‘What about you?’ Hal countered. ‘I don’t see you having committed yourself to marriage either.’

‘That’s because I haven’t met the right man yet, not because I’m afraid of commitment.’

Hal raised a brow in disbelief. ‘Don’t tell me you’re waiting for Mr Perfect?’

‘What’s wrong with that?’

‘Only that you strike me as a sensible woman, and it doesn’t seem like a very sensible thing to do. You must know as well as I do that no one will ever be perfect, which gives you commitment issues too,’ he said. ‘Instead of admitting that you don’t want to take the risk, you pretend you’re waiting for someone who doesn’t exist.’

‘Who says he doesn’t?’ demanded Meredith fiercely. ‘I’m not waiting for a man who’s perfect, just a man who’s perfect for me.’

‘I can’t believe a sensible girl like you would fall for that happy-ever-after fantasy,’ said Hal with a snort of contempt.

‘Actually, it’s a perfectly sensible approach.’ Meredith’s voice was cool. ‘Lucy falls in and out of love the whole time, and it always seems to me that it’s a waste of time and energy and emotion when any fool can see that it’s not going to last. It’s much more sensible to wait until you’re sure that you’ve met someone who’s going to make you happy before you let yourself fall in love.’

‘But how can you tell?’

‘You just can. I’m looking for someone kind and sensitive and intelligent. Someone with integrity. Someone I can talk to…a friend.’

Richard had been all those things. He was everything Meredith had ever wanted in a man, so of course she had fallen for him. It wasn’t Richard’s fault that he hadn’t felt the same about her. He had been quite happy being friends, and she had been terrified of scaring him away by telling him how she felt.

And then he had seen Lucy, and that had been that.

Meredith sighed.

‘It sounds to me as if you’ve got very high expectations,’ Hal commented.

‘That’s what Lucy says. She says I’m too picky, but I think you should be picky when it comes to choosing someone you’re going to spend the rest of your life with. It’s important. You and Lucy might call it having unreasonably high expectations, but I call it being sensible.’

‘And you’re not prepared to compromise?’ asked Hal, who hadn’t been able to avoid noticing that her wish list for a man didn’t include many characteristics that would apply to him. He hadn’t been particularly kind or sensitive as far as she was concerned, he had to admit.

Meredith finished her coffee and put the mug down with a little click. ‘Not on the important things,’ she told him. ‘I’ve seen lots of my friends going to enormous lengths to change themselves and their expectations when they meet a man and decide he’s The One, but I’ve never yet seen a man changing. Women will accept that their man is unreliable or reluctant to commit because they love him. They accept being taken for granted and never being made to feel that they’re special because if they didn’t accept it the relationship would be over and they’re afraid of that.

‘They can accept that if they want to,’ said Meredith, ‘but I don’t see why I should. I’m not perfect, far from it. I know I’m bossy and prickly and uncompromising and I’m never going to win a beauty contest, but I don’t want to change, and I want a man who doesn’t want me to change either. I want someone who’ll love me the way I am, someone I don’t feel the need to change for.’ She sent Hal one of her challenging looks. ‘That’s sensible, isn’t it?’

‘If you really think you’re going to meet someone who lives up to all those expectations,’ he said in a sceptical voice. ‘Have you ever met anyone who did?’

There was a tiny pause. Meredith watched a moth blunder into the blue light. ‘Once,’ she said.

‘So how come it didn’t work out?’ asked Hal harshly, unaccountably irritated by the idea of Meredith finding someone so perfect.

So unlike him.

‘Or wasn’t he so perfect after all?’

‘No, he was perfect,’ said Meredith. ‘It turned out that I wasn’t perfect for him, that’s all. But that’s OK,’ she went on composedly. ‘Maybe there’s someone else out there for me, but until I meet him I’m not going to waste my time on anyone less than perfect.’

‘You mean like me?’ said Hal, hoping that he sounded suitably amused instead of chagrined.

‘Yes, like you,’ she said. ‘As you pointed out yourself, I’m a sensible woman and that really wouldn’t be a sensible thing to do.’

CHAPTER SIX

IT MIGHT not be sensible but at least it would be something to do, Meredith thought the next morning as she carried a bucket of scraps out to the chickens, who had a large fenced run on the far side of the yard. Spotting her, they came rushing to meet her, ruffling their feathers and tumbling over in their haste.

What was she doing here? Meredith wondered. All those qualifications had got her to this point, tossing scraps to chickens in the middle of the Australian outback. The heat was crushing. Shaking out the bucket, she left the chooks to it and closed the gate behind her, walking slowly back across the yard, not at all charmed by the chickens or the dogs chained up in the shade.

It was too hot and there were too many flies. She waved them irritably from her face. It must be hundreds of miles to the nearest bar. The pub at Whyman’s Creek didn’t count. She was thinking of somewhere cool and smart where she could sit back and enjoy a frosted glass of white wine.

Here, there was just…nothing. Miles and miles and miles of nothing beneath the glaring sky. Nothing to do, no one to talk to, if one didn’t count Emma and Mickey, who could rarely be persuaded to lift their heads up from their computer games. The air was filled with the raucous cawing of crows, their cries falling mournfully into the thrumming silence.

She had been up since five to prepare breakfast. It had been a silent meal, but that was hardly surprising at that hour. Even so, Meredith had been uncomfortably aware of Hal. She had spent far more time than was necessary last night reminding herself how sensible she was in not getting involved with him.

