THE PAIN WAS LIKE A GREAT IRON BOOT PRESSING DOWN on Ian’s chest, overflowing into his arms and his legs and his head. The despair was even more crushing.
Lying in his hospital bed, Ian watched Jacy through his eyelashes for long periods of time when she thought he was sleeping. God help him, he loved her, and he cherished their unborn baby, too, even though he’d managed to hide his jubilation when she’d had herself tested and reported the results as positive.
He had nothing to give her now, with most of his sheep gone and probably the homestead as well, and certainly nothing to offer another child. No, it was better for Jacy, and for their baby, if she did what her mother wanted and took herself back to the States.
Life was too hard in the bush, too treacherous and unpredictable. Especially for an infant.
Slanting his gaze toward the window, Ian studied his young son. Chris was thriving, in spite of recent hard times. Jacy’s going would be a wrenching thing to him; the boy was bound to see it as a betrayal, and there was no guarantee that he’d ever get over the loss. Still, it had been just the two of them before, and somehow they’d get on.
Chris’s video game made an electronic blipping sound that got under Ian’s right temple and pounded there. The lad must have felt his dad’s eyes on him, because he met Ian’s look straight on and smiled.
Ian’s heart twisted. He couldn’t afford to love another child the way he did this one—it was just too dangerous.
He looked away toward Jacy, who was perched on the wide sill of the window wearing slim jeans and an orange T-shirt, fair hair tousled, completely absorbed in a paper-back book.
Ian felt a stab of irritation. Here he was, trying his best to get rid of the woman, to send her packing, and she was so unmoved by his decision that she could read some silly novel.
If he couldn’t get her to go by asking politely, he thought, he’d have to be mean about it. He didn’t care for that idea, for even though he enjoyed a good brawl now and then, with his mates down at the Dog and Goose, there was none of the bully in him.
Ian bit his lower lip, wondering if the old pub still stood. For all he knew, the bushfire might have wiped out the whole of Yolanda as well as his own holdings and those Jake had left to Jacy.
An abysmal depression settled over him, as heavy as his injuries.
“Why don’t you get out of here,” he growled at Jacy, who looked up at him in pleasant bewilderment, “and give a man a chance to rest!”
Jacy smiled. “I’m not sure whether it’s rest you need,” she replied in dulcet tones, “or an enema.”
Ian felt color surge up his neck and into his face. Damn it, she’d bested him, and in front of his son, too. Never mind that he’d asked for it.
To make matters worse, Chris laughed. They exchanged a look, the pair of them, like conspirators, and Ian was that much more furious. “Go on, the lot of you,” he barked. “I’m tired of looking at your faces.”
Jacy winked at Chris, then turned her sunny smile on Ian again. “Then don’t look,” she said. “We’re not going anywhere.”
And they didn’t.
Ian was outraged at such flagrant disobedience, but then, he couldn’t think why he’d expected anything else. A part of him, tucked away under layers of sorrow and emotional scar tissue, rejoiced because Jacy refused to leave him.
“Let me try that,” he rasped, reaching out a hand toward Chris.
The boy handed him the video game, beaming.
“You’re not going home with me, are you?” Regina asked glumly on the fifth day of the vigil as she and Jacy sat drinking coffee in the hospital cafeteria. Chris was upstairs with his grumpy father.
Jacy shook her head and smiled sadly.
Regina leaned forward, her voice lowered to a raspy whisper. “Ian’s rejected you, Jacy,” she pointed out. “He said so, and now he won’t even speak to you!”
It was true. Ian laughed and chatted with Chris, but he’d stopped talking to Jacy at all. Once in a while she caught him looking at her, and each time the bemused expression in his eyes had soured into a scowl.
“Ian thinks he’s saving me and our baby from a grim life on the charred and barren frontier,” Jacy said. “He’ll get over it.”
She hoped to high heaven she was right in her suspicion, because if it turned out that her husband really didn’t want her anymore, she was going to be devastated. For the present, she was taking things one crisis at a time.
