LITMIR.BIZ

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      That got everyone’s attention. Lisa stopped staring at her watch. Jodie’s mouth went so dry she wouldn’t have had a clue if she had been drinking red wine or juiced sawdust. Louise spun on her seat leaving Beach Street’s Angelo and Cait to sort out their worries on their own.

      Jodie felt a pang of guilt lodge between her shoulder blades. Until that moment Louise had had no idea that she was considering not returning to London. In Jodie Louise would have a close friend outside the Valentine family she was feeling so angry toward right now, and a sister to be at her side when she met her real mother for the first time.

      And though Jodie so wanted to be that person for Louise, she wanted to be in Melbourne more. She waved a quick hand at Louise, intimating she would explain everything later.

      ‘How? I’ve tried everything,’ Jodie managed, ‘including writing letters to the Australian Department of Immigration telling them how much I want to be one of you.’

      Jodie looked from Mandy to Lisa. She would have given her right ear to be like them—bright, breezy, and free as the wind. And being that way in Melbourne.

      ‘But I still have to be on a plane back to London on the thirtieth of December,’ Jodie said, letting her hand flop back to the table.

      Mandy grinned. ‘I have found a way.’

      ‘And it has something to do with Jodie’s love life?’ Louise asked, sounding anxious.

      Mandy nodded. ‘Dust off your best bridesmaid’s frock; we are going to marry your sister off to an Australian.’

      Jodie felt herself blanch and blush all at once. ‘You want to marry me…off?’

      Mandy looked down at the computer printout she held through a pair of tiny reading glasses. ‘The marriage would only have to last two years. At first you’ll get a Temporary Spouse Visa and at the end of those two years, once you achieve your Permanent Visa, you can divorce the guy and be free.’

      Free. Of all the words Mandy could have chosen to sell the idea that was the one that worked. For a child from a split home it certainly rang in her ears a lot more comfortably than marriage, or divorce…

      But surely it couldn’t be that simple.

      ‘You and Lisa are both natives, yet Lisa has been single since I’ve known her and the closest thing to a long-term boyfriend you have managed to locate is rotten Jake. What makes you think I can do it in two and a half months?’

      Lisa looked back down at her watch again, neatly avoiding Jodie’s comment.

      ‘One and a half,’ Mandy said, also ignoring the point.

      ‘Excuse me?’

      ‘You have to fill out an Intention To Marry form one month and one day before marrying. So at the outside, you have six weeks in which to find your man. Considering it has been a month since you starting putting big red crosses on your calendar in a passive-aggressive reminder of the looming Day You Have To Leave, I had my team make it top priority. As of today you have your own website!’

      ‘Website?’ Jodie repeated.

      ‘It’s called www.ahusbandinahurry.com,’ Mandy said, puffing up proudly.

      Louise, who had been elegantly sipping on a Cosmopolitan, coughed inelegantly into her drink.

      Jodie sunk her head onto her hands so as not to see the amplified mortification that would surely be in Louise’s eyes. ‘But what if anyone I know has seen it? What if my mother has seen it?’

      ‘Unless she is trawling the Internet looking for a cute British bride, then I think you’ll be fine. Besides, we did you proud. We used that photo of you from the Christmas in July barbecue on the home page.’

      ‘Not the action shot where I was laughing so hard you could see my tonsils as I fell off my chair by way of too much champagne?’ Jodie asked.

      ‘That’s the one,’ Mandy said, grinning. ‘The men at work voted that one their favourite. They all said you seemed, and I quote: “cute, adorable, and fun”.’

      ‘So why not just set her up with one of the guys from your work?’ Louise asked. Several faint frown lines marred her forehead. She wasn’t as aloof to the situation as she was making out. But Jodie couldn’t deal with what those frown lines meant. Not yet.

      Jodie was beginning to see the possibilities. There was any number of reasons why two people could happily marry for convenience’s sake. And considering this was her last chance at staying in Australia, the place where she had found fabulous friends, a growing number of people who stopped her on the street to ask her where they could buy the unique floral-inspired earrings she herself created, and where she had begun to delight in her youth, maybe, just maybe, she could pull this off.

      That was the clincher. After years of being the adult in the family, the one who remembered to pick up milk, the one who kept the house free of dust bunnies, the one who remembered to pay the gas bill, the one who made sure her mum got to work in time—when she managed to hold down a job—Jodie felt hopeful that at last she had a chance to find the youth inside herself.

      ‘Oh, no,’ Mandy said, ‘once they knew she was looking for a husband, even a two-year one, they backed away like I had pulled a shotgun.’

      And there was the rub.

      Jodie looked to Lisa, who had been quiet through all of this. ‘What do you think?’

      Lisa held up both hands before slipping off the seat and backing away. ‘You don’t want to know what I think. Besides, can’t talk, I’m now on the clock.’

      ‘She has some old-fashioned view that you should only date, marry, sleep with a guy if you’re in love.’ Mandy shivered as though that would have saved her from a whole lot of fun. ‘But I’m not expecting you to worry about any of that. Leave it all to me.’

      Jodie had every intention of leaving it all to Mandy. Though it wasn’t in her make-up to come out and say it, she needed help. For there was no way on God’s green earth she was ever going back to London. To that oppressive apartment. To that half life…

      But the real question was: what sort of man would give up two years of his life to marry her, to be her husband, after knowing her for less than a month?

      Heath swung back and forth on the love seat on the veranda of his big old home, staring out across the flat red dirt of Jamesons Run.

      A blood-red sunset glowed across the plain. A nimble dry wind whipped along the dusty ground so that the golden kangaroo grass seemed to be waving toward the grand old willow dipping its sad leaves into the dam at the centre of his main paddock.

      He could do with rain—and not just to damp down the dust storms that were springing up from nowhere more often than not these days. Rain would be a break in routine of stifling hot temperatures that spoke of an oppressive summer to come. Rain would be a change.

      ‘Knock, knock.’

      Heath looked over his shoulder to find his older sister Elena standing in the doorway with a paper plate drooping under the weight of mixed desserts. An outfit of a floral dress and stockings on such a warm day could only mean one thing—a wedding or a funeral. And there had not been a wedding at Jamesons Run in years.

      He let his riding-boot-clad feet drag against the wooden floor until the seat stopped swinging so she could sit beside him.

      ‘I brought this for you before the Crabbe sisters had the chance,’ Elena said. ‘No doubt they are still squabbling over whether you might prefer Carol’s custard tart or Rachel’s mud cake.’

      Heath smiled, and he only hoped he had managed to make it reach his eyes. His appetite seemed to have departed him since the moment he had picked up the phone four days earlier to learn that Marissa was gone, but he swallowed a bite of Elena’s home-made pavlova to keep her happy. His mouth was so dry that the sticky passion-fruit topping caught on his palate.

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