Heart Of The Outback, Volume 2

by Margaret Way

  It was all too much. As she sat on the toilet seat, in her beautiful yellow dress and her curls and the sunny scent of daffodils in her nose, her emotions ran over.

  Her heavy head lolled against her chest and she buried her face in her hands as she began, in earnest, to cry.

  Between her ridiculous unstoppable sobs she heard Heath swear under his breath and suddenly he was beside her. His knees cracked as he slid to the bathroom mat at her feet.

  “Jodie. Sweetheart. What’s wrong? What’s happened? Who was on the phone? Is it your mum? Is she okay?”

  She felt him reach out and lay a hand on her shoulder. It was gentle, it was kind, and it wasn’t enough. She leaned into him until his arms enveloped her in a haven of warmth.

  “It was Lou, on the phone,” Jodie said against his reassuring shoulder. “She and Mum are meeting for afternoon tea.”

  “And you won’t be there to officiate,” Heath said, figuring out the guts of her concern in a heartbeat. If she was at her mulish best in that moment she would have huffed and puffed and given that shoulder of his a good whack. But she didn’t have the energy.

  “They won’t need me to,” she conceded.

  Heath slowly extricated himself from her clinging embrace until they were face to face. “And that’s a bad thing?”

  He wasn’t smiling at her as he usually did when she acted a little haywire; on the contrary, his face was a mask of serious concern, as though if he could soak up her pain in any way he would.

  “No,” she said on a bone-tired sigh. “It really is a wonderful thing. But it also makes me feel redundant.”

  He reached up and tucked a stray curl behind her ear, his hand lingering at the back of her neck. “Jodie, you are a big part of many people’s lives, and not just those back in London.”

  “I know,” she said, thinking of Mandy and Lisa and feeling weaker by the second as his fingers curled and twirled through the downy hair at the base of her skull.

  “I don’t know that you do. I don’t know that you have a clue as to how important a person you already are in my life, Mrs Jameson?”

  Mrs Jameson. The way Heath said those words Jodie had a brief glimpse into how important a woman could be in a man’s life. Had her mum been that important in her dad’s life before her moods and her unpredictability had driven him away? And if so, why was she now so determined to follow in her mum’s footsteps?

  The warmth of the small room, the bouquet wilting out of the corner of her eye, and the handsome groom kneeling at her feet created such ambience that her weak demeanour gave in to it all. All the confusion and mixed-up desires and the potent fact of Heath Jameson grew large in her mind until she couldn’t stand it any longer.

  She leaned in, bare inches, until her mouth gently met his. He tasted of salt. It took her a moment before she realised that was the taste of her own tears. Tears that made the joining of their lips slippery, and voluptuous, and as such the kiss quickly spiralled from comforting to something much more fervent.

  Heath was so beautiful. So incredibly warm. And he wanted her. The tightness of his embrace left her in no doubt. A soft groan escaped her mouth as she slid from her seat to kneel on the bathmat in front of him, all the better to blend herself with him.

  The warmth of his bare chest scorched through her thin dress and she pushed herself closer still, needing to brand her body and mind with such sensation to get her through the long lonely nights that would surely stretch ahead of her.

  An age later, he pulled away to trail kisses over her face and neck.

  “You’re exquisite,” he whispered at the base of her ear and she all but blacked out with the pleasure of it.

  She arched back to give him better access to whatever he wanted, to allow his enchanted lips to burn a hot trail over her desperately sensitive skin.

  It felt so wonderful it almost hurt. Her throat had closed over with pleasure. She could barely breathe. In Heath’s strong arms, with his kisses raining over her, she felt ravished, desired, worshipped, vital …

  A great noise suddenly invaded her hazy senses as Mandy tumbled noisily into the apartment singing “Going to the Chapel” at the tops of her lungs.

  Jodie sprang apart from Heath like a teenager caught parking, but it was too late. Mandy and rotten Jake were standing gaping at the bathroom door.

