Outback Boss, City Bride

him.

‘I’ll miss you,’ he told her, his voice cracking. ‘I’ll miss you more than I can say, but there’s no future for us. You know that.’

‘I know,’ she managed, muffled by his shirt, her arms around his back, clutching him. ‘I know.’

‘You’re a city girl, and I live in the outback. If you stayed, you’d get bored, sooner or later, and then you would want to go.’

And you couldn’t take being abandoned again, Meredith thought to herself. She couldn’t take the risk of hurting him. She nodded again. ‘I know, Hal. You’re right.’

‘Richard lives the same kind of life as you,’ Hal went on, as if determined to prove to himself that saying goodbye was the right thing to do. ‘You told me that you liked the same things. You both like music and food and going to Italy, all that kind of stuff. You’d miss all that eventually.’

‘Yes, I probably would.’ Meredith struggled to help him. She knew he was finding this as hard as she was. ‘And we always said it was just a temporary thing, didn’t we? That was what we both wanted.’

‘Yes.’ Just at that moment, Hal couldn’t remember why he’d wanted it, but he knew that it was right.

‘I just…don’t know how I’m going to say goodbye to you,’ she burst out.

Hal’s arms tightened around her. ‘It’s going to be hard,’ he acknowledged, ‘but we were always going to have to say it some time.’

‘You’re right.’

Meredith pulled herself determinedly away from him and forced her wobbly mouth into an approximation of a smile. ‘It looks like it’s time to start being sensible again,’ she said.

‘That’s my girl,’ said Hal, although his throat felt so tight it was hard to get the words out.

‘So…’ She straightened her shoulders. The last thing Hal needed was her turning weepy and clingy at this point.

She found another smile, a better one this time. ‘You go back to the yards and I’ll make this cake, and then I’ll find out about flights back to London. And we’ll find a way to say goodbye when the time comes.’

CHAPTER TEN

‘GOT everything?’

Meredith took a last look around the kitchen. She hadn’t brought much with her, and she wasn’t taking anything away. Except memories.

She picked up her laptop. ‘Yes,’ she said.

Hal had her case in one hand. He held open the screen door with the other and Meredith walked through it for the last time. Her shoes clicked on the wooden veranda and down the steps to where the truck was parked.

At the bottom she stopped and looked towards the creek where the ghost gums leaned, and then up at the tree where the galahs gathered. They were there now, huddled together along the branches in lines of pink and grey. It was very quiet.

Hal put her case in the back of the truck and, as if at a signal, the galahs erupted off the branches with much squawking and flurrying of feathers. They took off into the brilliant blue sky in a blur of pink, turning as one so that their wings flashed silver in what might have been farewell.

Meredith’s vision blurred as she got into the truck. This is the last time, she had been thinking ever since last night. The last time she would make love with Hal, the last time she’d lie against him and feel him breathing, the last time she would clutch at his hair and gasp his name. The last time she’d hear his boots on the steps, the last time she would see him put his hat on his head, the way he was doing right now.

Hal didn’t speak as they drove down the track, and Meredith didn’t look back. She sat staring straight ahead of her, concentrating on not crying, on just sitting there and breathing deeply.

On being sensible.

Hal was going to fly her into Whyman’s Creek where she would pick up the plane to Darwin as Lucy had done, not so long before. Meredith had never been in such a small plane. It had four seats and a single propeller on its nose, but she was too wretched even to feel nervous, and Hal seemed to know what he was doing. He checked the controls, his eyes cool and calm, his fingers deft, and then the little plane was speeding down the runway, faster and faster, until it lifted into the air.

Meredith’s stomach dipped as the ground dropped away beneath them. Had Lucy felt like this? she wondered. As if her heart were being torn out of her as the plane lifted into that immense sky?

Hal banked over the homestead and, as they turned, Meredith saw the corrugated iron roof flash in the sunlight. There was one last glimpse of the grey-green trees along the creek and then were they climbing, turning and climbing up into the blue. She craned her neck, suddenly desperate not to lose sight of it, but the homestead was already receding, growing smaller and smaller until it disappeared into the vast, featureless brown landscape and was gone.

They flew in silence. There was nothing to say. There was too much to say. You’re being sensible, Meredith kept telling herself. It’s the sensible thing to do. Just say goodbye and go.

Hal landed the plane at Whyman’s Creek’s tiny airport and taxied over to where several small planes like his were parked in a row. When he cut the engine and the propeller died, the silence was overwhelming.

Hal took a deep breath. ‘Meredith-’ he began, but she interrupted him.

‘Wait!’ she begged him. ‘You don’t need to say anything, Hal. In a moment, I’m going to get out and take my case and say goodbye. I’m going to get on the Darwin plane and I’m going to go home, and I’m not going to look back because we both know it’s the right thing to do.’

She drew an unsteady breath and made herself go on. ‘But…but I want you to know that the last few weeks have been the best of my life, and whatever happens there will always be a bit of me that still loves you the way I do now.’

Hal had turned in his seat to look at her and now he cupped her face between big, gentle palms. ‘I love you too,’ he said, very simply, because in the end, what else was there to say? They kissed, not a deep, passionate kiss, but one that was warm, tender, and heartbreakingly sweet, and Meredith’s eyes were starry with tears when their lips parted at last.

‘I won’t ever forget you, Meredith,’ Hal told her. ‘I just wish…’

‘That we weren’t the people we are?’ she finished for him as his voice trailed off hopelessly. Losing the battle with a tear that spilled over her lashes, she wiped it away with a hurried finger.

He nodded. ‘I wish we could do something about it, but we can’t.’

‘No.’ Meredith took a deep, steadying breath. ‘No, we can’t.’

She gathered up her laptop. ‘I think I’d better go, Hal. Don’t come with me. I don’t think I can bear it. Let’s say goodbye here.’

So he simply lifted her case out of the plane and pulled up the handle so that she could trundle it along behind her. Meredith hoisted her laptop on to her shoulder and hesitated, holding her sunglasses in her hand.

‘Actually,’ she said, her voice high and cracked with strain, ‘I don’t think I’m going to be able to say goodbye.’

‘Then we won’t say it,’ said Hal. His chest was so tight he could hardly breathe. ‘Travel safely, Meredith. Be happy.’

She looked at him for one last moment, her vision swimming with unshed tears, and then she put on her sunglasses, took hold of her case blindly and walked away across the tarmac to the hut that passed as a terminal at Whyman’s Creek.

Hal stood in the shade of the little plane and watched her disappear inside. A few minutes later the Darwin plane landed. It disgorged two passengers, and four more came out from the terminal and walked up the steps. Meredith’s walk was so familiar to him by now that he could have spotted her even in a crowd.

He saw her hesitate at the bottom of the steps and glance his way, and he raised a hand to her. She lifted hers back and then went on up the steps and into the plane.

Come back! Hal wanted to shout.