The Australians' Brides. Lilian Darcy
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grin. And she could feel the awareness, the way she’d been feeling it at certain moments for the past four days.
They were both so cautious about it, so full of doubt. It was still only a hint in the air, like the smell of approaching rain or the sound of a church bell across city rooftops. Distant. You had to strain to catch it. The rain might pass over different terrain and never fall. The wind might carry the sound of the bells away.
And they might very easily never act on this … this little zing, this recognition. They might let it go. Smile and move on. It might fade as they got to know each other better, if what they saw on the surface wasn’t reflected deeper within.
Or they might get too scared, because things like this rarely stayed simple for long.
For now, it made Jacinda’s heart beat faster sometimes, it made her stomach go wobbly, and she watched these things happening in her body and didn’t know what to think.
The vehicle lurched again, throwing her in his direction, this time. They jarred against each other, one solid, the other soft. He reached and clamped an arm around her shoulder, working the wheel with one hand. “Going to stop under that tree, and we’ll walk the rest.”
The awareness hit again, stronger in her because she’d felt his body against hers, harder to resist. It made her breathing go shallow. It started her wondering.
The tree he’d mentioned loomed in the headlights, its trunk the same grayish white as the horse Jac had ridden today. After a couple more lurches and the screech of protesting suspension, Callan braked beneath it, switched off the engine and jumped out.
Jacinda followed him, handing him a flashlight.
“See that moon?” he said. “We hardly need these.” He tossed it up in his hand and caught it. “We can leave them switched off until we’re searching the rocks.” Lockie’s description of the Game Boy’s location had been vague.
They tramped along in the dark, surrounded by the same magical blue and silver shadows and shapes that Jacinda had noticed the other night. They didn’t talk. Callan had said as they drove that there might still be wildlife at the water hole at this hour. They always came down at dawn and dusk to drink. “And if we’re quiet, we can take a look.”
It was good not to talk. Good just to walk along, listening to the sound of their feet on rock and sand, listening to the way Callan’s boots creaked, aware of the way he moved with such sure-footed balance and such economy.
In Los Angeles, everyone seemed to talk all the time. They were chained to their cell phones, locked in meetings, constantly updating arrangements, passing messages through secretaries. There was a whole, ever-shifting hierarchy regarding who Kurt would speak to directly, who he’d call back right away, who he’d fob off on an assistant and who he wouldn’t call back at all.
There was a standard repertoire of lies and evasions. I love the script. This is so fresh. We ’re in contract negotiations right now. Our marriage is rock solid. Jacinda had believed way too many of those statements for way too long—believed them when she’d heard them from Kurt, from his staff, from his so-called friends.
She’d had a solitary childhood. Too much silence. First, her parents’ quiet, immaculate home, and then her own protective silences, withdrawing to the inner kingdom of her imagination, as she sat squashed into the corner seat in the back of the car while Aunt Peggy drove her cousins around.
When Kurt had brought her into his world, fresh from taking her college degree in English and creative writing, she’d loved the opening of new horizons; she’d loved all the talk, meeting other writers, traveling to Europe, adventures on yachts and ski slopes and horseback. She’d wanted to talk and hadn’t needed silence, at first.
But then she’d hit overload, and had discovered that her distant, reluctant parents had given her a positive legacy, after all. Silence could be good sometimes. It could be necessary. It didn’t mean that communication disappeared. Sometimes you could understand more about a person when you left some space between all the words.
“We should start looking for the wretched thing,” Callan finally said. His voice sounded a little rusty, as if he hadn’t wanted to break into the rhythm of their walking. “Here’s the water hole just ahead.”
“Can we check for kangaroos first?” she asked him on a whisper.
“They’re much less scary than bunyips, I promise.”
“No, I want to see them drinking. You said we might.”
He looked at her, gave a quick nod, grabbed her hand and they crept toward the water hole. It looked still and beautiful, but they crouched behind a rock, waiting and watching for several minutes, and there were no animals there.
Only the two of them.
Jac didn’t feel quite human tonight, alone with Callan in the desert. Watching the water hole for signs of movement, she heard his breathing, felt his body like a flannel-and-denim-covered magnet just inches away. A man like this gave masculinity a whole new meaning, reminded a woman that human beings were animals, too.
“We were a bit late for them, I guess,” he said, as they walked back toward the ring of barbecue stones in the creek bed. “It’s better when there’s still some daylight. We’ll make a special trip one day. You can bring your camera.”
She’d forgotten it on their picnic, today. “That would be great. Could we get up extra early and come at dawn? I just love the light and the air then.”
“We can climb Mount Hindley, watch the sunrise, make breakfast over the fire in the creek. Would that be good?”
“Oh, it would be wonderful!”
He gave her a look. They still hadn’t switched their flashlights on. “You sure you’re from L.A.?”
“Last time I checked.”
“You’re supposed to like shopping malls better than water holes, aren’t you?”
“I like new things.” She thought about it for a moment. “No, that’s not right. That sounds like I am talking shopping malls.” She tried again. “I like being made to see things in a new way. Like dawn.”
“Dawn is new?”
“It’s new for me. In L.A. dawn means you stayed out late at a party, or you had to set the alarm early for a flight. If you do see the sunrise, you only see it through glass. You don’t smell it, or feel the dew falling on your skin. Here, dawn is … yes, new. It notches my senses up higher, makes me aware. And writers need that. Writers—” She stopped.
There was an old, fallen eucalyptus tree lying on the creek bed at this point. Its trunk was as big as a concrete culvert pipe, as hard and smooth as iron. Without taking his eyes from her face, Callan leaned his lower back against the curved wood as if the two of them had all the time in the world. He put his flashlight down on the tree trunk beside him, tested its balance for a moment, then let it go.
“Tell me about writers,” he prompted.
But Jacinda shook her head and closed her eyes against the idea. “Doesn’t matter.”
“No, it was important,” Callan insisted. “I was interested. Say it.”
She faced him, ignoring the invitation in his body language that told her to lean against the horizontal trunk, too. Those bells of awareness weren’t so distant or so faint, now. The breeze had carried the sound this way and it was clearer, much closer. But she still had the freedom to ignore the bells, if she wanted.
“I don’t know if I’m a writer anymore, that’s all,” she said. “I think it’s gone. Was it ever really there, I wonder?”
“Hey, you made a living at it.”
“I had an ear for dialogue, and I could make those crazy soap-opera plot twists semibelievable when I put the right words into the characters’ mouths. Was it ever more than that?