder toward Kimberly as she struggled to milk the cow in the last stall. “How did you have an answer so easily?”

  She managed to get all four cups on a squirmy Jersey cow’s udder, but the suction didn’t hold and the whole thing fell off. She huffed, shook the worst of the muck off the machine, and started again. “Answer to what?”

  “To what you’d do if you could do anything. What makes Wildfire the thing for you?”

  She reattached all four cups. The cow kicked and caught the rubber hose pumping milk to the vat, breaking suction again. The contraption fell off.

  Sam took a second look. He knew that udder—cow number 481. A known brat.

  He stepped forward, but Kimberly waved him off, set her jaw, and tried again. This time 481 munched on a mouthful of grain and decided she didn’t care. The machine held, milk swirling down into the clear plastic “body” of the spiderlike machine and then disappearing into the black hose that went up to the pipes above their heads. Kimberly turned to him with a triumphant grin. He grinned back. She was nothing if not persistent. “So, what makes Wildfire your thing?”

  She shrugged. “I dunno. It helps kids, I’m good at business, and it combines those things.”

  Sam chewed on his cheek and pondered. “Nope, that’s not it.”

  “What?”

  He grasped a water hose hanging down from an overhead pipe. Holding the spray against one palm had the double benefit of cooling him down and washing the filth from his hand. “That’s not it. Those are good reasons, but that’s not what gets you out of bed in the morning. It’s not what puts you on a plane to ’Straya.”

  Jules had given Kimberly a thorough pronunciation lesson last night on how locals said Australia.

  He jostled Kim with his shoulder. She slid him a sideways look. “Come on. You can tell me.” Now that his brain had seized on the thought, it held on tighter than a koala in a gum tree.

  She pursed her lips and appeared to consider the question for a long moment. “I guess . . . it’s the act of taking something that has potential but is underdeveloped and helping it grow. That’s what I did with businesses in LA before Wildfire.” She rubbed her cheek against her shoulder, removing the worst of the splattered muck there.

  “So, why’d you leave the business stuff for youth ministry?”

  She met his eyes. “Don’t get me wrong—business is great, and good businesses can really make people’s lives better. But in Wildfire I can point to fifteen-year-old kids who now know they’re loved and say, ‘I helped make that happen.’ And that’s just”—she shrugged—“what gets me on a plane to ’Straya.” The corner of her mouth lifted as she overarticulated the word.

  He winked his approval.

  She quirked an eyebrow. “Isn’t that why you do it?”

  Yikes. Back to him and his less-than-satisfactory answer. Should’ve seen that coming. He opened his mouth to obfuscate—Kimberly’s word—when movement caught his attention. A cow tail above Kim.

  Lifting.

  Sam seized a handful of Kimberly’s plastic dairy apron and yanked her toward him. She stumbled forward just in time, bounced off his chest, and almost fell backward. The cow shifted in her stall, lowering her tail again. False alarm.

  Sam kept his grip on Kim’s apron and steadied her. “Sorry. Thought she was—Sorry.”

  She blinked, then seemed to register his meaning. “Oh. Yep. Thanks.” He’d brought her half a step closer, and her cheeks pinked. He tucked that information away.

  “Um, what were we talking about?”

  Sam pulled the dairy’s hydraulic controls to release the milked cows. The stalls lifted up and away like a Lamborghini door, and the cows wandered out into the yard. “What gets us out of bed for work. Mine’s what you’d expect. Preaching or talking to the kids one-on-one. Getting to articulate the ultimate truths of the universe and put them into people’s brains. Nothing better.”

  She cleared her throat. “I don’t think you realize how good you are at it.”

  He looked at her and raised his eyebrows. Seriously? He’d had no formal tertiary education—barely, in fact, graduated Year 10—and had to rely on audiobooks, a strict preparation routine, and memorization to prepare his messages. Billy Graham he was not.