Jacy saw the worry in her mother’s eyes and understood it. She reached out to pat Regina’s hand. “Go home to Michael, Mother,” she said gently. “I’m a big girl now. I can look after myself.”
Regina smiled. “Yes, I suppose you can,” she said. “Still, to just leave you here with that grouchy bear of a husband—God knows if you even have a home to go back to—”
“We’ll manage,” Jacy said quietly.
Regina drew a deep, resolute breath and let it out slowly. “Very well, then. I guess I’ll get over to the hotel and start packing.” She pushed back her chair, stood, and then abruptly sat down again, studying Jacy’s face imploringly. “Are you sure you don’t want to come back to New York?”
“Positive,” Jacy said. “Just like my pregnancy test.”
Regina made a sound of elegant and affectionate disgust and left the cafeteria.
Jacy lingered over her coffee for a while, then gathered all her emotional forces and went upstairs to beard the lion in his den. This was one standoff Ian Yarbro wasn’t going to win.
When she reached the doorway of his room she stopped on the threshold, stunned to find Andrew Carruthers there, seated next to Ian’s bed, with an open briefcase in his lap.
Ian looked at her with an expression of mingled defiance and desolation, and she felt the color drain from her face.
“What are you doing here?” she demanded of Carruthers, even though she knew.
“Leave it alone, Jacy,” Ian warned. “It’s none of your concern.”
“The hell it isn’t!” she cried, her voice rising a little with each word. “You’re trying to sell my land out from under me!” She gestured toward Carruthers. “And this lowdown, sorry-looking weasel is trying to buy it!”
A grin twitched at the corner of Ian’s mouth, and he subdued it, but not before Jacy saw. “Your property is worthless without the springs, sheila—and the water hole is mine. I can sell it if I wish.”
Jacy stormed into the room, grabbed a stack of suspicious-looking papers out of Carruthers’s open briefcase, and waved them over her head. “You just try it, Ian Yarbro!” she challenged, dodging the unwelcome visitor from Merimbula when he tried to grab for the documents. “I’ll have you tied up in court for the rest of your natural life!”
It was then that she remembered Chris, who had been sitting on the windowsill, taking in the whole scene. He was grinning in admiration and encouragement.
At least somebody was on her side, Jacy thought as she ripped the contract to bits and threw it up in the air. It descended like snow.
Carruthers was muttering, and Ian’s face was unreadable.
“I’ll have another agreement drawn up,” the American said, looking warily at Jacy, as if she’d lost her mind, and she supposed she had. Temporarily, at least.
“Don’t bother,” she said.
“You’ve lost all but a few head of your sheep,” Carruthers argued, red-faced now, snapping his briefcase shut with a vengeance. “The house and barn at Corroboree Springs are completely gone, and so are every last one of the outbuildings at your husband’s place—the stables, the shearing shed, all of it.”
Jacy hadn’t known the damage was so bad as that; she guessed she’d consoled herself with the fantasy that the bush had been satisfied with Ian’s blood. Instead it had spat fire, like some dragon, and consumed her legacy as well.
“Get out,” she said to Carruthers, but her voice was small, and her knees shook.
She collapsed into a chair.
“What the hell did you think you were doing just now?” Ian growled through his teeth. “Maybe the kind of money Carruthers was throwing about means nothing to you—a spoiled rich girl—but it would mean a new start for Chris and me!”
“Just us?” Chris interrupted tremulously. His smile had faded, and his freckles seemed to stand out from his skin the way they always did when he was upset. “What about Mum, and the nipper?”
Ian closed his eyes for a moment, and his face was granite-hard when he looked at Jacy again. His words, though, were directed to Chris. “We don’t need them,” he said coldly. “We got along just fine before.”
Jacy had been through a great deal in recent days. She was pregnant and exhausted, and her nerves were strained to the snapping point. She’d been eating only enough to keep going, and most of what she forced herself to swallow didn’t stay down.
