Outback Boss, City Bride

CHAPTER FIVE

IT TOOK Meredith an hour to restore the kitchen to some semblance of order. Emma and Mickey slipped away as soon as they suspected jobs might be in the offing, but trailed back after a while, complaining that they were bored.

‘You can help me make a cake if you like,’ Meredith offered. She felt sorry for the poor kids, dumped out in the middle of nowhere with nothing to do and only a grim uncle and a bunch of taciturn stockmen for company. ‘You choose what kind.’

‘Can we make a chocolate cake?’

‘You can if we can find some cocoa.’ She peered into the larder, which was next on her list for a major clear out. ‘I’m sure I saw some in here.’

By the time Hal came in later that morning, the cake was in the oven, Meredith had heard all about the children’s lives in Sydney and the carefully tidied kitchen was once more looking as if the proverbial bomb had hit it. Emma and Mickey were licking out the cake bowl, measuring how much the other had taken with eagle-eyed precision, and Meredith was resignedly wiping up the debris when the clatter of the screen door announced Hal’s arrival.

Her body was still strumming with a mixture of indignation and something that was shamefully like excitement in spite of her best efforts to work it out of her system. She had thrown herself into a frenzy of cleaning all morning, but she might as well not have bothered judging by the way her heart jerked at Hal’s appearance. The strange buzzing sensation in the pit of her stomach immediately ratcheted itself up to full vibration.

It wasn’t the kind of thing sensible stomachs did. Crossly, Meredith scrubbed at a sticky patch with renewed vigour.

Hal sniffed appreciatively as he hung up his hat. ‘Something smells good.’

‘We made a cake,’ said Mickey importantly.

‘It’s for smoko this afternoon,’ Emma added, anxious not to miss out on the glory.

‘That sounds great.’ Hal looked around the kitchen and his eyes came to rest on Meredith, still rubbing industriously. ‘You’ve been busy.’

‘Just doing my job,’ said Meredith, horrified to hear that her voice was positively squeaky. She rinsed out the cloth under the tap and willed her nerve endings to stop carrying on as if it were party time. Honestly, anyone would think that she was attracted to him!

Or that she wished she’d accepted his offer.

Wringing out the cloth rather more forcefully than necessary, she laid it by the sink and turned to Hal, disguising her unaccustomed nervousness in brisk practicality.

‘You don’t know if there’s an apron around, do you?’ There, that was much better. Nobody whose nerves were fluttering frantically with awareness under their skin would even be able to think about aprons, let alone care whether they were wearing one or not, would they? ‘I couldn’t find one anywhere.’

‘An apron?’ Hal made it sound as if she had asked for an intergalactic spaceship, and there was probably about as much chance that she would find one of those out here, Meredith reflected. ‘What do you want an apron for?’

‘Why does anyone ever want an apron? To protect my clothes, of course,’ she said sharply. ‘Look at the state of me!’

Hal looked. She looked fine to him. Overdressed as usual, and perhaps not as well-groomed as she might have been after this morning’s trip in the back of the truck, but she was gesturing fastidiously at her front as if she’d been castrating bullocks. Hal didn’t care to think how she would react to what went on in the yards. He made a mental note to keep her away from there.

‘I can’t lay my hands on an apron, but I could find you an old shirt,’ he said. ‘Would that help?’

‘It would be better than nothing,’ she accepted as graciously as she could.

Hal was back a few minutes later. ‘It’ll be too big for you,’ he told her, handing her a shirt that was soft and faded from repeated washings. It had once had a blue check that now looked more like a smudgy grey. ‘At least it might cover you up, though.’

‘Thank you,’ said Meredith, taking it from him and lifting it to her face without thinking. ‘Mmm, it smells nice,’ she said, breathing in the clean fragrance of sun-dried cotton and something else that she couldn’t quite identify.

Hal raised an eyebrow. ‘It’s one of my old shirts, but it’s perfectly clean. It shouldn’t smell of anything.’

‘I know.’ Meredith flushed at the realisation that the lovely, clean but unmistakably masculine scent was Hal’s. Please God he didn’t guess that she had recognised it. She cleared her throat. ‘I just like the smell of clean clothes,’ she excused herself and then regretted it. Now she sounded like some kind of pervert who went around sniffing laundry.

‘Whatever turns you on,’ he said and the children sniggered. It was obvious they all thought that she was deeply weird. ‘Anyway, the shirt’s yours. I haven’t worn it for a while and it doesn’t matter how dirty you get it.’

