Claiming His Family. Barbara Hannay

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      ‘You and—and Dad.’ He peered up at her and looked frightened. ‘Are you crying, Mom?’

      ‘No.’ Hastily, she pulled Joey to her with a one-armed hug while she sniffed and used her other hand to swipe at her eyes. She kissed the top of his head. ‘Your dad and I were just talking. Sorry if we got a little loud.’

      ‘You sounded mad.’ Joey looked past her. ‘Where’s Dad now?’

      ‘He’s gone back to his room.’

      ‘Why?’

      ‘Because—because he needs to sleep. And so do I. So do you.’

      ‘I’m not tired any more.’

      Erin’s heart sank to the floor. She was emotionally wrung out and dead on her feet. She couldn’t bear it if Joey was wakeful now.

      ‘I’ll get room service to bring us some hot chocolate and something to eat,’ she said. ‘We’ll have it together in my big bed and then you can snuggle up with me.’

      The boy’s bottom lip protruded as he thought about this. ‘What can we have to eat?’

      ‘What would you like?’

      ‘Pancakes?’

      ‘Pancakes at this hour?’ Two seconds later, she shrugged. ‘Why not? I’m sure the hotel can fix them for us. And then the sooner you get to sleep the sooner you’ll see your dad in the morning.’

      She was rewarded with a huge grin.

      What exactly was our problem?

      Why, Luke wondered, had he asked Erin that? After all, he’d had five years to come up with his own answers. He’d worked out exactly why their marriage had ended.

      At the time, he hadn’t seen it coming. There’d been no lead up. No storm warning.

      It was only later that he’d understood that he should have taken Erin’s concerns seriously. When she’d fretted about the baby he’d tried to jolly her out of it, had told her she worried too much.

      When she’d got mad with him for spending too much time away working with cattle he hadn’t tried to explain the pressures of running the property, he’d simply tried to shrug and crack a joke. Which had been pretty damn thoughtless. But he hated conflict.

      If there had been a problem—a little bickering—he’d tended to say, ‘Let’s forget it and have a cuddle.’ Erin, on the other hand, was a bit of a terrier. She was an up-front person. She wanted to push an issue through to the bitter end.

      But tonight he’d been the terrier pushing her, goading her. Why the hell couldn’t he stay calm and play this game her way? Their marriage was over.

      Why was that so hard to remember?

      What exactly was our problem?

      Erin lay staring at the ceiling, desperate for sleep, while Luke’s question echoed in her head.

      How could Luke pretend not to know the answer? Their problem had been clear as day. Right from the start it had been there in letters ten feet high for everyone to see—everyone, that was, except the two of them, blinded by foolish, foolish passion.

      Luke’s parents and the Mannings’ neighbours and the ranch hands—they had all known that Luke’s Yankee bride was wrong for him. Her taste in clothes, her accent, her complexion, her attitude—everything was wrong.

      The people at Warrapinya were friendly enough, but they had shown Erin, with varying degrees of subtlety, that she didn’t fit in. Even the contract fencing team, who had spent a few weeks on the property repairing barbed wire fences, had looked at her with puzzled smiles and she knew they’d joked about her behind her back.

      Even so, she felt so terribly, terribly guilty because the things that had ended their marriage were so small really. Luke hadn’t gambled or drunk excessively or beaten her. But the little problems had snowballed till they loomed too large.

      And that had been before Joey was born and her real problems started.

      Everything had become completely clear once she had been safely back in NewYork. How could she ever have been so idiotic as to think she could live anywhere else?

      CHAPTER THREE

      THE scratch of a key turning in a lock woke Erin, but although she heard the sound quite distinctly she felt too drugged by sleep to respond.

      She lay very still, drifting slowly up and up from the murky depths of deep slumber, aware of sounds…the rattle of the door opening and the thud of it closing. Then silence. Lovely. She could sink back into the mattress. She could…

      Her eyes flashed open. Something was wrong. The silence was wrong. Was someone tiptoeing about in her room? An intruder?

      Squinting through semi-darkness she saw unfamiliar furniture. The windows were covered by heavy curtains, but glimmers at either ends of the fabric indicated dazzling daylight outside.

      Then she heard a loud whisper. ‘Do you think she’s awake yet?’

      Joey.

      Erin lurched upright, her heart racing as she remembered she was in a hotel in Sydney. How long had she slept? Oh, God, how long had Joey been awake? What had he been doing? Who was he talking to?

      She flung the bedclothes aside just as two figures appeared at the door to her bedroom, one very tall, the other small.

      ‘Mommy, you’re awake!’ A small, Joey-shaped torpedo launched across the carpet towards her. ‘You’ve been asleep all day.’

      ‘All day? I can’t have.’

      ‘Only half a day.’ Luke’s voice came from the doorway. ‘It’s just gone noon.’

      Noon. Erin groaned. This day was the last time she had with Joey before he left for North Queensland. And she’d wasted half of it. Why hadn’t she factored jet lag into her planning?

      ‘We’ve already had breakfast and lunch,’ Joey announced. ‘’Cause I was starving.’ With a happy grin, he threw himself beside her on the bed. His cheeks glowed pink, as if he’d been running and playing outdoors. ‘Guess what we had for lunch?’

      Erin was super-aware of Luke watching from the doorway. Joey was sitting on top of the sheets so she couldn’t use them to cover her bare legs. She tried to pull her yellow silk nightdress higher to cover the tops of her breasts. She hated to think how her hair must look. It would be a fright. She focused on Joey. ‘I give up. What did you have for lunch?’

      ‘Fish and chips,’ he exclaimed excitedly. ‘Dad and me had a picnic down near the water. We had these hot and crunchy pieces of fish with salty French fries and they were all wrapped up in paper.’

      ‘Wow, that sounds…neat.’

      ‘It СКАЧАТЬ