Heart of the Outback by Emma Darcy Read Free Book Online Page A

Gareth. I’m not. And it’s no use thinking I can be. I just can’t take being used again.”
    “Alida.” It was a rasp of protest. His hands moved to her upper arms, rubbing them in a soothing way. Then he heaved a ragged sigh and stepped back from her, his face tight with frustration, his eyes sick with it, confused and accusing.
    Alida felt sick, too. Tears spilled down her cheeks in a miserable dribble as she stared at the man she had loved and hated and wanted for so long. Why couldn’t it be different? Why couldn’t he have courted her decently, as he must have courted his wife? Why did he judge her so meanly?
    He lifted his hand in a stiff, awkward gesture of offering. “Is there anything I can do?” he asked.
    “For a woman who lives in the fast lane?” she choked out bitterly. “You don’t care about how I feel, Gareth. You never did. Your desire is only to take.”
    Her legs felt as though they were flowing with heavy treacle, boneless. Somehow she forced them to move, to support her as she turned and stepped to the console table. “I’ll ring for a taxi. You won’t have to wait long,” she said, reaching for the telephone.
    “Why are you doing this, Alida?”
    His voice was low and strained. She paused, yearning for him to be sincerely sympathetic, then shook her head with bleak resignation. “There’s nothing for you to stay for, Gareth. I won’t change my mind.”
    “You shared yourself with me once,” he reminded her. “Won’t you let me give you something in return?”
    “Like what?” She swept him with a dull, derisive look.
    “Company. You said you didn’t want to be by yourself tonight.”
    “Yes. I said that. But what company would you be, Gareth? All you do is judge me contemptuously. I don’t want to hear any more of your prejudices. They hurt.” Her eyes raked his with pained accusation, then dropped to the award she had won. She picked up the statuette. “You think this represents ambition.”
    “Doesn’t it?”
    A harsh, bitter laugh scraped from her throat. “Have you ever worked hard to keep from thinking of other things, Gareth? To wear yourself out so you’ll sleep at night?”
    “Yes. I’ve done that,” he answered quietly.
    “Are there national awards for good management of a cattle station?”
    “Not that I know of.”
    “But you give yourself goals.”
    “Yes.”
    “Well, so did I. So did I,” she repeated sadly as she set the statuette on the table again. “Years of hard work to stave off the loneliness—that’s what this award represents to me, Gareth. And you know what I felt when I went up on stage to get it tonight?”
    “Tell me.”
    “I didn’t feel anything.” She turned to him with a wobbly little smile. “I should have felt something, shouldn’t I? It wasn’t right to feel nothing.”
    “You looked proud.”
    “Yes. And I smiled. I smiled very brightly, like a winner. Except I’m a loser in life, Gareth. The right things don’t happen to me. Not the things that I really care about.”
    “What do you want?”
    She stared at him, seeing the restraint he was rigidly applying to keep this conversation calm and reasonable. His hands were clenched at his sides, belying the quiet, soothing words he spoke to her. He was wound tightly like a clock, exerting control by sheer willpower.
    The strain showed on his face, making it look older somehow. She saw that the lines carved from nose to mouth were deeper than she remembered. Fine crow’s-feet marked the outer corners of his eyes. A few threads of grey glinted in the midnight-black hair. Time moves on and stamps its passage on all of us, she thought. We’re both five years older, the circumstances are different, yet everything remains the same between us.
    “You wouldn’t think of introducing your daughter to me, would you, Gareth? You’d keep her as separate from me as you once kept your wife.”
    A muscle in his cheek contracted. “I didn’t think that far ahead,