On top of everything else, Ian’s words were too much.
She burst into tears with a wailing cry, but instead of fleeing from the room she snatched an extra pillow from the closet shelf and clubbed Ian with it. She struck him again and again until two nurses rushed in and stopped her.
Ian wasn’t hurt—she’d never intended that—but he was pale as he stared at her, amazed by her outburst. Chris was hunched over his video game, his small shoulders trembling, and Jacy couldn’t guess whether the child was laughing or crying.
“Here now,” clucked one of the nurses, pulling Jacy gently toward the door, “she’s at the end of her tether, poor thing, and needs a rest.”
“Out on her feet,” agreed the other woman, hurling a tart glance at Ian. “It’s no wonder, either, with this one ignoring her half the time and bellowing at her the other.” She made a huffing sound. “Ungrateful, I call it.”
Jacy lay down in an empty bed, for she had no strength left to resist—Ian had taken it all. She slept soundly straight through dinner and didn’t so much as stir until morning.
After a visit to the hotel, where she’d showered, put on fresh clothes, and looked in on a still-sleeping Chris, she returned to Ian’s room. He was alone, and he didn’t look any friendlier than he had the night before.
“It won’t help, your acting like a bastard,” Jacy announced crisply, “though I must say you’ve refined the technique. If you want me out of your life, you’ll have to get a lawyer—excuse me, a solicitor—in here and start divorce proceedings. And even that will be pretty futile, because you’ll have to throw me out of our house bodily to get me to leave. And it looks like it’ll be a while before you have the strength to do that.” She paused to take a breath, half enjoying the furious bewilderment in Ian’s eyes. “Of course, if you do give me the boot, I’ll just find a place in Yolanda and plague you from there. You’ll be the talk of the Dog and Goose, letting your poor, helpless, pregnant wife fend for herself that way. Maybe I’ll have twins and go around with bare feet—that would really make you look bad.”
Ian’s jaw tightened. He engaged in some internal struggle for a few moments, then muttered, “Why, Jacy? Why would you want to stay when you know I don’t care for you, don’t care for our baby?”
It was hard to keep from crying in the face of such coldness, but Jacy managed it. She’d learned a lot about courage in recent weeks. “I don’t believe you, that’s why,” she answered. “I think you do love me, though God knows you probably wish you didn’t, and you’ll love our baby, too. That’s the kind of man you are—you couldn’t turn your back on Chris, and it’ll be the same with this child. Personally, I hope we have a little girl, with your blue eyes and dark hair—”
“There’s no point in all this, Jacy,” he broke in grimly. “I’m selling out to Merimbula. It’s only a matter of time before Carruthers comes back with another sheaf of legal papers.”
“You idiot!” Jacy whispered, closing the door to the hospital room. “Are you out of your mind? Don’t you think it was awfully convenient for the folks at Merimbula that you got shot when you did?”
Ian frowned. “It was Redley Shifflet—I saw him pull the trigger.”
Jacy took a moment to react to the image, to struggle against the emotional reverberations of it. Then she went to stand beside the bed. “Who better? He wanted to kill you, and everybody knew it. And a little cash from Merimbula would have made the deal that much sweeter for scum like Shifflet.”
“You’ve been watching too much television,” Ian said, but he spoke slowly, thoughtfully, and with a lot of uncertainty.
“We’ll never prove it, of course,” Jacy rushed on, undaunted. “It’s the perfect crime. Nobody on the face of the earth would believe Redley had been paid to do you in—everybody knows he’s a mad dog, and that he hates your guts in the bargain.” She jabbed at Ian’s bandaged chest with an index finger for emphasis. “And you know you’ve been suspicious of Carruthers’s methods of dealing with competition—so was Jake.”
Ian narrowed his eyes, pondering the case. Then he glared at Jacy again; he’d done it often, and the hostility in his expression was expert.
“You’re right—we’ll never prove it. Either way, I’m finished as a grazier.”