Mortified, Meredith clutched the shirt to her chest and wished that Hal hadn’t mentioned being turned on. The mere feel of the shirt in her hands was enough to make her think about how he would have looked, bare-chested, as he shrugged it on. How many times had this material rested against his skin? God, she was actually stroking it, she realised, appalled, and dropped it on to the table as if it had burnt her.

‘Ready for smoko?’ she asked crisply.

‘We are, but I wasn’t sure if you’d have had time to make tea.’

‘Of course.’ She might be sadly lacking in control on the shirt front, thought Meredith, but let no one suggest that she wasn’t efficient. ‘Lucy left some biscuits, so I’ve put them on the veranda there with some mugs. I’ll just put the kettle on.’

Screened in like the dining veranda, this was the most comfortable part of the homestead where they came for smoko or to sit with a cold beer at the end of a long, hot day. It was a man’s place. There were no knick-knacks or pictures or matching upholstery. Instead there were tatty wicker chairs, some limp, stained cushions and the occasional table decorated with ring marks from countless mugs and scattered with a motley assortment of magazines dating back as long as Hal could remember. No rugs, nothing fancy, just a scarred and stained concrete floor so you weren’t afraid to walk in with your boots on.

At least it had been comfortable. When Hal stepped through from the kitchen, he hardly recognised it. The tables were clean, the floor shining and the chairs all lined up, the cushions plumped and realigned with military precision.

He stared around him, appalled. ‘What have you done?’

‘I’ve given it a good clean,’ said Meredith as she carried in the huge teapot. ‘The place was filthy.’ She set the teapot on table-newly scrubbed. ‘And I tidied up a bit.’

‘A bit? This is supposed to be a place we can relax,’ Hal complained. ‘Now it looks as if we’ll have to march in time and salute before we ask permission to sit down. What are you, woman-a frustrated sergeant major?’

‘No, I’m a housekeeper,’ she said tightly. ‘At least, that’s what I understood you wanted me to be. And housekeepers keep houses clean. This place was a tip!’

‘I liked it being a tip,’ said Hal, scowling. ‘And what have you done with the magazines?’

‘I put them in the box of papers to be incinerated.’

‘What? You’d better not have burnt them!’

‘Not yet, no,’ Meredith admitted reluctantly, although she wished that she had now. What a fuss about a lot of old magazines!

‘In that case, you can bring them back right now!’

‘But they’re all years out of date!’ she protested.

‘I don’t care,’ he snarled. ‘Bring them back.’

‘Fine.’ Tight-lipped, Meredith marched out to the kitchen and retrieved the magazines. ‘There you are,’ she said, dumping them on a table. ‘Happy now?’

‘Yes,’ he said grudgingly. ‘Thank you.’

‘Perhaps you’d better tell me where else is to be preserved as a dusty tip,’ she said, her voice dripping with sarcasm. ‘Or shall I assume that you don’t actually want me to do any cleaning. Clearly nobody else has done any for a very long time!’

‘You can clean,’ said Hal, eyeing her with dislike. ‘Just don’t change anything.’ Deliberately, he pulled a chair out of its neat line and sat down in it as the rest of the men began trooping in, all equally aghast at finding themselves somewhere clean and tidy. ‘I don’t like change,’ he said.

Meredith drank her tea in a huff. Honestly, she fumed to herself, what was the point of having a housekeeper if you were only going to complain when she kept house? No wonder Hal Granger had such a high turnover of cooks and housekeepers. He obviously never let them do their jobs.

The men were uneasy until they had restored the veranda to its habitual mess, which took surprisingly little time compared to how long it had taken her to clean it up, Meredith thought vengefully, but someone eventually started a conversation about something called agistment, not a word of which Meredith understood. She was heartily relieved when they all stood up to go back to work.

Still stroppy, she followed them out to where they were collecting their hats by the kitchen door. Hal was the last to go.

‘What were you planning for supper?’ he asked, obviously preparing to pre-empt any further disasters like them actually eating something different for a change.

‘Well, let’s see…’ Meredith put her head on one side and pretended to consider. ‘I thought I would do something simple since it’s my first night,’ she said, her voice dripping sarcasm. ‘Perhaps filet mignon with timbales of aubergine and red pepper served with a rosemary and redcurrant coulis?’

