‘Oh, and the temperature here’s going to be boiling.’ The woman doing the questioning looked as if she might burst into tears on his behalf. ‘You could have made snowmen in Central Park.’

‘I don’t…’

‘Or thrown snowballs,’ someone added.

‘Or made a Snowman Santa.’

‘Hey, did you see that movie where they fell down and made snow angels?’

‘He could do that here in the dust.’

There was general laughter, but it was sympathetic, and then the next carol started and William was mercifully left alone.

Um…maybe she should have protected him from that. Maybe she shouldn’t have told anyone he was her boss. Meg looked across at William-immersed in his work again-and thought-I’m taking my boss home for Christmas and all we’re offering is dust angels. He could be having a white Christmas in Central Park.

With who?

She didn’t know, and she was not going to feel bad about that, she decided. Not until he told her that he was missing a person in particular. If he was simply going to sit in a luxury penthouse and have lobster and caviar and truffles and open gifts to himself…

She was going home to Scotty and Grandma and a hundred cows.

That was a good thought. No matter how appallingly she’d messed up, she was still going home for Christmas.

She was very noble to share, she told herself.

Hold that thought.

Tandaroit wasn’t so much a station as a rail head. There’d been talk of closing it down but Letty had immediately presented a petition with over five thousand names on it to their local parliamentarian. No matter that Letty, Scotty and Meg seemed to be the only ones who used it-and that the names on the petition had been garnered by Letty, dressed in gumboots and overalls, sitting on the corner of one of Melbourne’s major pedestrian malls in Scotty’s now discarded wheelchair. She’d been holding an enormous photograph of a huge-eyed calf with a logo saying ‘Save Your Country Cousins’ superimposed.