No Job for a Girl Read online

  About the Book

  From the bestselling author of The Country Practice comes a quirky and insightful story about fighting for what you believe in, and finding love where you least expect it.

  Leah Jackson leaves behind everything familiar, taking up a job as the resident safety supervisor and nurse in a construction fly camp in the remote South Australian outback. Everyone has told her that it’s no job for a girl, but this isn’t the first time she’s had to prove her mettle.

  Project adviser Alex McKinley is happy to be as far away from the city as he can get. Recently divorced, he’s reassessing where he went wrong. Alex has nothing against women specifically. He’d just rather they weren’t working on his construction site, sharing his office, invading his space.

  In the close confines of the desert camp, anything can happen, and Leah soon finds herself the centre of attention – from bothersome bureaucrats to injured workers and hordes of isolated men. But it is one man in particular who pushes her to her limits … in more ways than one.

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Acknowledgements

  ‘None of us can know what we are

  capable of until we are tested.’

  ELIZABETH BLACKWELL

  If there’d been any other way, Leah would have taken it, welcomed it with open arms. But there wasn’t. She rolled her tongue around her mouth, trying to make enough moisture to swallow, and scrubbed sweaty palms across denim-clad thighs.

  Another patch of rough air and the tiny twin-engine plane dropped like a stone. Leah’s stomach lurched into her throat; hands flew to the armrests, knuckles blanching. Cold sweat p­rickled between her shoulder blades. Being buffeted about in a small al­uminium capsule thousands of metres above sea level had just rocketed to the top of her list of least favourite pastimes.

  She risked a look sideways. The man crammed into the seat across the narrow aisle hadn’t even looked up from the Guns & Ammo magazine spread across his lap. Her gaze darted around the small cabin and the remaining four occupants appeared just as unperturbed. And the pilot was laughing and chatting to the pass­enger in the seat beside him.

  The moisture she’d been searching for moments before flooded her mouth when the Piper Chieftain shook and shuddered like a boat tossed about on a wild sea. More of this and her hastily eaten breakfast would reappear. Were the experts lying when they said air turbulence wasn’t that dangerous?

  She plunged her hand into the seat pocket but came up empty. Great. No airsickness bag. She did a rapid inventory of the contents of her hand luggage. The only bag she had was the canvas carryall.

  Her eyes watered. She licked her lips and swallowed hard, held onto the armrests until her fingers ached, silently drafting her eulogy. Always did her best . . . Not afraid to stand up for what she believed in . . . Scared witless by turbulence when flying in small aircraft.

  The pilot’s voice sputtered through the tinny intercom. ‘Apologies for the bumpy ride, folks. It shouldn’t be much longer. Keep yourselves belted in and I’ll see what I can do.’

  The small plane bounced and chopped some more. Leah squeezed her eyes shut, mentally rehearsed the brace position and hung on. After what felt like an eternity, the twin engines changed pitch and the flight smoothed. With considerable effort she relaxed the death grip she had on the armrests, flexing her fingers.

  She would have to get used to this. Flying in a small aircraft was the way she’d get to and from work for the next months. Being sick in her own lap or, worse, onto the bloke sitting next to her wouldn’t be a stellar start to what was already a tenuous position.

  Leah made herself look out the tiny Plexiglass window. She tried to concentrate on the dry watercourses snaking their way through the desert below instead of rehashing, for the umpteenth time, her final interview with Cameron Crawley, the Head of Safety, Security and Environment.

  She scanned the blindingly bright salt pans, the intermittent drifts of red sand. But there it was again, that interview . . . The man in his slick-looking suit with his thinly veiled misogyny; an a­ttitude at odds with his age and his position in the company. Cameron Crawley had looked younger than Leah’s thirty-eight years, and although she’d bumped up against similar prejudice before, it had usually been from the more senior, blue-collar male workers.

  The horizon flatlined into infinity. She pushed against the ache that tightened her throat. In the interview he’d made his position abundantly clear, more by what he hadn’t said than what he had. He would have preferred the job went to someone, anyone, with more testosterone. He’d kept reiterating how rough and tough the construction fly camps were for men, the subtext being how did she think she’d survive out there? Few women did, and only by being as rough and tough as their male counterparts.

  He was a creep. Creepy Crawley. She grinned, fleetingly.

  But there hadn’t been anyone else. Not at such short notice. That’s why they’d asked her to transfer, and he knew it. On paper no one could argue that Leah Jackson had the skills and the qualifications. It was the experience she was a bit light on. They might think it was no job for a girl, but in her heart of hearts Leah knew she was up for it, that she wouldn’t let anyone down, least of all herself. She just needed the time to prove it, with or without Cameron Crawley’s three-month probation period.

  Taking a swig of water from the bottle the pilot had handed out earlier, she moistened her mouth and lips. After everything else she’d lost, the sacrifices she’d made, she would not lose this job. If a re­lationship and a family weren’t her destiny, she would show them that a woman was every bit as capable as a man of being the safety advisor and nurse on an outback construction project. Perhaps even more so. She screwed the lid onto the water bottle and slipped it into the brightly coloured canvas tote at her feet.

