Outback Man Seeks Wife Read online

  Carrie reached for something to hold on to.

  Click, click, click! It all came together. She’s not mine!

  A trembling began right through her body. A profound sadness filled her eyes. Nonetheless, she didn’t step backwards, but forwards. She was devastated, but to her wonderment, not demolished. She’s not mine! Hadn’t such a thing been implied by his behaviour all these years?

  ‘Shut up and keep your voice down,’ Alicia ordered in a voice akin to the sharp crack of a whip. ‘Carrie will be home soon.’

  ‘She’s home now.’ Carrie found herself in the kitchen, where her parents or her mother and the man she thought was her father faced each other across the table like combatants in a deadly battle. ‘Would someone like to explain to me what I just overheard?’

  Alicia’s face went paper-white. ‘Carrie, darling!’ She rushed to her daughter who stood stricken but resolute in the open doorway.

  Carrie held up her hand, warding her mother off. ‘Who exactly am I, Mum? Is there anyone in this world who hasn’t betrayed me? My father all these long years isn’t my father at all. So who is? I’m not going anywhere until you tell me.’ Her dark eyes bore into her mother’s. ‘That’s if you know?’

  Bruce McNevin stood watching Carrie with such an odd look on his face. ‘Please don’t speak to your mother like that,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry you had to hear that. I’m just so terribly upset.’

  ‘You’re upset?’ Alicia rounded tempestuously on her husband, unleashing one of her stunning tennis backhands. ‘You miserable bastard!’ she cried. ‘You miserable whining cur! You swore you’d never tell her.’

  Bruce McNevin stood as stiff as a ramrod against the blow, the imprint of Alicia’s hand clear on his cheek. ‘I didn’t tell her. She overheard. This was just supposed to be between you and me, Alicia.’

  ‘God!’ Alicia moaned. ‘I don’t want to live with you anymore, Bruce. You’ve killed whatever feeling I had for you. Carrie is my daughter. I love her best in the world. Far more than I could ever love you.’

  ‘But you never loved me, did you?’ Bruce McNevin’s grey eyes glittered strangely. ‘I’ve been the one who’s done all the loving.’

  Carrie intervened, saying what she had to say as if it were enormously important. ‘You don’t know the first thing about love. You don’t even know about simple compassion. You’re a cold man. You think only of yourself. God, it must have been so hard for you fathering a child that wasn’t yours. Why didn’t you tell Mum to have an abortion?’

  A white line ringed Bruce McNevin’s tight mouth. ‘She wouldn’t have it, that’s why!’

  Alicia shook her head, her eyes full of grief. ‘Never, never!’

  ‘So who’s my father, Mum?’ Carrie ignored the tears pouring down her mother’s face. ‘Or is it as I said. You don’t know.’

  ‘She’s knows all right,’ Bruce McNevin burst out furiously. ‘But she couldn’t marry him. He was married already. I was the poor fool who took her to the altar.’

  ‘It was all you ever wanted.’ Alicia rounded on her husband with utter contempt.

  ‘I loved you then. I love you now,’ Bruce McNevin’s grey eyes turned imploring.

  ‘Totally amazing!’ Alicia gave a broken crow of laughter. ‘You actually believe it. This marriage is over, Bruce. All these years I’ve lived with your emotional blackmail. Now it’s out in the open.’

  His answer was full of fear. ‘You don’t mean that. You’ll never leave me, Alicia. It would be very wrong and dishonourable. I’ve been good to you, haven’t I? I’ve tried my best with Carrie, but the way she looks at me! It’s like she’s always known.’

  ‘I guess some part of me did,’ Carrie said. ‘Now I don’t give a damn which one of you leaves. All I need to know is the name of my real father, then I’m out of here.’

  ‘Where to? You have nowhere to go.’ Alicia made another attempt to take her daughter in her arms, but Carrie would have none of it.

  ‘Oh, yes, I have,’ she said.

  ‘I hope you’re not talking about Cunningham?’ Bruce McNevin’s breath escaped in a long hiss.

  ‘None of your bloody business,’ Carrie said, enunciating very clearly. ‘Who’s my father, Mum. I must know.’

  ‘You’re crazy!’ Bruce McNevin said.

  ‘Shut up, Bruce!’ Alicia looked positively dangerous. She turned her head towards her daughter. ‘I can’t tell you, Carrie. Maybe one day.’

