Outback Boss, City Bride. Jessica Hart

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СКАЧАТЬ what Bill had told her was the stock agent’s office. Whyman’s Creek wasn’t the kind of town where crowds thronged the streets. In fact, sometimes Hal Granger was the only person in sight and Meredith was sure he was deliberately taking his time to keep her waiting.

      Irritably, she waved the flies from her face. It was incredibly hot, even in the shade, and she wanted nothing more than to lie down somewhere cool and go to sleep for a week. In spite of the discomfort, her eyelids kept closing and she had to jerk herself awake. The moment she fell asleep she knew Hal Granger would have driven off to Wirrindago without her, claiming that she ‘wasn’t ready’.

      So she took out her laptop and tried to concentrate on some work, but it was hard when Hal’s tall, austere figure kept catching at the corner of her eye as he crossed the street or came out of the store, and his grim features seemed to shimmer between her eyes and the computer screen. Those pale, almost silvery eyes were definitely striking and while Meredith didn’t think that she had noticed the angular planes of his face or the set of his mouth particularly, it was amazing how clearly she could picture them now.

      Amazing and more than a little disturbing.

      She had managed to download her emails in Brisbane the night before, but she was so tired that the words blurred on the screen and she was very close to dozing off in spite of everything when Hal came out of the store opposite and got into the truck.

      Jerking upright, Meredith got ready to run after him, but it turned out that he hadn’t forgotten her after all. He threw the truck into a wide U-turn and stopped at the bottom of the pub steps.

      Hastily, Meredith shoved her laptop into its case and reached for her suitcase but, to her surprise, Hal Granger was already there.

      ‘I’ll take it,’ he said abruptly.

      ‘Really, I can manage perf—’ she began, but he ignored her, carrying the case down the steps and tossing it into the back of the truck with insulting ease.

      ‘—fectly well,’ Meredith finished under her breath as she followed him. She had already taken a fond farewell of Bill, who was delighted to hear that she expected to be back again very soon. She would be back with Lucy or she would be on her own, but either way she didn’t intend to spend any longer in the outback than she had to.

      ‘Do you want me to take that?’ Hal nodded at her laptop.

      Meredith eyed the back of the truck askance, where her suitcase sat in a thick layer of dust between a couple of sealed boxes and a jumbled collection of farm machinery. At least, she guessed it was farm machinery.

      There was no way she was putting her precious laptop in there.

      ‘I’ll keep it with me, thanks,’ she said, clutching it protectively to her chest as if afraid that Hal would wrest it from her.

      He shrugged. ‘Suit yourself,’ he said, opening his door.

      Meredith hurried round to the other side and clambered awkwardly up into the cab, where there seemed to be just as much dirt as in the back. Fastidiously she brushed at the seat but it didn’t seem to make much difference and she suppressed a sigh as she sat down and searched around her for a seat belt. Her trousers were going to be ruined.

      ‘Sorry about the dust,’ said Hal, not sounding particularly sorry. ‘The air-conditioning’s broken.’

      Great. Meredith’s heart sank. So much for her magic carpet, she thought, brushing at her trousers in a futile attempt to clean them. It looked like being an uncomfortable journey.

      Not that that would probably bother Hal Granger. Comfort didn’t seem to be very high on his agenda. The truck was basic, to say the least. Meredith was used to cars with comfortable bucket seats separated by a gear stick. Here, the gear shift was set oddly in the steering wheel column and the seat was a single hard bench, its plastic covering torn in places and oozing some mean brownish foam.

      Still, perhaps she was lucky there was any padding at all, Meredith reflected. She’d thought bench seats like this went out in the Sixties before seat belts were enforced. Weren’t these the kind of car seats just made for making out on? Not that she had ever been the kind of girl who was taken out for a date that ended in a clinch in some secluded parking spot, but she’d read plenty of novels where teenagers got carried away and took advantage of the lack of obstructions to get horizontal.

      Meredith sighed. Typical that her only experience of turbulent teenage passion was through books.

      Or of roaring-towards-thirty-verging-on-middle-age-ifshe-wasn’t-careful passion, come to that.

      She glanced at Hal Granger as he put the truck into gear and wondered if he had ever put the bench seat to good use. He must have been a teenager once, although it was hard to imagine now that he was all grim, solid man and, anyway, where would he have found a heavy date living out here in the middle of nowhere?

      Presumably people did meet and marry, though. Hal might even be married himself. It was a thought that made Meredith pause. Was he married? He was a few years older than her—pushing forty, she guessed—so it wasn’t beyond the bounds of possibility, although she couldn’t quite picture it, somehow. He seemed so closed and stern, it was impossible to think of him happy and smiling, falling in love, making love…

      Which was a shame, really, with a mouth like that.

      The thought came out of nowhere, like an unexpected poke in the stomach, and Meredith was so shocked by it that she actually gasped. It was little more than an indrawn breath, in fact, but the next instant she found herself skewered by Hal’s cold, oddly light, grey gaze as he turned his head to look directly at her.

      ‘Are you OK?’ he asked, frowning, his hand stilling on the gear shift.

      To her horror, Meredith found herself blushing. ‘Yes, fine,’ she said quickly. ‘I’m just…a bit hot, that’s all.’

      Oh, God, what had she said that for? She had made it sound faintly suggestive, and if it had seemed like that to her, what would Hal have made of it?

      ‘I’m fine,’ she added again, ridiculously flustered.

      To her intense relief, Hal didn’t seem to notice anything amiss. ‘There’ll be a bit of a breeze once we get going,’ he said.

      ‘A bit of a breeze’, Meredith discovered as they bowled along the tarmac, was his way of describing the constant buffeting of the air through the open windows. In no time at all it had snarled her hair into an impenetrable tangled mess and deposited what felt like an inch-thick layer of red dust on her face. When she lifted her hand to touch her cheek it felt like sandpaper and she grimaced.

      ‘How long will it take us to get to Wirrindago?’ she asked, raising her voice above the sound of the rushing air.

      Hal shrugged. ‘Couple of hours,’ he suggested.

      ‘A couple of hours?’ Appalled, Meredith stared at the tarmac, stretching remorselessly straight ahead until it vanished into the shimmering heat haze. ‘I didn’t realise it would take so long,’ she confessed.

      ‘Two hours is a good trip.’ He glanced at her as she struggled to keep her dark hair from blowing about her face. ‘It can take a lot longer in the Wet when there’s water in the creeks,’ he told her. ‘Sometimes we can’t get across at all and have to fly in and out.’

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