Snowy River Man

by Lizzy Chandler

  She tried to think positively.

  Surely she could do what Jack asked without running too great a risk? Talking to Nick hadn’t tipped her over the edge. In fact, so far, tuning in to her psychic powers had simply made everything seem more vivid, more beautiful and alive. So why did she still feel afraid?

  She shivered.

  The photo of Murray Tom with Nick. That must be what was making her so uneasy. Why had she dreamed all those years of a derelict living on the bank of Lake Eucumbene? Had those dreams been a premonition of this time, a future she never expected to come? But what, if anything, did that have to do with Nick?

  The thought that the old man might’ve hurt the boy in some way filled her with horror. Like Jack, she couldn’t bring herself to believe he could mean the child harm. Not if he was the same man who had appeared in her dreams. Far from being a threat, the old man of her visions was a good, kind person, someone she would trust implicitly.

  But was it wise to trust a dream?

  * * *

  Katrina stood waiting by the gate, in the shade of the snow gum.

  A jangle of harness signalled the arrival of an old buggy. Jack and Nick, riding high on the buggy seat, appeared along the track. The antique contraption was drawn by a monstrous horse with shaggy hooves and an untidy mane.

  ‘This might make things easier for you,’ Jack said, jumping down. He was grinning beneath his Akubra. ‘It was Nick’s idea.’

  She looked up warily. The simple seat was narrow, barely enough room for three.

  ‘Climb up, Katina.’ The boy shifted across onto the driver’s side.

  ‘Go ahead. I’ll walk,’ Jack said, his eyes glinting as if her hesitation amused him. ‘Do you need a hand getting up?’

  ‘I’ll manage.’ Relieved not to have to squash in beside Jack, she put the cane on the floor and attempted to pull herself up onto the springy seat. At the last moment, Jack came up behind her and pushed her bottom, giving her a lift.

  ‘That’s got it,’ he said, a smile in his voice.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said, as she settled. She refrained from commenting that she could have done without his help. She could still feel the imprint of his firm hands.

  Nick insisted on taking the reins, not that the Clydesdale took much direction. While Jack strode ahead, the horse ambled down the dirt track toward the farm sheds, not even breaking into a trot. The buggy might have been kept for its novelty value but, considering her scrapes and bruises, she appreciated the thought.

  ‘One day, when I can ride real good,’ Nick said when they’d gone some way down the hill, ‘I’m going to break in brumbies, just like my dad.’

  ‘Isn’t there a pony club around here where you could learn to ride?’

  ‘Oh, I can ride ponies already,’ he said. ‘I mean wild ones. Daddy won’t let me get on them yet. He says I’m too little.’

  Katrina was glad to hear that. She couldn’t imagine anyone letting a small child on a brumby. It was dangerous enough for a grown man. Yet, she had to admit, Nick had a touch of fearlessness about him that she admired. Maybe he’d inherited it from his father.

  She took a breath, deciding to broach the subject and get it over with. ‘Nick, you know Murray Tom?’

  The boy ignored her and flicked the reins, but the horse kept to a slow, steady pace.

  She persisted. ‘You talked to him the day of the show, didn’t you?’

  He gave her a sideways look. ‘You’ve seen him, haven’t you, Katina?’

  Her hair stood up on the back of her neck. Had she heard right? How could he possibly know that?

  ‘Giddy-up!’ the boy cried, clicking his tongue.

  This time, the huge horse responded, breaking into a trot. Katrina grabbed hold of the seat as the world rolled by. With the buggy squeaking and jerking as it bumped down the dirt road, Jack’s son squealed with laughter. The stables lurched into view. So much for going easy on her scrapes and bruises!

  When the horse clomped to a halt, she leaned back in the seat, dragging in a breath. Her hands were trembling, but it wasn’t from the ride. Nick knew. He knew about her and Murray Tom. But how?

  ‘We beat you!’ He stood up and shouted back at his father.

  ‘So you did.’ Jack caught up, tipping his hat in salute. ‘Here, do you want a hand down?’

  ‘I can do it.’ Nick jumped off and tumbled in the dirt, got up and brushed off the dust. ‘I’m okay. I’m okay.’

  Jack turned toward her. ‘Katrina?’

