“So Callan wants to drive us to his house. Are you ready?”
“Where’s his house?”
Good question. You couldn’t see the homestead from here. It was set above a loop of Arakeela Creek, just under a kilometer from the line of white-trunked eucalyptus trees that marked the creek bed, on the far side of a low rise. “You’ll see it soon, Carly,” he told her. “Let’s get you strapped in.”
“You use seat belts out here? When there are no other cars around for miles?” Jacinda asked.
“They keep your head from hitting the ceiling on the bumps.”
She thought he was joking.
He had enough expertise at the wheel not to need to shatter her illusions on that point today, on the relatively well-made track between the airstrip and the homestead, but if she did any more extensive driving with him around the property, she’d soon find out the truth.
Once again, he wondered how long she would need to stay, what he could possibly do to make her feel welcome and entertained, and what would happen to such a new and untested kind of friendship in the isolation of the outback.
Most importantly, why had she fled her life in Los Angeles? What was she running from? And what was she hoping for, when she’d told him in such a desperate voice that she needed to catch her breath?
He couldn’t ask.
Not yet.
Callan stayed silent for the first few minutes of the drive. Jacinda listened to the grind of the vehicle’s engine and the squeak of its bodywork and springs on the unsealed track. The landscape they drove through was stark, yet she could already understand why some people would find it beautiful. She found it beautiful, herself. It was like looking at the very bones of the earth—bones that were colored clay red and ocher yellow and chalky white. In the distance, near an arc of eucalyptus trees, she saw a spreading herd of red-brown cattle grazing, their big bodies dwarfed by the sheer scale of ground and horizon and sky.
She knew she’d soon have to tell Callan why she was here, but not yet. She needed to wait until she was a little calmer and her blood sugar was a little higher, for a start. She wanted him to believe her. She needed him to understand how terrified she was and that her story wasn’t the product of her bitter feelings toward Kurt and her writer’s imagination—even if in some of her most paranoid, self-doubting moments, she had wondered if it was.
… Because if he didn’t believe her, and if she and Carly weren’t welcome here, she didn’t know where else they could go.
“There’s the homestead,” Callan finally said.
His bare, brown forearm and hand came into Jac’s body space, pointing strong and straight, across to the left of the vehicle. She’d forgotten what a powerful, sturdy build he had and, here in his natural element, the impression of strength was emphasized all the more. What would he look like on horseback, or wrestling with his cattle in a branding yard?
The mental images were too vivid and far too appealing. Kurt’s strength had never been physical … or even emotional. Instead, it was based purely on money and influence. Callan’s kind of strength would be so different, much simpler and more straightforward, and she needed that so much right now.
Right away she saw the cluster of buildings that he indicated, their forms and outlines growing clearer as the vehicle got closer. They had roofs painted a dark red that had faded to a dusty cherry color in the strong light and they were shaded by stands of willowy, small-leafed trees that she couldn’t identify. Not eucalyptus. As a California resident, she knew those well. Some of the buildings were wooden, but the main house was made of sand-colored stone with a framing of reddish brick where walls met and windows opened.
She glimpsed something that looked like a vegetable garden. It contained a couple of short rows of orchard trees and was protected on two sides by walls made of some kind of dry brush, and on a third side by a screen of living shrubs. In a sparsely grassed field close to the house, several horses grazed or drank water from a metal trough, placed in the shade of some trees.
Several of the buildings had wide verandas, and all of them had metal water tanks hugging close on one side, to collect roof runoff when the rare rains came. Houses, storage sheds, barns, she didn’t know what each building was for, but there was something very pretty and alluring about the grouping. It reminded her of circled wagons in an old-fashioned Western film, or a town in a desert oasis.
She had stretched a very new friendship by her desperate act of coming here, she knew, but at least she felt that she and Carly would be physically safe.
Far safer than she had felt they were in Los Angeles.
Safer than she’d felt at Lucy’s after those phone calls had started coming at all hours—hang-ups, every one of them. They had to have been from Kurt.
“How big is your ranch?” she asked Callan.
“My station. We don’t call them ranches here. It’s around twenty-four hundred square kilometers.”
“Wow!” It sounded like a satisfying number. “In acres, that would be … twice that? Four or five thousand?”
She was only guessing. Kurt had had a ranch around that size in eastern California. Six thousand acres. He used to spread his arms out and take a deep breath and tell everyone, “Man, this is a piece of land!”
But Callan laughed at her estimate. “Uh, a little bit bigger, actually. Nine hundred-odd square miles. In acres, six hundred thousand.”
“Six hundred thousand? You’re saying this is a hundred times bigger than my ex-husband’s dude ranch?”
“It’s a pretty small place compared to some in this country. Anna Creek, out west of Lake Eyre, is something like six million acres, the biggest pastoral lease in the world.”
Jacinda didn’t care about Anna Creek. “You own—heavens—Rhode Island!”
“Only I probably have a lot fewer cattle.”
“How many? Don’t tell me! More than the human population of the whole country?”
“Nowhere close. Again, around twenty-four hundred. One beast per square kilometer. It’s arid, out here. The land just doesn’t support more than that. Most of the time, they roam free, and they can be pretty hard to find when we want to round them up and send them to market.”
She didn’t care about the number of cattle, although she could well believe they were hard to locate in this vastness. Callan owned more land than the average European prince.
And a hundred times more land than Kurt.
Which probably shouldn’t make her want to grin with pleasure, but it did.
“As far as the eye can see? It’s all yours?”
“Yep.” And though he said it quietly—lazily, almost—she could see the pride and satisfaction it gave him.
Soon they rumbled across a metal grid between two lines of fence, and a couple of hundred yards later, they’d reached the homestead. Callan parked the vehicle at a casual angle out front and switched off the engine. Two dogs raced around from the side of the house and greeted their human as if they hadn’t seen him in a week. One was a black and white border collie and one was probably the red dog featured in Callan’s magazine photo.
“Okay, Pippa,” he said. “Okay, Flick. You like me. I get the message. But Jacinda and Carly don’t need to get told the same thing, you hear? They’re not used to wretches like you.” He issued a couple of sharp commands and the dogs dashed over to sit in the shade of the house, pink tongues panting and lolling, attitudes repentant.
A screen door squeaked on its hinges and flapped back against the jamb, and three people materialized on the shaded