‘Come on, Andrew, you can have a drink too,’ she said and turned to tell Cal how to find the manager’s house. But he had ruffled Natalie’s hair in farewell and was already striding away. She watched him for a moment, puzzled by the way he seemed to know exactly where he was going, but then shrugged and forgot about it as she ushered the three children through the screen door.
Natalie had lost her shyness entirely with the twins by the time Cal came back. She was sitting at the kitchen table showing them how to blow bubbles in their drinks when he walked into the kitchen. Juliet, leaning by the sink and watching the children indulgently, straightened abruptly as he appeared and her heart gave an odd jump.
Cal was tight-lipped with anger. ‘The house is disgusting,’ he said furiously, without any preliminaries. ‘I wouldn’t ask a dog to live in there! How was it allowed to get into that kind of state?’
‘I never even went there until last week.’ Juliet was immediately on the defensive. ‘Hugo—my husband—always dealt with the men.’ Not that he had been around to do much dealing, she remembered bitterly, and when he had been there all he had done was set the men’s backs up, until all the good ones had left and only the men who didn’t care were left at Wilparilla.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said helplessly, ashamed but tired, too, of apologising for Hugo’s mistakes.
Cal took an angry turn around the kitchen. ‘Natalie can’t stay there,’ he said. ‘And the men’s quarters aren’t much better. I checked.’
‘That’s what I tried to tell you before,’ Juliet pointed out. She paused, desperately trying to think of an alternative, but there simply wasn’t anywhere else for a child to go. ‘Look, I think the best thing you can do is to stay here at the homestead,’ she said eventually. ‘There are plenty of spare rooms.’
Cal hesitated, raking his fingers through his brown hair in frustration. The last thing he wanted was to be beholden to Juliet Laing, and if it had been just him he would have slept in his swag under the stars, but Natalie couldn’t do that. He didn’t have any choice, he realised heavily.
‘Thank you,’ he said with evident reluctance, adding quickly, ‘It will just be until we can fix up the house. We’ll go as soon as we can.’
CHAPTER TWO
‘THERE’S beer in the fridge if you’d like one,’ Juliet said rather hesitantly as Cal came in from unloading the car. She knew that the offer sounded rather ungracious, but Cal hadn’t been particularly gracious about staying in the homestead. It didn’t seem to have occurred to him that she might not be that thrilled at the thought of sharing her home with him either.
If Cal resented her lukewarm tone, he gave no sign of it. Nodding his thanks, he took a bottle from the fridge and pulled off the top. Juliet, preparing vegetables in the sink for the children’s supper, tried not to watch him, but her eyes kept sliding sideways to where he stood, leaning casually against the worktop, his head tipped back as he drank thirstily.
She hadn’t thought to ask him how old he was, but she guessed that he was in his thirties. He had the toughness and solidity of maturity, but his face wore a guarded expression that made it hard to be sure of anything about him. He could hardly have been more different from Hugo, Juliet reflected. Hugo had been volatile, swinging from breezy charm to sullen rage with bewildering speed. Cal was, by contrast, coolly self-contained. It was impossible to imagine him shouting or waving his arms around wildly. Even the way he stood there and drank his beer suggested an economy of movement, a sort of controlled competence that was at once reassuring and faintly intimidating.
His presence seemed to fill the kitchen, and Juliet was suddenly, overwhelmingly aware of him as a man: of the muscles working in his throat, of the brown fingers gripped around the bottle, of the dust on his boots and the creases round his eyes and the coiled, quiet strength of his lean body. She couldn’t tear her eyes off him. It was as if she had never seen a man before, had never been struck by the sheer physicality of a male body before that moment.
Cal was unaware of her gaze at first. The beer was very cold. To Cal, hot, frustrated and tired after a long day, it tasted like the best beer he had ever had. He lowered the bottle to thank Juliet properly, only to find that she was watching him with a dark, disturbingly blue gaze, and as their eyes met he was conscious of a strange tightening of the air between them, of an unexpected tingling at the base of his spine.
Juliet felt it too. He saw her eyes widen, and a faint flush rose in her cheeks before she turned away and concentrated almost fiercely on peeling a potato.
Oddly shaken by that tiny exchange of glances, Cal levered himself away from the units and, a faint frown between his brows, took his beer over to the table where Natalie was entertaining the twins. She was normally a shy, quiet child, more comfortable with animals than people, but she had obviously taken to the twins immediately, and her face was lit up in a way that he hadn’t seen for years now.
Not since they had left Wilparilla, in fact. Cal shook off the unsettling effect Juliet’s eyes had had on him and sat down next to his daughter, remembering how she had wept into her pillow and begged to be taken home. He had done the right thing bringing her back, even if things weren’t working out quite as he had planned.
‘Dad!’ Natalie tugged at his sleeve. ‘Show Kit and Andrew that trick you do.’
At the sink, Juliet could hear the noise behind her, and she turned, potato in one hand, peeler in the other, to see the twins convulsed with laughter, Natalie giggling and Cal, straight-faced, turning his hand back and forth as if looking for something. ‘Again!’ shouted Kit, clambering excitedly over Cal as if he had known him all his life.
Juliet’s smile was rather twisted as she watched them. At times like these it hurt to realise how much the boys missed in not having a father. Did Cal ache this way when he saw his daughter without a mother?
Natalie seemed a nice little girl. She obviously adored her father, but from what Juliet had seen of him so far she thought he must be a formidable figure for her. He had been dour, if not downright hostile, ever since he had arrived. Not that the children seemed to find him nearly as intimidating as she did, Juliet had to admit. They were still squealing with laughter as he confounded them each time with whatever he was concealing in his hands.
It was then that Cal, unable to keep a straight face any longer, gave in and smiled at the twins’ delight, and Juliet nearly dropped her potato. Who would have thought that he could smile like that? Who could have guessed that cool mouth could crease his face with such charm, that the steely look could dissolve into warmth and humour, that the cold grey eyes could crinkle so fascinatingly?
Juliet was disturbed to discover how attractive Cal was when he smiled. She didn’t want him to be attractive. Somehow it was easier to think that he was always cold and hostile than to know that he was nice to children, and to wonder why it was that he would never smile at her the way he smiled at them.
As if to prove her point, Cal looked up, and his smile faded as he saw the peculiar look on Juliet’s face. Probably waiting to point out that she had employed him as a manager, not a children’s entertainer, he thought with an edge of bitterness.
He drained his beer and pushed back his chair. ‘When do the men finish for the day?’ he asked Juliet, ignoring the children’s disappointment. If she wanted an efficient manager, that was what he would be.
‘About now.’ As if suddenly realising that