  She stood up and swayed, her head spinning. He must have misinterpreted. Before she had a chance to climb down, he grabbed her by the waist and swung her to the ground.

  ‘There,’ he said, his hands lingering on her hips.

  The intimacy of his stance, his hips nearly touching hers, rocked her. She stared into his chest, her heart beating hard, her heightened sensitivity now attuned to him. Standing so close, she could feel the heat of his body, smell the fresh, pine scent of his aftershave. She heard his heartbeat, his indrawn breath. She sensed the tingling awareness that spiralled through him, his growing arousal.

  Something uncurled inside her. Desire. Hot, fierce, possessive. She wanted Jack Fairley. It was all she could do to stop herself from curling her hand behind his neck and pulling his mouth down onto hers, running her hands over the hard muscles of his chest, grabbing his buttocks and forcing his hips against hers.

  He reached out and smoothed a strand of hair behind her ear, his fingers grazing the sensitive part of her neck. Her legs crumpled. Sagging, she laid a hand on his chest to steady herself. Beneath her palm, his heartbeat thundered.

  So he felt it, too.

  She couldn’t stand much more of this.

  ‘Katrina?’ His fingers lifted her chin, forcing her to meet his gaze.

  For a moment, she drowned in the green shady depths of his eyes. But something else happened, something totally unexpected. She glimpsed a pain buried deep inside him, a hurt she’d never have dreamed was there. It was grief. Not grief over what might’ve happened to his son. Not for the loss of his wife. Not even the grief he must’ve felt as a boy, when his mother died so young. No…it had something to do with her. As if she had hurt him profoundly in some way. The revelation stunned her. Had she hurt Jack Fairley?

  Dropping her hand, she stepped back, her heart hammering. She grabbed the cane and leaned on it, anchoring herself to the ground. She felt light-headed. She knew what she had seen was important, very important, but she couldn’t make sense of it. Not yet.

  This was another risk of awakening her psychic powers, she realised. Not tipping over the edge, but forging a connection between her and Jack. Desire. Knowledge. Intimacy. They were the things that really scared her. Had Jack felt it? she wondered. Had he felt her touch him inside?

  ‘Come on!’ Nick shouted, running ahead to the corral, no sign of the traumatised boy she had found yesterday. He leaped onto a fence. Beyond him, horses milled in the yard.

  ‘Hard to believe he was lost only yesterday, isn’t it?’ Jack said, echoing her thoughts.

  ‘It is hard to believe.’ But she wasn’t only talking about Nick. She meant them, too, what had just happened.

  ‘Did you ask him about Murray Tom?’ he pressed.

  ‘I asked, but…’ She breathed deep. The crazy thing was, she knew what Nick had said to her about seeing Murray Tom. She had heard him plainly enough, but — as with what had just happened with Jack — she didn’t trust her own perceptions. What if she was imagining things? ‘I need more time, Jack. Time to talk to him.’

  ‘There’s plenty of that,’ he said, ‘especially if you delay your flight another day.’

  She frowned, caught out by her own words. A web, as light as gossamer, was spinning around her, binding her closer and closer to Yarrangobilla, to Jack.

  ‘We’ll see,’ she managed.

  ‘Come on,’ he said, his eyes glinting as if with satisfaction. ‘Let me show you around.’

  She followed h
im to the yard.

  As they walked, he told her his plans for Yarrangobilla, mentioning the tender he was submitting to the council for a tourist development that included horse-trail riding further up the mountains. Katrina only half listened. She was too aware of him, the way he walked, the way he moved, the easy masculine energy that came off him in waves.

  He stopped in front of a large corral and leaned up against the fence. A lone horse pranced restlessly beyond the wooden railing. He was a beauty, his tail high, the whites of his eyes showing, his silver coat shining in the sun.

  ‘Why is this one on its own?’ she asked.

  ‘He’s the brumby stallion I rode at the show,’ Jack said. He stepped up onto the railing and swung one leg over the fence. ‘The one Nick wanted you to see.’

  The horse snorted, as if to command their full attention.

  Katrina leaned over the sun-warmed fence and stared at the wild brumby, the proud profile, the sleek muscles and silky mane. He looked like the king of the wild, the Silver Brumby of legend. The stallion lifted his head and stopped prancing. He pawed at the ground as if posing for her admiration.

