Island of escape by Dorothy Cork Page B

being fair, you know. All I contracted to do was the cooking—the housework —that sort of thing. Now you—you
    His eyebrows tilted. 'Now I want you to wear a ring?' He had retrieved the small box from the floor and now he tossed it up and caught it and put it back in his pocket. 'I haven't asked anything else of you, have I?'
    `Not yet,' she thought, mistrusting the expression in those green eyes as they surveyed her. Meanwhile, the jeep had come racing along, and she said coolly, 'I warn you, Mr Gascoyne, if you say I'm your fiancée I shall call you a liar
    `At least call me Steve,' he said mockingly, and she felt oddly disconcerted.
    Her cheeks were flushed and her composure practically non-existent a moment later as she climbed out of the plane and found herself confronting a husky-looking young man with light brown hair and grey eyes. Steve's brother, much younger than he was, and resembling him only in that he too had a wide mouth. But his mouth was good-humoured and entirely lacked the cynical twist that was so obvious in Steve's mouth. · He smiled at Ellis and his eyes accorded her a brief and casual inspection before he stooped and peered inside the plane. As Steve came round to shake him by the hand he commented, 'I thought you were going to hunt up a housekeeper before you came back, Steve.'
    Steve ignored the remark and Ellis bit her lip. She wanted to exclaim, 'I'm the housekeeper,' but she had the dreadful feeling that Steve was right—his brother would laugh. Charles Gascoyne's smile and his quick
     
    inspection of her had said very plainly, 'So Steve has another girl'.
    Steve took Ellis by the arm. 'Ellis, this is my brother, Charles. This is Ellis Lincoln, Charl ie. And ,don't worry about a housekeeper—Ellis says she's going to look after us. She's not anything like as useless as she looks.'
    Charlie smiled-again and said 'Hi, Ellis,' but she didn't think he was impressed—not the right way, at least, because he grimaced and remarked, 'With shearing coming up, Leanne's going to be cranky. You know she can't cope with that sort of a deal.'
    `I can cook for the shearers,' Ellis interjected, before Steve could speak. She was annoyed to find her voice pitched nervously high, but she was even more annoyed when both the men ignored her and proceeded to unload the cases and a few packages from the plane and transfer them to the jeep. Seething inwardly, she tagged along behind. Obviously Charlie didn't see her as the new housekeeper, and she supposed he most likely thought she was romantically interested in his brother. In fact, he'd probably think she was really eager, the way she was offering to look after the shearers. She writhed inwardly and wondered if she'd have felt any worse if Steve had said she was his fiancée. The fact that he hadn't should have given her a sense of triumph, yet it didn't. Her position was now so uncertain and vague that Charlie probably thought Steve was a bit dubious about her and had brought her to Warrianda for a—a try-out.
    She felt decidedly uncomfortable as they all installed themselves in the jeep, herself between the, two brothers.
    As they drove to the homestead the two men talked briefly and sombrely of the death of their aunt, and
     
    followed that up with some discussion as to whether the recent rain would delay the shearing at Mussetts.
    `I reckon Bob got enough sheep into the shed to get them dried out—they'll be right,' said Charlie, then presently asked Ellis politely, 'Do you think you're going to like Flinders, Ellis?'
    Ellis didn't know how to answer. If she'd come here on a job, she might have said a polite yes, and if she'd been in love with Steve she'd have said yes, too. Actually, she found the thought of living on this island a romantic one. She had thought, when she'd written her letter to Steve Gascoyne, the simple farmer, that there she'd be able to disappear into the blue—start a new life in a place so isolated that Paul and the past would be