  “Oh.” Mandy giggled drunkenly behind her hand. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to interrupt.”

  “Whoa,” Jake said. “Jodes, babe, you look hot in yellow.”

  Mandy slapped him across the chest, and all giggling ceased. She then grabbed him by the shirtfront, took her half-drunk bottle of champagne and began tiptoeing towards her bedroom. “Pretend we’re not here,” she whispered loudly. “Go on doing whatever it was you were doing.”

  When they disappeared into Mandy’s bedroom with a bang of the door, the room was left again in quiet, the only sounds a faint whistle of wind at the windows, the hum of the fridge in the nearby kitchen, and their steady, louder-than-normal breathing.

  Heath recovered first. Holding onto Jodie’s hand, he got to his feet, then helped her up as well. She rubbed her knees, which, now that she was fully functional again, hurt from the hardness of the tiled floor.

  “Are you okay?” he asked. His voice was husky and she could tell he was as shaken up as she was.

  She nodded, though she wasn’t sure okay described her current state. Her tears had dried up. Her headache was a mere memory. But she had been left with a yearning so deep she couldn’t even hope to name it.

  Tucking her hand behind his back, Heath drew her out into the lounge room in silence. It was a loaded silence. Jodie had no clue what to say. Whether to apologise for jumping on him, or remind him that she thought that indulging in such activities would only cause conflict later on, or simply give into the tingling sensation that had overtaken her from top to toe and say, “What the heck? We’re married; let’s do it,” and blame an excess of martinis in the morning.

  “I think it’s time for bed,” Heath said and Jodie’s knees all but gave way beneath her.

  He moved past her to the safe side of the lounge chair, took the throw rug off the back of the couch, and shook it out and Jodie’s heart lumbered back to a healthier pace. Only when he began to peel his unbuttoned shirt from his back revealing masses of lean, tanned muscle did Jodie move. But once she reached her bedroom door she turned, holding the frame for support, and said, “Heath, thank you for today, and for the next two years, and … everything.”

  It felt pathetically lacking considering the mix of emotions churning through her system, but Heath nodded graciously.

  “You’re welcome,” he said.

  And on her wedding night, Jodie turned and walked into her bedroom—alone.

  Heath walked around the apartment, turning off the table lamps and the stereo. And by the time he lay down, he felt as though he had run a marathon.

  He grabbed the light blanket from the back of the couch and laid it over his prostrate form. It was a warm night; he wouldn’t need any more coverings, but it would take more than a snug blanket to put him to sleep.

  Blame it on the kiss. For what a kiss it had been. Jodie’s hands had been all but ready to slide his shirt from his back and then some. He was certain he hadn’t been imagining it, even if his desire for such an occurrence had been all but blinding him at the time.

  But there was no way he was going to follow through on the promise of that kiss with Mandy and her beau on the other side of their bedroom door. Jodie was way too special for that. Such a union, in such a place, would only have been soured by morning.

  A bump sounded in one of the bedrooms, followed by giggling and whispering. At least someone in the house would be getting some tonight. He laughed aloud, the cynical sound disappearing in the lofty room.

  Most guys didn’t really think much about their wedding day, about what they would wear, about who would come, about the band, or the flowers, as women tended to. But the wedding night
, now that was something they held in high regard. And here he was, lying on a lumpy couch, his feet sticking over the end, dressed still in his wedding-day trousers so as not to frighten the several other inhabitants of his wedding-night accommodations, while his bride slept in the other room.

  “Well, buddy,” he said out loud, staring at the flickering shadows on the wall, “she never promised you anything more. So you have no one to blame for this but yourself.”

  He rolled onto his side to block one ear against a cushion. Light from street lamps outside spilled through the big front windows. He could sleep through a full moon. But the bright golden hue of the fluorescent lights just didn’t feel natural to this country boy, even against the backs of his closed eyelids.

