Page 18 of Stockman's Sandstorm

Mason was so cute he should be paid to endorse nappies or sit alongside puppies and sell toilet paper.

‘Do me a favour, Harper?’ Cap pointed to the mean-looking black shepherd chained to the verandah’s far corner post. ‘Keep Mason away from the shepherd, until I get the dog assimilated.’

‘You have an attack dog?’ Was this place a dog kennel?

‘Sarge is an ex-riot dog.’

‘On a cattle station?’ She then noticed the rifles leaning against the wall. A few surveillance cameras lay beside some shotgun shells, spilling over the map spread across the table. She recognised the assorted paraphernalia to show a war-room’s battle in progress, a disorganised one at that.

A tingle of terror crept up her spine. She scooped up Mason and held him close, with Ruby, the dog, watching her every move. Was the boy safe? Was she? ‘Are you going to war?’ What sort of hillbilly outfit was this?

‘Nah, we’re good. Aren’t we, brothers?’ Ash glared at his older siblings, then put on a fake smile for Harper. ‘Come on, Harper, I’ll let you pick a room.’

Ten

Dear Diary, welcome to hell.

It was a full thirty-seven hours and twenty-nine minutes since Harper had arrived at this soulless desert of dust, living on nothing but sheer teeth-gritting determination to beat Dex’s bet. Only made worse by the prick reverting to his original twenty-dollar bet, that she wouldn’t last the week.

He might win that bet.

Harper sat heavily in a kitchen chair in the large empty kitchen, where she fed Mason breakfast in his highchair. It was the only furniture in a house she’d class as a hovel filled with boxes.

It had taken Harper all of yesterday to clean and sort out Mason’s room, next door to hers. Then she attacked the bathroom that should’ve been declared a toxic war zone. But Mason enjoyed playing in the enormous bathtub like it was a private swimming pool, while she got soaked to the bone with raw hands and broken nails from cleaning.

She was the nanny. Not a cleaner.

Even though she had no clue what she was doing as a nanny, at least she had wi-fi, which allowed her to play music and scour social media for tutorials and tips.

Today, she was exhausted. Who knew cleaning was more physical than taking five spin classes with her Swedish spin master, urging them to train for the ski season? She hated that man. Right now, she hated cleaning more.

But boredom drove her to contemplate cleaning the kitchen with its long wide benches that only held a coffeemaker, and lots of cupboard space because it was a kitchen with no food!

They had plenty of baby food, beer, and bourbon. But there was nothing resembling any form of vegetable. The empty pantry had a few tins of beans that had long since expired, and were likely toxic.

Food for these savages was slabs of barbecued meat, slapped between slices of bread, smothered in tomato sauce, then washed down with a deep guzzle of beer.

Let’s not forget the volume of coffee they drank, because she’d never seen one of the Riggs brothers drink water.

The coffee she approved of. She’d never been picky over her coffee, which she needed to keep her eyes open from lack of sleep. Especially when Mason and Ruby, the labrador, had moved into Harper’s room at two in the morning.

But she needed food. She couldn’t live off coffee, beef, and bread, and she was not about to steal the processed toddler food.

Mason pushed away his cereal bowl, upending it to land with a splat on the kitchen floor, where Ruby the labrador was eager to lick it clean.

She left the dog to it. She was over cleaning.

She was also over doing laundry.

Oh, how she missed her local laundry. The magical store where she dropped off her laundry in a white sack, to return a few days later to collect her suits and shirts all perfectly pressed.

Now she had to fight with an old washing machine that you had to hold on to during the spin cycle, or it’d walk off the verandah. And then it was drip drying.

D-d-d-drip. Drying.

On a metal wire that made up the clothesline already filled with assorted long-sleeved work shirts and jeans, starchy and faded from the harsh outback sun.

They were Cap’s, Dex’s or Ash’s clothes. She knew this because yesterday, she’d watched in horror, as they dumped their clothes in a pile beside the washing machine where they had undressed, on their way to the outdoor shower. Then they’d tugged a set of clean clothes off the clothesline, dressing as they snatched a cold beer on the way to the table that lived on the front porch, where they sat around and argued over whose turn it was to cook dinner.

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