She was attracted to him-Meredith was never less than honest with herself-but she simply couldn’t account for it. Hal wasn’t her type at all.

Richard was the kind of man she had always been attracted to, and Hal was nothing like him. Richard had twinkling brown eyes and a lovely smile. Hal’s eyes were keen and hard, his smile elusive, but he had a mouth that for some reason dried the breath in Meredith’s throat whenever her eyes rested on it.

Richard was charming and sensitive and not afraid to talk about his feelings. Hal was cool and self-contained. In fact, when he wasn’t there, Meredith could almost persuade herself that she didn’t really find him that attractive, but all he had to do was walk through that screen door and take off his hat and her heart would perform sickening somersaults while every sense in her body tautened as if she were walking a tightrope. Yes, thought Meredith wryly, her body was a regular circus routine when Hal was around.

Still, that was no reason to fall into bed with him. Hal belonged in this strange, red land under this immense sky and she…well, she didn’t.

Meredith looked around her. Overlooked by the kitchen, the dusty yard was shaded by a big gum-tree, where the dogs drowsed in the shade, and framed by an odd assortment of out-buildings, whose purpose was obscure, at least as far as Meredith was concerned. There were a couple of huge water tanks, the chicken run and a rickety wind tower, its arms unmoving in the still, shimmering heat. To Meredith, city girl incarnate, it was all profoundly alien.

Australia was so big it was almost scary. The space and the light were so overwhelming that she was afraid that she would lose herself, crushed by the heat and the eerie silence. Meredith could practically feel herself diminishing, and she didn’t like it. She liked to be in control of things, but how could she control this huge, wild place?

She had hardly given Lucy or Richard a thought either, she had realised guiltily last night. The sense of urgency that had possessed her since Richard’s accident had deserted her since she had arrived at Wirrindago. She really must check her email. Lucy had promised that she would let her know when she was safely back in London.

Swinging the empty scrap bucket, Meredith climbed the steps to the kitchen with a renewed sense of purpose. It was high time she set up her computer and got down to some work too. It would be easier then to remember who she was and what she was doing here.

But she had to clean that office first. If she opened her laptop in there now it would be choked in dust in five minutes. There was no way she could work in that mess. Hal would probably have a fit, but she didn’t care. It wouldn’t kill him to have one tidy room.

With everything under control in the kitchen, Meredith rolled up her sleeves and prepared to get dirty. The desk was piled so high with papers that she could hardly see the phone, and the desktop computer was shrouded in dust. She wiped it down, unimpressed. She had seen more up-to-date technology in a museum. Thank God she had brought her laptop with her.

Fine red dust lay in thick layers over everything. Meredith’s eyes were soon watery from sneezing, and she was very glad of Hal’s shirt which, disturbing or not, kept the worst of the dirt from her own clothes. She would have to borrow another so that she could wash this one.

Mindful of Hal’s reaction to her removal of the old magazines from the veranda yesterday, Meredith was careful not to throw anything away, but she tidied and straightened and did her best to put everything in date order. Methodically, she worked through pile after pile of assorted papers and, in spite of not knowing anything about station business, she thought she did a pretty good job of sorting it out. Everything that looked similar she stacked together in date order, her eyebrows climbing as she saw some papers going back twenty-five years. Didn’t these people understand the notion of filing?

It was the kind of job that appealed to Meredith’s organised nature and, although she tutted, she secretly enjoyed restoring order. When it was tidy, the office would be a great place to work, she decided. On a corner, it had one window that looked out over the kitchen yard and another with a view of the garden and the lemon tree she had been so thrilled to see. A bright pink bougainvillaea scrambled over a pergola built into the garden, keeping the room cool and shady without cutting out too much of the light, and it was very quiet.

Yes, she could happily work here, Meredith thought.

She was sitting on the floor, sorting through an old cardboard box which had clearly functioned as a rudimentary filing drawer, when Hal came in, and her heart promptly began its usual impression of a trapeze artist.

Look! Up it soared into the air to perform-gasp!-a triple somersault before catching on to a pair of ankles just in time and-yes!-managing a neat flip before settling into a breathless swing from one side of her chest to another.

Desperately hoping that her internal acrobatics didn’t show in her face, Meredith did her best to keep her expression cool. ‘Hi,’ she said, delighted at how casual she sounded.

Hal was staring suspiciously around the office. ‘What are you doing in here?’

‘I’d have thought that was obvious,’ she said. ‘I’m tidying up. You told me I could,’ she reminded him before he could object. ‘“Knock yourself out”, you said. And you don’t need to panic,’ she added, correctly interpreting his expression of dismay. ‘I haven’t thrown anything away! But there is a pile of stuff over there that looks like complete junk to me.’ She pointed. ‘Since you’re here, could you please check it and take out anything you want to keep? The rest is going in the incinerator.’

‘I’ll never be able to find anything again!’ grumbled Hal, but he didn’t actually tell her to put everything back as he had done the day before.

Encouraged, Meredith scrambled to her feet. ‘Nonsense, you’ve got a system now,’ she said and showed him how she had arranged things into piles. ‘You know, if you invested in a couple of decent filing cabinets, you could get all this stuff out of the way.’

Hal’s down-turned mouth showed how much he thought of that suggestion, but he did pick up the first few papers from the junk pile and flicked through them briefly before tossing them aside. ‘They can be burnt.’

Just as Meredith had thought, in fact.

Hal picked up another sheaf of papers. ‘Why are you so determined to reorganise me?’ he asked.