The Australians' Brides. Lilian Darcy

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      She heard him swear under his breath and understood the painful way his own words must be echoing in his head. My wife died four years ago. She hated saying it, too. Kurt and I are divorced now. It felt as if you were ripping open your clothing to show total strangers your surgical scars.

      “It’s okay,” she repeated quickly to Callan Woods. “This is a very artificial situation, isn’t it? Anyone would be crazy to hold out serious hopes of meeting the right person, no matter how much they were looking for it. But I don’t think that makes it a pointless exercise. You know, just to get a bit of practice … or … or validation, maybe. I’m divorced. And it was a horrible divorce.” See, I have scars, too. “I actually can’t think when I last talked to a man I don’t know, purely for the pleasure of making some contact.”

      He nodded, but didn’t make a direct reply. Maybe he was better at talking to his rust-colored dog. After a few seconds of silence, he said, “You’re not Australian.”

      “No. The accent’s a giveaway, isn’t it?” She smiled, but he didn’t smile back.

      “But you’re living here?” he said.

      “No, again. On vacation. Staying with an Australian friend I met in California a few years ago. Lucy. She’s great. She’s babysitting my daughter tonight. She was the one who suggested I try that photo-matching thing in the magazine, just for fun. Most of them were pretty easy.”

      “I guess it made sense, added more interest, having the magazine turn it into a kind of contest.”

      “And, yes, it was fun,” Jac agreed. “I’m not sorry I did it.”

      Oh.

      Really?

      Since when?

      She’d spent the first twenty minutes of the cocktail party feeling deeply sorry that she’d given in to such an insane impulse at Lucy’s prompting, but at some point very recently that had changed. The blue eyes? The lizard? The fact that Callan Woods wasn’t serious about this, either?

      “No,” Callan agreed. “I wouldn’t have done it, except for my mates, but, yeah, so far it’s turned out not to be as bad as I thought.”

      Jac saw the expression in his eyes. Definitely relief. An after-the-dentist kind of relief that she understood and shared, and it felt nice to share the same emotion with a man again, even if it was a man she didn’t know.

      “When do you fly home?” he asked.

      “Tuesday. Three days from now. We’ve been here a month, and I can’t believe the time has flown so fast. I’ve loved all of it, and so has Carly.”

      “Tuesday.” He relaxed a little more. “So you’re obviously not serious about tonight, either.”

      “No.”

      “Thank heavens we got that established nice and early!”

      They grinned at each other, grabbed a canapé each from a passing tray and somehow kept talking for the next two hours without quite noticing how quickly the party went by.

      “Mine? A washout,” Brant said over a state-of-the-art weekend urban café brunch the next morning, in answer to Dusty’s question. “A total washout. She had a chip on her shoulder so big I’m surprised she could stand straight. When I told her that being single didn’t bother me all that much, she acted as if I’d personally insulted her. She gave every one of my questions a one-syllable answer and couldn’t come up with a single bit of small talk when it was her turn. Thank the Lord you didn’t get her, Call.”

      “Why me?” Callan asked.

      Brant frowned. “Why you, what?”

      “Why is it good that I didn’t get her? You think I’m particularly incapable of dealing with women with big shoulder chips and no small talk? Why?”

      “Mine was great,” Dusty cut in before Brant could answer, but not before he and Brant had exchanged a strange, uneasy, lightning-fast look. “A genuine, decent woman who knows what she wants and doesn’t mind saying so. There’s a good chance we’ll stay in touch. I’m telling you, it was a heck of a lot better than I expected, the whole thing.” He added quickly and awkwardly, “And, you know, I thought it was a promising idea from the start, so …”

      Hang on a minute.

      Dusty had a look on his face that Callan recognized. It spoke loudly of his awareness that he wasn’t a very good liar, but what was he lying about?

      Callan began slowly, putting the puzzle pieces in place as he spoke, “So you don’t mind that you’re single, Brant, and you’re suddenly pretending you thought this was a promising way for an isolated outback cattleman to meet a future wife, Dusty, even though four seconds ago you pretty much stated the opposite ….” He paused, watched the guilty expressions on his mates’ faces. “Can one of you tell me the real reason we put ourselves through this?”

      He wasn’t stupid.

      He didn’t really need their answer.

      Which was good, because they both stumbled through some garbled piece of bull dust and didn’t actually give him one.

      While the stumbling thing was still happening, he thought about whether he was angry with them—whether he wanted to be angry, whether he even had the energy.

      Brant and Dusty had set him up in the worst way. They’d conspired behind his back. They’d conned him into putting his picture and his life story and his heartfelt feelings in a national women’s magazine. Why? In the hope that he might meet someone? Or … or … start to believe in the possibility of someday meeting someone? Or … or … even just enjoy himself for a night and get a bit of an ego tickle from the bunch of eager women’s letters the magazine had started sending him?

      Angry about it?

      To his own surprise he found himself grinning, after a moment. When all was said and done, they were his best friends. They meant well. They would never let him down. They were idiots, and he liked them.

      “Serves you bloody right if yours was a washout, Branton Smith. Serves you right, Dustin Tanner, if you never hear from yours again. Me, like a prize con victim, thought I was helping you out, going along for the ride. Turns out I wasn’t, and I’m not looking for anything beyond … yeah … keeping my boys happy, but I had a good time last night, talking to Jacinda.”

      He knew it couldn’t go anywhere. He didn’t want it to, and neither did she. That was probably the only reason they’d been able to talk to each other so freely in the first place—because of the safety valve of her imminent departure and the glaring nature of his loss and her divorce.

      She looked nothing like Liz, and that was a big plus, also. Where Liz had been compact and strong, Jacinda was long and willowy. She had big, luminous gray eyes, not twinkling, sensible green ones. She had wild dark hair, in contrast to Liz’s neat, silky waterfall of medium blond, and an even, magnolia-olive skin tone, instead of fairness and freckles. Voices, accents, backgrounds, all of it was different and therefore much safer. Safe enough for him to feel as if Jacinda could be a friend, a new kind of friend, if he ever needed one.

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