Barbara Hannay - The Bridesmaid's Best Man

Fighting down the nausea that had been troubling her more frequently over the past fortnight, she tiptoed to a window and tried to peer inside the house. But the glass was covered by an ageing lace curtain, and she could only make out the shape of an armchair.

The window was the sash kind that had to be lifted up. Feeling like a criminal, Sophie tried it, but it wouldn’t budge.

Another glance at the road behind her showed that the mail truck had completely disappeared. She was surrounded by absolute stillness, no background noise at all. No comforting hum of traffic, no aircraft, no voices. Nothing.

If she wasn’t careful, the silence would rattle her completely.

I mustn’t panic.

Sophie sat on her suitcase and tried to think.

Was this her biggest mistake yet?

The family failure strikes again?

Mark could be anywhere on this vast property. She knew there’d been a muster, but she had no idea what other kinds of work cattlemen did. She supposed they kept busy doing something. They couldn’t simply lounge about the house all day with their feet up, while their cattle ate grass and grew fat.

But, if Mark was off working somewhere on his vast cattle station, where was his caretaker? When she’d spoken to him on the phone, he’d sounded rather nice, with a warm Scottish brogue that had made her feel very welcome.

The abandoned house, however, didn’t look particularly welcoming. The veranda was swept, but the floorboards were unpainted and faded to a silvery grey, and the ferns in the big pottery urns were brown-tipped and drooping. The house in general needed a coat of paint, and the garden—well, you couldn’t really call it a garden—was a mere strip of straggling vegetation around the house, full of weeds and dried clumps of grass.

Sophie looked at her watch and sighed. It was only ten in the morning, and Mark might be away all day. It was midnight at home. No wonder she felt so exhausted and ill.

Leaving her bags near the front door, she went down the front steps and tottered over the uneven, stubbly grass in her high heels.

Back in London, high heels and a two-piece suit had seemed like a smart idea. She’d wanted to impress Mark. Huh! Now, twenty-six hours and twelve thousand miles later, she felt positively ridiculous. No wonder the fellow in the mail truck had looked amused. She’d probably been his week’s entertainment.

She reached the back of the house and found a huge shed with tractors, but no sign of anyone. The house had a back veranda with a partly enclosed laundry at one end. A large glass panel in the back door offered her a view down a long central passage, and an uncurtained window revealed a big, old-fashioned kitchen with an ancient dresser and an enormous scrubbed pine table set squarely in the middle. It was all very neat and tidy, if a bit drab and Spartan.

A large brown teapot on the dresser had a piece of paper propped against it, and Sophie could see that there was a handwritten note on it. A message?

She chewed her lip. She felt wretchedly hot and nauseous. If she didn’t get inside soon, she might faint.

She rattled the back-door knob and shoved at it with her hip, but it held firm.

Desperate, she pulled out her mobile phone and stared at it, thinking. The only person she knew in Australia was Mark, but his satellite phone wasn’t being answered. If she’d had a phone book, she could have rung the helpful woman in the Post Office in Wandabilla. If only she’d thought to take down her number.

She tried Mark’s phone again, with little hope, and of course there was no answer.

She was stuck here, on the outside of this enormous, old shambles of a house, and her stomach warned her that she was going to be ill very soon.

There was only one option, really. She would have to find a way to break in, and she would simply have to explain to Mark later—if he turned up.

The louvres beside the back door were promising. She studied them for about five seconds, and then carefully pulled at one. To her utter amazement, it slid out, leaving her a gap to slip her hand through. Straining, with her body pressed hard against the wall, she could just reach the key on the other side of the door. It turned easily, and the door opened.

As Sophie stepped inside, she felt a twinge of guilt and then dismissed it. At least now she could make a cup of tea and find somewhere to lie down. And hope that Mark would understand.

Sundown.

Low rays of the setting sun lit the pink feathery tops of the grass as Mark’s stock horse galloped towards the home paddock, with two blue-heeler cattle dogs loping close behind.

Man, horse and dogs were tired to the bone, glad to be home.

At last.

The past fortnight had been damned frustrating, and quite possibly the worst weeks of Mark’s life. He’d been preoccupied and worried the whole time, and desperate to get back early, but then the young jackaroo had thrown a spanner in the works.

A week ago, on a pitch-black, still night before the moon was up, the boy had been standing near the cattle in the holding yard when he’d lit a cigarette. The fool hadn’t covered the flare of the match with his hat, and the cleanskins had panicked. In no time their fear had spread through the herd. Six hundred head of cattle had broken away, following the wild bulls back into the scrub, into rough gullies and ravines, the worst country on Coolabah.

It had taken almost a week to retrieve them—time Mark hadn’t really been able to spare—but with the bank breathing down his neck for the first repayment on this property he’d needed to get those cattle trucked away.

During the whole exasperating process, he hadn’t been able to stop thinking about Sophie and about his promise to ring her. Hadn’t been able to hide his frustration, and had been too hard on the men, which was why he’d encouraged the mustering team and plant to travel straight on to Wandabilla now. The men had earned the right to a few nights in town before they headed off to their next job.