  ‘One day very soon.’ Carrie was adamant. ‘Understand? Now tell the truth if you can, Mamma. Did my real father know about me?’

  Alicia’s white face flushed deeply. ‘I never told him.’

  ‘He had a right to know.’

  ‘Yes, he did,’ Alicia admitted, revealing the depth of her old anguish.

  ‘What would he have done, do you think?’

  ‘He’d have bloody well wrecked his marriage,’ Bruce McNevin suddenly shouted. ‘A good marriage, mind you. Two small children. Two boys. I never had a son,’ he cried, his voice full of bitterness.

  ‘Nothing wrong with me, Bruce,’ Alicia said. ‘You never would see a doctor.’ She turned her attention back to her daughter. ‘I couldn’t tell your real father I was pregnant, Carrie. I couldn’t do it to him,’ she confessed, brokenheartedly.

  ‘No, but you could do it to me,’ said Carrie. ‘That makes you a ruthless person. I should hate you, Mamma. I’m not sure I don’t right now. You were supposed to protect me. Not deliver the two of us up to this man.’ Her gentle voice was harsh.

  Alicia collapsed into a chair, crumpling up over the table. ‘Please don’t go, darling. Don’t leave me,’ she sobbed. ‘We’ll go together.’

  Carrie shook her head. ‘You have your husband. You’ve stuck it out with him all this time. I am going to find my father. With or without your help.’

  ‘He’ll never recognise you as his daughter,’ Bruce McNevin told her, the expression on his face half scorn for Carrie, half misery for himself. ‘Not even now when his wife is dead. Scandal can’t touch a man like that.’

  ‘Oh, yes, he will.’ Alicia’s tears abruptly turned off. ‘I know that much about him.’

  ‘Then perhaps when you’re ready you’ll give me his name,’ Carrie said. ‘I don’t intend to embarrass him. I just want to see him with my own eyes.’

  ‘You have seen him, you little fool!’ Bruce McNevin had totally lost his habitual cool. One side of his face was paper-white, the other flushed with blood. ‘All you have to do is watch television.’

  ‘What’s he talking about, Mum?’ Carrie asked.

  ‘Go ahead. Tell her,’ Bruce McNevin dared his wife.

  ‘Is he some television personality?’ Carrie asked with something like amazement.

  ‘No, no, nothing like that!’ Alicia shook her head. ‘He’s an important man, Carrie.’

  ‘Oh, listen to her! He’s an important man. And I’m not?’ Bruce McNevin glared at his wife.

  ‘Oh, shut up, Bruce,’ she said yet again. ‘I wish to God you’d just been kind. I’ll tell you when I’m ready, Carrie. Please don’t ask me now.’

  Carrie could see the trembling in her mother’s hands. ‘Okay,’ she sighed, her heart torn. ‘Now I hope you don’t mind if I throw a few things in a bag. It won’t take me long. I’ll get the rest of my things picked up.’

  ‘Carrie, no!’ Alicia jumped up, her voice full of emotion. ‘Please stay. We’ll work something out.’

  ‘Not anymore, Mum.’

  ‘Let me handle this, Alicia,’ Bruce McNevin said, striding after Carrie as though she were deliberately causing her mother unnecessary pain. ‘Where are you going, Carrie? Answer me.’

  ‘Sorry, Mr McNevin.’ Carrie turned with great severity on the man she had called father. ‘You’ve given your last performance. You’ve waited for this a long time. You wanted me out? Be thankful. I’m going!’

  When she arrived at Jimboorie, a red sun was sinking towards the jewelled horizon. Carrie stepped out of her 4WD, which
one of their employees had brought back from the town only that morning, looking up at the great house. There was the glow of lights inside. She had parked right at the base of the flight of stone stairs, now she leaned into the vehicle keeping her palm pressed flat on the horn.

  I’m on the run, she thought. I’m a fugitive. A profoundly wounded woman.

  At least Clay was at home. She felt in her jeans pocket for the folded note paper she intended to present to him. He would understand what it was. It was her response to the advertisement for a wife he’d never placed. Surely he’d told her she would fit the bill? She had nowhere else to go. And nowhere else she wanted to be.

  Clay’s tall rangy figure appeared on the verandah. ‘Caroline, what’s up?’

