Wife to Order: An Australian Outback Romance by Lucy Walker

Author:Lucy Walker [Walker, Lucy]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: australian author, small town and rural, outback romance, australian rural novels, australian romance, clean romance, clean and wholesome, autstralian rural romance
Publisher: Wyndham Books (Small Town & Rural Romance)
Published: 2020-12-15T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Ten

Carey worked in the pantry, just off the big kitchen. Over Cook’s conversation she listened for the telephone. Perhaps he mightn’t ring. Perhaps he might just bring Jane up unannounced.

How would she greet Jane?

Would she have to take Jane up to her bedroom to do her hair and make-up?

My goodness, how much would that room give away the life she and Oliver led in the homestead? No, that was one thing she couldn’t bear … Jane’s all-seeing eye and Jane’s mocking laugh.

Carey put down the salad knife and went upstairs and along the passage to her bedroom. She stood inside the door and looked at it. Well, there were two beds even if Jane had to pull aside the covers of one to discover it was never slept in. And surely even Jane wouldn’t do that!

Everything in the room was, of course, feminine and belonged to Carey. But then didn’t all the bedrooms of married people look like that? Maybe she ought to have just something of Oliver’s to give it the masculine touch.

Carey crossed the hall to Oliver’s room. She hardly ever went there; only to put away Oliver’s laundry, in fact. Somehow it seemed very private and inviolate.

It was so scrupulously tidy a room that it seemed to reflect Oliver’s remoteness. The bed under the window was a fairly big bed but its cover was a severe grey. The headboard was of dark wood and the lamp over it was a cold streamlined steel. The chest of drawers, the wardrobe, the dressing-table were all of heavy dark unadorned wood. The carpet on the floor was unpatterned.

On top of the chest of drawers was a white cloth and on the cloth stood two square hand-carved boxes. In them Oliver kept things like obsolete studs, tie-pins, a variety of cigarette holders and lighters that he never used. Carey knew because once she had looked in them to find the jigger buttons missing from his dress shirt; the one he had worn at his wedding.

On the dressing-table his two hair brushes and a comb stood on a square glass tray. On the walls were some photographs of rowing eights, souvenirs of Oliver’s school days. Otherwise the room was bare of any ornament.

What could she take and put in her own room to give that masculine touch?

Then her eyes went down to the base of the chest of drawers and there, heels just protruding, stood Oliver’s house-shoes. Carey darted across the room, picked up the shoes and went back to the door. She looked up the long passage and across the wide hall to make sure Hannah was not in sight and then she sped down to her own room. She did not wait to shut the door but put Oliver’s shoes under the bed that stood nearest the window, their heels just showing. She put her own slippers, which generally were hidden in a cupboard, under her own bed. She went back to Oliver’s room, took a shirt from a drawer and brought it back and put it over the back of a chair as if ready for him to don.

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