Outback bride - Hart Jessica - Страница 11

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‘If she was that astute, she wouldn’t have married you unless she really wanted to be with you,’ she said after a moment.

Mal shook his head. ‘That was what I thought. Of course, I had what you would call a stupidly romantic idea about marriage, but Lisa’s attitude was much more practical. Marriage to me gave her a sort of position, an image of someone equally at home in the outback as in the city, but she never really liked it out here and she ended up spending more and more time back in Brisbane.’

‘But what about Megan?’

‘Megan was the result of a doomed attempt to save a doomed marriage,’ said Mal stonily. ‘It didn’t work, of course. Lisa saw pregnancy as an excuse to escape permanently to the city. She said that she needed to be near a hospital, that Birraminda was no place for a baby, so she went to Brisbane and she never came back. She didn’t even ring me until after the baby was born.’ His mouth set in a bitter line. ‘She told me her labour came on unexpectedly and that there hadn’t been time to call me and tell me to come to the hospital, but it wasn’t true. I was supposed to be grateful that she even let me see my own child.’

His voice was very controlled but Copper could see the rigidity in his jaw. She understood now what had put that shuttered look in his eyes and carved sternness into his face. No wonder Mal had changed. The birth of his daughter ought to have been a joyful occasion, but instead he had been excluded, rejected, denied the emotional intensity of seeing his child come into the world.

Copper wished she knew how to offer him sympathy. If she had been another girl she might have been able to take his hand, or put her arms around him, but she wasn’t another girl. She had condemned herself as a girl who put her job first, just like his wife, and she was afraid that Mal would flinch from her touch.

So she only clenched her hands around the rim of her hat and said nothing.

After a while Mal went on, as if the words were being forced out of him but he needed to finish the story. ‘We both knew that there was no point in pretending that the marriage was going to work after that,’ he said. ‘It was a relief in a way, but the divorce settlement crippled me financially. All my money’s in land, and I’m still struggling to get back to the way things were before. The worst thing was leaving Megan behind, but everyone said she needed to be with her mother.’

His expression was closed, refusing pity. ‘I believed it myself until I saw how she was handed over to a succession of nannies while Lisa went back to working fifteen-hour days in her business. I flew down to see her as often as I could, but the child had no chance to get to know me. When Lisa was killed in a car accident and I went to bring Megan home, she was terrified. She was only two and it must have seemed as if she was being handed over to a complete stranger.’

Copper’s eyes rested on Megan, squatting by the water. Her hands were full of mud, her face grubby and absorbed, and she was chattering away to herself, oblivious to the two adults watching her. ‘She seems happy enough now.’

‘I think so too, when I see her like this, but she’s too used to playing on her own.’ Mal sighed. ‘She doesn’t remember much about Lisa, but she misses having a mother. It might be different if I could get a housekeeper to come out here and stay for a year or so, but these girls who come and go are just unsettling for her. She needs some security.’

‘You’re her security,’ said Copper gently, but he shook his head.

‘I’m not enough,’ he said. ‘I can’t be around the homestead the whole time. Megan needs more attention than I can give her. Too often she has to sit on a fence where I can see her and keep out of the way. She’s learning plenty about how to run a cattle station but she isn’t learning enough about being a child.’

Mal’s eyes rested on the curve of his daughter’s back. ‘Of course, what I really need is a new wife,’ he said with a mirthless smile. ‘But I don’t think I can go through another marriage like that again.’

Copper hesitated. ‘It doesn’t need to be like that,’ she said quietly. You didn’t need to be a romantic to believe that marriage didn’t have to be a battleground of conflicting interests, as Mal’s had been.

‘Doesn’t it?’ said Mal. ‘Where am I going to find a woman who’d be prepared to give up everything and come and live out here? No friends, no shops, no restaurants, no interesting job-just heat and dust and hard work.’

It would be hard, Copper thought. There was no doubt about it. And yet Mal’s wife would have other things. She would have the creek and the gums and the diamond bright air. She would be able to reach out and touch Mal whenever she wanted. His lean, brown body would be as familiar to her as her own. She’d have long, sweet nights in his arms, and when she went to sleep she would know that he would be there in the morning when she woke. What kind of woman had Lisa been to walk away from all that?

A woman like her? Something cold touched Copper’s heart. ‘None of that would matter if she loved you,’ she said, in a voice that was not quite steady.

‘If there’s one thing I learnt from my marriage, it’s that love isn’t enough,’ said Mal bleakly. ‘Lisa loved me-or she said she did-and look where that got me. And look at you. You love Glyn, but not enough to give up the things that really matter to you. Why should it be any different for the next woman I marry? Always supposing I could find one wandering around the bush! No,’ he said, getting to his feet and beginning to untether Megan’s pony, ‘I’m not getting married again. Megan will be all right if I can find a decent housekeeper. All I can do is keep hoping that one will turn up sooner or later.’

He glanced over his shoulder at his daughter. ‘Come on, Megan. We’re going home.’

CHAPTER FOUR

‘I’M not getting married again.’ Again and again, over the next few days, Copper found herself brooding over Mal’s words, although she could never satisfactorily explain to herself why they grated in her memory so much.

After all, Mal and his daughter weren’t her business. It was a shame that his marriage had been such a disaster, of course, but Copper couldn’t help resenting the way he had lumped her in the same category as Lisa. She hadn’t walked out on a marriage, or deprived a father of his child. Glyn was the one who had walked out on her. All she had done was care about the work she did. What was so wrong with that?

At least she understood now the guarded way Mal treated her. He was polite but watchful, and, although he patently found her amusing in an exasperating kind of way, he rarely smiled-and if he did it was as if the smile had been surprised out of him against his will. Sometimes Copper felt his eyes resting on her with an expression that she could never identify, but which made her edgy and nervous, and she wanted to shout at him and tell him that she wasn’t like Lisa.

At times, Copper hated Lisa for turning the intriguing man she remembered into this cool, reserved stranger. And at other times, like now, lying awake in the dark, she was disgusted to find herself envying her. Lisa had been beautiful, Mal had said. He must have loved her very much. He had married her and brought her to Birraminda and done everything he could to make her stay.

Which meant that it hadn’t taken long for him to forget her. Megan was four and a half now, so he must have married Lisa at least five years ago, six if one took into account the fact that the marriage had gone wrong long before the baby was conceived. And that meant that a year after their idyllic encounter on that Mediterranean beach Mal had dismissed her from his mind and married someone else.

Copper turned over irritably. The knowledge that he had so quickly forgotten left her feeling a fool for having remembered him so clearly, even when all hope of ever seeing him again had gone. It was just that the three days they had spent together had felt so utterly right that it was impossible to believe that it hadn’t been meant to last for ever. She had used to invent endless excuses as to why Mal had never got in touch with her in London, as he had promised, but never once had she thought that he would simply carry straight on and fall in love with someone else.

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