Outback Boss, City Bride

‘Haven’t you ever wanted kids of your own?’ she asked, wanting the reassurance of his voice.

Hal’s face closed. ‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘Why should I?’

‘Well…I don’t know,’ she admitted. ‘I suppose I’d expect you to want to pass the land on to your children. Farmers are always supposed to think in terms of generations, aren’t they?’

‘This farmer doesn’t,’ said Hal flatly. ‘Wanting children means wanting a mother for those children.’

‘The two usually go together,’ Meredith agreed.

‘I’m not going to take the risk of marrying someone and having children. There’s no guarantee that the marriage would last. It’s hard enough under normal conditions, but when you add in isolation and drought and all the other things you have to contend with in the outback…no.’ He shook his head. ‘It’s not a risk I’m prepared to take.’

‘There’s no guarantee that a marriage wouldn’t last either,’ Meredith pointed out. ‘Some marriages are very happy.’

‘None that I know of,’ said Hal.

‘If I were talking to one of my friends in London, I’d say you had real commitment issues,’ said Meredith with one her acerbic looks.

‘What about you?’ Hal countered. ‘I don’t see you having committed yourself to marriage either.’

‘That’s because I haven’t met the right man yet, not because I’m afraid of commitment.’

Hal raised a brow in disbelief. ‘Don’t tell me you’re waiting for Mr Perfect?’

‘What’s wrong with that?’

‘Only that you strike me as a sensible woman, and it doesn’t seem like a very sensible thing to do. You must know as well as I do that no one will ever be perfect, which gives you commitment issues too,’ he said. ‘Instead of admitting that you don’t want to take the risk, you pretend you’re waiting for someone who doesn’t exist.’

‘Who says he doesn’t?’ demanded Meredith fiercely. ‘I’m not waiting for a man who’s perfect, just a man who’s perfect for me.’

‘I can’t believe a sensible girl like you would fall for that happy-ever-after fantasy,’ said Hal with a snort of contempt.

‘Actually, it’s a perfectly sensible approach.’ Meredith’s voice was cool. ‘Lucy falls in and out of love the whole time, and it always seems to me that it’s a waste of time and energy and emotion when any fool can see that it’s not going to last. It’s much more sensible to wait until you’re sure that you’ve met someone who’s going to make you happy before you let yourself fall in love.’

‘But how can you tell?’

‘You just can. I’m looking for someone kind and sensitive and intelligent. Someone with integrity. Someone I can talk to…a friend.’

Richard had been all those things. He was everything Meredith had ever wanted in a man, so of course she had fallen for him. It wasn’t Richard’s fault that he hadn’t felt the same about her. He had been quite happy being friends, and she had been terrified of scaring him away by telling him how she felt.

And then he had seen Lucy, and that had been that.

Meredith sighed.

‘It sounds to me as if you’ve got very high expectations,’ Hal commented.

‘That’s what Lucy says. She says I’m too picky, but I think you should be picky when it comes to choosing someone you’re going to spend the rest of your life with. It’s important. You and Lucy might call it having unreasonably high expectations, but I call it being sensible.’

‘And you’re not prepared to compromise?’ asked Hal, who hadn’t been able to avoid noticing that her wish list for a man didn’t include many characteristics that would apply to him. He hadn’t been particularly kind or sensitive as far as she was concerned, he had to admit.

Meredith finished her coffee and put the mug down with a little click. ‘Not on the important things,’ she told him. ‘I’ve seen lots of my friends going to enormous lengths to change themselves and their expectations when they meet a man and decide he’s The One, but I’ve never yet seen a man changing. Women will accept that their man is unreliable or reluctant to commit because they love him. They accept being taken for granted and never being made to feel that they’re special because if they didn’t accept it the relationship would be over and they’re afraid of that.

‘They can accept that if they want to,’ said Meredith, ‘but I don’t see why I should. I’m not perfect, far from it. I know I’m bossy and prickly and uncompromising and I’m never going to win a beauty contest, but I don’t want to change, and I want a man who doesn’t want me to change either. I want someone who’ll love me the way I am, someone I don’t feel the need to change for.’ She sent Hal one of her challenging looks. ‘That’s sensible, isn’t it?’

‘If you really think you’re going to meet someone who lives up to all those expectations,’ he said in a sceptical voice. ‘Have you ever met anyone who did?’

There was a tiny pause. Meredith watched a moth blunder into the blue light. ‘Once,’ she said.

‘So how come it didn’t work out?’ asked Hal harshly, unaccountably irritated by the idea of Meredith finding someone so perfect.

So unlike him.

‘Or wasn’t he so perfect after all?’

‘No, he was perfect,’ said Meredith. ‘It turned out that I wasn’t perfect for him, that’s all. But that’s OK,’ she went on composedly. ‘Maybe there’s someone else out there for me, but until I meet him I’m not going to waste my time on anyone less than perfect.’

‘You mean like me?’ said Hal, hoping that he sounded suitably amused instead of chagrined.

‘Yes, like you,’ she said. ‘As you pointed out yourself, I’m a sensible woman and that really wouldn’t be a sensible thing to do.’

CHAPTER SIX

IT MIGHT not be sensible but at least it would be something to do, Meredith thought the next morning as she carried a bucket of scraps out to the chickens, who had a large fenced run on the far side of the yard. Spotting her, they came rushing to meet her, ruffling their feathers and tumbling over in their haste.

What was she doing here? Meredith wondered. All those qualifications had got her to this point, tossing scraps to chickens in the middle of the Australian outback. The heat was crushing. Shaking out the bucket, she left the chooks to it and closed the gate behind her, walking slowly back across the yard, not at all charmed by the chickens or the dogs chained up in the shade.

It was too hot and there were too many flies. She waved them irritably from her face. It must be hundreds of miles to the nearest bar. The pub at Whyman’s Creek didn’t count. She was thinking of somewhere cool and smart where she could sit back and enjoy a frosted glass of white wine.

Here, there was just…nothing. Miles and miles and miles of nothing beneath the glaring sky. Nothing to do, no one to talk to, if one didn’t count Emma and Mickey, who could rarely be persuaded to lift their heads up from their computer games. The air was filled with the raucous cawing of crows, their cries falling mournfully into the thrumming silence.

She had been up since five to prepare breakfast. It had been a silent meal, but that was hardly surprising at that hour. Even so, Meredith had been uncomfortably aware of Hal. She had spent far more time than was necessary last night reminding herself how sensible she was in not getting involved with him.

She was attracted to him-Meredith was never less than honest with herself-but she simply couldn’t account for it. Hal wasn’t her type at all.

Richard was the kind of man she had always been attracted to, and Hal was nothing like him. Richard had twinkling brown eyes and a lovely smile. Hal’s eyes were keen and hard, his smile elusive, but he had a mouth that for some reason dried the breath in Meredith’s throat whenever her eyes rested on it.