A Girl's Guide to the Outback

by Jessica Kate

  Steph’s voice crackled on the long-distance connection. “Ohhhhh, sorry. Miscalculation. But now that you’re awake already . . . you’re going to want to hear this.”

  Somehow she doubted that. Kimberly sighed and kicked back her sheet. “Hold on. Let me go to the veranda. There’s better Wi-Fi on that side of the house.” She raced past the sleeping household in bare feet, exited the back door, and sat on the steps. Toads croaked from the ground below and the occasional cow mooed in the distance. “Okay, hit me.” A fresh breeze kicked up, raising gooseflesh on her arms.

  Indistinct music played in the background of Steph’s call. Was she in the car? “I’m hearing chatter I don’t like. I just came from lunch with a couple of the other board members. They’ve swung against finding a replacement for Sam.”

  Kimberly’s chest tightened, and she rubbed her eyes. This couldn’t be happening, not now. “It’s two a.m., Steph; I can’t do subtext. What are you saying?”

  “You either go all in on Sam or you come home now. Two more weeks and I don’t think they’ll warm to any replacement, no matter who it is.”

  Home. Funny thing was, at times her heart felt as at home here as if she’d been born in this house.

  “If I got on a plane tomorrow and lost any chance with Sam, do you think I could convince them to stay open?”

  “Yes, because you’d get to them individually and unleash that Kimberly Foster persuasiveness that I love. But if you wait till after the next board meeting, I’m convinced they’ll lose faith.”

  Kimberly tapped her forehead against the stair rail beside her. “Okay. I’ll—I’ll think about it.”

  Steph signed off and Kimberly stared at the black screen of the phone. This was not a 2:00 a.m. decision—at least, not one she should make alone. She turned the screen on and punched in a number.

  Come on, pick up.

  “Kimberly?”

  She sat up straighter. “Hey, Mom.”

  She endured the awkward sorry-I-didn’t-call-you-back excuses and launched into her predicament, sketching out the situation in the broadest strokes.

  “. . . and that’s how I ended up in Australia talking to you at two in the morning.”

  “Wait—you mean you’re there right now? You went to Australia? Kimberly, I think there were more efficient solutions than that. This man isn’t irreplaceable.”

  Tell that to her still-tingling lips.

  “I tried, Mom. We hired three other people, but he has this X factor, and the board . . . We—I—trust him. He’s the right guy for this. I just have to convince him.” God, please help me to convince him. The way things were going, it’d take nothing short of an act of God.

  “The ones you need to convince are your board. You need to show them you have this place under control by yourself. You don’t need some Australian farmer. Seriously, Kimberly, you could be on the fast track to the C-suite if you wanted.” Her mother huffed. “Never mind. Who’re your top contenders?”

  Kimberly rubbed a hand over her face. “Mom, you’re not listening. Sam—”

  “From what I’m hearing Sam has weakened your position and caused these problems. Cut the dead weight loose.”

  Kimberly fell silent, save for a sniff. Logic supported her mother’s opinion, but her brain rejected the image of a Wildfire without Sam. She sniffed again.

  “Are you crying? Honestly, I expected better than this. If you can’t handle that little organization on your own, I don’t know why the board wants you.”

  Kimberly cringed. Mom’s mantra: toughen up and learn to do it yourself. A phrase she’d heard constantly since moving in with Mom as a grief-stricken eleven-year-old. And an area she still failed in. “I know.”

  “Change your plane ticket and get back over here, or it sounds like you won’t have a job come New Year’s.”

  Their goodbyes as stilted as the hellos, Kimberly sighed with relief as the phone beeped to signal the end of the call. She pressed the phone to her forehead and groaned. Mom’s instinct for managing boards and nervous stakeholders was legendary. She should search flights and bus routes.

  But her fingers didn’t move.

  Did she even want a Wildfire without Sam? One day, sure, the ministry would need to run without him—a cult of personality was never healthy. But that day would come after they established a culture and mentored new leaders. Right now the ministry was still toddling about, in need of that special something only Sam could bring.

