Ten #2
She didn’t respond, just let her gaze wander until a shooting star streaked hot and brief and bright across the inky dome. Gasping, she pointed at it, turning eyes glittering with excitement—or maybe starlight—on him.
‘Did you see that?’
He grinned. ‘I did.’ It wasn’t unusual to see several shooting stars per night out here under the glimmering outback sky. ‘You get to make a wish now.’
Her smile died a little and Lachlan could have kicked himself for stealing that sparkle as she resumed her star watch. Was she thinking about whatever had brought her to Acacia Junction?
‘I don’t think I believe in wishes anymore.’ Her voice was low and husky in the night, almost melancholy. ‘But—’ She gave her head a little shake as she cleared her throat. ‘Who needs them when you’re lucky enough to have all this?’
Rowena gestured to the magical shimmer overhead, but Lachlan wasn’t looking at the stars, he was looking at her. ‘Careful there, city slicker.’ He injected a deliberate tease into his voice. ‘We’ll make a country girl of you yet.’
‘Ha!’ She glanced at him, the huskiness gone. ‘I wouldn’t hold your breath. But … I gotta admit, this is pretty special.’
And she raised her face to the sky again.
Lachlan tried not to let Rowena in the starlight fill his head with fanciful thoughts. She’d literally just told him she wasn’t about to change. And, after two failed marriages, he was finally smart enough to listen.
‘So, what happened to the other one?’ she asked, as she lowered her gaze to peer straight ahead into the endless dark abyss of the bush.
‘What other one?’
She looked over her shoulder at him, a smile on her mouth. ‘The other wife. Your first one, I assume? Unless you got married and divorced again in the last four years.’
Chuckling, Lachlan suppressed a shudder at the thought as he placed his elbows next to hers. With his eyes fully adjusted to the night he could make out the sturdy outline of the shearing shed further down the way, the holding pens for the sheep to one side.
Like the bunkhouse and the homestead, large gum trees stood in clumps around the building, their gnarled, ghostly trunks topped with bushy crowns. Silvery-green leaves, black in the night, drooped from branches like charred fingers.
The trees grew sparser and more varied as he gazed beyond. They were smaller, too, and Lachlan knew that in the morning light the scrubby landscape would explode in yellow as the sun hit the wattle puffs.
He inhaled, noting the earthy fragrance of eucalypt and acacia, but it was Rowena’s perfume that clouded his senses. More bergamot than bush, its sweetness made him excruciatingly conscious of how close they were.
‘You ever heard that Johnny Cash song “Jackson”?’ he asked, glancing at her.
‘We got married in a fever? That one?’
‘Yep. That was me and Brit.’
Lachlan turned back to the vastness in front of him as he decided where to begin.
‘We should have been nothing more than a wild, crazy fling, but we were young and in lust. I’d escaped Acacia Junction and gone to the big smoke, ready to live.
And she was as wild and carefree as I’d always wanted to be.
Getting hitched at city hall after knowing each other for nine weeks seemed like the ultimate romantic way to celebrate my acceptance into the police academy. ’
Lachlan took a breath, dragging his gaze off the night shadows ahead to glance at Rowena, who was watching him. ‘In case you’re wondering, it was actually pretty moronic.’
She barked out a laugh, disturbing a bird somewhere, the squawks of its displeasure echoing all around. ‘I figured.’
‘She hated my shiftwork and I hated how often I’d come home to the debris of a party.
People passed out everywhere. Tripping over empty bottles of booze.
The house reeking of hooch and dozens of noise complaints from neighbours.
She bought this beat-up old Harley and wanted us to just take off whenever the whim took her, like we’d done before I started my basic training but, of course, I couldn’t. ’
‘Yeah, working full-time sucks.’
It was his turn to laugh, the unimpressed bird doubly so now as it flapped around, its wings surprisingly noisy in the night. ‘It sure does. She cut and run after six months.’
She winced. ‘Ouch.’
Lachlan shrugged. It had been doomed from the start, really. ‘It wasn’t meant to be. Sure, it was fun to be so ridiculously impulsive. I hadn’t felt like that since before my parents had died, and it was intoxicating.’
He shook his head as he remembered those giddy days when he’d been free. ‘It was unsustainable but, man … those first nine weeks were a blast.’ He glanced down to find a smile curving her mouth. ‘Foolish, huh?’
It was her turn to shrug. ‘I got married at nineteen and it lasted two years, so I’m not one to judge.’
‘Nineteen?’ Lachlan blinked. ‘Wow. Were you young and dumb too?’
‘I was young and pregnant so, yeah, I guess.’
‘Oh, shit.’ Lachlan sobered quickly. ‘Sorry. I shouldn’t have been flippant.’
Also … did that mean she had a kid out there somewhere? A teenager?