Page 63 of Stockman's Stormcloud

‘I can sit there. Or you can call up the nurse to babysit me.’ Dex wouldn’t mind seeing Nurse Kitty again, especially the way her eyes lit up and her smile was so free and bright. She’d enjoy watching the cattle from behind her camera.

Ryder narrowed his eyes at Dex. ‘I’m not paying for a dating service, mate.’

Dex shrugged. ‘You can stop it.’

Ryder just glowered over his coffee mug. Obviously not cutting off his medical visits. Even if he was a cranky prick, his big brother cared.

‘When I get rid of this thing,’ Dex said, tapping on the annoying oxygen tank, ‘you can take me for a spin in your chopper and we can look at potential reservoirs, the cattle around Emu Plains, and Cap can show us the best places for those carbon corridors.’

‘So, not wildlife corridors but carbon corridors?’ Cap asked.

‘It does both. We’ve just put a new label on it.’ Ryder sipped on his coffee.

‘Ash?’ Harper was at the front door, rubbing her sleepy eyes. ‘Your phone is making some strange alarm noises.’ Shepushed open the screen door and held out the phone. ‘Hey, Dex, good to see you’re back.’

Dex nodded.

‘Have you seen your place yet? Bree did a good job.’

‘Bree won’t let me near it because of the fumes.’ But once Dex finished his coffee, he was planning to hike across the paddock to check it out.

‘Dammit.’ Ash scrolled through his phone’s screen. ‘It’s the app I created for the GPS trackers. The alarms are going off on the tags.’

‘Your new cattle tags?’ It was the hi-tech ear tags they’d been trialling.

Ash nodded as he scooped up a laptop from the nearby shelf and quickly tapped away on the keyboard.

‘Is a beast down?’ Cap asked.

‘No.’ Ash turned the screen around to show his brothers. ‘There’s six of them and they’ve just broken the boundary barriers we’ve set.’

‘Where?’ Ryder sat forward.

‘The steers in the bush block. It looks like someone is stealing our cattle.’

Twenty

There were two police cars parked out front of the farmhouse when Sophie drove up to Elsie Creek Station’s homestead that afternoon.

A young woman with ivory skin and black hair jumped down the front steps and waved her down. She was immaculately dressed, like she’d stepped out of some executive office in a southern city, not a run-down farmhouse on a cattle station in the outback.

As Mr Purrington lay across the dashboard of the car, taking in the scenery, Sophie slowed down the work car and cracked open the window, again checking Mr Purrington’s halter was strapped in securely.

‘Sophie, is it? Hi, I’m Harper. I live with Ash in the farmhouse. Oh, look at the cat.’ She held out her hand and shook it like they were in a business meeting.

Of course, the cat shimmied its big furry butt across the dash close enough for Harper to pat him. ‘He’s so soft. I’ve never seen a cat kept in a car like this?’

‘Mr Purrington likes the drive.’ And Sophie was using it as her excuse to leave early and not go on any cross-country hikes. Sadly, she couldn’t find anyone else to do this shift, so she did the next best thing—brought her cat.

‘Is everything all right?’ Sophie nodded at the police cars.

‘Someone has stolen their cattle.’

‘Oh, no? Dex must be going nuts over this. Do they know who?’

‘Not a clue. We’re lucky Ash had the cattle’s ear tags set fora certain boundary. Otherwise, Ash said they might not have known about it for a month or more.’

‘How many are missing?’

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