There were only the emerging stars and the silence of this place he’d loved. How long since he’d experienced a night like this?

How long until he would again?

He’d leave as soon as he had this mess sorted out, he decided, but then… The thought came out of nowhere, like a gift. When he came back he could visit! Whenever he was in Australia he could drive down to the country and see his half-sister-and this woman and her Gabbie. They’d be waiting for him, like a family.

The prospect gave him a warm glow right in the middle of his solar plexus and he couldn’t help a tiny, smug smile creeping across his face.

Brilliant. This was brilliant!

‘How often do you think you’ll come?’ Wendy asked, and he snapped back into the present with a start. She was eyeing him curiously, and by the look on her face she knew exactly what he was thinking.

‘I…’

‘Grace will need someone to attach to,’ Wendy said softly. ‘If her mother really doesn’t want her…then, like it or not, you’ll be it.’

‘I guess I don’t mind.’ He thought it through, still feeling self-satisfied with his arrangements. What problem would one baby be? Money was no hassle and he’d have his secretary buy her gifts. He’d send them to her often…

But then the thought came back to him of his father, and how much his father’s treatment of him had hurt. His father, paying expensive school fees, sending him over-the-top gifts, with cards not written in his handwriting.

Never wanting to see him…

‘It doesn’t work,’ Wendy said softly. ‘You know it doesn’t.’

‘What?’

‘Being a parent by proxy.’

‘You’d know?’

‘I know.’ She sighed and hugged Gabbie closer. Of course she knew. Some of the warmth went out of the evening and she hauled herself back to practicalities. And responsibility. Of course. That was her role in life. Picking up responsibility where other people left off… ‘Ready for bed, love?’ she asked the little girl.

‘In my new bed with the pretty quilt?’ Gabbie asked.

‘That’s the one.’

‘And you’ll stay out here?’

‘Yes. Luke and Grace and I will be just under your window. We’ll stay out here for a while because it’s so dusty in the house. But I’ll sit on your bed with you until you go to sleep. Okay?’

‘Yes,’ Gabbie said definitely. ‘You’ll stay with me until I go to sleep and then you and Luke and Grace will stay outside my window with the fire and the cows.’

‘That’s right.’

‘That’s good,’ Gabbie said definitely. ‘That will be very good.’

Woman and child left. Luke was left with the remaining pizza and one soggy baby lazily drinking her bottle and gazing up at him with eyes that wondered.

And wondered and wondered.

Just like him.

That’s good. That will be very, very good…

Good grief!


Grace was fast asleep by the time Wendy returned, and Luke wasn’t far behind. He started as she touched him on the shoulder, and then, as he turned to find her smiling down at him, the sight gave him an unexpected jolt. She did have this mystical quality, he thought. It was as if she was the sudden embodiment of a vision he’d thought was only a dream.

But in truth, she was real. In one hand she had Grace’s carry-cot and in the other she had a pile of baby clothes.

‘We need warm water,’ she told him. ‘And a bucket.’

‘Why?’ He raised his brows. ‘We hardly have dishes to wash.’

‘No, but we have a baby to wash,’ she told him. ‘That baby has spent half the day in wet clothes. We bathe her now or you spend the next few days walking a bundle of misery because she has a rash on her bottom. Okay?’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

There was nothing else to say.

Grace hardly woke.

Baths, obviously, were one of her favourite things. She opened her eyes in sleepy wonder as Wendy lowered her naked person into the bucket of warm water. Then she smiled her gracious approval, fluttered her tiny hands in the suds, and lay back in sleepy delight.

For some reason Luke couldn’t take his eyes from her. This was his half-sister, he kept thinking. His sister. His…family?

He hadn’t had family for so long, and now, suddenly, she was partly his-and she was just beautiful. By the time Wendy had finished soaping Grace’s small pink body, Luke was near as not in love with her. What a sweetie!

His sister…

Afterwards, she lay on warm towels and Wendy expertly slipped her into dry clothes, and her eyes closed again before she was dressed. She snuggled into her carry-cot with a contented sigh, and fell instantly asleep.

God was in his heaven. All was right with Grace’s small world, and Luke’s world was still realigning itself on its axis-an axis that had somehow tilted…

‘I can’t believe her mother could just give her up,’ Wendy said slowly, looking down at the sleeping baby, and there was such a look of pain on her face that Luke thought for a moment that he must have imagined it.

