A Kiss for Julie. Betty Neels

about you?’ Gray asked as she opened a jar. ‘I could find you something to eat in the cookhouse,’ he offered, but she shook her head.

      ‘I’m not really hungry. A cup of tea will be fine.’

      Alice was a messy eater, even by the standards of most babies, and Clare wasn’t surprised when Gray left them to it after seeing what she did with the first few mouthfuls. He said that he would go and see how the men were getting on in the yards.

      Clare didn’t expect to see him again that afternoon, but she was just removing Alice’s bib when he came back into the kitchen. ‘I think there might be an old highchair somewhere,’ he said, watching as Clare lifted Alice out of the backpack.

      Clare’s face lit up. ‘Oh, that would be wonderful!’ she said eagerly, and smiled at him, surprising a strange expression in the brown eyes before they were quickly veiled. ‘I don’t suppose there’s a cot, too, is there?’

      ‘There might be. As far as I’m aware, my mother never threw anything away, and all the stuff she used when Jack and I were small just got dumped in the unused quarters. I’ll get one of the men to look them out tomorrow.’

      Having taken Alice out of the backpack, Clare realised that there was nowhere to put her down. ‘I think you’d better stay there until I find that brush,’ she said to the baby, settling her back into the seat. Alice looked puzzled to find herself back where she had started, but she made no objection, merely sticking her fingers in her mouth and sucking them as she regarded Clare thoughtfully.

      Gray was watching Clare too. She was straightening her shoulders in a gesture of unconscious weariness, and he frowned. ‘You’re not going to start cleaning now?’ he asked sharply.

      ‘That’s what I’m here for,’ she said, with a smile that somehow turned into a yawn.

      ‘You can clean tomorrow,’ said Gray in a brusque voice, looking at the smudges of exhaustion beneath her eyes. ‘Right now you need some sleep,’ he added bluntly.

      ‘I can’t.’ Clare tucked her hair behind her ears and wished Gray hadn’t even mentioned the word sleep. ‘Alice slept in the plane. She’ll be wide awake for hours now.’

      ‘I’ll look after her.’

      Clare had the feeling that Gray had taken himself by surprise as much as her. ‘You?’ she said blankly.

      ‘Why not?’

      ‘I thought you were busy?’

      ‘Things seem to be going all right at the yards. I’ll need to go and check how they’re getting on, but there’s no reason why she shouldn’t come with me, and in the meantime I’ve got plenty of paperwork to catch up on. She can be in the office with me.’

      ‘But…that wasn’t the arrangement,’ stammered Clare. ‘You don’t want to be bothered with a baby.’

      ‘I don’t want to cope with her when you’ve collapsed with exhaustion either,’ said Gray roughly. ‘You’re no use to me as a housekeeper if you’re so tired you can hardly stand upright.’

      Clare tried to push aside the tantalising prospect of being able to lie down and close her eyes. ‘I don’t know,’ she said, worried. ‘Alice can be difficult…’

      ‘I manage four thousand square kilometres out there,’ said Gray, nodding his head in the direction of the window. ‘Are you telling me I can’t manage a baby?’

      ‘One baby takes just as much attention as a cattle station,’ Clare pointed out. ‘If not more! You can’t just prop her on a fence and forget about her while you get on and do whatever you do to all those cows! You won’t be able to take your eyes off her for an instant.’

      ‘You’ll have to trust me,’ he said, putting an end to argument by calmly lifting Alice out of her seat once more. Then, when Clare just stood irresolutely chewing her lip, he took her arm in a firm grip with his free hand. ‘Come with me.’

      Clare found herself propelled back across the living area to his bedroom. ‘Maybe just for an hour,’ she mumbled, succumbing to temptation and the force of his will. She had held out against the exhaustion for so long that no sooner had her resistance cracked than she was overwhelmed by a great, crashing wave of tiredness, so that she stumbled and would have fallen if Gray hadn’t held her up.

      Beyond thinking up any more objections, or even thinking at all, she let him pull back the cover and sit her down on the bed before he carried Alice over to the window to pull the blinds.

      ‘Get some sleep,’ he said gruffly, but when he turned to close the door behind him, Clare was still sitting there, watching him in a daze, too tired even to lie down.

      Gray hesitated, then went back and set Alice down on the bed beside her. He bent and took off Clare’s sandals before easing her back onto the pillow and lifting her legs up onto the bed. Covering Clare with the sheet, he picked up Alice once more and for a moment they looked down at her as she lay there like a child, looking back at them with great, blurry grey eyes.

      Dimly, Clare knew that she ought to thank him, but all she could manage was a wavering smile, and by the time Gray and Alice had reached the door she was asleep.

      When Clare woke, several hours later, it was to find herself lying in a strange room and a strange bed. Disorientated, she lay for a while, blinking at the unfamiliar ceiling and trying to disentangle dreams from reality in the swirl of unconnected images in her head. She was in Australia, she remembered eventually. She was at Bushman’s Creek, in Gray Henderson’s bed.

      Gray…It was disconcerting to discover just how clearly she could picture a man she had only met for the first time that morning. Clare turned her head on the pillow as if to dislodge the memory of the creases around his eyes, the brown, competent hands, the way his uncompromising mouth had relaxed into such an unexpected smile. She had a nasty feeling Gray’s smile had played an overlarge part in her dreams.

      Frowning slightly as reality returned, Clare pulled herself up on the pillows. Gray hadn’t wanted her to come, but he had accepted Alice in the end. He had even been kind, offering to let her sleep, closing the blinds, even taking off her shoes.

      She had a vague memory of smiling up at him and seeing the oddest expression in his eyes, but that was probably a dream, she decided. Gray wouldn’t have been looking down at her with a mixture of tenderness and desire. No one would look at a housekeeper like that, and a housekeeper was all she was and all she would ever be as far as Gray was concerned.

      As far as I’m concerned too, said Clare firmly to herself as she pushed back the sheet and swung her legs to the floor. She wasn’t here to wonder about Gray Henderson and how he would look at a woman he really wanted to be lying in his bed. She was here for Alice, and if that meant being a housekeeper, that was what she would be.