A Place With Heart Read online

  About the Author

  JENNIE JONES loved everything with a romantic element from an early age. That’s why she became an actor before she started writing, touring the UK’s grand old theatres, becoming someone else for two hours, eight performances a week, and loving every second.

  Now an Australian with Welsh roots, she wrote her first book seven years ago and says writing, like acting, keeps her imagination bubbling and will never get boring.

  Jennie lives in a small country town north of Perth, Western Australia with Jonesey the boy cat, Zena the girl cat, plus Churchill the 50-kilo rescue dog and the occasional sighting of her daughter.

  Also by Jennie Jones

  Swallow’s Fall Series

  The House on Burra Burra Lane

  The House at the Bottom of the Hill

  The House at the End of the Street

  Daughters of Swallow’s Fall Series

  The House on Jindalee Lane

  The Rangelands Series

  A Place to Stay

  A Dollar for a Dream Series

  Last Chance Country

  A PLACE WITH HEART

  JENNIE JONES

  www.harlequinbooks.com.au

  For my daughter, Liz, who teaches me so much

  and always did, right from the start

  Contents

  About the Author

  Also by Jennie Jones

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Acknowledgements

  One

  Isabelle Jaxine Brown closed the aviary door with a soft hand, wishing she could do the same with her heart and lock out all the reminders. She’d come to Mt Maria in the West Australian outback eight years ago—to at last get away from the years of guilt and remorse. To find somewhere far from what had been, and what she’d done.

  She swung around with a smile, anxiety building to such a degree that for the first time in her life she thought she might faint. But Jax, as she’d been known for the last few years, was no longer the shy, frightened and good-girl seventeen-year-old who’d been coerced into doing things she ought not to have done. Jax the thirty-year-old could handle anything …

  Except that what she was responsible for—a gift she’d longed for and never expected—was here, ten steps in front of her, and would be staying. Under heart-wrenching circumstances.

  She walked forwards, looking into her thirteen-year-old daughter’s blue eyes, so similar to hers in colour and shape that for a second she faltered.

  One relief was that she looked nothing like her father. Maybe a little, around the mouth. It was difficult to judge because the child had her mouth clamped, lips compressed.

  Jax wiped her hands on her jeans although they were scrupulously clean and she hadn’t been handling the rescued birds, only removing a branch that had fallen to the ground.

  ‘It’s lovely to see you,’ she said as dogs yipped and barked in the fenced paddock behind them. The early evening sun still shone on the property, shedding a golden glow that had settled her nerves over the last hour as she prepared for this extraordinary, unexpected moment in her life. But those ragged nerves had returned a couple of minutes ago when the car pulled into her driveway.

  She held out her hand. ‘My name’s Isabelle, but everyone calls me Jax.’

  ‘I’m not calling you Mummy,’ Franca said.

  Jax drew a breath. ‘I don’t expect you to.’

  ‘And I’m not staying here.’

  Jax dropped her hand, steeling her heart and ensuring her expression remained calm. ‘I’m afraid you are.’ She refrained from adding ‘sorry about that’ because she’d been told to make Franca aware she was included in decision-making, but also to understand that it was Jax’s responsibility to make the final assessment and judgement of all the important things. All the parenting things.

  This had sounded logical on the many telephone conversations and assessments she’d had with counsellors and the Department of Child Protection officers. But in practice? And she must remember to call her Frances, not Franca. It was the smallest things that meant the most and Frances had no reason to respond to the name Franca.

  She turned to Wendy, the social worker who had driven Frances from Kalgirri.

  It was a six-hour drive, so they would both be tired from that. And Jax, overwhelmed by the anxiety of how this would go, suddenly couldn’t remember any of the advice she’d been given.

  The woman smiled kindly but Jax didn’t miss the observant look in her eye. She had to prove herself, but how to do that without falling to the ground and begging for strength to deal with the situation?

  ‘You’re welcome to stay here tonight,’ she told the woman. She had five bedrooms in the rambling old brick-and-iron house she’d bought five years ago when money had literally fallen into her lap. Not that she’d ever cared about having a lot of money, her main focus being the efforts she put into the Brown Café in town, and into the rewarding but dollar-draining animal rescue shelter she ran. She still had a small mortgage, but she’d worked hard to keep paying off the house as well as the loan for the café renovations. Nothing to spend your money on out here in the back of beyond. But this back of beyond was beautiful and she’d never wanted to live elsewhere from the moment she’d driven into town. It was the place where most of her heart had been healed. Now that wound was open again, but it was the injustice recently done to her daughter that concerned her.

  ‘No thanks,’ Wendy the social worker said. ‘I’m staying in town at Breakers Hotel tonight.’ She buttoned her jacket and placed an impassive smile on her face, telling Jax her job was done—over to you.

  Jax had never shied from hard work and had no intention of slinking off into the bush like some frightened animal, but she did have a fleeting thought about running to some place where she didn’t have to show the world—in this case her daughter, who was now her whole world—how much trouble she was having with the rise of almost uncontrollable panic that she wouldn’t get this right for Frances.

