CONTENTS

      CHAPTER ONE

      CHAPTER TWO

      CHAPTER THREE

      CHAPTER FOUR

      CHAPTER FIVE

      CHAPTER SIX

      CHAPTER SEVEN

      CHAPTER EIGHT

      CHAPTER NINE

      CHAPTER TEN

      CHAPTER ELEVEN

      EPILOGUE

      CHAPTER ONE

      DARCY walked quietly across the Persian rug towards the still figure in the massive canopied bed. The bed was a monstrosity really, elaborately carved and wide enough to sleep a half a dozen but her father was very attached to it. It had once been the property of a McIvor Scottish ancestor. Her father’s eyes were closed, his face the dreadful grey that spoke of severe physical trauma. A fuzz of mottled grey and marmalade coloured hair showed at the neck of his pyjamas lending a peculiar vulnerability. The once powerful hands that could handle anything from the wildest brumby and the biggest bullock to every kind of station machinery rested like fleshless talons on the folded top sheet.

      Splendid health had accompanied Jock McIvor all the days of his life now he was a wraith of his former self. Almost overnight, the flesh had dropped off his impressive frame. His nurse, Wilma Ainsworth, an angular white-clad figure, competent but not particularly motherly or compassionate had been and gone taking with her the tray that held the medicines and syringes to bring temporary relief to her suffering patient.

      Big Jock McIvor had not recovered from his first heart attack as everyone had expected. Jock McIvor was dying. Of that there could be no doubt. As she leaned over his prone figure Darcy hardly dared draw breath for fear of waking him out of his drug induced slumber. She withdrew to the wide verandah that enclosed the homestead on three sides. Like everyone experiencing a crisis she desperately wanted to change things. To turn back the clock. To insist on her father having regular medical checkups, knowing he had never been ready to listen to her anyway. Jock McIvor was a law unto himself. It was a strategy that in the end hadn’t worked in his favour.

      Darcy stared out over the extensive homestead grounds with their magnificent date palms and diverse array of desert plants. The palms had been planted well over a century before by a Afghan camel driver her great great grandfather Campbell McIvor had befriended. Midafternoon the grounds were shrouded in the quivering white fire of a heat haze. It caused a legion of parrots in their glorious colours to descend on the lagoon at the foot of the homestead for a drink. Otherwise the home compound bore a strangely deserted air. Jock McIvor was no longer in charge and it was manifestly obvious. She had been neglecting her duties while she attended her father after that first frightening heart attack. In these last stages despite his agitated protests she’d been forced to call in a full time nurse.

      Curt had flown over from Sunrise to urge her to do it. Curt Berenger was another one who was a law unto himself especially since the death of his own father in a helicopter mustering accident leaving Curt master of Sunrise Downs and the entire Berenger chain. Though she found numerous ways of telling him how interfering he was, the truth was Curt followed his family’s tradition of looking after his friends and neighbours in time of need. Not that he was an admirer of Jock McIvor. Their relationship was as strained as it could be with her in the middle. Curt saw her father as a tyrant who’d had far too much influence shaping her life. Part of her recognised that. Her father was very controlling but the things Curt said cut her to the quick. Things do when there’s a basis in truth.

      Now Jock McIvor was dying and she was about to be abandoned again. What a long terrible struggle she’d had with that first abandonment. A double whammy. Mother and sister. She could never put the wrenching psychic separation, the painful moods of loneliness and not being loved behind her. She still saw their tearful faces in her dreams. She had loved Courtney with all her heart assuming they were going to be the closest, dearest friends forever. Her mother had always promised her a baby sister. Everything should have been perfect but in the end the dream had been shattered. Childhood innocence had been replaced by painful moods of sadness and loneliness. How had she lived through her adolescence with no mother present? By becoming what her father wanted. She had lived off the dollops of affection he handed out like the desert flora survives on rare showers.

      Anxiety was having the effect of a steel band tightening around her head. Fit as she was, many long sleepless nights had exhausted her. Nurse Ainsworth always urged her to go to bed saying she would wake her if she saw the need, but Darcy was not happy with that. This was her father. He was all she had. Didn’t the woman realize that? She had to be there at her father’s side. She sensed she would know the exact moment when all life would leave him.

      What then?

      What will my life become? She sought to push back all thoughts of freedom as a betrayal but it continued to hover on the periphery of her mind. She had never known real freedom. By fair means or foul—she became agitated when she thought about it—her father had tenaciously kept her tied to his side. After his marriage break up he had made it a purpose in life. She could understand it in a way. He was a proud man who had suffered bitter losses. Worse, he had been publicly humiliated. Now he was waiting to die and the atmosphere was charged with powerful emotions.

      She couldn’t run Murraree by herself. It was a big job, not an Outback adventure. Her father had been King of the Castle. The Boss. Jock McIvor always made the decisions. As efficient as he had trained her to be, essentially she carried out orders. What would happen to Murraree with her father gone? She knew the men liked and respected her. Some of them had watched her grow up. She knew how to handle herself, but she wasn’t a hard, tough man in a hard, tough man’s country.

      “You can’t cure yourself of being a woman, Darcy,” Curt had told her, a kind of pity in his eyes. “Don’t you realize you define yourself in relation to your father? It’s high time you started being your own person, your own woman.”

      Curt refused to allow her to avoid issues. Just one of the reasons their arguments were legion. Fighting was a protection against feeling. A way of protecting herself against the pain of a dream that had never come true. Sometimes