‘Simon’s a rat,’ he told her.
‘He’s not.’ She hiccuped on a sob. ‘He’ll come back. He and Kirsty aren’t really—’
‘He and Kirsty are really,’ he told her. It wasn’t helping anything if she kept deceiving herself. ‘He really is a rat, and you can’t love a rat. Think about the life they lead down there in the sewers. Gross. Come on, Em. You can do better than that.’
‘Says you,’ she whispered. ‘You lost your lady-rat five years ago, and have you done better since Gina left? I don’t think so.’
‘Hey!’ He was so startled he almost spilled his beer. How did Em know about Gina? Then he gave an inward groan. How could she not? Everyone knew everything in this dratted house. Sometimes he thought they were even privy to his dreams.
‘We’re not talking about me,’ he said, trying to sound neutral. ‘We’re talking about you. You’re the one who needs to recover from a broken heart.’
‘Well, I’m not going to learn from you, then,’ she wailed. ‘Five years, and you’re still not over it. Charles says you’re just as much in love with Gina as you were five years ago, and for me it’s just starting. Oh, Cal, I can’t bear it.’
Gunyamurra. Three hundred miles south. A birth and then…a heartbeat?
No. It was her imagination. There was nothing.
Nothing.
Distressed beyond measure, the girl stared down at the tiny scrap of humanity that should have been her son. Maybe he could have been her son. Given another life.
How could she have hoped this child would live? She was little more than a child herself, so how could she have ever dared to dream? How could she have ever deserved something so wonderful as a baby?
Now what? Living, this child might well have made her life explode into meaning. But now…
It would all go on as before, the girl thought drearily. Somehow.
Her body ached with physical pain and desolate loss. She was weighed down, sinking already back into the thick, grey abyss of the last few months’ despair.
She put out a tentative finger and traced the contours of the lifeless face. Her baby.
She had to leave him. There was no use in her staying, and this quiet place of moss and ferns was as good a place as any to say goodbye.
‘I wish your father could have seen you,’ she whispered, and at the thought of what might have been, the tears finally started to flow.
Tears were useless. She had to get back. The cars were leaving. She’d slip into the back seat of the family car and her parents wouldn’t even question where she’d been. They wouldn’t notice.
Of course they wouldn’t notice. Why would they? Her life was nothing.
Her baby was dead.
‘There’s a baby behind my rock.’
Gina closed her eyes in frustration and tried hard not to snap. CJ’s need for the toilet was turning into a marathon. The coach left the rodeo grounds in ten minutes and if they missed the coach…
They couldn’t miss the coach. Being stranded at Gunyamurra in the heart of Australia’s Outback was the stuff of nightmares.
‘CJ, just do what you need to do and come on out,’ she ordered, trying hard for a voice with inbuilt authority. It didn’t work. Dr Gina Lopez might be a highly qualified cardiologist who worked in a state-of-the-art medical unit back home in the US, but controlling one four-year-old was sometimes beyond her.
CJ was just like his daddy, she thought wearily. Even though those big brown eyes made her heart melt, he was fiercely independent, determined to follow his own road, whatever the cost.
Like now. CJ had taken one look at the portable toilets and dug in his heels.
‘I’m not using them. They’re horrible.’
They were, too, Gina conceded. The Gunyamurra Rodeo had come to an end, the portable toilets had accommodated a couple of hundred beer-swilling patrons and CJ’s criticism was definitely valid.
So she’d directed his small person to where the parking lot turned into bushland. Even then she had problems. Her independent four-year-old required privacy.
‘Someone will see me.’
‘Go behind a rock. No one will see.’
‘OK, but I’m going behind the rock by myself.’
‘Fine.’
And now…
‘There’s a baby behind my rock.’
Right. She loved his imagination but this was no time for dreaming.
‘CJ, please, hurry,’ she told him, with another anxious glance across the parking lot where the coach was almost ready to leave. She was too far away to call out, and she hadn’t told the driver to wait. If they missed the coach…
Stop panicking, she told herself. It’d come this way. If the worst came to the worst, she could step down into its path and stop it. She might irritate the driver but that was the least of her problems.
She should never have come here, she thought wearily. It had been stupid.
But it had seemed necessary.
Back in the States she’d thought maybe, just maybe she could find the courage to face Cal. Maybe she could find the courage to tell him what he eventually had to know.
But now she was even questioning that need. Was it even fair to tell him?
She’d started out with the best of intentions. She’d arrived at Crocodile Creek late last Thursday and she’d left CJ with her landlady so she could go to find him. The house she’d been directed to was the doctors’ quarters—a rambling old house on a bluff overlooking the sea. At dusk it had looked beautiful. The setting should have given her courage.
It hadn’t. By the time she’d reached the house, her heart had been in her boots. Then, when no one had answered her knock, things had become even worse.
She’d walked around the side of the house and there he’d been, on the veranda. Cal. The Cal she remembered from all those years, with all her heart.
But he wasn’t her Cal. Of course he wasn’t. Time had moved on. He hadn’t seen her, and then, just as she had been forcing herself to call his name, a young woman had come out of the house to join him.
Gina had stilled, sinking back into the shadows, and a moment later she had been desperately glad she had. Because Cal had taken the woman into his arms. His face had been in her hair, he had whispered softly, and as Gina had stood there, transfixed, the woman’s arms had come around Cal’s shoulders to embrace him back.
This wasn’t passion, Gina thought as