  Through no fault of her own, Frances had already been punished by her father and her step-mother. It wasn’t going to happen again on Jax’s watch. But she’d have to feel her way around this delicate situation of not knowing each other.

  ‘I’ll be making my way back to Kalgirri early tomorrow and then to Perth,’ Wendy said. ‘You can contact me anytime, as you know. You too, Frances.’

  Frances showed her interest by remaining totally still. Not a single twitching muscle or disdainful blink.

  This was her daughter, the hour-old baby she’d been coerced into giving up. The child she’d only seen four times before she turned five, and nobody knew Jax had seen her at all.

  Jax smiled at Wendy. A smile that hopefully told her not to worry, they’d get through this.

  ‘I’ve made arrangements for a district family counsellor to get in touch with you,’ Wendy told her. ‘I believe they come out here once a fortnight.�
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  Out here in the outback, 950 kilometres from the state’s capital of Perth and 400 from the nearest city of Kalgirri.

  Jax nodded, forcing her nervous smile to curve a little more. ‘We have all the services out here we need. Once a fortnight.’ Except guidance on how to deal with meeting your teenage daughter for the first time.

  Jax looked over at sloop-shouldered Frances, and her heart bled. It ached with worry for her now more than it had over the last four months when everything changed, for both Jax and Franca Adelita Brown, now legally Frances Fellows, daughter of Michael, step-daughter of Linda. Suddenly unwanted by either.

  Damn you, Michael Fellows. What have you done?

  No wonder the kid was uncooperative, after everything she’d been through recently, and no wonder Jax was frightened to death, after guarding her heart for the last thirteen years, never expecting to see her child, let alone have her come live with her.

  Frances moved, but it was only to turn her back on Jax and Wendy.

  ‘I’m sorry I wasn’t able to pick you up myself,’ Jax said to the back of her head. She’d asked to, and Frances had refused. She hadn’t wanted to talk on the telephone or even have a premoving-in-with-your-real-mum meeting. Jax had never had legal visitation rights, but she’d tried to get them. When Frances was six months old, she’d asked her mother if it was possible and had been persuaded that it would best for the child if she forget the whole episode. Except she never forgot, and it was too late now to go back and try harder. Frances would never believe she’d attempted such a thing, which made Jax feel so bad for not trying harder that her stomach knotted painfully.

  But she was older now and could do anything if she wanted it badly enough and if she put effort into the task. She wanted this to work. She’d made a decision when she reluctantly handed over her baby to its father and that had now changed. Her daughter was going to be living with her—forever. At least until she went to university and left home. Which meant Jax had five or six years to make this work.

  It felt like a lifetime. It felt like it was too late. Too impossible.

  But she was a believer. It will work, she told herself. Twice in her life she’d had doubts about what she’d been forced to do or what she’d decided to do. Maybe she’d doubted herself three times, but there was no need to remember the man who’d knocked her sideways twelve months ago.

  She pushed the memory aside. Why Jack Maxwell had come into her mind at a time like this she didn’t know.

  Minutes later, she waved Wendy goodbye while Frances trudged into the house, pulling her suitcase behind her, not looking back.

  Frances. It was such a responsible-sounding name to sit on the shoulders of a slightly built young teenager. She understood that Michael and Linda wouldn’t have wanted to keep it Franca—the name Jax had chosen—but they could at least have changed it to something simpler that the child could carry with her throughout life without feeling self-conscious about having an old-fashioned name.

  It looked like such a small suitcase too. Surely the kid had more possessions than were packed in that case on wheels? Perhaps she’d decided not to bring any of them. Perhaps she felt they didn’t really belong to her anymore.

  That was a heartbreaking thought.

  She followed Franca—Frances—to the house, throwing a look at the rescued dogs in the fenced paddock, who were mostly happy while they waited for a new home. She gave the three dogs she often thought of as her own an apologetic smile that she wouldn’t be allowing them inside this evening.

  In the stone-floored, airy kitchen, her daughter stood with her bottom against the sink, arms crossed defensively. ‘You couldn’t even bother to come pick me up, could you?’

  Jax took her time, toeing off her pink Wellington boots, a hand on the doorframe of the wet room for balance. Pink was her favourite colour for clothes and lipstick but not much else. She had more pink shirts or jeans or belts than maybe a dozen women put together. She definitely wasn’t feeling in the pink at the moment, but at least Frances had started a conversation, even though she knew by the tone it was an argument her daughter wanted. ‘Your mother told me you didn’t want me to pick you up.’

  ‘I don’t have a mother. I’ve been abandoned—and she’s not my mother any more than you are.’

  The poor kid. How her heart must be suffering. ‘Linda, then. Linda told me you didn’t want me to pick you up.’

  ‘That’s bullshit. She just hates me.’

  ‘Please don’t swear.’ Jax peeled off her socks and put them in the laundry hamper, then slipped her feet into soft, worn sandals and walked into the kitchen, shoving her hands into the pockets of her faded blue jeans. Not quite as defensive as her daughter, but close enough to have her snatch a breath. Is this what recognition of mother–child resemblance felt like?