  When the plane began its descent thirty minutes later, Leah pressed her nose to the window and searched the landscape until she found the newly constructed electrical transmission towers dotted like sentinels across the desert. They rose majestically out of the red sand and clay pans, arms outstretched, waiting for cables as thick as her wrist that would carry electricity to the new mine development at Nickel Bluff. She squinted towards the horizon, hoping to see the cluster of demountable buildings that would be her home for three out of every four weeks. But all she could see was endless rusty red dirt dotted with stones and laced with patches of scrubby
saltbush.

  Now firmly on the ground, Leah let out a sigh of relief and peered through the aircraft window. They’d come in over the Nickel Bluff mine site and she’d had a clear view of the mining camp: a hotchpotch of transportable and semi-permanent buildings, and heavy plant and equipment. The airport consisted of a single shack beside the unsealed strip.

  After disembarking, the pilot unloaded their luggage and the passengers traipsed across the apron to the compact terminal. Leah quickened her stride and didn’t take her eyes off the tall, well-built man ahead of her. She’d overheard the pilot say, ‘Good to catch up, Alex. Don’t work too hard,’ and she’d guessed he was the person she was looking out for: Alex McKinley, site supervisor and her immediate boss.

  They arrived inside the terminal together. ‘I’m Leah Jackson, your new nurse and safety advisor,’ she said, with a confident smile.

  He ignored her outstretched hand, staring at her with cool blue eyes. ‘Where’s Steve Simons?’

  Her smile slipped. ‘Didn’t they tell you? His wife is very sick and he went home. I’m his replacement.’

  McKinley looked her up and down, nodded once and said, ‘We’ll see about that.’ He strode off.

  Leah closed her gaping mouth and did a quick scan to see if an­yone had overheard the exchange. Satisfied they hadn’t, she grabbed her suitcase and hurried after him, out to the square of desert designated as the airport car park. He was already sitting in a dusty LandCruiser, tapping impatient fingers on the steering wheel. Two men were hastily loading luggage into the vehicle’s cargo bay. They smiled briefly, glanced at the driver and helped her hoist her suitcase in.

  ‘Thanks,’ she murmured. With a sinking feeling she watched both men climb into the back seat, leaving her to sit beside the stone-faced McKinley.

  They left Nickel Bluff and bumped along a gibber track, barely wider than a single lane. Leah’s mind bubbled with a hundred questions but she kept her mouth firmly shut. The two men in the back seat talked between themselves, while the man in the driver’s seat ignored her completely. Without moving her head she shifted her eyes sideways. His strong, clean-shaven jaw was rigid, his attention focused on the road.

  Rude bastard. As quickly as the thought flitted through her mind, she quashed it. There was no going back. She had to make this to work; her future depended on it. And hadn’t she learned by now that first impressions were often misleading?

  McKinley was broad-shouldered and filled out his jeans and khaki shirt without an ounce of flab. Dead-straight sun-streaked brown hair was scraped back from a wide, tanned forehead. She remembered his eyes – the translucent blue of the clear winter sky, and equally as chilly. His mouth was firm and uncompromising.

  If he ever smiled he’d probably be quite handsome, in a weathered, outback kind of way. It was hard to pick his age but she pegged him to be around forty, maybe a bit more, but not a lot older than she was.

  Leah turned her attention to the desert landscape and tried to ignore the butterflies fluttering around her stomach. This job was a great opportunity, professionally and financially. She couldn’t afford to mess it up. If it meant putting up with a grumpy, uncommunicative boss, she’d do it.

  They passed a road sign with a single word on it, Alpha, and Alex reached for the UHF handset. The radio crackled to life.

  ‘Light vehicle entering Alpha, travelling south,’ he said in a clipped tone and replaced the handset.

  Leah recalled from her induction that each section of the n­arrow road was identified by a letter from the phonetic alphabet. It was mandatory for all vehicles to identify themselves as they entered each stretch and state the direction they were travelling.

  ‘How long will it take to get to the camp?’ she said, the words tumbling out before she could stop them.

  Strong fingers flexed on the steering wheel. ‘Fifty minutes.’

  ‘Oh.’ Fifty minutes of stony silence. Yippee.

  Leah turned her attention back to the scenery, entranced by the stark vastness of the moonscape-like vista. The landscape was a p­alette of colour, from the terracotta hues of the dunes, through the orange-yellows and ochres of the gibber, to the silvery saltbush and greenish-greys of the acacia scrub, all topped by the clear, endless blue of the desert sky.

  She started counting the transmission towers as they passed, estimating them to be about 500 metres apart. She was up to twenty-nine when the vehicle slowed and stopped at a closed gate. She couldn’t believe it. They were in the middle of nowhere and there were fences and gates!