  But how could she convince him? She’d tried logic, tried bargaining, tried the threat of closure. Her mind raced back, first to the day at the dam, second to the day Meg was bitten—two of the first moments when Sam had thawed toward her. Two moments when her guard had come down, if only temporarily.

  Maybe going all in didn’t just call for a career risk but an emotional one. Her insides quivered, the hurt from Mom’s words still rolling in waves through her system.

  She just wasn’t sure she could take any more punches tonight.

  Chapter 20

  Sam screwed his eyes shut and hummed, trying to block out the sound of Kimberly’s conversation with her mother. Not that he didn’t enjoy the soft lilt of her voice. It just sounded like a private discussion. But as he shifted the pillow pressed to his ear, a few words slipped in.

  “. . . crying? Honestly, I expected better than this. If you can’t handle that little organization on your own, I don’t know why the board wants you.”

  Kimberly’s hushed tones sounded again. “I know.”

  Sam sat bolt upright. Had he heard that right? That was the kind of care she got from her mother? He shook his head. If that’s what she’d grown up with, no wonder Kim had the prickliness of a porcupine with PMS.

  He listened but heard nothing. Was she okay?

  Pulling on the high-vis work shirt from the top of his “clean stuff” laundry basket, he slipped through the dark house until he was at the back door.

  Kimberly sat huddled on the top step in an oversized LA Dodgers T-shirt and—he assumed, from his angle—the Battlestar Galactica pajama shorts he’d seen her in this week. She turned as the hinges squeaked, and whispered, “Did I wake you?”

  “Wasn’t sleeping well anyway.” And that was the truth. When he wasn’t thinking about Kimberly’s lips on his, he’d been tumbling her words in his mind.

  “You’re full of big talk about Team Jules, but you won’t actually listen to my ideas.”

  It was time to admit his hesitation didn’t come from reasonable caution. A reasonably cautious person would’ve agreed to go through Kimberly’s figures and hear her out. No, he was bunny-in-front-of-a-semitrailer scared.

  He opened his mouth to speak, but words came out of Kimberly’s mouth instead.

  “That was my mom. She told me to give up on you.”

  He lowered himself onto the step beside her. Kimberly’s mum was right, but hearing it aloud deflated him more than expected. He braced his forearms on his knees, gaze on the moonlit paddocks before them. “And?”

  “I don’t want to. But Steph said the board’s growing doubtful.”

  The disappointment in her voice cracked something inside of him. Had she asked him to shift Mount Everest by himself, he’d have gone to find a shovel. But to be responsible for other people’s investments in him? He laced his fingers together. “I’m sorry for how I acted today. And I don’t want Wildfire to end. But this future you envision—I’m not convinced I can do it.”

  She rested her chin in her hand. “I know.” The quiet resignation in her voice tore at him. He’d let her down. Again.

  But maybe he wasn’t the only thing upsetting her. Time for a subject change—into the mystery of Kimberly’s family. “So your mum’s a tough cookie?”

  She sat up straighter. “How much did you hear?”

  Interesting reaction. He opened his mouth to say, “Not much,” but she kept talking. “She’s not as bad as she sounds. She thinks Dad made me too soft. She’s still just trying to course correct
.” Her words tumbled over one another in her rush to get them out.

  He shook his head. Parenting styles aside, Kimberly’s mother was flat-out wrong—about so many things. “The board wants you for a thousand reasons I can’t even begin to list.” He shifted his gaze from the soft gray landscape to Kimberly’s moonlit face. She stared at the steps below, unmoved—till a lone tear slid down the curve of her face. He couldn’t help himself; he touched his finger to her cheek and caught it. “We want you.”

  The smile she gave him was sad. She obviously didn’t believe him, and he couldn’t blame her. No matter how many tears he caught or nice things he said, when push came to shove, he had never let her play on his team.

  He grasped her cold fingers in his. “I’m serious.”

  She swiped at her eyes and took a deep breath, her face clearing of emotion. “Thanks.”

  Any other day of their partnership—every other day of their partnership—he’d have taken that at face value. But these last days had honed his Kimberly radar, which screamed with one clear message: she was shutting him out.

