The Curran, just like my father. Life on a property so isolated the loneliness became my only friend, the only one I could talk to.’ She turned away from the look in his eyes, as hard as coal crystallising into a diamond, and just as black. ‘Being tied to a man who wants things I can never give, and has never given me the one thing I truly want.’
‘There’s one thing you want, asleep behind us,’ he replied in a voice so cold she shuddered beneath the ice he poured on her. ‘If Rosie doesn’t come back, I’ll be committing perjury to give you what you want, despite the sugar coating you put on it. Little white lies are worth prison time if anyone finds out.’
‘Yes,’ she managed to say, feeling small and almost sick at his ruthless ripping apart of her delusions. ‘But while I’m truly grateful, I don’t want to sleep with you again.’
‘I don’t remember saying I expected that—or that I wanted it.’
At his cool, amused tone, a heat far drier than the steam-room kind seeping into the plane now the engine was off scorched her cheeks. ‘You kissed me like that. I guess I assumed it’s what you wanted.’
He lifted one shoulder: his I couldn’t care less shrug. ‘I thought you wanted to come back. Jarndirri’s half yours—and you’re the real Curran. Kissing used to make you happy.’
Swallowing the unexpected lump in her throat, she closed her eyes and willed control. Why did she ever bandy words with him, or expect to get her point across? His few words could always slay her into silence. ‘All right, Jared. You win,’ she said wearily. ‘You always do.’
Jared swore with efficient fluency, rough and angry. ‘Anna, that isn’t what I wanted.’
Too numb to get into an argument she knew she’d only lose, she muttered, ‘Then why won’t you look me in the eye when you say it?’
Silence met her reluctant challenge.
She shrugged. ‘It doesn’t matter. You always end up getting everything you want, one way or another. I don’t think you could stand to lose at anything.’ When he turned to look at her then, moving closer as if to touch her, hold her—knowing it always softened her—she shook her head. ‘Can you please see if it’s clear to go into the house?’ she whispered, fighting tears with everything she had. She’d shed enough for a lifetime.
After a moment that hung between them like a corpse, he swore again and climbed out of the cockpit, stalking to the house across the half-acre of yard that had once been her little veggie patch in dry season.
To her surprise, Jared walked in the straight lines of the plough, because her little patch of ground wasn’t dead. There were green shoots of carrots, the lumps for potatoes and onion, and full heads of broccoli and cabbage everywhere.
She was surprised someone had cared enough to plant more. It was probably Mrs Button, who appreciated that they didn’t have to fly in vegetables every week.
Lifting Melanie out of the car seat, she cuddled the baby and waited in the shadows of the hangar until Jared returned. She wasn’t in a hurry to go back to the house: the beautiful pale yellow homestead with double-glazed windows and wide verandahs that had been her mother’s and grandmother’s and great-grandmother’s home before her, but had never felt like hers.
So many Currans had lived at Jarndirri, with so much history—so much of it forever unspoken. Strong women had married tough, silent men who had worked the land, struggled against the elements and illness, women who’d borne their children in the rooms inside that house because doctors hadn’t existed out here. The Curran women were the perfect complements for their men. Even her mother had taken six long years to surrender to the breast cancer that had killed her, and had only taken to her bed after four of those years. Until then she’d worked the land, run the house, looked after their staff and cared for her daughters, even given birth to her, Anna—she’d been given the breast cancer diagnosis when she’d been pregnant.
And she, the last Curran woman, had only ever felt like a fake. Less than a woman, less than strong, bonded to the land in a love-hate relationship because it had taken the only thing she’d ever wanted from her. She’d even risked her life to try one final time for a child when the doctors had advised against it, because Jared needed a son.
‘They’ve all gone.’
Jared’s voice soaked into her consciousness like the history of this, the land she loved and loathed—and she wondered when he’d become a part of that love and loss and hate. She nodded. ‘Go and do what you have to. I’ll get the bags once Melanie’s settled.’ Words as dead and emotionless as her heart felt.
As she walked past him, holding Melanie against her like a shield and bulwark against the enemy, he said, low and fierce, ‘I didn’t want to win, Anna.’
For a moment she almost turned back. He touched her shoulder, and she shuddered with her body’s betrayal of her heart. ‘Then why does talking to you, touching you, always feel like a contest I’ve already lost?’
When he didn’t answer, she moved out of the hangar into the bright-and-darkness of the heavy-clouded air, thick like soaked cotton wool, glistening with diamond-bright moisture and a touch of sunlight breaking through in tiny slivers.
Coming home again felt like a farewell. The beginning of the end … and this time goodbye would be for ever. She couldn’t go through this again—and after Melanie’s life was settled, one way or the other, she hoped to have the strength to leave Jared and Jarndirri for ever, and, finally, never yearn to come back.
CHAPTER FIVE
JARED took his time feeding the animals in the massive sheds on the high ground, and making sure the gates were securely closed and the electric alarms on—the storm was closing in hard now—before returning to the homestead. He kept trying to think of what to do to get things back to the way they used to be with Anna; but even after all the years of being her lover and husband, and after everything they’d been through together, he felt as if he was locked inexorably in square one.
Her words kept chiming in his head like a bell tolling. Talking with you always feels like a contest I’ve already lost. Well, he knew how it felt now. That was how he’d felt every time she’d thrown him out of her place at Broome. And if he hated it, if he couldn’t stand being in last place with her, how had always losing made her feel? In his driving need to do it all, be it all, to win at any cost, had he left her behind, left her out in the cold and, worse, not even noticed?
Maybe it’s time things changed. Maybe it’s time we both won.
He strode in through the back verandah to the kitchen. After a spare breakfast and no lunch, he was more than ready for dinner—but there was nothing cooking. Anna was no cook, but she could do a steak and salad when Mrs Button was sick, so why hadn’t she …?
Distant cries gave him his answer. He followed the wailing sound to the spare room where she’d slept for so many months. Anna’s bags were on the floor, unopened, but the baby’s things were strewn all over.
So she was still resisting coming back to their room? He squashed the urge to grab her bags and take them where they belonged—for now. He’d change her mind soon enough. He’d make her melt for him.
Then he forgot his needs, his plans. Holding the baby, jiggling her in an awkward attempt at comfort, Anna was striding the floor, totally frazzled as the baby wailed
