in Kurt’s spiky handwriting, floated in front of her eyes. She felt ill to the pit of her stomach, and when Elaine took her for a pep talk over lunch, she couldn’t eat a bite.
Elaine didn’t do much better. “I have to be honest with you, Jac,” she said, sounding tense. “I can’t run this kind of interference for you much longer. You know Kurt.”
“Yes, I do.”
“He has me walking on quicksand, and he knows it. We have the mortgage, we have school fees …”
There was an awkward pause, and Jac knew what she had to say.
So she said it. “Elaine, don’t ruin your own career trying to protect mine.” And she saw the relief in the senior writer’s eyes.
When she got back to her computer, she discovered that there was an e-mail from Callan Woods waiting for her. Until she caught sight of her daughter’s smile of greeting at preschool three hours later, it was the only pleasurable, decent, safe moment in her entire day.
Chapter Three
The mail flight would get here at any time now.
Beside the packed red dirt of the airstrip, Callan sat in the driver’s seat of his four-wheel-drive. He had the door open and the windows down to catch the breeze. In mid-April, the dry daytime heat in the North Flinders Ranges could still be fierce, even though it was technically autumn.
Lockie and Josh were back at the Arakeela Creek homestead doing their morning schoolwork via the Internet and the School of the Air. Sometimes when there was a visitor coming, Callan would give them a morning off so that they could come and meet the plane, but this time he’d said no.
He heard the buzz of the plane in the distance. It came in low with the arid yet beautiful backdrop of the mountains behind it, and he felt an odd lurch in his stomach as it got closer.
Was he looking forward to this arrival?
Like so many of his emotions since Liz’s death, this one shifted back and forth, giving him no consistent answer.
Callan didn’t know why Jacinda and her daughter were coming to Arakeela Creek, nor how long they wanted to stay, but he did know that Jacinda was a mess, that she wouldn’t have asked if she’d felt she had any other choice, and that he couldn’t even have considered turning down her desperate plea.
They’d been e-mailing each other for six weeks. A couple of times he’d thought about calling her, but the idea had panicked him too much. The e-mail correspondence was good. Nice. Unthreatening. A phone call would have been a stretching of boundaries that he wasn’t ready for and didn’t see the point in, since their lives were so far apart, in so many ways.
He honestly hadn’t expected anything to come out of the magazine thing, and yet something had—a small, new window into a different world, a friendship at a safe distance. He was also in e-mail contact with two of the Australian women who’d written to him, via the magazine, but in contrast to what he’d developed with Jacinda, those exchanges so far didn’t feel nearly as honest or as easy, and he suspected that either he or the women themselves would soon let them dwindle away. Meanwhile, letters from more women continued to arrive.
Why had his e-mails to and from Jacinda felt so much better?
Because she was a writer by profession, and her natural fluency smoothed their exchanges in both directions?
Maybe.
Sometimes, she hadn’t been fluent at all.
Meanwhile, Dusty seemed pretty happy with his own outcome to the magazine story and the cocktail party. He and that small brunette, Mandy, were still in touch. He was even talking about flying back down to Sydney to meet up with her again, and had written polite notes to the other women who’d contacted him to tell them thanks, but I’m not looking anymore. Dusty was the same with horses—only ever bet on one in each race, and always bet to win.
Brant was a lot less happy. He’d been receiving way more letters than he wanted. More than Callan, apparently, and Callan had already received quite a few. Since Brant’s property was closer to Sydney and Melbourne, where most of the letters came from, he’d met and been out with a couple of the women who’d written.
So far he hadn’t been impressed.
Or hadn’t admitted to being impressed.
Possibly because at heart he was perfectly happy as he was. The whole magazine campaign had been Brant’s sister’s idea, Callan had learned.
The plane skimmed the ground at the far end of the airstrip, bounced up for a moment or two, then bumped down harder, keeping its wheels in contact with planet earth this time. It careened along at speed, its wings rocking a little, but gradually slowed to a sedate taxi, propellers still roaring.
Callan climbed out of his vehicle. He didn’t bother to shut the door or take the keys. Six weeks seemed, simultaneously, like a long time and like no time at all. Would Jacinda look the way he remembered?
It hadn’t been her physical attributes that had drawn him, and yet the memories were all good. Big eyes, sparkly smile, an emotional warmth that showed in her whole body. Rose-colored spectacles, maybe? At a closer acquaintance, would a living, breathing, three-dimensional Jacinda Beale have anything in common with the woman who’d e-mailed him almost every day since they’d met?
Her e-mails had been far briefer over the past couple of weeks, he remembered. Stilted, almost. Cryptic, definitely. Not fluent at all. She’d said she didn’t want to talk about it, that she couldn’t talk about it, but that she was having some problems.
Then there had been total silence for several days. He’d even sent her a “Jacinda, are you okay?” message, which he’d regretted a split second after hitting Send.
Next thing, her phone call.
From Sydney.
Shaky voice, tense attempts at humor, nothing but stark honesty when she came to the point. “Would Carly and I be able to come stay with you for a little while? I can’t think of anywhere else to go. Everything’s a mess.”
“Sheesh, Jacinda! What’s the problem?”
“I—I can’t talk about it yet. But I promise it’s not because I’m, like, wanted for homicide in eleven jurisdictions, if that helps.”
“It sets a person’s mind at rest, yeah.”
“Callan, I’m sorry to be doing this. I can’t stay with Lucy. And I can’t—You are the only person I know who feels … your ranch is the only place that feels safe, so far away. Just until I catch my breath? Just until then, Callan. I—I do know it’s a huge thing to ask.”
How could he have said no?
Even if, right at this moment, he wished she hadn’t asked.
The plane had come to a halt in its usual spot less than fifty meters from his four-wheel-drive. A private outback airstrip didn’t need a terminal building, or even a sealed blacktop runway. The dust thrown up by the aircraft was still hanging in the air like a tea-and-milk-colored curtain. It drifted slowly to the east as the plane’s