Jacy folded her arms. “I never guessed you could be such a wimp,” she said. “One little fire and you’re finished?”
Ian’s face was downright stormy. In fact, Jacy figured if he could have gotten out of bed—he still had an IV needle in his right arm—he might have throttled her. “One—little—fire,” he repeated very slowly. “Add to that a near-fatal gunshot wound, a global recession, and the fact that I was barely scraping by in the first place, and yes, I’m through.”
She held her tongue for a few seconds, pondering the enormity of what he’d said, and gave the area immediately surrounding Ian a quick glance just to make sure there was nothing he could throw at her.
“Have you forgotten, Ian? You married a rich woman.”
His free hand knotted into a fist, and he glowered up at the ceiling, but he said nothing for a long time. When he finally looked at Jacy again his aspect was bleak. “I won’t take your money,” he said.
Jacy felt it all slipping away, everything she held dear, everything she’d dreamed about since her marriage to Ian. “Why not?” she demanded. “That’s why you married me, isn’t it?”
A quiet, savage rage flickered in his eyes, and his skin was pallorous. “No,” he answered, his voice as relentless and cold as a New England winter. “I married you for the water.”
She stood at the foot of his bed, gripping the iron rails in both hands. “Liar,” she said. “Jake gave you the springs outright, remember? No wedding required.”
He was silent, angry, broken. Jacy longed to put her arms around him, to soothe and comfort and reassure him in much the same way she’d done with Chris, but it wasn’t the time for that. Not yet.
“If it wasn’t my money, what was it?” she persisted.
Ian’s determination to drive her away was formidable; Jacy had a terrible, desperate feeling that she was losing the battle. “Sex,” he said. “You were a good lay. But then there are plenty of those about, aren’t there?”
“That was a lousy thing to say!”
He was absolutely obdurate. “True nonetheless,” he said, looking out through the window instead of at Jacy.
She was crying by then, there was no hiding it. “Don’t do this, Ian. Don’t drive me away just when you need me most. And think about Chris! His life is in upheaval as it is. Does he have to lose the stepmother who promised never to leave him, on top of everything else?”
“I don’t love you,” he said, still not meeting her eyes.
Jacy left the room with her shoulders straight, her chin high, and her heart in splinters.
She almost collided with Nancy and Alice Wigget, who were just coming down the hall.
Nancy immediately took Jacy into her arms for a quick hug. “Oh, Lord, look at you. Ian’s been a bear, I see.”
Jacy sniffled and tried to smile, and it didn’t matter that the effort failed miserably, because these two women were her friends. She didn’t have to keep up a front for them.
Alice was actually wearing a dress, her infamous tattoo covered by a long sleeve, and she had on a straw hat that had probably gone out of style sometime in the sixties. She rolled her eyes. “He can be that impossible, our Ian. Don’t worry your head about it, though. I’ll sort him out soon enough.”
Jacy’s smile came more easily that time.
“I’m going to throw the first punch,” Nancy said with narrowed eyes, and she turned on her heel to march into Ian’s room.
Alice, for her part, took Jacy’s arm and tugged her along to the waiting area. They sat facing each other across a round table next to the vending machines.
“I’ve come to see Ian all right,” Alice said, looking reluctant, guilty, and determined all at once. When she went on, it was in a rush of words. “But there’s more. It’s taken the heart right out of me, that fire. I found my cats, thank the Lord, but my photographs are gone, and my books, everything I had that mattered. I’ve given the cats to Sara McCulley—she’s a good sort and can be trusted to look after them proper—and I’m off to America to look for a cowboy.”
Jacy took Alice’s work-worn hand, full of sympathy and respect. “I’m so sorry—about your things, I mean. The fire must have been terrible.”
Alice shuddered. “I’ve never been so frightened in all my life. Saved the main homestead, I did, but everything else is gone. Ian’s horses are scattered from here to hell’s front parlor by this time, and he lost all but a handful of the sheep. Not many were burned to death—that’s a mercy, isn’t it?—but the smoke finished them off just the same.”