Mark had left them at the crossroads because he needed the solitude. Thinking time.

And, now he was almost home, his guts clenched. He had an important phone call to make, possibly the most important phone call of his life.

At last he saw his homestead, crouched low against the red and khaki landscape. It was good to be back. After almost three weeks in the saddle, sleeping in swags on the hard ground, showering beneath a bucket and hose nozzle tied to a tree branch, bathing and washing clothes in rocky creeks, he was looking forward to one thing.

Make that three things—a long, hot soak in a tub, clean clothes and clean sheets. Oh, yeah, and a mattress.

Luxury.

But he attended to his hard working, loyal animals first, washing the dust from them and rubbing his horse down, giving the dogs and the horse water to drink, and food.

He entered the homestead by the back, pulling off his elastic-sided riding boots and leaving them on the top step. He dumped his pack on the laundry floor beside the washing machine, drew off his dusty shirt and tossed it into one of the concrete tubs. Looking down, he saw the dried mud caked around the bottom of his jeans, and decided his clothes were so dirty he’d be better to strip off here and head straight for the bathroom.

He smiled as he anticipated the hot, sudsy bath-water lapping over him, easing his tired muscles. After a good long soak, he’d find his elderly caretaker, irreverently nicknamed Haggis. The two of them would crack open a couple of cold beers and sit on the veranda, while Mark told Haggis about the muster.

After dinner, he would ring Sophie.

His insides jumped again at the thought. He’d gone over what he had to say a thousand times in his head, but no amount of rehearsing had made the task any easier.

The worst of it was, he would have to ring Tim first to get Sophie’s number, and he could just imagine Emma’s curiosity.

Hell.

Mark reached the bathroom, and frowned. The door was locked.

Splashing sounds came from inside.

Who in the name of fortune…?

‘Is that you in there, Haggis?’ he called through the door. ‘You’d better hurry up, man.’

He heard a startled exclamation and a loud splash, followed by coughing and spluttering. The person inside shouted something, but the words were indistinct. One thing was certain though—the voice was not Haggis’s. It was distinctly, unmistakably feminine.

‘Who is it?’ Mark shouted, his voice extra loud with shock. ‘Who’s in there?’

Sophie spluttered and gasped as she struggled out of the slippery bath, her shocked heart pounding so wildly she feared it might collapse with fright.

She’d been asleep for most of the day, had woken feeling much better, and hadn’t been able to resist the chance to relax in warm water scented with the lavender oil that she’d found in the bottom of the bathroom cupboard. But now her relief that it was Mark Winchester’s deep voice booming through the door, and not some stranger’s, was short lived. Mark sounded so angry.

She grabbed at a big yellow towel on the rail behind the door. ‘It’s me, Mark! Sophie Felsham.’

‘Sophie?’

She could hear the stunned disbelief in his voice.

‘When did you get here?’ he cried.

Oh, help. He was annoyed. And he sounded impatient.

So many times she’d pictured her first meeting with Mark in Australia, and she’d been wrong on every occasion!

With frantic fingers, she wrapped the towel around her and managed a fumbling knot. ‘I’m so sorry, Mark! There was no one home, and I didn’t know what to do.’

When there was no response from the other side of the door, she called again, hoping desperately that he would understand. ‘I’ve come out here to see you. So we can talk.’

Then, because it was ridiculous to communicate through a locked door, she opened it.

Oh, gosh.

Bad idea.

Her heart stopped beating.

Mark was…

Totally, totally naked.

Her face burst into flames. ‘I—I’m s-sorry,’ she stammered. ‘I d-didn’t realise.’

Mark didn’t flinch. There was something almost godlike in the way he stood very still, and with unmistakable dignity, but his silence and his very stillness betrayed his shock. And then a dark stain flooded his cheekbones.

An anguished, apologetic cry burst from Sophie and she slammed the door shut again.

Sagging against it, she covered her hot face with her hands. She hadn’t seen a skerrick of warmth in Mark’s eyes.

Could she blame him? She wished she could drop through a hole and arrive back in London on the other side of the globe.

She’d never been so embarrassed.

And yet, as Sophie cringed, a part of her heart marvelled at how fabulous Mark had looked. In those scant, brief seconds, her senses had taken in particulars of his tall, dark, handsome gorgeousness—the hard planes of his chest, the breathtaking breadth of his shoulders, the powerful muscles in his thighs.

Although she’d tried to keep her eyes averted, she hadn’t been able to avoid seeing the rest of him—and how very male Mark was.

But alien, too, with his dark, stubbled jaw, and suntanned limbs, with the red dust of the Outback clinging to him.

Mark cursed and his heart thundered as he flung open wardrobe doors, grabbed clean clothes and dragged them over his dusty body. It would be some time before he recovered from the sight of Sophie Felsham, in his bathroom, wearing nothing but a towel—and the equal shock of standing in front of her like a dumbstruck fool. Stark naked.

Then again, Sophie Felsham wearing anything at Coolabah Waters would have stunned Mark.