There was a moment’s silence. Deep blue eyes met cool grey in an unspoken challenge, and that should have been the end of it. But then something happened. Afterwards, Meredith couldn’t really explain it to herself, but it was as if someone somewhere had flicked a switch, making the air crackle alarmingly, and she could practically see the spark jumping between them.

Whatever it was, it unnerved her enough to make her jerk her gaze away, unaccountably shaken. She moistened her lips.

‘Or perhaps a bowl of mince,’ she finished.

Hal settled his hat on his head in a gesture that was already familiar to her. ‘Mince sounds good,’ he said.

He turned to reach for the screen door, but not before Meredith had glimpsed a tell-tale dent at the corner of his mouth and that the elusive smile that never quite seemed to reach his lips was gleaming in his eyes.

The next moment he had gone, letting the door clatter shut behind him, but it was as if that smile were still there, tingling in her blood, and her huff evaporated like mist on a summer morning. To Meredith’s disgust, she found herself thinking about the smile rather than about how totally unreasonable Hal had been as she cleared the mugs from the veranda.

What on earth was the matter with her? Meredith gave herself a mental shake. She wasn’t the kind of girl who went all fluttery at a smile-not that you could really call that gleam in his eye a real smile. She was a sensible, down-to-earth woman, who didn’t go in for imagining sparks or smiles or anything silly like that and, even if she were, it wouldn’t do her any good.

She certainly wasn’t about to go weak at the knees for a man who was to all intents and purposes her employer. That would be a stupid thing to do, and Meredith didn’t do stupid. She didn’t do reckless or romantic. She did careful and considered, so that was quite enough nonsense about non-existent smiles!

No, she reminded herself, she had agreed to do this job. She didn’t have to like it, she just had to get on with it. Jet lag might excuse some uncharacteristic behaviour, but that was enough now. It was time to pull herself together.

And she would start off by changing into the shirt he had provided, instead of letting herself be unnerved by its scent or the fact that Hal had worn it. Pulling off her top in her bedroom, she slipped on the shirt. It felt cool and comfortable, the soft material almost caressing her skin, the way it must have caressed Hal’s.

Meredith’s fingers fumbled at the buttons, imagining him doing the same, imagining what it would be like if he were there now, watching her, brushing her clumsy hands aside and slowly unbuttoning the shirt with deft fingers until it slid from her shoulders.

All right! Meredith told herself fiercely as her insides promptly melted at the mere thought. She had to stop this, she had to stop it now. It was just a shirt and she was a sensible woman. Just do up the buttons and go and get lunch.

Being sensible didn’t stop her being agonisingly aware of the feel of Hal’s shirt against her body, but at least she avoided having to explain to Hal just why she had taken his shirt off after being so insistent that she wanted to protect her own clothes.

The thing is, she would have had to say to him, I keep thinking about you wearing it. I keep thinking about it against your bare back, and that gives me this awful, squirmy feeling in my stomach, so I decided I’d rather ruin my own clothes.

No way was Meredith having that conversation.

Still, it was a relief when she had supper under control that evening and could go and change into her own clothes once more. She put on a black skirt and a flattering pale blue top that hugged her curves without being too revealing, and slipped her feet into strappy sandals with vertiginous heels. Add some lipstick, and Meredith immediately felt more herself-confident and competent.

The feeling lasted until the stockmen shuffled in from their quarters for the evening meal. They had a beer on the veranda first, and stared at her as if they had never seen a woman in high heels before.

In spite of her determination not to care if she seemed out of place, Meredith was desperately self-conscious and she despised herself for it. It was true that, like Hal, the men all seemed to have showered and changed their shirts at least, but it was clear that the notion of dressing for dinner had not yet reached this part of the outback.

‘You look…very…smart,’ said Hal, who really wanted to say something like sensational or sexy-or both-but thought she would probably bite his head off if he did. But those shoes…!

To Meredith, ‘smart’ sounded like an insult. ‘I’m allowed to change in the evenings, aren’t I?’ she snapped. ‘Or is a change of clothes too much change for you to deal with?’

Hal held up his hands. ‘We’re just not used to it, that’s all. Lucy never changed in the evenings.’

No, well, if she had Lucy’s figure and could look fabulous in jeans and a T-shirt, she probably wouldn’t either, Meredith reflected with a touch of bitterness. She would love to be slender and long-legged like her sister instead of short and round. It was no surprise that people often found it hard to believe that the two of them were related. She had often wondered if there had been some mix-up at the hospital when she was born as she appeared to have no genetic connection to the rest of her family.

