Sarah's Baby by Margaret Way Page B

the role of dictator. She seems to enjoy making everyone around her feel insecure.”
    Kyall acknowledged Sarah’s words with a grimace. “Still, she’s shown me nothing but affection.”
    â€œA bond that can’t be broken.” Sarah leaned her head back, her expression plainly unhappy.
    â€œIf she’s ever hurt you, Sarah, she’d learn very quickly that her love—her kind of love—is not enough.”
    A curious expression rippled across her face. “You sayall this, Kyall, but you don’t really want to cut your ties with the land. Your love for it has a spiritual dimension. I feel it myself, although I’m not from an outback dynasty. My father just happened to be your top ringer.”
    He gazed at her, so beautiful, so desirable, so maddening, she made his head spin. “Your father knew everything there was to know about shearing. He had the reputation of being a great bloke. You have no reason to look down on your father.”
    â€œWho said I did?” Sarah burst out. “It’s your family and the likes of India Claydon who make judgments like that.”
    â€œShe’s jealous, Sarah,” he said quietly. “What can anyone do about jealousy? It’s in her nature. India didn’t get to be top student at school. She didn’t go on to collect a medical degree. I’ve noticed that tendency in India. I don’t particularly like it. Mitch couldn’t be more different.”
    Thinking of their friend Mitchell Claydon, Sarah’s face relaxed into a smile. “Mitch spent almost as much time with Christine as you and I did together. We seemed to team up very early. You and I. Mitch and Chris. I know Christine cares about Mitchell Claydon to this day, only the struggle to be free of your mother’s domination took her away from him. Just like me. Both of us outcasts.”
    â€œYou’ll both return,” Kyall answered somberly. “Would you consider Joe’s proposition? It would bring you back to me.”
    Sarah wondered yet again what Ruth McQueen would make of that. “It’s too weighty a decision to be made quickly. It would bring me back to you, certainly. It would also bring me a lot of stress.”
    â€œAs in work?” He picked up on that swiftly. “If you accepted, I’d do everything in my power to find anotherdoctor, although as you’d know, it’s not easy when we’re so remote.”
    Part of her wanted to answer now. Part of her couldn’t. “I can’t say just yet, Kyall. I’m feeling far more vulnerable than I’d like. Going it alone—being separated from my mother—I had to develop a whole set of barriers or be overwhelmed. Can you understand that?”
    He answered decisively. “I understand that, Sarah. What isn’t clear to me is why you were ever separated in the first place.”

CHAPTER FIVE
    K YALL HAD DECIDED at some point in the evening to raise the subject of Sarah’s taking over from Joe Randall. He expected outright, bitter hostility from his grandmother and mother, a quiet, reasoned response from his father. He loved his father. He only regretted that his father had married into this family. Of course, he wouldn’t have been born otherwise, but his father had missed out on a chance at happiness. Or was he finding it with the delicately beautiful Carol Lu, the artist? Kyall didn’t have a lot to go on, except the magnetic current he sensed passing between them whenever they met. The last time was at a concert given by the Matheson String Quartet at the Endeavour theater. No mediocre affair. Alex Matheson, strangely afflicted with periods of near-blindness, was a brilliant violinist, who under better circumstances could have had a career on the international concert platform. Three other gifted people of the town made up the quartet. The redoubtable Harriet Crompton, a woman of many talents, on viola; Lottie