Only by Chance. Betty Neels
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thanks, he took a bottle from the fridge and pulled off the top. Juliet, preparing vegetables in the sink for the children’s supper, tried not to watch him, but her eyes kept sliding sideways to where he stood, leaning casually against the worktop, his head tipped back as he drank thirstily.
She hadn’t thought to ask him how old he was, but she guessed that he was in his thirties. He had the toughness and solidity of maturity, but his face wore a guarded expression that made it hard to be sure of anything about him. He could hardly have been more different from Hugo, Juliet reflected. Hugo had been volatile, swinging from breezy charm to sullen rage with bewildering speed. Cal was, by contrast, coolly self-contained. It was impossible to imagine him shouting or waving his arms around wildly. Even the way he stood there and drank his beer suggested an economy of movement, a sort of controlled competence that was at once reassuring and faintly intimidating.
His presence seemed to fill the kitchen, and Juliet was suddenly, overwhelmingly aware of him as a man: of the muscles working in his throat, of the brown fingers gripped around the bottle, of the dust on his boots and the creases round his eyes and the coiled, quiet strength of his lean body. She couldn’t tear her eyes off him. It was as if she had never seen a man before, had never been struck by the sheer physicality of a male body before that moment.
Cal was unaware of her gaze at first. The beer was very cold. To Cal, hot, frustrated and tired after a long day, it tasted like the best beer he had ever had. He lowered the bottle to thank Juliet properly, only to find that she was watching him with a dark, disturbingly blue gaze, and as their eyes met he was conscious of a strange tightening of the air between them, of an unexpected tingling at the base of his spine.
Juliet felt it too. He saw her eyes widen, and a faint flush rose in her cheeks before she turned away and concentrated almost fiercely on peeling a potato.
Oddly shaken by that tiny exchange of glances, Cal levered himself away from the units and, a faint frown between his brows, took his beer over to the table where Natalie was entertaining the twins. She was normally a shy, quiet child, more comfortable with animals than people, but she had obviously taken to the twins immediately, and her face was lit up in a way that he hadn’t seen for years now.
Not since they had left Wilparilla, in fact. Cal shook off the unsettling effect Juliet’s eyes had had on him and sat down next to his daughter, remembering how she had wept into her pillow and begged to be taken home. He had done the right thing bringing her back, even if things weren’t working out quite as he had planned.
‘Dad!’ Natalie tugged at his sleeve. ‘Show Kit and Andrew that trick you do.’
At the sink, Juliet could hear the noise behind her, and she turned, potato in one hand, peeler in the other, to see the twins convulsed with laughter, Natalie giggling and Cal, straight-faced, turning his hand back and forth as if looking for something. ‘Again!’ shouted Kit, clambering excitedly over Cal as if he had known him all his life.
Juliet’s smile was rather twisted as she watched them. At times like these it hurt to realise how much the boys missed in not having a father. Did Cal ache this way when he saw his daughter without a mother?
Natalie seemed a nice little girl. She obviously adored her father, but from what Juliet had seen of him so far she thought he must be a formidable figure for her. He had been dour, if not downright hostile, ever since he had arrived. Not that the children seemed to find him nearly as intimidating as she did, Juliet had to admit. They were still squealing with laughter as he confounded them each time with whatever he was concealing in his hands.
It was then that Cal, unable to keep a straight face any longer, gave in and smiled at the twins’ delight, and Juliet nearly dropped her potato. Who would have thought that he could smile like that? Who could have guessed that cool mouth could crease his face with such charm, that the steely look could dissolve into warmth and humour, that the cold grey eyes could crinkle so fascinatingly?
Juliet was disturbed to discover how attractive Cal was when he smiled. She didn’t want him to be attractive. Somehow it was easier to think that he was always cold and hostile than to know that he was nice to children, and to wonder why it was that he would never smile at her the way he smiled at them.
As if to prove her point, Cal looked up, and his smile faded as he saw the peculiar look on Juliet’s face. Probably waiting to point out that she had employed him as a manager, not a children’s entertainer, he thought with an edge of bitterness.
He drained his beer and pushed back his chair. ‘When do the men finish for the day?’ he asked Juliet, ignoring the children’s disappointment. If she wanted an efficient manager, that was what he would be.
‘About now.’ As if suddenly realising that she was still clutching a potato and peeler, Juliet turned back to the sink. Why should she care if he wouldn’t smile at her? she asked herself, refusing to admit that she was hurt by the way his attitude changed so completely whenever he looked at her.
‘I think I heard the ute go by a few minutes ago,’ she added, glad to hear that her own voice sounded just as cool as his. ‘They should be back in their quarters by now.’
‘How many men are down there?’
‘Four at the last count.’ Juliet dropped the last potato in the saucepan and filled it with water. ‘I haven’t had much to do with them. The last manager brought them in when he’d succeeded in getting rid of all the experienced stockmen who were here when we arrived. His wife used to cook for them. I offered to give them meals up here when she left, but they obviously didn’t want to sit down with me every evening, so they take it in turns to do their own cooking.’
Juliet tried hard to keep the loneliness and rejection out of her voice. It had been so long since she had had anyone to talk to that she would have welcomed the company of even the dour and taciturn men who so clearly disliked her. ‘I only ever see them when one of them comes up to ask for more flour or sugar or whatever. They don’t seem to require much in the way of fresh vegetables,’ she added with a would-be careless shrug.
Cal frowned as he set the empty bottle on the side. ‘Then who tells them what to do every day?’
‘No one,’ said Juliet bitterly. ‘I didn’t have much choice but to tell them to carry on with whatever they would normally be doing until the new manager arrived, but I know they thought I was stupid to have sacked the last man in the first place. For all I know they’ve just been lying around for the last couple of weeks.’
She set the pan on the cooker and turned on the element, then wiped her hands on her apron, trying to make Cal understand. ‘I’m pretty much tied to the house with the twins,’ she said. ‘I can’t leave them here on their own, and it’s too far to take them with me if I wanted to go and check up on the men—even if I knew where they were and what they were supposed to be doing in the first place.’
‘You’ve been here over three years,’ Cal pointed out. What he had seen of Wilparilla so far hadn’t left him in any mood for sympathy. He had sold a thriving property and had come back to find that all his hard work had been thrown away and the station left to crumble into disrepair. ‘You must have had some idea.’
‘My husband never involved me in the station side of things.’ Hugo had never involved her in anything, thought Juliet dully. She looked down at her hands, unable to meet Cal’s eyes directly. ‘When we first came here, he was taken up with the idea of turning Wilparilla into a place that would attract the kind of tourists who want to see the outback but who want a bit of luxury too. There was a nice little homestead here before, but Hugo said it wouldn’t be big enough or smart enough, so he knocked it down and built this one.’
Juliet looked around her at the state-of-the-art kitchen, with its view out onto the wide, shady verandah that ran completely round the house. Everything had been done with a designer’s style, but it still made her angry to think of how much money Hugo had poured into the house when the station around it was neglected and falling inexorably apart. She had tried to remonstrate with Hugo, but he had brushed her objections aside. It was his money, he had said, and he knew what he was doing.
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