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“No, my husband is…was…” Oh, now she’d said too much; hadn’t meant to reveal even that much about her life. This man was making her too relaxed, too easy in his presence. She needed to remember to keep her guard up. “Whatever, it doesn’t matter. What does matter is that you can’t fix my car.”
His curiosity must’ve finally got the better of him, because he took off his hat, ran a distracted hand through his damp hair, fixed her with his baby-blue gaze, and said, “Do you mind if I ask just what you’re doing out here? I mean, you seem woefully under-prepared for a trip into the Queensland outback. You have no camping gear, no water, nothing at all that might help you survive in the desert.”
“I have extra fuel,” she said, pursing her lips at him. Which was true, she at least knew she didn’t want to run out of fuel all the way out here. But she was only half focussing on her reply. It was the first time she’d seen him without the shade of his hat covering his face. Sunlight played over the planes of his cheekbones and brought the true color of his eyes to the fore. They were so pale, they were almost gray, like the morning mist lifting from Pushkar Lake back in India. She’d never been to the sacred lake herself, but her mother had shown her photos, and she’d loved to stare at them endlessly as a child.
Kee shook her head. What was she doing? Drooling over the color of a stranger’s eyes, like a lovesick teenager?
Wazza was still waiting for an answer. What should she tell him? It was obvious she wasn’t a tourist. All the travellers she’d seen in the past few towns had new, four-wheel-drives, stacked to the roof with camping gear, and often towing a caravan or trailer. She certainly didn’t fit into that category.
“I’m on my way to…” she scrambled for one of the township names she remembered from the maps she’d studied as she planned her hasty drive away from Sydney. “Cooktown,” she said, hoping her hesitation didn’t come through in her words. “I’m going to visit my aunty.”
“Cooktown?” She didn’t need to look at his face to see his confusion. “Yes, but I think I took a wrong turn somewhere,” she added hurriedly.
“A pretty big wrong turn. You should’ve turned north when you hit Mareeba. Headed back toward the coast.”
She knew that. But she was staying as far away from the major roads and big towns as she could possibly get. This road was supposed to take her deeper into Queensland. Away from the coast and toward the Northern Territory. Even though she’d thought she’d been prepared for the back roads, she now knew how woefully ignorant her knowledge of life in the desert was. How long might she have been stuck out here, before anyone else came along? It was a hard lesson to learn. Kee didn’t want to die out here, and next time she’d make sure she was much better prepared. Eventually, she would’ve removed the cover from the camera and hoped someone at the other end noticed her waving madly. But that’d been her last resort. She hated being reliant on the kindness of strangers. And the fewer people who knew where she was, the better.
Kee pursed her lips and widened her eyes in mock surprise. “Really? Is that where I went wrong?”
“That’s not the only place you went wrong.” Wazza’s frown was almost comical, and it was all Kee could do not to laugh. She needed to keep up the dumb-woman façade if he were to believe her, however, so she smoothed out her complexion, lowering her eyes and demurring. Something she’d become extremely good at while she’d been Jakov’s wife. And at the moment, it wasn’t that far from the truth, either. It had been pretty dumb to get lost in the middle of the desert.