He hadn’t. She turned away, but as she did he saw the glimmer of tears on her lashes. So, social worker or not, Wendy wasn’t quite impervious to human drama.

‘Tell me what your background is?’ he asked her again as she bundled towels and baby clothes together.

She shook her head. ‘I have things to do.’

‘Yeah, right. Like running the washing machine-without electricity, without hot water and without a washing machine.’ He patted the bare boards beside him, inviting her to sit. ‘We have two sleeping children. It’s grown-ups’ time now.’

That made her smile. ‘I guess, for you, it’s always grown-ups’ time.’

‘I don’t have a lot to do with children,’ he agreed. ‘Until now.’

‘And now it’s only for a week.’

‘As you say…’ He looked at her, his eyes asking a question. ‘Go on, then.’ He held out a hand, took hers and tugged, so she had to sink down to sit beside him. For some reason she was reluctant-but there was no good reason not to.

It was just, he made her feel…

Peculiar. She wasn’t taking it any further than that, she decided, as she pulled her hand away. She couldn’t afford to. If there was one thing Wendy Maher had decided all those years ago it was that men were trouble. And this one looked more trouble than most.

‘I’ll give you my résumé if you like,’ she said, lowering herself to perch on the edge of the veranda and then staring out to the distant sea. Distancing herself… ‘It’s very good.’

‘All this and modest to boot?’

‘If I don’t sing my praises no one will.’ She smiled. ‘I have a first-class honours degree in social work. I have nursing training-only one year but it’s enough for what I need it for. I have five years’ experience as a Home mother at Bay Beach Orphanage.’

He frowned at that. It didn’t quite fit. ‘I would have imagined a social worker with a first-class honours degree would have been working in an organisational capacity rather than hands-on child care,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Surely you don’t need those qualifications to be a Home mother.’

‘I like children,’ she said, and her voice was suddenly clipped.

‘You always wanted to be a Home mother?’

‘No. Only when…’

‘Only when your husband died?’

‘I…yes.’

‘I see.’ He nodded. ‘So when you say if you don’t sing your praises no one else will-it’s because you’re totally alone in the world?’

‘I have friends.’

‘Friends aren’t the same,’ he said softly. ‘I figured out that one early.’

‘When your mother died.’

‘As you say.’ He shrugged. ‘My grandparents and my mother died within two years of each other. It was pretty hard.’

‘I’d imagine it must have been.’ There was soft sympathy in her tone and he looked curiously across at her. She was sitting staring out into the moonlight, her face serene and calm. What she had said was an open invitation-to tell her all his troubles. Lay it all on her.

How many people had done that to her, he thought suddenly. Wendy was that sort of woman. It was an almost irresistible compulsion-to burden her with his needs…

Somehow he managed not to. ‘You haven’t finished telling me about you,’ he told her, and he received a surprised look for his pains. He was right, then. She was a woman who took on other people’s troubles and kept her own close to her heart.

‘What else do you need to know?’

He surveyed her thoughtfully. What else…?

‘How did your husband die?’

‘Car crash,’ she said briefly. ‘How else?’

How else indeed? There was a story behind this. ‘You sound bitter.’

‘Do I?’ She caught herself and managed a smile. ‘I shouldn’t be. It was a long time ago.’

‘It was a good marriage?’

Her breath sucked in at that. He’d overstepped the mark and he knew it straight off. ‘That, Mr Grey, is none of your business,’ she told him. ‘And there are better ways to be exercising your mind right now than by going over past history.’

He was still watching her-this lady with shadows. ‘Like what?’

‘Like, where are we going to sleep?’ Ever practical, Wendy’s mind closed completely to the nerve ends he’d just exposed. She’d learned long ago what to do when life slapped her in the face, or when something made her think of the past. She looked about her for what came next-and then she did it. Right now!

‘Mattresses,’ she said firmly, and he blinked.

‘Pardon?’

‘You can sleep in the house if you want,’ she told him frankly. ‘But I’m not. I’ll sneeze all night. We have Gabbie’s room habitable-just-but the rest of the house is an environmental nightmare. Air pollution two hundred and twenty per cent and rising, I’d guess. We’ve stirred up dust that hasn’t been touched for twenty years. I’ll sleep on a mattress out here, under Gabbie’s window so I’ll hear if she wakes.’

‘Are you sure you don’t want us to pick ourselves up and go to a hotel?’ he said almost desperately, and she grinned.