  She gave him a pathetic little wave, feeling pushed to the limit, yet in the space of a nanosecond the vision of herself as a child waving to him while Clay, the handsome little boy, waved back flared like a bright light. For weeks and weeks she had searched the archives of her mind for that cherished memory. Now like some miracle it presented itself, bringing her a moment of happiness.

  Clay lost no time covering the distance between them, moving through the portico and taking the steps in a single leap.

  ‘I’ve just remembered waving to you when I was a little girl. Isn’t that strange?’

  ‘Strange and beautiful,’ he said, staring down at her ‘That meant a lot to me, Caroline.’ He spoke quietly, gently, seeing her disturbed state. ‘What’s happened?’

  She looked up at him a little dazedly. ‘I’ve left home and I’m never going back.’

  He absorbed that without comment. ‘Come inside the house,’ he said, tucking her to his side. ‘You’re trembling.’

  A parched laugh escaped her lips. ‘How come nothing shocks me to the core anymore?’

  ‘You’re in shock, that’s why,’ he pointed out, already feeling concern he could have been a cause of the family fallout.

  From somewhere furniture had appeared in the drawing room; a huge brown leather chesterfield and two deep leather armchairs. A carved Chinese chest acting as a coffee table stood on a beautiful Persian rug all rich rubies and deep blues. She looked at the comfortable arrangement with a little frown on her face. ‘Where did these things come from?’

  ‘Out the back,’ he said, offhandedly. ‘There’s more in store in Toowoomba. So are you going to tell me?’ He led her to an armchair, waited until she was seated. ‘What happened? Did you have an argument with your father?’

  ‘What father?’ she said.

  Clay’s face darkened. ‘He surely couldn’t have told you to go?’

  Carrie shrugged. ‘No, I did that all by myself.’

  ‘Look, would you like coffee?’ Clay suggested. ‘I’ve got some good coffee beans. Won’t take me a moment to grind them and put the percolator on.’

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ she said, her movements almost trancelike.

  Furniture had been moved into the enormous kitchen as well. It hadn’t been there on her visit. He really was settling in. A long refectory table adorned the centre of the room with six carved wooden chairs, Scottish baronial, arranged around it, three to each side. The seats were upholstered in luxurious dark green leather. The huge matching carver stood at the head of the table. ‘Expecting guests?’ she asked, starting to drag out one chair. God, either it was heavy or she had lost her strength.

  ‘You’re here,’ Clay pointed out, directing her to the carver instead, with its substantial armrests. A big man, it suited him fine. It nearly swallowed her up.

  ‘This is a marvellous kitchen,’ she said, looking around her. ‘Or it could be. These chairs really belong in a dining room, you know.’ She ran her hands along the oak armrests. ‘Were they shipped out from England? They’re antique. Early nineteenth century, I’d say.’

  ‘Plenty more where they came from,’ he said, busying himself setting out china mugs. ‘While you were visiting Harper, I took a look at what was in storage. My favourite things were still there. Things I remember from when I was a child. There’ll be more than enough to furnish the ground floor. I don’t know about upstairs. Twelve bedrooms takes a bit of furnishing. At least I have a bed.’

  ‘That’s good,’ she said wryly. ‘Somewhere to rest a weary head. You might want to take a look at this.’ She stretched her right leg so she could remove the folded notepaper from the pocket of her tight fitting jeans.

  ‘What is it? Hang on a moment, I’ll just grind these beans.’

  Carrie covered her ears, counting to about twenty.

  A few moments later, the percolator on the massive stove, Clay took the seat right of her. ‘So what’s this?’ He unfolded the crumpled paper, looking at it with interest.

  ‘It’s not my best effort. I just had enough time to get down the facts,’ she explained, very carefully, very precisely.

  He turned his head to stare into her large, almond eyes. She was hurting badly but she wasn’t going to say. ‘Is this what I think it is?’

  ‘Read on,’ she invited, with an encouraging little movement of her hand.

  He began again. ‘This is truly remarkable, Caroline,’ he said when he had finished. ‘On the scale of one to ten, I’d give you an eleven. No, wait, a twelve!’ He refolded the letter and thrust it into his breast pocket.

  ‘Isn’t it good,’ she agreed. ‘I mean it’s so good you won’t need to advertise for anyone else.’

