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make a shambles of her intention to keep him at arm's length if she had such a tangible reminder of him after they parted. 'I wasn't thinking about you,' she denied. 'I was worried about the value of the ring.'
    He arched an eyebrow. 'You surprise me. I told you I didn't expect you to co-operate for nothing. Consider the ring your payment.'
    'For doing what I didn't want to do in the first place?' she asked, hurt by his words but determined not to let him see how much.
    'If you like.' Without warning, the cynical mask dropped away to reveal such unhappiness that she was shaken. 'I know it must be difficult for you to stay here and see Rick marry someone else, but I'm grateful that you agreed to do it for Robyn's sake. Now I don't know if I did the right thing by suggesting it.'
    She had never seen Ben like this before, vulnerable and willing to admit that he could be wrong. He was, but not in the way he thought.
    The silence grew but Ben made no move to leave. He seemed to have something else on his mind. She waited for him to speak. After a while, he did. 'Let's go for a drive before dinner. I have something to show you.'
    She understood his reasoning. To the rest of the family, it would look odd if they didn't spend some time together. It wasn't because he wanted to be alone with her. 'All right,' she said, her depression projecting into her voice.
    'It was an invitation, not an order,' he said, sounding irritated.
    'If it wasn't, I wouldn't have accepted,' she assured him. On an impulse, she touched his arm then let her hand drop as she recognised the danger in such intimacies. 'Can't we try to be civil to each other, for Robyn's sake if not for our own?'
    'For Robyn's sake,' he echoed, but she couldn't tell from his tone what he thought of the idea.
    They drove in silence for several miles across the unending plains, their surfaces corrugated after the long dry season. Most of the rivers had dwindled to a series of billabongs with dry river bed in between. They crossed several of these, lurching down one side and up the other at angles which made her feel as if they could tumble backwards at any moment. Ben was a skilful driver, however, and was in full control of the powerful vehicle. 'Where are we going?' she asked after their third creek crossing.
    'To see a pet project of mine,' he informed her. He gave her no more clues. Her curiosity was piqued as they drove into a settlement on the banks of a creek which she recognised as part of Crocodile Creek.
    She made her own assessment of the pens, buildings and fenced-off stretch of riverbank. 'You're farming crocodiles.'
    He nodded. 'I've had a permit for several years, but this is the first year I've been able to put so much time into making it work.'
    She didn't try to mask her pleasure. 'Crocodile- farming has been a hobby-horse of mine since . . .' She let her voice tail off. 'I'm forgetting, you've been keeping tabs on me in Darwin.'
    'Enough to know you've written several articles for Australian Natural History magazine on how managed farming of crocs can help the conservation cause. One of your pieces gave me the idea to try it here.'
    She was inordinately pleased. She had long been an advocate of egg-ranching and had helped to collect the eggs from wild nests so that they could be incubated under ideal conditions and the young raised on farms under special licence. The need to monitor the areas from which the eggs were taken was the reason for her survey of Crocodile Creek but she hadn't guessed that Ben was the holder of the licence, nor that he shared her enthusiasm for the idea. 'Show me everything,' she insisted.
    Their differences might not have existed as he took her on a tour of the project. Large sheds accommodated the generators needed to run the incubators where the eggs were hatched. 'We have two spares for back-up in case the main one fails,' he explained.
    'What's your survival rate?' she asked with brisk professionalism.
    'Eighty per cent of