should just try falling off like before?
'Take your foot out of the stirrup,' he said. 'Then swing your leg over the saddle. I'll catch you.'
He held his arms up as he spoke but a paralysing shyness had Copper in its grip once more and she could only stare helplessly down at him and wish that he had never been married, that the last seven years would simply dissolve and leave them as they had been then, a man and a girl bound briefly by magic.
'Come on,' said Mal as she hesitated still. 'You're going to have to get off some time!'
Somehow Copper managed to wriggle one leg over the saddle, and the next thing she knew she was slithering clumsily to the ground, Mal's hands hard at her waist. He held her for a moment and she stood with her hands resting on his shoulders for support, struggling against the overwhelming temptation to slide them round his neck and lean against him.
'Thank you,' she muttered, unable to meet his eyes in case he read the longing in her own, and after a tiny moment he let her go.
'This is where your father wanted to put the camp,' said Mal, looking around him at the tranquil scene.
'It looks perfect.' Copper cleared her throat and moved away from him in what she hoped would look a casual way. 'Well, I…I'd better take some notes.'
She threw herself into looking busy. She paced out the site and stopped to make notes, but her mind wasn't on siting tents or camp kitchens. It was on Mal, leading the horses down to the creek to drink before he tethered them in the shade. He looked tough and self-contained and somehow right, she thought, watching him move through the splintered light beneath the trees with his deliberate, unhurried tread. There was something uncompromising about him that belonged with this unrelenting landscape.
Then Mal turned to see her watching him, and Copper hurriedly bent her head back over her notebook. She couldn't take notes for ever, though, and when she thought she had impressed him enough with the fact that she only cared about business, she went to join him on the fallen tree.
Mal moved along to make room for her. There was an ironic look about his mouth as she put her notebook away. He made no comment but Copper had the feeling that he knew perfectly well that all her rushing around had just been for show, and she avoided his eye as she sat down beside him.
For a while they sat without speaking, watching Megan who was busily scooping water from the creek for some unseen project that seemed to involve a good deal of mess and mud. Behind them, the horses shifted their legs and blew softly. Slowly the peace settled around Copper, and some of the tension went out of her shoulders.
'It's a beautiful place,' she said at last.
'Yes.' Mal looked around him, and then at her. 'It wouldn't be so beautiful with a clutter of tents and a busload of tourists, though, would it?'
Copper met his eyes squarely, her own green and direct. 'Everything would be in keeping with the landscape,' she said. 'I think you'd be surprised at how beautiful it will all still be, but I'm not going to try and convince you now.' She smiled. 'I haven't forgotten what we agreed and I'm not going to waste my one chance!'
'Oh, yes, talking of our agreement…' Mal tipped his hat and resettled it on his head. 'I rang the agency at lunchtime to find out what had happened to my new housekeeper. Apparently she got offered a job as a waitress in town at the last minute and decided to take that instead.'
Copper looked at the trees reflected in the glassy water and wondered why anyone would choose to work in a restaurant when they could be somewhere like this. Then she thought about the chores she had slogged through that morning and decided that the girl, whoever she was, might have made a sensible decision.
'Are they going to send someone else?'
'They haven't got anyone immediately available, so they're going to have to advertise. It'll be at least a week before I get someone else, maybe longer.' Mal glanced at her. 'Think you can stand it for that long?'
'Of course,' said Copper, secretly relieved. She wasn't ready to go back to Adelaide yet, but nor was she ready to enquire too closely into the reasons for her reluctance to leave Birraminda. 'I said I'd stay until you got a proper housekeeper, and I will.'
'What about your commitments at home?'
'That's not a problem,' she said with some surprise. 'We got someone in to help out at the office so that I could concentrate on our plans for here, and Dad can keep an eye on things. It's not a very busy time of year, anyway.'
'I was thinking more of personal commitments,' said Mal dryly. 'Isn't anyone going to miss you?'
Would anyone miss her? She had plenty of friends who would wonder aloud where she was and wish that she was around to get a party going, but they were as busy as she was and their lives wouldn't stop without her.
'No,' said Copper with a sad smile. 'I don't think anyone will miss me very much.'
'What about this man you're so in love with?'
She had forgotten that she had told him about Glyn. 'I don't think he'll notice much difference.' She sighed and stirred some curls of dried bark in the dust with her foot. 'He was always complaining that I was never at home, anyway. I have to travel a lot, and when I'm in Adelaide there's so much paperwork to catch up with at the office. I can't be home at four o'clock every day, just waiting for him to come home.'
'You could get a different job,' said Mal.
'You sound like Glyn,' she said bitterly. 'Quite apart from the fact that Dad needs me now, I love my job. Why should I give it up?'
'No reason, if your job is more important to you than your boyfriend.'
'Why does it always have to be a choice between them?' Copper burst out in remembered frustration. 'I was perfectly happy with the way things were. Glyn knew what I was like. Why did I have to be the one to make all the compromises?'
'It doesn't sound as if you were prepared to make any compromises,' commented Mal, with an unexpectedly harsh note in his voice, and Copper's angry resentment collapsed abruptly.
'That's what Glyn said.' She took off her hat and combed her fingers dispiritedly through her hair. 'Anyway, it doesn't matter any more. I'd been in Singapore for ten days, and when I got back Glyn said he wanted to talk to me. I made a joke about it at first, said I'd have to consult my diary to see if I could arrange an appointment, but he was dead serious. He said he was fed up with coming home to an empty house and that he didn't feel there was any point in us pretending to be a couple any longer when he spent most of his time on his own. And then he said that he'd been seeing a lot of Ellie, who's a good friend of mine. Her husband left her earlier this year, and they were both lonely, and…'
Copper tried to shrug carelessly but the memory still hurt. 'Well, in the end he said he was going to move in with her. It was all very amicable. Glyn has always been one of my friends and so has Ellie. We're all part of the same crowd. I couldn't avoid seeing either of them if I wanted to keep my friends, so we were very civilised and talked it through together.'
'And you had your job to comfort you,' Mal reminded her ironically.
'Yes, I had my job,' she said in a flat voice. What had she expected? That he would be sympathetic?
Mal leant forward, linking his fingers loosely between his knees. 'So when you said you were in love with this Glyn yesterday, you weren't telling the truth?'
'Oh, I don't know…' Copper turned her hat listlessly between her hands. 'I do love Glyn. He's a great person. We even talked about getting married once, but we never got round to it.
Mal said nothing. It was impossible to tell whether his silence was sympathetic or contemptuous. 'Anyway,' she went on brightly after a while, 'at least you know now why I'm not in any hurry to go back to Adelaide. I really don't mind seeing Glyn and Ellie together, but it seems to make everybody else feel awkward when we're all together. If I'm away for a while, it'll give everyone a chance to get used to the situation.'
'It sounds to me as if this Glyn had a lucky escape.' Mal was watching his daughter playing happily in the sand, but his mouth was twisted as if with bitter remembrance. 'It must have been a shock for him to realise that you were prepared to put your business before everything else.
'My wife was like you,' he went on after a moment. 'She thought she could have everything. When I met her, she had her own chain of shops in Brisbane. I never thought she'd be prepared to give it all up to live out here, but Lisa liked the idea of being mistress of a huge outback station. She always thought big, and Birraminda was that all