  Thankfully, the next night they would be at Jamesons Run for their “honeymoon”. No matter how forgiving someone might be to the fact that when in town they lived with two other women, Heath had managed to convince Jodie that if they didn’t at least spend some time by themselves after the wedding the whole thing would be labelled a farce by not only his family, but by any officials asking questions later on.

  But the knowledge that tonight of all nights his lovely wife, the woman whose kisses sent him up in flames, was snuggled up in her bedroom mere feet away would be enough to keep his thoughts occupied and his eyes wide open for hours to come.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  LATE the next morning, Jodie leant her head against the window letting the hum of the car thrum through her as they swept past scenes the likes of which she had never seen.

  Gangly newborn sheep dotted numerous herds as they headed further into rural country, and she knew just how they felt. For the first time since she had left home and travelled the miles of land, air and sea to reach Australia, she felt displaced. She wasn’t on holiday any more. But she didn’t feel quite at home either.

  Her life was changed. She was changed. And she saw the world around her through changed eyes. Dorothy wasn’t in Kansas any more.

  Cerulean-blue sky stretched as far as the eye could see. Sporadic puffs of perfect white clouds all but blinded her with their brilliance, as did grass the colour of wheat, dirt the colour of red wine, lonely grey gums and bottle-green willows dipping their branches towards large brown dams.

  While back in London the days would be growing overcast, rainy and dark, in Melbourne it was only getting hotter and the days longer. And Christmas was coming.

  Christmas had always been the best time of year in her London life. Somehow every year Patricia ended up with a windfall just before her Christmas Eve birthday. In celebration the two of them would take the half-hour public-transport trek out to the Kings Road in fabulous Chelsea.

  They would walk the length of the famous old strip, window shopping, maybe even picking up a fancy new outfit or two, and stopping for tea at one or other of the old cafés, even passing by the Bella Lucia flagship restaurant without having an inkling of the family link behind that grand façade.

  They would walk off their meal with a wander around the gardens at the back of the Royal Hospital where the Chelsea Flower Show was held each May. To Jodie that was the most beautiful place in the whole world, a secret garden with park benches engraved in honour of lovers young and old, flowers as far as the eye could see, the River Thames slinking by, and her mother contented and smiling.

  Jodie never knew where the money came from each year. She had always kind of hoped it was from her father, but since Louise had shown up on the scene Jodie had had all sorts of horrible ideas that perhaps the Valentines had been paying hush money all along. From what she had gleaned from Louise they would be capable of such a deed. Either way she had never questioned it as it gave her one day a year of a real mother-daughter relationship.

  Heath’s black Jeep, his “city car” as he called it, turned off the main road at a gap in a long horse fence, bounced over a cattle-grid, and then bumped along an uneven dirt track toward a wall of massive pine trees in the near distance.

  “We’re here,” Heath said, his voice low and quiet in case she had been sleeping.

  She rolled her head back upright and sent him a guarded smile. He smiled back before turning his face to the front. His right arm rested along the edge of the open window, his soft hair flickered in the breeze, an easy smile rested on his lips. With the horizon as a background to his profile, lit by a different sun, breathing different air he looked like a different man. It was how one looked when one felt at home.

  She turned back to face the front as they whisked through the tall green trees and on the other side of the enclosure stood a grand white two-storey wooden house with a silver roof and a wrap-around veranda. Past the house were a number of paddocks and to the right stables.

  And beyond? Land as far as the eye could see. Wide flat red dirt scattered with random eucalypts leading away to a perfect hill in the distance.

  Her “home” had been a dingy little flat. She had slept on the lounge floor and then, when her father had left, her mother’s only concession to the grief she had felt had been the gift of a second-hand single mattress. With a mother on sickness benefits there had been little more they could afford. But Jamesons Run, Heath’s home, was magnificent.

  “Oh, my, Heath,” she said, feeling a little breathless. “This is just so beautiful.”

  “You like it?” he asked, his voice unusually hesitant.

