Outback Boss, City Bride by Jessica Hart

Author:Jessica Hart
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2007-08-31T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVEN

THERE was a long, terrible silence. ‘Oh…Hal…’ Meredith didn’t know what to say.

Hal acknowledged her sympathy with a hunch of his shoulders. ‘You see why Dad didn’t want any reminders of her around? After Jack…I’ll never forget the way he tore up every picture, anything that might remind us of her. He wouldn’t have her name mentioned, and we all pretended that she was dead. Like Jack.’

‘Did your mother know?’

‘She must have done. I don’t know if she ever tried to contact Lydia or me—if she did, Dad wouldn’t have told us. Lydia’s seen her once or twice in Sydney, but I’ve never wanted to, not after Jack, and not after what she did to my father.’

He shook his head. ‘Dad was never the same after she left. I think there was part of him that knew it had been inevitable from the start, and that they should probably never have got married in the first place, but still, he couldn’t break himself of her spell. After she left, he just…gave up. He lost interest. It was only when he died that I realised how far he had let Wirrindago run down. It’s taken a long time to build things up again.’

Meredith’s throat was tight as she watched Hal, trying to imagine life in the homestead over twenty years ago, when his mother had gone and Jack was dead and his father had turned in on himself. Her heart ached for him, for the boy he had been, and she wanted to take him in her arms and hold him tightly.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said instead, desperately conscious of how inadequate that sounded.

Hal looked into her warm, dark eyes and felt something tight around his heart loosen. ‘That’s what I said to you when you told me about boarding school, and you told me that you got used to it,’ he reminded her. ‘It was the same for me.’

‘Who looked after you and Lydia?’

‘We ran pretty wild for a time, then my father’s sister got wind of the situation and came to sort us out. She’d grown up at Wirrindago but met Guy’s father when she was in England and stayed there. She and my father were always close, and I think she hated seeing how broken he was by what had happened, but she’s a very practical person too. In fact, you remind me of her a lot,’ Hal said with a half smile.

‘She arranged for a housekeeper and tried to get us back to our schooling. I went to boarding school and she took Lydia to live with her in England until she was old enough to go to boarding school as well.’

Meredith hated the thought of Hal, losing his mother and his brother, and then his little sister too before being sent off to school on his own. Poor boy.

‘Going to boarding school must have been horrible for you,’ she said compassionately.

‘No worse than for you,’ said Hal, ‘and I was nearly thirteen, not nine.’

‘I had Lucy,’ she pointed out.

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