  He certainly was impressive.

  ‘I’ll have to get rid of him,’ Jack said. ‘Put him back into the wild. He’s upsetting the mares coming into season. We’ve already had to shift one across to the other stables at Gwen and Wayne’s. She was getting way too frisky. She could smell him.’

  Katrina’s nostrils flared. She felt like the mare. Except the male she sensed wasn’t a brumby.

  ‘You wouldn’t try to breed with him?’ she asked, her voice husky.

  Jack shook his head. ‘He’s too wild. You’d never tame him.’

  She kept staring at the young stallion, but her thoughts were fixed on Jack Fairley. Some intuition told her she’d been getting this all wrong. It wasn’t Nick getting lost that had summoned her to Yarrangobilla. It wasn’t Murray Tom, either, the old man of her dreams. The common link to both of them was Jack. He was the reason she had come there, and he was why she felt compelled to stay. But he’d trampled her heart once before. She’d have to be insane to let him do it again.

  Chapter 9

  Nick insisted on dragging Katrina into the stables to see a foal. Jack stood at the door, observing them. As the two watched the little foal suckling its mother, the image struck him with painful beauty.

  Horse and foal. Mother and child.

  The truth hovered at the edge of his brain and he seized it, ready to face it now. He knew without any word back from Eriksson why Katrina had come there. It was the same reason she had been able to describe Murray Tom. Much as it went against his grain to admit it, she was psychic. She had to be. And she had a connection with her son.

  Incredibly, though, despite a connection that had brought her hundreds of miles, she still hadn’t made the link. Not consciously. What would happen when she did? Would she hate him for not telling her sooner, for his unwitting part in separating her from her child?

  * * *

  Katrina’s attention shifted from Nick’s chatter about the young foal and tuned into Jack. The way his shoulder nudged the wooden doorpost at the stable entrance. How the fall of sunlight on the brim of his hat cast his face in shadow. The way one knee crooked forward, casual, relaxed.

  He was a supremely handsome, fit man. But there was more to him than that. She could sense the person he had become, the loner and the father, as well as the lover he could be.

  It was incredible to think now, about how close they had come over the course of one night. Staying up talking, laughing, making love. It had been so brief and was so long ago, it had almost felt like a dream. But now it was as if she was waking up to find the dream was real.

  ‘What would you like to see now, Katina?’ Nick pulled on her skirt.

  ‘What would you like to show me?’ she said.

  ‘Well…’ He frowned, tilting his head. ‘If you weren’t a girl we could take you up to the caves and show you the rock paintings. But that’s only for boys.’

  ‘Who says that?’ she asked, smiling.

  ‘Murray Tom.’

  Katrina glanced at Jack, her heartbeat picking up pace. A sudden alertness in his body suggested his sharpened attention.

  ‘Murray Tom said that, did he?’ she said carefully. ‘What else does Murray Tom say?’

  ‘Oh, lots of things. He used to work at Yarrangobilla before I was born. He could ride brumbies real good, like my daddy. But he can’t anymore because he can’t see prop’ly.’

  She breathed out. There was no sense that the boy was at all frightened of the old man. But why had he been so reluctant to admit that he’d been talking to Murray Tom at the showground? It didn’t make sense.

  ‘Nicholas…’

  ‘We have photos of Yarrangobilla in the olden days,’ he said. ‘Would you like to see them? There’s heaps of stuff like that in the lib’ary.’

  She glanced at Jack in query.

  He half smiled. ‘Why don’t we head up to the house and you can show Katrina the photo albums after morning tea?’

  As she walked back outside, Katrina realised that the discomfort in her ankle was fading so that she hardly needed the cane, though she still felt stiff and sore in other places. The day was heating up, cicadas chorusing from the gum trees. Harnessed to the buggy, the giant horse flicked flies away with its tail. She consoled herself: she hadn’t made much headway with Nick, but she would get another chance to talk to him on the ride back.

  That wasn’t meant to be.

  ‘I’m going to walk back with my dad,’ the boy announced once she had clambered up onto the seat. ‘You can drive by yourself, can’t you, Katina? You won’t be too scared?’