  Frances did look like Jax, and like Jax’s Spanish grandmother whom she was named after. Thick, dark chestnut hair falling to her shoulders in a bob that wasn’t right for her. It was squared and should be feathered softly around her pointed chin.

  The woman she’d eventually become was already obvious in her thirteen-year-old body and in her face, despite the mask of resentment she currently wore. She was going to be a looker. Jax wondered if she realised this. Possibly not, going by the bad haircut and the sloped shoulders.

  Her cheekbones were high and prominent. Maybe a little too prominent, but they wouldn’t be in a couple of years’ time when she grew into herself. They drew a person to her eyes, which were a fascinating shade of darkened teal, with specks the colour of a fairy-bluebird. Just like Jax’s.

  Frances’s father’s eyes were brown. Trustworthy, persuasive brown. How wrong Jax had been about that first assumption.

  The expression in Frances’s eyes was hard at the moment. As though she were standing barefoot on hot coals but didn’t want to show her pain.

  ‘I guess you have a lot of questions,’ Jax said softly, although her heart was beating a tattoo in her chest. ‘I’ll answer them all.’ Except one. ‘And I’ll tell you the truth.’ Except for how you came into existence. That no longer mattered. It hadn’t mattered from the moment she’d given birth to this child she regretted giving away. But she hadn’t been strong back then. She’d been only a few years older than her daughter was now.

  ‘I don’t like dogs,’ Franca—Frances said.

  ‘That’s a shame,’ Jax said softly, ‘since we currently have around twenty of them.’

  ‘You have twenty. I have none. So don’t expect me to look after them. I’m not interested.’

  Jax pulled her hands from her pockets and turned for the pantry. ‘I don’t expect you to work with them. They’re my responsibility, anyway. But I’m sure you’ll like them eventually.’ Frances didn’t want to be responsible. Jax hoped she could help change that.

  ‘Bullshit. Bullshit. Bullshit.’

  Jax pulled a box of pasta from a pantry shelf. This was going to be harder than any of the sleepless-night thoughts and scenarios that had played in her mind over the last weeks after she’d learned that her daughter would be coming to live with her. ‘Spaghetti for dinner?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m gluten intolerant.’

  ‘You can have the meat sauce on its own then. It’s freshly made. Organic beef. No preservatives or sugar.’

  ‘I hate Parmesan cheese too.’

  There was a lot to learn about Frances, but Jax had to stand her ground here, and show herself capable of making those parental judgements. ‘Okay. You don’t have to have any.’

  ‘What’s wrong with you?’ Frances asked, her voice taking on a different tone, as though surprised that anyone—especially an adult—wouldn’t be shocked and angered by her antagonism.

  ‘Nothing major that I know of,’ Jax said with a smile, but she’d slap a hundred-dollar bet down that her daughter would be advising her of any perceived defects as she found them.

  Just don’t let them all come in one day.

  She put the box of sp
aghetti onto the old, scarred and notched but super-clean pine kitchen table. Cleanliness was the heart of everything she did, at home and in the Brown Café. ‘I’ll show you your room.’

  ‘I’m not staying.’

  She’d expected everything—sulks, sullenness, fear, worry—but not this. Not belligerence and big attitude. But the kid was hurting, and who could blame her?

  ‘This way, Frances,’ she said coaxingly as she grabbed the handle on Frances’s suitcase and tilted the case so she could wheel it across the flagstone kitchen floor. She took a moment to breathe in the comforting smells of wax furniture polish, freshly washed cotton curtains, and the lemony-pepper aroma of the dried herbs hanging on an old-fashioned wooden clothes pulley mounted on the ceiling.

  She’d worked hard to make this old house a country-looking home. It was a little incongruous to have decorated it the way she had, considering the hundreds of kilometres surrounding it was nothing but vast red dirt or scrubby patches of spinifex grass—beautiful though that russet-gold landscape was. But she liked the harmony of both, and she was only a ten-minute drive from the town of Mt Maria where her café thrived. She was proud of living remote and still making a life and a home for herself. She lived only a dozen kilometres from the Great Central Road, the GCR, which led to the Outback Way—Australia’s longest shortcut, slicing right through the middle of country. The place where people started or ended their adventurous drive was practically on her back doorstep.

  But she was procrastinating …

  She gripped the suitcase more firmly as the wheels bumped over each rut in the wooden floorboards of the hallway, jolting from rug to wood. Her daughter followed and she was pleased to hear her footsteps sounding steadily. She’d have hated it if Frances dragged her feet and scuffled the way young Billy Baxter in town did.

  She withheld a sigh at the thought of the Baxters. She had enough to concentrate on without having to think about Billy’s older brothers and what she thought they’d been doing on her property these last few nights. She should have known better than to give either of them a job and a chance in the first place, let alone both of them at the same time. But no matter what they were up to—and she wasn’t even sure they were on her land at night—she now had to find someone else to maintain the property. She had over ten acres, but only the dog paddocks with the makeshift kennels at the far end, and a small paddock at the side of the house, were properly fenced and secure. She wanted to expand her animal sanctuary, but that meant employing help to attend to the fences and immediate acreage surrounding the house, and there weren’t many men or young boys around who weren’t already overworked on their own family farms.