than any shearer. You’ve planned, you’ve cooked, you’ve cleaned. You’ve gone to bed as exhausted as me every night and you’ve got up every morning and started all over again. You call that fun?’
‘Yes.’ She said it firmly. It was a stand she’d defended for years and she wasn’t letting it go now. Cooking was her love, and cooking for people who appreciated it was heaven. ‘But you needn’t sound so amazed. Tell me why you’re here. You own a bauxite mine, one of the richest in the country. You surely don’t need to farm. You’re working yourself into the ground too. For what?’
‘Fun?’ he said and she smiled.
‘Gotcha.’
‘Okay.’ He sighed. ‘I get it, though I’m imagining the work at Malley’s would have been just as hard. So where do you go from here? You knocked back a permanent job to help me.’
‘I knocked back a permanent job because I wanted this one. And, even without the mice, Malley sounds mean.’
‘The man’s an imbecile,’ Matt said. ‘To bad-mouth a cook of your standard? He obviously has the brains of a newt. To lose you...’
And then he paused.
The atmosphere changed. That thing inside her twisted again. To have someone defend her...value her...
It’s the cooking, she told herself. She was never valued for herself.
But suddenly his hand was covering hers, big and rough and warm. ‘Thank you,’ he told her and it sounded as if it came from the heart. ‘Thank you indeed—and I think your wages just went up.’
* * *
Fun.
He thought of the massive amount of work she’d put in over the last ten days. He thought of the drudgery of planning, chopping, peeling, cooking and cleaning. He thought of the mounds of washing-up. How had he ever thought he could handle it himself? In the end he’d hardly had time to help her cart food across to the shed, but she hadn’t complained once.
She was a pink princess, the daughter of one of the wealthiest families in Australia, yet she’d worked as hard as any shearer.
And in four days? Shearing would be over. The water was already dropping in the creeks. Cooking at Malley’s was obviously out of the question. Penny’s long-term plan to set up a catering company would take months. Meanwhile, what would she do?
She’d come a long way to be here, and she’d come for a reason. She’d exposed her pain to him. She’d exposed the hurt her family had heaped on her. She was here to escape humiliation—and now, because she’d decided to help him she had little choice but to head back and face that humiliation again. Even if she went to another city the media would find her. He had no doubt the media frenzy during her sister’s wedding would be appalling.
‘Stay for a bit,’ he found himself saying. Until the words were out of his mouth he didn’t know he’d intended to say them, but the words were said. He’d asked the pink princess to stay.
There was a moment’s silence. Actually, it was more than a moment. It stretched on.
She was considering it from all angles, he thought, and suddenly he wondered if she was as aware as he was of the tension between them.
Tension? It was the wrong word but he didn’t have one to replace it. It was simply the way she made him feel.
She was little and blonde and cute. She played Abba on her sound system while she worked and she sang along. This morning he’d come in to help her cart food over to the shed and found her spinning to Dancing Queen while balancing a tray of blueberry muffins. She’d had flour on her nose, her curls had escaped the piece of pink ribbon she’d used to tie them back and Samson was barking at her feet with enthusiasm.
He’d stopped at the door and watched, giving himself a moment before she realized he was there. He’d watched and listened and he’d felt...
It didn’t matter how he’d felt. He didn’t do women. His mother and then Darrilyn had taught him everything he needed to know about the pain of relationships and he wasn’t going there again. Especially with an indulged society princess.
The label wasn’t fair, he told himself, and he knew it was the truth. Penny had proved she was so much more. But past pain had built armour he had no desire to shed, and right now he felt his armour had to be reinforced. Yet here he was asking her to stay.
‘Why would I stay?’ Penny asked cautiously and he tried to think of an answer that was sensible.
‘I... This place...I was thinking maybe I could open it up a bit. Get rid of a few dustcovers. There’s a possibility my daughter might come and visit.’ That was the truth, though he wasn’t sure when. ‘I wouldn’t mind if it looked a bit more like a home when she came. Maybe you could help. I’d pay.’
‘I don’t need...’
‘I know you don’t need to be paid,’ he said. ‘But I pay for services rendered. The shearers will move on, but I’d need you for another two weeks in total—a few days’ slack then getting the house in order. Of course—’ he grinned suddenly ‘—cooking would be in there as well. Donald and Ron and Harv would kill me if I didn’t say that. They’ve been in heaven for the last ten days.’
And then he paused and tried to think about why he shouldn’t say what came next. There were reasons but they weren’t strong enough to stop him. ‘And so have I,’ he added.
* * *
Heaven...
That was pretty much what she was feeling.
She was breathing in the scents from the garden, watching the moon rise over the distant hills, listening to the odd bleat of a sheep in the shearing pens and the sound of a bird in the gums at the garden’s edge.
‘What’s the bird?’ she asked. It was an inconsequential question, a question to give her space and time to think through what he was proposing. There was a part of her that said what he was suggesting was unwise, but she couldn’t figure out why.
Or maybe she knew why; she just didn’t want to admit it. The way he made her feel... The way his smile made her heart twist...
‘It’s a boobook owl,’ Matt said, quietly now, as if there was no big question between them. ‘It’s a little brown owl, nocturnal. He and his mate are the reason we don’t have mice and places like Malley’s do. Malley’s stupid enough to have cleared the trees around the hotel and he’s probably even stupid enough to shoot them. They’re great birds. Listen to their call. Boobook. Or sometimes people call them mopokes for the same reason. So there’s a question for you. Do you side with mopoke or boobook?’
It was an ideal question. It gave her time to sit and listen, to settle.
‘Mopoke,’ she said at last. ‘Definitely mopoke.’
‘I’m a boobook man myself. Want to see?’
‘You need to go to bed.’
‘So do you, but life’s too short to miss a boobook.’
‘A