She didn’t care anyway, Meredith reminded herself, sitting at the end of the table opposite Hal and lifting her chin defiantly. Let them think of her as strange. She didn’t want to be accepted here, the way Lucy obviously had been. She didn’t want to belong.

Meredith’s first meal could not be said to have been a raving success. There was nothing wrong with the mince or the vegetables, all perfectly cooked, or with the apple pie she had made for pudding, but the atmosphere was distinctly awkward. Meredith was defensive, the children sullen, and Hal was having so much trouble concentrating on anything except how she looked in those shoes that he barely knew what he was eating.

Never the chattiest of company, the stockmen left immediately after pudding, leaving Meredith alone with Hal and the two children.

‘What do you two do with yourselves in the evening here?’ she asked Emma and Mickey, since it seemed hardly fair to them to sit in silence and she couldn’t think of a thing to say to Hal, who had been looking distracted all evening.

‘Nothing. It’s so boring,’ sighed Emma.

‘There isn’t even a TV,’ Mickey added in the incredulous tones of a child unable to imagine anywhere without this most basic of technologies.

‘There’s a record player,’ Hal offered in his defence, and they looked at him blankly.

‘What’s that?’

In spite of her determination to stay aloof, Meredith couldn’t help catching Hal’s eye and she smothered a smile at his expression. ‘It’s been a very long time since anyone played records,’ she said. ‘Even I never had a record player. Don’t tell me you’ve never heard of CDs?’

‘Of course I have,’ said Hal. ‘But, in case you hadn’t noticed, music shops are few and far between out here. I just never got round to buying CDs or anything to play them on.’

‘Don’t you listen to music?’ asked Meredith, trying to imagine a life without music. ‘I always have it on in the background, even when I’m working.’

His mother had been the same, Hal remembered. There had always been music when she was around.

‘I listen to the night,’ he said.

Emma and Mickey exchanged a glance. Hal pushed back his chair and got to his feet, glad to get off the subject of music.

‘If you two are so bored, you can come and give me a hand with the washing-up,’ he said and watched their faces crumple in consternation.

‘Oh, that’s not fair!’

Meredith looked puzzled. ‘I was expecting to clear up,’ she said.

‘No, the cook doesn’t wash up the main meal,’ said Hal. ‘This is your time off. You can relax now and I’ll bring you a cup of coffee in a minute.’

He bore the children, still protesting, off to the kitchen and Meredith was left in sole possession of the table.

Well, it was a nice idea, but what did you do with time off in a place like this? Meredith wondered. If she were at home in London, she could stretch out on the sofa and watch telly, or ring a friend and go out for a drink. She could go to a film or catch an exhibition or see if she could get a ticket to the latest play everyone was talking about.

What was there to do here? A big, fat nothing.

Of course, she could do some work, but somehow the thought of going into that cheerless office-that was next on her list for a revamp!-and sitting at her laptop was too depressing to contemplate. Catching herself in the middle of a huge yawn as she got up from the table, Meredith reasoned that she was still suffering from jet lag and could therefore be excused from working this evening. She would get down to it tomorrow.

It was too early to go to bed, though. The children had portable DVD players, but Meredith didn’t rate her chances of being able to borrow one now that they were having to wash up, and besides, she didn’t think her eyes could cope with the tiny screen.

For want of anywhere else to go, she went to sit on the back veranda where she had seen that incredible sunset the day before. It was quite dark now, with no light to discourage the flying insects who hurled themselves at the blue light trap instead. Meredith was a bit disconcerted by the way it would spit and fizzle every few seconds as another insect was caught by its deadly lure.

She looked outwards instead. The night sky was quite different in the Southern Hemisphere, Meredith realised, and certainly very different from the starless yellow glow that hung above London. Here, the darkness wasn’t black or grey but a deep, dark blue and blurry with brilliant white stars.

Meredith thought about Lucy, who was up in that sky somewhere at thirty thousand feet, flying, flying, flying. The memory of that long journey made Meredith shudder. Then she thought about Richard, lying still in his hospital bed, but London seemed unimaginably distant, here in the vastness of the Australian outback. It was hard to remember exactly what Richard looked like.

Or why she had loved him so much.

Behind her, the screen door creaked, jolting her out of her thoughts, and through the dim light she saw Hal looming with two mugs.

