CHAPTER THREE
SHE woke and it was eleven o’clock and someone was thumping outside her bedroom window.
Someones. Male voices.
She double-checked her clock—surely she hadn’t slept so long. Her head didn’t have a clue what time it was. Eleven in the morning—that’d make it … nine at night in Manhattan. She should be just going to bed.
She was wide awake. She crept over to the drapes and pushed one aside, a little bit. Expecting to see Jack.
A van was parked right by her bedroom window. Wombat Siding Plumbing, it said on this side. She could see three guys with shovels. Bathroom menders.
Jack might just be a man of his word, she thought, and grinned.
Where was he?
Did it matter? The sun was shining. The day was washed clean and delicious. Her bathroom was being prepared. How was her mare?
It took her all of two minutes to dress. She felt weirdly light-headed, tingling with the lighthearted feeling that this might work, that contrary to first impressions, here might be a veterinarian job she could get her teeth into.
And she’d be working beside a guy called Jack.
He wasn’t in the kitchen. Instead she found a note.
Sorry, but you’ll still need to use the outhouse this morning. Plumbing is promised by tonight. Help yourself to breakfast and go back to sleep. You deserve it. I’m working down the back paddock but am checking Sancha and her foal every couple of hours. They look great. Thank you.
There was nothing in that note to get excited about. Nothing to make this lighthearted frisson even more … tingly.
Except it did.
Go back to bed?
She’d thought she wanted to sleep until Monday. She was wrong.
Two pieces of toast and two mugs of strong coffee later—another plus, Jack obviously knew decent coffee—she headed out to the stables.
As promised, Sancha and her foal looked wonderful. The mare was a deep, dark bay, with white forelock and legs. Her foal was a mirror image. They looked supremely content. Sancha tolerated her checking her handiwork and she found no problem.
‘I’ll take you for a wee walk round the home paddock this afternoon,’ she promised her. ‘No exercise for you for a while but your baby needs it.’
Where was Jack?
She tuned out the sounds of the plumbers and listened. From below the house came the sounds of a chainsaw. Jack was working?
She should leave him to it.
Pigs might fly.
She headed towards the sound, following the creek just below the house. It really was the most stunning property, she thought. It had been cleared sympathetically, with massive river red gums still dotted across the landscape. A few hefty beef cattle grazed peacefully under the trees. They’d be used to keep the grass down, she thought, a necessity with such rich pasture. The country was gently undulating, with the high mountain peaks of the Snowies forming a magnificent backdrop. Last night’s rain had washed the place clean, and every bird in the country seemed to be squawking its pleasure.
The Australian High Country. The internet had told her it’d be beautiful, and this time the web hadn’t lied.
She rounded a bend in the creek—and saw something even more beautiful.
Jack. Stripped to his waist. Hauling logs clear from an ancient, long-dead tree, ready for cutting.
She stopped, stunned to breathlessness. She’d never seen a body so … ripped.
If she was a different sort of girl she might indulge in a maidenly swoon, she thought, and fought to recover.
He lifted his head and saw her—and he stilled.
‘You’re supposed to be sleeping.’
‘I came here to work.’
‘No more mares are foaling right now.’
‘Thank heaven for that,’ she said, and ventured a smile. Seeing if it’d work.
It didn’t. He looked … disconcerted, she thought. As though he didn’t know where to pigeonhole her.
As though he’d like her pigeonhole to be somewhere else.
She glanced around and saw a pile of chopped logs, neatly stacked on a trailer. There was an even bigger pile of non-stacked timber beside it.
She metaphorically spat on her hands, lifted a log and set it on the trailer.
‘You can’t do that.’
She heaved a second log onto the tractor and lifted another. ‘Why not?’
‘It’s not your—’
‘Job? Yes, it is. The agreement was I’d work as a vet and handyman.’
‘Handyman,’ he said, with something akin to loathing.
‘Do we need to go there again?’
‘No, but—’
‘There you go, then,’ she said, and smiled and kept on stacking.
How was a man supposed to work with a woman like this beside him?
He’d used the tractor to haul a dead tree out of the creek. Chopped, it’d provide a year’s heating. The fire stove was nearly out. This needed doing.
Not with Alex.
She didn’t know the rules. She was heaving timber as if she was his mate, rather than …
Rather than what? He was being a chauvinist. Hadn’t he learned his lesson last night?
But the logs were far too heavy for a woman. Her hands …
She didn’t want to be treated as a woman, he told himself. Her hands were her business.
No.
‘If you were a guy, I’d still be saying put gloves on,’ he growled. ‘There’s a heap up in the stables. Find your size and don’t come back again until you have them on.’
‘I don’t need—’
‘I’m your employer,’ he snapped. ‘I get to pay employee insurance. Gloves or you don’t work.’
She straightened and stared at him. That stare might work on some, he thought, but it wasn’t working on him.
‘Your choice,’ he said, and turned his chainsaw back on.
She glowered, then stomped up to the stables to fetch some gloves. And then came back and kept right on working.
They worked solidly for two hours, and Jack was totally disconcerted. He started chopping the logs a little smaller, to make it easier for her to stack, but he’d expected after half an hour she’d have long quitted.
She hadn’t. She didn’t.
He worked on. She piled the trailer high. He had to stop to take it up to the house and empty it. She followed the truck and trailer to the house and helped heave wood into the woodshed. Then, as he checked again on Sancha and the foal, without being asked, she took the tractor and headed back to the river to start on the next load.
Either she was stronger than she looked, or she was pig stubborn. He couldn’t tell unless he could see her hands. He couldn’t see her hands because she kept the gloves on. She worked with a steady rhythm he found disconcerting.
She was from New York. She shouldn’t be able to heave wood almost as easily as he did.
She did.
Finally the second trailer was