“Were any—any people killed?” Jacy held her breath.
Alice shook her head. “No—not so they’d have to lie down from it, anyway. But a lot of the graziers lost stock and buildings the way Ian did, and it will be the end of them.” She gazed at Jacy for a few moments, as though gauging her ability to take more bad news. “Corroboree Springs is gone, too—the sheds and the homestead itself, I mean.”
“I know,” Jacy said. She supposed the tragedy wouldn’t be real to her until she saw the charred remains of her father’s house.
Alice was rummaging in her large canvas traveling purse. “Ellie McAllister managed to save these, though. I thought you might want them, since they’re so cheery to look at and all.”
Jacy accepted a shoe box, lifted the lid, and found her shell collection inside. For just a moment all was beautiful and right with the world again.
“Thank you,” Jacy murmured.
Alice stood, smoothing her crumpled dress awkwardly. “Well, I’ll go in and say my farewells to Ian now. I’m catching a plane to Los Angeles soon enough.”
“You’ll want to see Chris before you go,” Jacy said, holding the shoe box carefully. She could smell and hear the sea, and the patterns on the shells reminded her that there was a order in the universe. “He’s over at our hotel right now. I’ll go and get him.”
Alice had had years of experience at giving orders, and the skill didn’t fail her then. “Nonsense. You’re on the verge of dropping over, you’re that tuckered out. I’ll find the place and the boy on my own after I’m through with that father of his.”
Jacy smiled. “I’m going to miss you, Alice.”
The housekeeper returned her smile. “You’re the best thing that ever happened to Ian Yarbro,” she said. “He’s nothing but a fool if he ever lets you go.”
Jacy didn’t answer; she couldn’t. She watched Alice walk away to join Nancy and Ian in the hospital room, then went to the elevator, the shoe box of memories and reassurances tucked under one arm.
After an hour or so Nancy and Alice came to the hotel. Alice and Chris went to have Devonshire tea together in the tiny restaurant downstairs, and Nancy occupied herself chatting with Regina. Like Alice, Jacy’s mother had a seat reserved on a departing plane.
Following a brief nap, Jacy felt better. Almost strong again. She had spread the colorful seashells, gathered years ago on the beach at Queensland, and was admiring them when there was a knock at the door.
The visitor was Nancy.
“Well, then, you look a little better,” she announced in her chiming voice.
“Tell me about Yolanda,” Jacy said. “Did the fire get that far? Was anyone hurt?”
Nancy looked bone-weary. And reluctant. “The fire didn’t actually reach us, no. But there was a shower of sparks—you can imagine it—and the buildings are all so old, and they all had tarpaper on the roofs …”
“Nancy,” Jacy insisted.
“The schoolhouse is gutted, Jacy,” Nancy admitted. “So is the church.”
Jacy sank into a chair. The schoolhouse. Now, if Ian truly didn’t relent, there would be no place, no place at all, for her to go back to.
Nancy rushed into the bathroom and returned shortly with a glass of water, which she shoved into her friend’s hand. “You look awful, Jacy. What’s the matter with you?”
Jacy made a sound that was half laughter, half sobbing. “I’m pregnant.”
Nancy’s response was a low whoop of joy. “But that’s wonderful—why do you look as though tomorrow’s been cancelled?”
Tears trickled down Jacy’s face. In the presence of her friend she could weep without restraint, and she needed the release desperately. “Ian’s decided he doesn’t want us—the baby and me, I mean.”
“That idiot,” Nancy said in cheerful dismissal. “He’s off his head from the fire, and being shot and everything. He doesn’t mean a bit of what he’s been saying.”
“I know,” Jacy sobbed, hugging herself now, and rocking back and forth. “But it still hurts!”
“Sure it does,” Nancy agreed sympathetically. She went back to the bathroom, this time for a box of tissues. “Just cry to your heart’s content, love,” she said. “It’ll do you good.”
