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, Clare turned to look at him once more. ‘Alice is the point,’ she said.
He frowned. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean that she is Jack’s daughter,’ she said steadily, ‘and she needs her father.’
There was an intense silence. ‘What?’ said Gray, dangerously quiet.
‘Alice is Jack’s daughter.’
His gaze narrowed, and he looked from Clare to Alice, who stared back at him with serious, uncannily similar eyes. One little hand held her toy to her mouth so that she could suck it, the other twiddled her ear as if to show off how versatile she was.
‘Jack said nothing about this to me,’ he said harshly at last.
‘He doesn’t know about Alice.’
‘Then isn’t it a little late to claim him as her father now?’
Clare pushed her hair behind her ears in an unconsciously nervous gesture. ‘I think he’d want to know.’
‘I think he’d have wanted to know a whole lot sooner than now if he had a child,’ said Gray in a hard voice. ‘If you say Alice is six months old, that means you’ve had a good fifteen months to decide on a father. Why wait until now to pick on Jack?’
Clare flushed. ‘I haven’t picked on him!’
‘That’s what it sounds like to me.’ He looked her up and down almost insultingly, taking in her slightness, her tired face and the eyes that were at once surprisingly vivid and desperately sad. ‘I wouldn’t even have said you were Jack’s type.’
‘I’m not,’ she admitted, smiling faintly in spite of herself. From all she had heard about Jack, she couldn’t imagine that she would ever have appealed to him. She was too calm, too sensible, too different from Pippa. ‘But my sister was.’
‘Then Alice isn’t your baby?’ said Gray slowly.
‘No, she’s my niece.’ Clare looked directly into his eyes. ‘She’s your niece, too.’
‘And her mother?’ he asked after a moment.
‘My sister. Pippa.’ She turned away to stare at the heat wavering above the empty road. ‘She died six weeks ago,’ she told Gray in a light, brittle voice, almost as if it didn’t matter, almost as if her world hadn’t fallen in.
There was a long silence. Beyond the shade, the sun bounced off the tin roofs and beat down on the road. A four-wheel drive, red with dust, drove past the hotel and parked a little further down, outside