Captivated By The Single Dad. Barbara Hannay

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СКАЧАТЬ to her family’s farm and saw the green pastures and red barns of Vermont.

      Tomorrow Anna and Josh would reach their new home. Holly hoped, for their sakes, but more especially for Gray’s sake, that they liked it. Actually, it was her job to make sure that they did.

      Gray couldn’t sleep.

      Leaving his bed, he prowled the length of his hotel room, trying to shrug off the tension that kept him awake. He’d lied to Holly tonight. He’d told her that feelings and memories faded with time but, after his mother’s cool reception at the airport today, and his conversation with Holly about Chelsea, he was once again battling with the feelings of inadequacy and failure that had dogged him all his life.

      As a child he’d never lived up to his mother’s expectations. Hell, he hadn’t even come close. He could still hear the way she’d yelled at his father.

      The boy’s hopeless. Unteachable. A disgrace.

      Even now, the memory brought his clenched fist slamming into his palm.

      Was he never going to shake off these patterns of failure? First his mother had left Jabiru, never to return, and then his wife had left, and both times he’d known he was a major cause of their problems.

      If he’d been able to, he would have taken Chelsea to live in Sydney, as Holly had so innocently suggested. He would have taken her to New York or wherever she wanted to live.

      But, thanks to his lack of schooling, he was unemployable in the city, and even if he’d sold his property and invested in stocks and shares to eke out a living, he would have gone mad in the claustrophobic city. After twenty-four hours, he was always chafing at the bit to get away to the bush.

      He’d tried his best to love and support Chelsea at Jabiru. When the twins arrived, he’d done everything he could to hold his little family together. He’d been a hands-on father, taking his turn at bathing and changing and walking the floors with the crying infants.

      But the timing had been lousy. The babies’ arrival had coincided with a downturn in the cattle industry. Overseas markets had collapsed. Money had been tight and, before the babies were six months old, he’d been forced to lay off the fencing contractors and the mechanics he’d hired, and he’d taken on these jobs himself.

      When these tasks were added to the usual demands of running a vast cattle property, his available time to help at the homestead had been minimal. He’d kept on his housekeeper, who’d also helped with the twins, but the toll on Chelsea had been visible.

      Gray had been shocked to see her growing thin and drawn and faded, so he’d sent her to Sydney for short breaks. And, as he’d admitted to Holly, the times she’d spent away had become longer and longer.

      When his wife had told him she needed to go home to New York, he’d let her go, taking the children with her, even though he hadn’t been free to accompany them. By then he’d known that to try to hold her was too cruel.

      When she’d rung from New York to tell him she wasn’t coming back, Gray had been heartsick but not surprised. He’d agreed to the divorce, accepting that he’d had no other option.

      He’d tried his hardest and failed, and he had no idea what else he could do. He would rather admit defeat than watch his wife become trapped and embittered the way his mother had been.

      But his sense of failure was overwhelming, even worse now that Chelsea had passed away. He hated to think that his love had made any part of her short life unhappy and he was determined that he wouldn’t fail her children as well. He couldn’t, he mustn’t.

      These next two months were critical. He would be guided by Holly and he wouldn’t be too proud to accept her advice. Sure, there were bound to be humiliating moments when his inadequacies were exposed once more, and Holly would probably be as disdainful of his home as Chelsea had been.

      But he could face another woman’s scorn—as long as his kids still looked up to him—and as long as he didn’t let them down.

      By the following afternoon, they were finally in Far North Queensland, barrelling over flat, pale grasslands in a big four-wheel drive which threw up a continuous plume of dust. The vehicle had a luggage rack on top, and bull bars protecting the engine—from kangaroos, Gray told them—and there were water tanks on board as well. To Holly it felt like an expedition.

      Wide open plains sprinkled with straggly gum trees and silvery grey Brahman cattle stretched in every direction. Flocks of white birds wheeled in the blue sky like fluttering pieces of paper.

      In the back seat, the children watched the panorama excitedly, waiting for their first kangaroo sighting.

      ‘This is my country,’ Gray told Holly and his emphasis on the word country seemed to instil it with special meaning.

      Holly had to agree there was something primitive but almost spiritual about the vast stretch of empty space. She could feel an awareness of something greater than herself and, strangely, it wasn’t unlike the way she’d also felt the first time she’d walked into the huge book-lined silence of the New York City Library.

      Every so often their vehicle would climb over a rocky ridge, giving a view of grasslands stretching for ever. At other times the road would dip downwards to cross a single lane wooden bridge over a stream. Some creeks only had a concrete ford disappearing beneath brown muddy water.

      ‘There’s no water here at all in the dry season,’ Gray told her.

      They came to a wider river, so deep that when Gray pushed the vehicle through, the water threatened to seep under the doors.

      He grinned at Holly. ‘This is where I did my ankle in, but the creek was flowing a lot faster then, of course.’

      The tops of the banks were still covered in flattened grass and the small twisted trees were all leaning in one direction, clear evidence of how high and savage the floodwaters had been.

      Holly hated to think what it must have been like to try to drive through it.

      ‘I thought you had an airstrip at Jabiru,’ she said. ‘Couldn’t you have flown instead of driving?’

      Gray shook his head. ‘The ground was too boggy for a normal plane to land—and all the choppers were needed for emergency rescues. I waited for the water to go down a little, then took my chances.’

      How scary. Holly shuddered, as she tried to imagine pushing a vehicle through a raging flood.

      ‘And that was when you broke your ankle?’ she asked.

      ‘I was testing the bottom before I drove across. Foot went down into a crevice.’

      ‘You weren’t on your own, were you?’

      ‘Sure.’

      ‘You mean you had to rescue yourself?’

      ‘It was either that or—’ He flicked a glance over his shoulder and dropped his voice. ‘Or this pair would have been orphans.’

      Holly shivered, chastened to remember how she’d rolled her eyes and complained loudly when Gray had telephoned to say he was held up in Australia by floods and a broken ankle. Now that she was here, and could see where СКАЧАТЬ