  ‘Well, that will certainly save a lot of time,’ he said briskly. ‘It’s all happening around here. I have a firm lined up to fix the roof and a team of tradesmen to do the repairs. They’ll be kept busy for months. There’s an expert on the environment—a Professor Langley, my old professor—calling some time soon to advise about drought and flood management on the station. He’s brilliant. He’s bound to know someone to restore the garden.’

  ‘Good heavens, you have been busy.’ For a few moments he had completely taken her mind from her own problems. ‘Where’s all the money coming from?

  ‘You,’ he said.

  She caught the gentle mockery in his eyes. ‘I don’t come with a dowry, Clay,’ she said sadly. ‘I daresay I’ll be cut out of my ex-father’s will without delay. I do have a little nest egg from Nona. That’s my grandmother, Alicia’s mother. I wish Nona were here, but she went to live in Italy after my grandfather died. You’re welcome to that.’

  ‘Why how very sweet of you.’ Clay lightly encircled her wrist. ‘But such a sacrifice isn’t necessary. That money is yours. Don’t feel bad about not coming with a dowry. I told you Great-Uncle Angus was far from broke. In fact he’d have given Scrooge a run for his money.’

  ‘So he left you the money as well.’

  ‘I guess I was the only one he could think of.’ Clay’s comment was sardonic. ‘One way or another we have enough.’ He lifted her hand and kissed it.

  ‘How upset that’s going to make your relatives!’ Carrie, numb for hours, awoke to sensation. ‘They were hoping it was all going to fall down around your ears.’

  ‘Instead of which I get to marry the princess and share the pot of gold,’ he said, gazing deeply into her eyes. ‘Now tell me what’s causing all this suffering? Take your time.’

  ‘Mum had an affair before she was married.’ She spoke in a voice utterly devoid of emotion.

  Clay’s strong hand closed over her trembling fingers. What was coming next just had to be momentous.

  ‘The man I thought was my father all these years isn’t my father at all.’ Carrie gave him a heartbreaking smile. ‘Can you beat that?’

  ‘How could they do that to you?’ Clay felt the blood drain from his own face.

  Carrie shrugged. ‘Apparently he was married with two kids, but he wasn’t worried about committing adultery. Neither was Mum. He must have been Someone even then. Mum decided she couldn’t break up his marriage. She married Bruce McNevin instead.’

  ‘So that explains it,’ Clay said, steel in his voice.

  ‘At least Mum
didn’t consider a termination.’

  ‘Thank God for that!’ he breathed, unable to contemplate a world without Caroline. ‘So how did this all come out? I mean what provoked it after all these years?’

  She pulled a sad little clown’s face. ‘You know the old saying. Eavesdroppers never hear well of themselves? I could hear them arguing when I arrived back at the house for lunch. They never argue. I heard my father say, “She’s not mine! How can you expect me to love her? She’s not my blood!’”

  Muscles flexed hard along Clay’s jawline. ‘Go on. You have to get this off your chest.’ He stood up to pour the perked coffee, setting a mug down before her then moving the sugar bowl close to her hand. ‘Do you want milk or cream?’

  ‘Black’s fine.’ She spooned a teaspoon of sugar into the mug and absently began to stir.

  ‘Have another teaspoon of sugar,’ he urged. ‘You’re awfully pale. Wasn’t your mother worried about your driving?’

  Carrie nodded. ‘She begged me not to go but I couldn’t stay in his house another moment. He’s only tolerated me because of Mum. He’s still madly in love with her. So what the hell’s wrong with me? Am I so unlovable?’

  Clay felt a rush of anger on her behalf. ‘That’s the last thing you have to worry about,’ he said so emphatically she felt immensely relieved.

  ‘You really want to marry me now? I could turn into a pure liability. Well?’ she pressed, directly holding his eyes. ‘Answer me, Clay.’

  ‘You aren’t going to order me to marry you, are you?’ he asked gently.

  ‘Not unless you want an illegitimate bride. Mum wouldn’t even tell me who my real father is. He knows.’

  ‘Who, McNevin?’

  ‘Yes. Don’t worry, I’ll find out.’

  ‘Then what will you do?’ he asked very seriously.

  ‘I don’t mean to embarrass my real father, Clay,’ she explained carefully. ‘I just want to lay eyes on him. Can you understand that?’

  ‘Caroline, God!’ He was debating whether to pick her up and carry her upstairs. If ever a girl needed loving it was this beautiful traumatised young creature. ‘Of course I understand. It’s hard to feel whole when you only know the identity of one parent.’