  He added his other hand to the one already holding hers. “Your mum tells you not to cry, and I’ve been willfully ignorant of the hurt I’ve caused you in the past. But you don’t have to hide that part of yourself anymore.” He grimaced. How many times had he caused her pain and she’d just hidden the hurt? The dragon lady had an underbelly far softer than he’d ever imagined. “Not that I’ve given you much reason so far to believe me.”

  Her breath releasing, she mumbled something he didn’t quite catch. “All in”? What did that mean?

  “If you really want to know, Mom never wanted me. She was seventeen and freaking out when she had me. If my grandfather wasn’t religious and paying for her college, she would’ve aborted me.” The fingers that tucked stray hair behind her ear trembled. “But Grandfather ruled with an iron fist, so I was born and given to Dad, but he died when I was eleven. Grandfather was gone by that time, and I moved in with Mom. I’d hoped by then that she was ready to be more than a school-holiday parent. But we never really connected.”

  Memories of his own childhood flooded Sam’s mind—Sunday baking with Mum, her homework tutoring, her cheers from the sideline at the school athletics carnival. Nausea flooded him at the thought of grieving eleven-year-old Kim living in a strange house with an emotionally distant mother. “She was hard on you?”

  She plucked a stray gum leaf from the stair and snapped it in half, then the halves into halves, till her hands were full of tiny brittle pieces. “My dad was artistic like yours, but more into comic books than landscapes.” She shrugged. “Mom’s all business, a rising star. She thought Dad was too soft on me and that I wouldn’t be tough enough to make it in the real world, so she decided to fix that. It’s her way of giving me my best chance in life.”

  A line she’d probably told herself a thousand times to ease the pain. But that couldn’t fix the festering rejection that now appeared so obvious. How had he never seen it before?

  “Whatever her intentions, that had to have been tough.”

  Kimberly pressed her lips together. Had she ever discussed this out loud before? He racked his brain for a list of her friends. She’d never seemed especially close to anyone—and obviously didn’t have family she could confide in.

  Her voice dropped to a low tone. “She dropped that tidbit about aborting me when I was twelve, on Mother’s Day. I used to ask her all the time if she loved me—like, obsessively ask. Part of dealing with Dad’s death, I guess.” She snapped another leaf. “She’d just say ‘of course’ but never actually use the words ‘I love you.’ Eventually she got sick of it and tried to toughen me up a bit more.” The leaves in her hands were fragments now, darkened by three tear splatters. “I know she must’ve been scared back when she found out she was pregnant—but I think there were probably better ways to tell me about it.”

  Her words from earlier tonight replayed again: “Team Jules.” The pieces clicked into place—all the way back to the beginning of her time with Wildfire. Her passion for Wildfire’s homey drop-in center. Her determination now to save his family’s heritage. Her enthusiasm for Team Jules. No wonder she’d looked so hurt earlier tonight. This woman craved belonging the way his lungs craved oxygen.

  Words failing him, he slid an arm across her shoulders. She leaned into him, just the tiniest amount.

  God, what can I even say to help this? No words came. If only he could convey the truth of how much God wanted her as easily as he could lend his warmth. “You have a right to feel grief over that. And I know the phrase sounds trite, but God loves you. To Him, there was nothing about you that was unexpected or less than delightful.”

  She nodded, wordless.

  “If you’re not getting on a plane tomorrow, I’d love to hear your plans for Wildfire again. I can’t make any promises, and I definitely can’t leave Jules in the lurch. But I’ll listen. I promise.”

  A pause. “Okay. Thanks.”

  The silence lingered, awkward—at least for him. If only he’d been able to promise her more, say he’d come back to Wildfire, put that spark back in her eyes. But it wasn’t on the table right now. So with his free hand he plucked at a splinter separating from the step. “Thanks for telling me.”

  She brushed the gum-leaf pieces from her palms. “I guess coping with her means I come off a little . . . aloof. Maybe abrasive. At least now you know why.”

  He gave a gentle squeeze. “I think we’ve both let our insecurities get the better of us. Thanks for trying to make me listen. You’re a real friend.”

  A hint of a smile softened her lips. “I’ve always wanted to be your friend.”

  He couldn’t help but grin. “You’re a lot more honest at two a.m., you know that?”