‘So this is where you are,’ he said, an odd note in his voice.

‘Is it OK for me to be here?’

‘Of course. I was just surprised to find you here. This is where I like to sit at night too.’

‘Oh.’ Meredith felt as if she ought to move, but it seemed rude to leave the moment he had arrived and, besides, he had brought her coffee.

She took it with a murmur of thanks and after a second’s hesitation Hal sat down in the chair next to hers. There was a table between them where she could put down her mug, but he still felt overwhelmingly close and she was suddenly reminded of how she had felt when she had put his shirt on earlier that day. The thought brought a flush to her cheeks and she was very glad of the dim light that hid her expression.

‘You’re not working tonight?’ he asked after a moment.

‘I should be,’ she said, ‘but I can’t face it until I’ve cleared that desk.’

‘You’re entitled to sit down and do nothing for a bit. You’ve been working all day and it’s all strange to you.’

‘It’s certainly that,’ said Meredith ruefully.

Hal’s eyes rested on her profile. In the dim light he could see little more than the pearly gleam of her skin and the outline of that lush mouth, but he could still picture exactly how she had looked as she had walked into the veranda that night in those ridiculously unsuitable and sexy shoes and announced that supper was ready. Her chin had been up at its usual combative angle and her eyes had been sharp and bright, but the rest of her was all warm curves and soft lines.

Hal pushed the memory firmly aside.

‘I’m sorry, I was probably a bit abrupt with you earlier about the veranda,’ he apologised. ‘I’m not very good with change.’

‘I gathered that,’ she said dryly.

‘I’m only thirty-five, but I guess I’m set in my ways,’ he said, trying to explain. ‘I’ve lived here at Wirrindago all my life, and I’ve been running the station on my own for the last fifteen years. I’m used to things being a certain way.’ He shrugged. ‘That’s probably why I’m finding the kids a bit difficult.’

‘Where are they now?’

‘Playing some computer game in their rooms and recovering from drying up a few dishes. You’d think holding a tea towel was a form of torture.’ Hal sighed and swirled the coffee round in his mug. ‘I don’t understand them,’ he admitted. ‘I feel as if I’ve let them down, but I don’t know what to do with them. They seem to be bored the whole time. We were never bored when we were children.’

Meredith eyed him over the rim over her mug. ‘What did you used to do?’

‘We used to have to help around the station, for a start,’ said Hal, ‘but when we’d done our jobs, we’d ride or go fishing or mess around by the creek. We’d go off exploring on our own for hours.’

His voice trailed off as he realised how long it was since he’d let himself talk about his childhood. Since he’d let himself think about it.

‘That was you and Lydia?’

And Jack. Hal wasn’t ready to talk about Jack.

‘Yes,’ he said.

Meredith drank her coffee thoughtfully. ‘Maybe you should show Emma and Mickey what you used to do?’ she suggested. ‘After all, their mum grew up here. She must have talked about it.’

Lydia wouldn’t have talked about Jack.

‘Maybe,’ Hal agreed. But how could he show them the creek and the rocks and the water hole and not think about Jack?

A silence fell, but it wasn’t an uncomfortable one. The blue light fizzled and snapped, but above it Meredith could hear insects shrilling and the strange cracks and rustles of the darkness, and she thought about what Hal had said about listening to the night.

A creeper that looked much too exotic to survive in the British climate was climbing up the veranda post, its scent heady on the night air. In the starlight, she could see a frangipani tree, recognised from holidays in Greece, its fragrant white blooms almost glowing in the dark, but beyond that there was nothing, just an ancient, immense darkness crouching in the silence.

Meredith shivered and sipped her coffee, glad that Hal was there.

‘Haven’t you ever wanted kids of your own?’ she asked, wanting the reassurance of his voice.

Hal’s face closed. ‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘Why should I?’

‘Well…I don’t know,’ she admitted. ‘I suppose I’d expect you to want to pass the land on to your children. Farmers are always supposed to think in terms of generations, aren’t they?’

‘This farmer doesn’t,’ said Hal flatly. ‘Wanting children means wanting a mother for those children.’

‘The two usually go together,’ Meredith agreed.

‘I’m not going to take the risk of marrying someone and having children. There’s no guarantee that the marriage would last. It’s hard enough under normal conditions, but when you add in isolation and drought and all the other things you have to contend with in the outback…no.’ He shook his head. ‘It’s not a risk I’m prepared to take.’

