long flight from England, another flight halfway across Australia to Mount Isa, and then a scary journey in a light aircraft no bigger than a paper plane over endless flat, dry grassland to Wandabilla, near the Northern Territory border. Finally, after getting advice from a helpful woman in the Wandabilla Post Office, she’d cadged a lift to Coolabah Waters on the mail truck.
Now she didn’t know what to do. She was exhausted to the point of dropping, and her decision to come all this way to talk to Mark felt like a really, really bad idea—even crazier than inviting him back to her flat on the night of the wedding.
It had been Tim, Emma’s husband, who had finally convinced her that she must make the trip Down Under.
‘Of course you need to talk to Mark face to face,’ he’d insisted. ‘He’s that kind of guy. A straight shooter. He won’t muck you about. And you’ll love it in Australia. There’s no place like it in the world.’
Well, that was certainly true, Sophie thought dispiritedly, looking about her. But she didn’t think she could share Tim’s enthusiasm for endless dry and dusty spaces.
She hadn’t expected Mark’s home to be so very isolated. She’d understood that the Australian Outback would be vast and scantily populated, but she’d thought there’d be some kind of a village nearby at least.
Fighting down the nausea that had been troubling her more frequently over the past fortnight, she tiptoed to a window and tried to peer inside the house. But the glass was covered by an ageing lace curtain, and she could only make out the shape of an armchair.
The window was the sash kind that had to be lifted up. Feeling like a criminal, Sophie tried it, but it wouldn’t budge.
Another glance at the road behind her showed that the mail truck had completely disappeared. She was surrounded by absolute stillness, no background noise at all. No comforting hum of traffic, no aircraft, no voices. Nothing.
If she wasn’t careful, the silence would rattle her completely.
I mustn’t panic.
Sophie sat on her suitcase and tried to think.
Was this her biggest mistake yet?
The family failure strikes again?
Mark could be anywhere on this vast property. She knew there’d been a muster, but she had no idea what other kinds of work cattlemen did. She supposed they kept busy doing something. They couldn’t simply lounge about the house all day with their feet up, while their cattle ate grass and grew fat.
But, if Mark was off working somewhere on his vast cattle station, where was his caretaker? When she’d spoken to him on the phone, he’d sounded rather nice, with a warm Scottish brogue that had made her feel very welcome.
The abandoned house, however, didn’t look particularly welcoming. The veranda was swept, but the floorboards were unpainted and faded to a silvery grey, and the ferns in the big pottery urns were brown-tipped and drooping. The house in general needed a coat of paint, and the garden—well, you couldn’t really call it a garden—was a mere strip of straggling vegetation around the house, full of weeds and dried clumps of grass.
Sophie looked at her watch and sighed. It was only ten in the morning, and Mark might be away all day. It was midnight at home. No wonder she felt so exhausted and ill.
Leaving her bags near the front door, she went down the front steps and tottered over the uneven, stubbly grass in her high heels.
Back in London, high heels and a two-piece suit had seemed like a smart idea. She’d wanted to impress Mark. Huh! Now, twenty-six hours and twelve thousand miles later, she felt positively ridiculous. No wonder the fellow in the mail truck had looked amused. She’d probably been his week’s entertainment.
She reached the back of the house and found a huge shed with tractors, but no sign of anyone. The house had a back veranda with a partly enclosed laundry at one end. A large glass panel in the back door offered her a view down a long central passage, and an uncurtained window revealed a big, old-fashioned kitchen with an ancient dresser and an enormous scrubbed pine table set squarely in the middle. It was all very neat and tidy, if a bit drab and Spartan.
A large brown teapot on the dresser had a piece of paper propped against it, and Sophie could see that there was a handwritten note on it. A message?
She chewed her lip. She felt wretchedly hot and nauseous. If she didn’t get inside soon, she might faint.
She rattled the back-door knob and shoved at it with her hip, but it held firm.
Desperate, she pulled out her mobile phone and stared at it, thinking. The only person she knew in Australia was Mark, but his satellite phone wasn’t being answered. If she’d had a phone book, she could have rung the helpful woman in the Post Office in Wandabilla. If only she’d thought to take down her number.
She tried Mark’s phone again, with little hope, and of course there was no answer.
She was stuck here, on the outside of this enormous, old shambles of a house, and her stomach warned her that she was going to be ill very soon.
There was only one option, really. She would have to find a way to break in, and she would simply have to explain to Mark later—if he turned up.
The louvres beside the back door were promising. She studied them for about five seconds, and then carefully pulled at one. To her utter amazement, it slid out, leaving her a gap to slip her hand through. Straining, with her body pressed hard against the wall, she could just reach the key on the other side of the door. It turned easily, and the door opened.
As Sophie stepped inside, she felt a twinge of guilt and then dismissed it. At least now she could make a cup of tea and find somewhere to lie down. And hope that Mark would understand.
Sundown.
Low rays of the setting sun lit the pink feathery tops of the grass as Mark’s stock horse galloped towards the home paddock, with two blue-heeler cattle dogs loping close behind.
Man, horse and dogs were tired to the bone, glad to be home.
At last.
The past fortnight had been damned frustrating, and quite possibly the worst weeks of Mark’s life. He’d been preoccupied and worried the whole time, and desperate to get back early, but then the young jackaroo had thrown a spanner in the works.
A week ago, on a pitch-black, still night before the moon was up, the boy had been standing near the cattle in the holding yard when he’d lit a cigarette. The fool hadn’t covered the flare of the match with his hat, and the cleanskins had panicked. In no time their fear had spread through the herd. Six hundred head of cattle had broken away, following the wild bulls back into the scrub, into rough gullies and ravines, the worst country on Coolabah.
It had taken almost a week to retrieve them—time Mark hadn’t really been able to spare—but with the bank breathing down his neck for the first repayment on this property he’d needed to get those cattle trucked away.
During the whole exasperating process, he hadn’t been able to stop thinking about Sophie and about his promise to ring her. Hadn’t been able to hide his frustration, and had been too hard on the men, which was why he’d encouraged
