Christmas Where She Belongs. Meredith Webber

up at the massive sky that spread above her and sniffing the fresh, eucalyptus-scented air, and trying very hard to ignore the feeling of well-being that was creeping over her.

      ‘Oh, no, I’ve done my time in the country and I’m a city girl,’ she told Mike. ‘Just you remember that!’

      CHAPTER THREE

      OF COURSE the car wasn’t an automatic, but making gear changes must have been burnt into her muscle memory because, with the selection clear from a diagram on the gearstick, Clancy managed three changes with barely a hitch, although once she had it in third she decided to stay there, at least until the end of the drive.

      The drive! It went on for ever, forcing Clancy to wonder if she’d somehow chosen the wrong track from the many leading away from the homestead. Although this one had seemed most used, and had trees planted either side, so surely …?

      But a front drive four miles long? More, for she hadn’t yet reached the gate!

      ‘You’re no help,’ she said to Mike, who was sitting on the front passenger seat, his head out the window so his long ears streamed back and his lips curled in a kind of grimace.

      Clancy drove with her window open as well, so the fresh air rushed through the vehicle.

      ‘The air off the river is fresh,’ she told Mike, feeling a need to defend her city living. ‘And the South Bank parklands are full of trees.’

      But did they diffuse their scent into the air? She had to suppose that if they did, then other city smells—car exhaust and building dust and people perfumes—must mask it.

      ‘Listen to me, Mike!’ she snorted, although she hadn’t spoken the thoughts out loud. ‘Half an hour in the country and I’m being seduced by the scent of it.’

      But the scent out here was different from that of the hills around her mother’s home. Out here the air was dry and a little dusty, so it carried the perfume of the gum trees easily. Back where she’d grown up, the hills were green, the air moist, the vegetation mostly rainforest with its scent of decaying leaves and mulch.

      ‘Oh, Mike!’ she sighed, for no particular reason, then the gate appeared in front of her—not a gate as such but a cattle grid with white-painted fence posts either side.

      Turn left, Mac had said, so she turned left, hoping she’d remembered correctly, wondering how far she’d have to go in the wrong direction before some signpost told her she’d made a mistake.

      The sun was sinking behind her, so shadows lay across the land on either side of the road, softening the harshness of the landscape, turning the grass a soft blue-green, the leaves on the gum trees lining the road silver in the dimming sunlight.