‘There’s no guarantee that a marriage wouldn’t last either,’ Meredith pointed out. ‘Some marriages are very happy.’

‘None that I know of,’ said Hal.

‘If I were talking to one of my friends in London, I’d say you had real commitment issues,’ said Meredith with one her acerbic looks.

‘What about you?’ Hal countered. ‘I don’t see you having committed yourself to marriage either.’

‘That’s because I haven’t met the right man yet, not because I’m afraid of commitment.’

Hal raised a brow in disbelief. ‘Don’t tell me you’re waiting for Mr Perfect?’

‘What’s wrong with that?’

‘Only that you strike me as a sensible woman, and it doesn’t seem like a very sensible thing to do. You must know as well as I do that no one will ever be perfect, which gives you commitment issues too,’ he said. ‘Instead of admitting that you don’t want to take the risk, you pretend you’re waiting for someone who doesn’t exist.’

‘Who says he doesn’t?’ demanded Meredith fiercely. ‘I’m not waiting for a man who’s perfect, just a man who’s perfect for me.’

‘I can’t believe a sensible girl like you would fall for that happy-ever-after fantasy,’ said Hal with a snort of contempt.

‘Actually, it’s a perfectly sensible approach.’ Meredith’s voice was cool. ‘Lucy falls in and out of love the whole time, and it always seems to me that it’s a waste of time and energy and emotion when any fool can see that it’s not going to last. It’s much more sensible to wait until you’re sure that you’ve met someone who’s going to make you happy before you let yourself fall in love.’

‘But how can you tell?’

‘You just can. I’m looking for someone kind and sensitive and intelligent. Someone with integrity. Someone I can talk to…a friend.’

Richard had been all those things. He was everything Meredith had ever wanted in a man, so of course she had fallen for him. It wasn’t Richard’s fault that he hadn’t felt the same about her. He had been quite happy being friends, and she had been terrified of scaring him away by telling him how she felt.

And then he had seen Lucy, and that had been that.

Meredith sighed.

‘It sounds to me as if you’ve got very high expectations,’ Hal commented.

‘That’s what Lucy says. She says I’m too picky, but I think you should be picky when it comes to choosing someone you’re going to spend the rest of your life with. It’s important. You and Lucy might call it having unreasonably high expectations, but I call it being sensible.’

‘And you’re not prepared to compromise?’ asked Hal, who hadn’t been able to avoid noticing that her wish list for a man didn’t include many characteristics that would apply to him. He hadn’t been particularly kind or sensitive as far as she was concerned, he had to admit.

Meredith finished her coffee and put the mug down with a little click. ‘Not on the important things,’ she told him. ‘I’ve seen lots of my friends going to enormous lengths to change themselves and their expectations when they meet a man and decide he’s The One, but I’ve never yet seen a man changing. Women will accept that their man is unreliable or reluctant to commit because they love him. They accept being taken for granted and never being made to feel that they’re special because if they didn’t accept it the relationship would be over and they’re afraid of that.

‘They can accept that if they want to,’ said Meredith, ‘but I don’t see why I should. I’m not perfect, far from it. I know I’m bossy and prickly and uncompromising and I’m never going to win a beauty contest, but I don’t want to change, and I want a man who doesn’t want me to change either. I want someone who’ll love me the way I am, someone I don’t feel the need to change for.’ She sent Hal one of her challenging looks. ‘That’s sensible, isn’t it?’

‘If you really think you’re going to meet someone who lives up to all those expectations,’ he said in a sceptical voice. ‘Have you ever met anyone who did?’

There was a tiny pause. Meredith watched a moth blunder into the blue light. ‘Once,’ she said.

‘So how come it didn’t work out?’ asked Hal harshly, unaccountably irritated by the idea of Meredith finding someone so perfect.

So unlike him.

‘Or wasn’t he so perfect after all?’

‘No, he was perfect,’ said Meredith. ‘It turned out that I wasn’t perfect for him, that’s all. But that’s OK,’ she went on composedly. ‘Maybe there’s someone else out there for me, but until I meet him I’m not going to waste my time on anyone less than perfect.’

‘You mean like me?’ said Hal, hoping that he sounded suitably amused instead of chagrined.

‘Yes, like you,’ she said. ‘As you pointed out yourself, I’m a sensible woman and that really wouldn’t be a sensible thing to do.’