  But Kimberly nodded enthusiastically, eyes latched on his face. “Talking to people the way you do. When you listen to someone, it’s like you forget the rest of the world and they’re the most fascinating thing in the universe to you. That’s why the kids love you so much.” She shrugged. “I’ve never had anyone really ask why I choose the work I do. It’s nice to feel that someone’s interested.”

  He stared at her, thoughts scrambling.

  Kimberly picked up the length of poly pipe propped in the corner and walked toward the steps out of the pit, then turned back to him. “You don’t know how much it means for someone who doesn’t have anyone in their corner to really be listened to. It changes everything.” Her expression flickered with something—loneliness? “That’s why I’ve stuck by you for so long. That’s why I’ll do anything to push you to reach your potential.” Her expression turned rueful. “Even when you hate me for it.”

  She headed up into the yard to chase the next group of cows in. Sam watched her go, mind reeling from the impact of an emotional two-by-four.

  This was how she saw him? His gaze unfocused as he replayed her words in his mind. “That’s why I’ll do anything . . .”

  Her actions at Wildfire, her decision to come here—everything looked so different through this lens. She seriously had this kind of belief in him?

  At least she hadn’t pressed him for more information the way he’d pressed her. The truth was, given a gazillion dollars and the brain meld of Einstein and Solomon, he knew exactly what he’d do too. But he didn’t have a gazillion dollars. Or a brain that could even read properly. So, he wiped away a glob of cow poop from his forearm and picked up the next set of cups, brain whirring to process this enigma of a woman that maybe he’d never really known before.

  Chapter 17

  Kimberly accidentally-on-purpose dropped a piece of ham from her second brekkie pizza scroll to Meg as she leaned against the workbench of Jules’s machinery shed. It was lunchtime on day two of the dog’s recovery—her first day home—and Meg thumped her tail appreciatively at Kim’s feet as she gobbled up the tidbit. So far the Kelpie’s appetite was just starting to return, and though they wouldn’t know the true fate of the pups till birth, the signs were positive.

  But from the mottled tone of Jules’s face, she wasn’t having quite as much fun. They’d been in here for the past hour, Jules tinkering with an old Massey Ferguson tractor’s fin
icky battery while Kimberly gathered information from her on the farm.

  Kimberly scanned the next question in her notebook and shrugged. They were twenty questions down, only sixteen more to go.

  She wiped at a trickle of sweat that tried to sneak down her chest and into her soggy bra. Maybe Jules’s face was just red from the heat. “So, is there a reason why you only milk twice a day? I read that increasing it to three times can increase milk production.”

  An empty soda can flew in her direction. Kimberly ducked.

  “Ow!”

  The voice came from behind Kimberly’s crouched position. She swiveled. Sam stood a step inside the shed, rubbing a red mark on his forehead. He grabbed the collar of his shirt and swiped the dust and sweat from his face.

  Kimberly bit her lip. Have mercy. He must’ve been working without his shirt on again, because his skin glowed with the tan that this Aussie sun perfected a little more every day.

  Snap out of it.

  Kimberly whirled back to Jules. “What was that for?” Jules was the one who’d asked her to help with a plan for the farm. Why was she bent out of shape now?

  If she could concentrate for more than three seconds, she’d get that answer out of Jules. But Sam stopped beside her and crouched to pat Meg. He played with the dog’s ears, flopping them over her face and then smoothing them back, making kissing noises the whole time. Kimberly shifted from one foot to the other. Was it wrong that her skin was tingling?

  Meg’s big brown eyes gazed up at Sam the whole time, till the dog made a quick movement and nailed him with a lick to the lips. Sam fell back onto his rump, laughed, and wiped his mouth on his shirt. The dog rolled onto her back and grinned up at Kimberly as Sam rubbed the animal’s belly. Kimberly clasped her fingers together.

  I am not jealous of a dog.

  Sam clambered back to his feet. “Bit sick of this interview process, are we?”