  ‘Me, scared?’ she joked. ‘I’m the daughter of a farm-girl, don’t you know?’

  ‘I didn’t know that.’ Jack lifted his eyebrows, and she immediately regretted her admission. She didn’t want any questions about her mother’s background. She knew so little. Only that her mother had come to the city from somewhere in the country after some heartbreak. All her life, despite Katrina’s curiosity, she had refused to speak about it.

  She flicked the reins and the horse obeyed, setting off at a trot, quickly overtaking Jack’s son who had run on ahead. When she made it up the hill, she saw Wayne waiting up by the homestead. She brought the buggy to a stop.

  ‘I thought you might’ve left already.’ He grinned up at her, his red hair sticking out from beneath his hat, his jeans and boots scruffy. He tethered the horse to the garden gate. ‘Changed your mind about staying, did you?’

  ‘Jack asked me to talk to Nick.’ She lifted a hand, shading her face from the sun. ‘I’m meant to be heading back some time this afternoon.’

  ‘Meant to be, eh?’ he said, raising his ginger eyebrows. ‘Katrina, I just wanted to say —’

  He broke off as footsteps sounded behind them.

  ‘G’day, Uncle Wayne!’ The boy scooted through the gate and raced up to the house.

  Jack joined them, stepping up close beside Katrina. Too close. As if he was sending out a challenge to his cousin, or staking some kind of claim.

  ‘G’day, Wayne,’ he said, tipping back his hat. His manner was in complete contrast to the energy which she felt emanating from him. ‘You must’ve been up early to get those cows shifted already?’

  Wayne shrugged, scratching the back of his neck. ‘I’ll get to them later. Couldn’t let Katrina go without saying goodbye.’

  ‘No need. I’ve persuaded her to stay at Yarrangobilla for a while.’

  Katrina tensed, heat flaming her face. That was the first she’d heard of it. Now was her cue to say she had already packed her bags, but she held her tongue.

  ‘Is that so?’ Wayne said. ‘Glad to hear it. By the way, young Steve reckons that tractor’s on the blink again. He’s bringing it up to the shed. You might want someone to look at it.’

  ‘I’ll take care of it,’ Jack said. He stood his ground, as if waiting for his c
ousin to move.

  ‘I was just having a private word with Katrina,’ Wayne said, scuffing his boot on the ground.

  Jack glanced from her to his cousin and back again. ‘All right. You won’t forget those cows, will you?’

  ‘Consider it done.’

  With a hint of a scowl, Jack strode toward the house.

  Wayne raised his eyebrows, chuckling softly. ‘If I didn’t know better, I’d think Jack was jealous.’

  Katrina felt heat rising to her cheeks.

  He raised his eyebrows, then laughed out loud. ‘Whoa! That hit the mark, didn’t it? You two don’t have a history, by any chance?’

  She bit her lip. ‘If we do, it’s ancient history.’

  ‘Mm,’ he mused. ‘I wouldn’t be so sure.’

  * * *

  Jack strode down the stone path, brushing past the blue hydrangeas and pink ‘naked ladies’.

  He groaned. Who in hell gave the lilies that name? It was indecent. Tossing a glance over his shoulder, he couldn’t see Katrina or Wayne. The dense foliage of the honeysuckle that draped the garden lintel obscured them from view.

  Wayne and Katrina…? No!

  He put it out of his mind. He had more important concerns: whether Murray Tom had anything to do with Nick’s disappearance, how Katrina came to believe her child had died. Who she flirted with was no concern of his.

  As he stepped in off the veranda Sandra approached, her high heels clicking on the tiled utility area. Her blonde hair was drawn back into a ponytail, her dark navy skirt crisply ironed. So different from Katrina’s loose hair and flowing skirt.

  He gritted his teeth. He was becoming obsessed.

  ‘Jack? Can I see you a minute in the office?’ Sandra asked. ‘You’ve had a few calls.’

  ‘Sure.’ He glanced through to the kitchen. Nick was already sitting up at the table, chatting to Mike. He poked his head inside the door. ‘Can you look after Katrina for me, Nick? Make sure she gets a cup of tea? I have a bit of work to do.’