  “How could I not? It’s breathtaking.”

  “It’s miles from anywhere, and anything,” he warned.

  And she knew he was thinking of her. Her city-girl tastes. But she’d never been one of these girls with a need to shop every day—she’d never had the money to do so anyway. The Christmas shopping sprees on the Kings Road in Chelsea had been to her like wishing on the first star—a way to remind herself there was hope beyond her four walls.

  “So long as there is food, water, a table on which I can make my jewellery, and a phone with which I can call my friends, then I think I can cope,” she said.

  He pulled the Jeep to an easy stop at the top of a circular dirt drive. Jodie opened the door and got out, stretching her tight, cramped limbs before a great yawn eased from her mouth, opening her lungs to the warm country air.

  As she followed Heath and their luggage up the front steps she felt even more nervous than she had been before their blind date—nerves jangling and tongue-tied, all gangly limbs and expectation.

  But this was worth all the nervousness—the thought of sleeping in Heath’s family home, the forthcoming intensive bovine research in case she ever had to answer any questions about such parts of Heath’s life, being away from Melbourne’s delights for a few nights every week. The end result made it so.

  Heath opened the front door and stepped back. As Jodie walked over the threshold, she had a vision of Heath scooping her up in his arms and carrying her through. And by the glimmer in his blue eyes and the crease in his right cheek she wondered if he was thinking the same.

  It only made her hustle faster and she was over that threshold and into the foyer before either of them had the chance to blink.

  But there her feet stopped.

  If she’d thought the exterior of the Run was beyond her wildest dreams, the interior was a step further again. Before her was an honest-to-goodness waste-of-space foyer with nothing for ten feet either way bar a six-foot-long solid-oak hall table resting against a brick-red feature wall and holding a vase filled with three-foot-high dried Australian wildflowers.

  Her feet slid slowly along polished wood floorboards as she eased herself around the stand-alone wall. As usual, she felt rather than heard Heath follow. She could always tell when he was near. His warmth? His woodsy scent? His comforting aura? Whatever it was, she skipped ahead into the sunken formal lounge so as to rid herself of the cloak of awareness wrapped about her.

  As she moved about the room complete with red leather sofas, rugs that looked as though they cost more than she had ever earned in a year, and a massive wood fireplace, it hit h
er like a sack of flour to the head—Heath had money. Lots of it.

  She hadn’t even thought to ask. Didn’t farmers struggle with things like crop failure and drought and government subsidies? Well, not this one. This one had flourished enough to support an extended family and a penchant for expensive furniture. It seemed the bookish young girl from the backwaters of London had married herself an outback land baron.

  So much for her promise to pay him for services rendered. Heck, the thousand-odd dollars she would have got back from cashing in her plane ticket would be a drop in the ocean to a guy in his position. No wonder he had never again brought up her offer of a monetary inducement, as it had nothing to do with his continued determination to be married to her.

  But why, if he was so prosperous, hadn’t he asked for a pre-nup? It had never even occurred to Jodie. She owned a suitcase full of clothes, and a car so rusty it ought not to be on the road. So why? Had she been ignoring the truth all along—did he actually think that in two years” time she might actually change her mind?

  She forced herself to keep exploring rather than to stand staring at each new opulent convenience, and wondering what other hidden delights, and secret motives, the man she had married had hidden up his sleeve.

  Heath stood back and watched as Jodie moved through his home, her wide eyes taking in every little detail.

  She liked it. She said it was beautiful. And those words had warmed him like a bonfire on a cool autumn night.

  He hadn’t realised how important her impression of the Run might be. In recent times, he had found the place too far from the world. Constrictive. Unvaried. The walls of his big old house made him antsy. The recent time spent in the city had felt like a relief. A way out. And Jodie had been a big part of that.

  He let her be, heading off to the large master suite. He dumped their bags by the twin couches in the parents” retreat and tried to ignore the thirty-odd messages blinking back at him from the answering machine on the bedside table.