of place she must look in this dusty outback town, with her pearl earrings and her yellow linen dress and her elegant Italian sandals. She had dressed with special care that morning, wanting to impress him, but if he was impressed, he was giving absolutely no sign of it.
‘Yes.’ She had a horrible feeling that her smile was as brittle and alien as she looked, and her voice sounded clipped and very English compared to his slow Australian drawl. ‘Thank you for coming,’ she added, stilted with the effort not to ask him why it had taken him so long.
‘You said it was important,’ he reminded her.
‘It is.’
Ever since she had learnt that she wasn’t going to be able to see Jack, as she had hoped, Clare had been practising how to explain the situation to Gray Henderson, but now that he was actually there all her careful speeches had vanished, and she was left staring at him, her mind blank with panic.
If only he had been more like his brother! Pippa had told her so much about Jack’s warmth and charm and reckless sense of fun that Clare almost felt that she knew him herself, and she was unprepared to deal with a man as coolly unapproachable as Gray Henderson appeared to be. Where Jack’s face in photographs was mobile and smiling, Gray’s was guarded, expressionless, giving her no clues as to what he was thinking.
‘Shall…shall we sit down?’ she suggested, playing for time while she tried to marshal her scrambled thoughts.
Gray followed her over to the bench at the back of the verandah, sat down next to her and waited calmly for her to tell him why she had asked him to meet her. It had seemed much too difficult to discuss over the phone when she had rung him last night, but now Clare wondered if it wouldn’t have been easier to explain without those enigmatic brown eyes on her face.
There was something oddly intimidating about his quiet self-containment. Clare had never met anyone so unperturbed by silence. Anyone else would have explained why they were late, or even asked her what it was she wanted, but, no! He just sat there and waited.
Since he obviously wasn’t going to give her an opening, Clare cleared her throat. ‘This is Alice,’ she said, nodding down at the baby, who was studying him with her unwinking baby’s stare.
‘G’day, Alice,’ said Gray gravely.
He reached out to tickle her tummy with one brown finger, and Alice broke into a gummy smile that showed off her two bottom teeth. She grabbed at his finger, but lost her nerve the next moment. Overcome by shyness, she buried her face against Clare, but couldn’t resist a peep back at Gray from under impossibly long lashes. When she saw that he was still watching her, she quickly hid again, burrowing closer into the safety of Clare’s body.
Clare couldn’t help smiling. She was prejudiced, of course, but Alice really was a beautiful baby, plump and peachy-skinned, with fine blonde hair and brown eyes. Surely even Gray wouldn’t be able to resist her?
Glancing at him, she was immensely reassured to see that he was looking amused. There was a definite dent at the corner of his mouth, and a lurking smile in the brown eyes that made him look suddenly much more approachable. He prodded Alice on her tummy until she chuckled and squirmed, and Clare found herself thinking that he was much more attractive than he had seemed at first.
‘How old is she?’ he asked, and Clare was obscurely hurt to see that when he looked at her the gleam of amusement had vanished from his eyes.
‘Six months,’ she told him. ‘Nearly seven, in fact.’
Lifting Alice off her knee, she settled her into the baby seat that doubled as a backpack when required, and forestalled any protests by offering her a floppy rabbit that had already been so sucked, pummelled, dropped and generally loved into submission that few of its original pristine features survived. She had seen Gray steal a glance at his watch. It was time to get down to business.
Unconsciously squaring her shoulders, she looked at him. Unlike Alice’s, her eyes were grey, almost silvery in contrast to her smooth, dark hair. ‘I suppose you’re wondering what we’re doing here?’ she said.
‘You said on the phone that you wanted to see Jack.’ Gray’s expression gave nothing away, but there was a shade of wariness in his voice. ‘You didn’t say anything about a baby.’
‘No,’ she admitted. ‘As I told you, it’s difficult to explain over the phone, and when the hotel manager gave me your number he said that you had a party line, so I thought it would be better if we could talk face to face.’
‘Well, now that we are face to face, perhaps you could tell me what you want?’ said Gray coolly.
Clare hesitated. ‘It’s really Jack I need to see. Do you have any idea when he’ll be back?’
‘A month…six weeks, maybe.’
Gray seemed unconcerned by the vagueness of his brother’s plans, but Clare could only stare at him in dismay. She had been expecting him to say that Jack was in Darwin or Perth, and would be back in a matter of days. ‘A month! But…where is he?’
‘He’s in Texas, buying bull semen to improve our breeding programme.’
She swallowed. ‘Can you get in touch with him?’
‘Not easily,’ said Gray unhelpfully.
Clare’s shoulders slumped as a crushing wave of exhaustion rolled over her without warning. It was more than the effect of the interminable flight from London, or the way she had lain awake the previous night worrying about how Gray Henderson would react. It was as if the strain of coping with a small baby after losing Pippa had suddenly caught up with her. She felt as if she hadn’t slept for months. Planning the trip to Australia had given her something to focus on, but now that she was here she was too tired to think clearly, and the thought of trying to explain it all to Gray was all at once too much to bear.
Bowing her head as if beneath a physical weight, Clare clutched her hands together in her lap and forced herself to concentrate. She couldn’t fall apart now. ‘I should have written,’ she said with an effort, her face hidden by the slide of dark, silky hair. ‘It never occurred to me that Jack wouldn’t be here.’
‘If you want to leave a letter, I’ll make sure Jack gets it when he gets back,’ Gray offered, almost as if against his better judgement, but she only shook her head, defeated.
‘It’s too late for that. I need to talk to him now.’
‘I’m afraid that’s not possible, so you’ll have to talk to me instead.’
‘Yes,’ said Clare numbly.
Alice had dropped her rabbit, and set up a shout when Clare didn’t immediately retrieve it for her. Automatically, Clare bent to pick it up and hand it back to her. She couldn’t think; she could just look at the baby who was utterly dependent on her to do the right thing. Reaching out, she stroked Alice’s head, and Alice smiled trustingly up at her as she stuffed the rabbit’s ear back in her mouth.
‘Look, I don’t want to rush you,’ said Gray after a while, and for the first time there was an edge of impatience in his voice, ‘but I’ve got a thousand head of cattle in the yards right now, and I’ve already given up time I can’t spare to come in and listen to you. Do you think you could get to the point?’
Straightening,