The storm passed quickly, but there was a small mountain of wadded tissues in Jacy’s lap by the time it had blown over.
Nancy sat there in accepting silence, listening when Jacy wanted to talk, making no judgments, offering no solutions. Presently, when they’d been sitting in comfortable silence for some time, Nancy spoke again. “I thought it would be a good idea if I took Chris home with me,” she said quietly. “I’ll look after him until you and that hardheaded husband of yours come back.”
Jacy nodded. “Has Ian agreed?”
“Yes,” Nancy said.
A fearful thought occurred to Jacy. “What about Redley? Is he still running around on the loose?”
“Nobody’s seen him,” Nancy replied, frowning slightly. “For all I know, he’s dead. The police have been over from Willoughby, though, looking for him. They mean to arrest him, of course, for what he did to Ian.”
Jacy’s mind was racing. “What if he tries to hurt Chris?” she asked, murmuring the words, believing, until she’d heard them herself, that she’d only thought them.
Nancy looked determined. And ferocious. “He won’t,” she said. “If Redley Shifflet comes near that child, I’ll shoot him in the kneecaps. And if he doesn’t already know that, he’ll find it out soon enough!”
Jacy winced, but she knew she could trust Nancy to look after Chris and keep him safe. Not that her opinion really mattered—Ian had all the say-so where his child was concerned.
It was a day for good-byes.
First Regina left, lovely and tearful, kissing Chris, commanding Jacy to call and write more often than she had so far. Then Alice went, having said her farewells to all of them, heading for America and the Golden West. And after that, Chris and Nancy departed for Yolanda with Collie.
Jacy, having had a nap, a good meal, and a shower, was better prepared to face Ian again that night.
He seemed subdued when she entered his room. His supper tray was sitting nearby, untouched, and he was staring out the window. If he heard her come in, he didn’t look around.
She approached the bed, took his free hand in both of hers. “Everything’s going to be okay,” she said gently. “Trust me.”
Ian turned his head and looked up into her eyes. The hostility was gone, but Jacy found herself regretting that. In its place was the sort of hopelessness she’d seen in Paul’s face when he knew his life was over.
Tears gathered along Ian’s lower lashes. “God, Jacy,” he murmured. “You should have seen them lying there, all twisted and black.”
Jacy knew he was talking about his beloved sheep, and she didn’t flinch, didn’t look away. Neither did she speak, because she sensed Ian needed for her to listen.
He swallowed convulsively, and one tear slipped down his right cheek. “And the land. Oh, Jesus, Jacy, the land—it’s nothing but soot now.”
The land would heal, but Jacy didn’t say so. She held Ian’s hand a little tighter, though, and raised it to her lips to brush the knuckles with a kiss.
The anguish in his eyes almost brought Jacy to her knees. Ian was no weakling; he’d been through a lot of grief and trouble in his twenty-eight years and withstood it all. He must have been suffering terribly to say such things now, she thought.
“I’ll go to Queensland, like Jake was going to do. Chris would like it there if we were somewhere close to the water—”
Jacy knew these plans didn’t include her, or the child growing under her heart, and the pain was fathomless. She hid it well. Her voice trembled only a little when she spoke.
“Don’t be too hasty about this, darling,” she said softly. “Wait until you’re on your feet again before you make any drastic decisions. You’ve got to go back after you get well. When you do that you’ll know the right thing to do.”
Ian’s only response was a glum nod. He went to sleep soon after, and Jacy sat with him until the doctor came and sent her back to the hotel with stern orders to rest.
Instead she held the seashells one by one, turning them in her hands, remembering, reflecting that life, with all its infinite variety of patterns and shapes, goes on. A quiet, determined sort of joy filled Jacy’s heart; she had a great deal to be grateful for.
Jacy smiled and sat back in her chair, spreading one hand over her still-flat stomach, thinking of Ian and how much she loved him, and of Chris, and of her good friend Nancy.
Oh, yes. There was a great deal to be thankful for.