  An undefinable expression crossed her face. Embarrassment? Shyness? She stood. “Want to see those figures?”

  He laughed. “Maybe later in the morning?” There were 2.5 hours left before his alarm was set to go off, and he planned to be unconscious for most of them.

  “Oh. Yeah. Right. See you in the morning.” She hustled back inside, leaving him on the step with the croaking toads and her dried tear on his fingertips.

  He rested his forearms on his knees. So, this was the Kimberly behind those hazel eyes he’d always wondered about. Loyal and determined but wounded by those who should’ve loved her. He’d waited three and a half years to get a glimpse of the real woman. It had been worth it.

  But when the clock struck midnight—or in today’s case, 3:00 a.m.—would she disappear?

  * * *

  Kimberly rattled off the final calculation, leaned back in Jules’s office chair, and assessed the damage she’d done.

  Sam stood a foot away, eyes still on the laptop screen, though, from his unfocused look, he probably wasn’t seeing it. Was it his lack of sleep last night that caused that dazed expression on his face or the data dump she’d just unloaded on him?

  She’d laid it all out. Every calculation, every variant of the farm plan, every probable outcome and its likelihood. It would’ve been so much easier on her to have him read it and she just answer any questions—every word she spoke made her own plan sound more ludicrous to her ears, the way he must be hearing it. But Sam had mumbled something about text-to-speech software being on the fritz and talking him through the numbers, so for the first pass Kimberly had to endure the sound of her own voice and Sam’s agonizing silence.

  But she was taking the risk. An email waited in Steph’s inbox with the subject line ALL IN.

  She grimaced at Sam. “So, what do you think?”

  If only this morning’s camaraderie could’ve lasted. They’d spent the milking talking about the time they’d both spent living in LA, and after church they made pizza for an early lunch and Sam bounced his next sermon idea off her. Though why he wanted her opinion on it was a mystery—she was about as suited to preaching as a pig to a career as a dental hygienist.

  And now that s
mile she’d enjoyed for a few glorious hours had turned into something else altogether. Not a frown, exactly. She linked her fingers across her Babylon 5 T-shirt and allowed herself the rare privilege of openly staring at him. Why did she find the way he rolled his blue work shirt to his elbows so attractive? She diverted her gaze elsewhere.

  His brow puckered together in the expression she’d labeled back in the US as You’re so ridiculous.

  But perhaps that had been a miscategorization.

  The clock ticked. Almost one thirty. A fly buzzed near the window, probably trying to escape the overpowering scent of Jules’s cotton-candy candle. From the direction of the kitchen came the clatter of a crutch hitting the wooden floor and subsequent grumbling.

  “Sam?” Kimberly tensed for whatever would come next. Whatever it is, I’ll just listen. Her sleep-deprived self was bound to overreact and therefore couldn’t be trusted.

  “Good work.” Sam’s brow smoothed. “I’m going to go chop wood with Mick and process a little. Maybe we can go over the Wildfire stuff tomorrow?” She gave a cautious nod, and he dropped his hat on his head. “See you at dinner.”

  Her mouth fell open as he strode away. “That’s it?” Her anxiety at his reaction morphed into something different. Something heavier that sank from her tight chest to weigh down her midsection. Could Sam actually say yes? And why did that thought bring zero relief?

  He paused in the doorway, quirked an eyebrow. “What did you expect?”

  “Some of this.” She pushed out of the chair and struck a hands-on-hips pose, raised her eyebrows, and did her best to look down her nose at him. “Plus a lot of reasons why borrowing money is a terrible risk that only a heartless businessperson would suggest.”

  A smile played around the edges of his mouth. “Pretty sure I promised not to do that.”

  She searched her brain for a response and opted for honesty. “I’m not sure what to do with this new status quo.”

  His smile increased. “Get used to it.”

  She trailed after him as far as the enclosed veranda, then watched through a window as he strode through the yard to where Mick stood with a ute, two axes, a chain saw, and the expression of a boy with all his favorite toys. Her eyes tracked their vehicle until it stopped next to a fallen tree in the east paddock. “It’s so weird.”