  McKinley turned to her and although she couldn’t see his eyes through the polaroid lenses of his sunglasses, she got the message.

  ‘I’ll get this one, you can do the next one,’ the passenger sitting behind her said and bounded out of the 4WD while she fumbled with her seatbelt.

  She swivelled around and smiled at him when he climbed in after closing the gate behind them. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Don’t worry, there’re plenty more gates between here and the camp. If you like, we can take turns being gate bitch.’

  He grinned at her startled look. ‘Every driver needs a gate bitch – someone to open and close the gates. There’re gates all down the line. Not sure how many there are between Nickel Bluff and Camp One. I’ve never counted.’

  ‘There are five.’

  All three heads swung in the driver’s direction. ‘There’re five gates on this stretch and under no circumstances do you ever, ever leave a gate open,’ he said.

  Leah took the curt directive to be aimed primarily at her. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘First rule of the bush, you always shut the gate.’

  ‘Got it in one,’ her fellow gate bitch said and thrust his hand through the gap between the seats. ‘We should have introduced ourselves earlier, but there was a bit of a rush to get away. I’m Jason Roberts. And this here’s Tyler Graham.’

  Leah shook Jason’s hand and reached through the gap for Tyler’s hand. ‘Leah Jackson. Nice to meet you both.’

  ‘You’re taking Steve’s place? I heard his wife was sick and he wasn’t coming back.’

  ‘Yes, that’s right,’ she said.

  McKinley’s face looked as if you could break rocks on it.

  ‘So, Leah, is this your first trip out here?’ If Jason squeezed any further through the gap in the seats he’d be on her lap.

  She suppressed a smile. ‘Yep, first trip out here, but I have worked in the bush before. What about you?’

  ‘Ah, we’ve been working on the line since the get-go. Building the camp and the roads to start with. I’ve been home on rest leave.’

  ‘I didn’t see you on the plane.’

  ‘We came in yesterday arvo. Had stuff to do in the Bluff.’

  Tyler nodded at everything Jason said, his plump cheeks blotchy pink with self-consciousness. Leah wondered if he was old enough to shave, let alone be out here on his own. Both men wore jeans and high-visibility shirts.

  ‘What do you both do?’

  ‘I’m an engineer and Tyler here’s a surveyor with one of the contractors.’

  Tyler nodded again and his cheeks stained an even darker pink.

  ‘And where are you from?’ Leah asked.

  ‘Me, I’m originally from Loxton, in the Riverland. Went to uni in Adelaide and started working for the company a couple of years ago.’

  She shifted her attention to Tyler. ‘Port Augusta,’ he stammered. ‘Studied in Adelaide, same as Jase.’

  ‘Port Augusta!’ Leah eased her seatbelt so she could turn around further to face them. ‘I worked at Port Augusta hospital years ago. Went agency nursing there. Had a great time. So close to the Flinders Ranges . . . I spent most of my spare time camping and bushwalking.’

  ‘Yeah?’ Tyler’s eyes lit up, and the three of them fell into an easy conversation about country versus city living.

  When they came to the next gate Leah had her seatbelt off and the door open before the vehicle had come to a stop. Careful not to trip in her cumbersome
steelcapped boots, she leapt out of the LandCruiser without even glancing at the man beside her.

  Leah leaned forward in her seat the moment she spied the shapes emerging from the shimmering horizon. According to her tally there was only one gate to go, and the blips in the distance would be the camp: her home and work base for the time being, except for the six days in every twenty-eight when she’d go home to Adelaide on rest leave. She tingled with anticipation.

  The camp buildings began to take on substance and she craned further forward, straining against the seatbelt. She hoped and prayed her confidence wasn’t misplaced, that the two short-term health and safety jobs she’d done in Adelaide and her eight-month stint as a j­unior safety advisor on the company’s wind-farm construction p­roject had prepared her for what lay ahead.

  This remote area project needed a safety advisor and a nurse. Few people came with both qualifications. Steve Simons was one of those few, as was Leah. There was no doubt her qualifications as a registered nurse with accident and emergency experience had been pivotal in her even being considered for the transfer. And few of her new-found colleagues had the desire to work out in the middle of nowhere, 700 kilometres from the nearest capital city.

  The money was excellent. There was nothing to spend it on out here, and she could use her six days of rest leave to do shifts for the nursing agency. If everything went to plan, she could make a s­ignificant dent in her mortgage.

  Minutes later the 4WD slowed and turned into an area designated Car Park, the words handpainted on a piece of tin and wired to a dropper stake. The vehicle came to a crunching halt in front of a once-white transportable building. Leah thought it looked a bit like an oversized shipping container with windows.

  The sign on the door read Administration Office, and an array of satellite dishes and aerials decorated the roof. Behind the office were rows of identical accommodation and amenities blocks, also tr­ansportable. Leah opened the car door and climbed out. She stretched and her eyes watered in the brisk breeze. The winter sun was warm but the wind was bitingly cold; a lazy wind that went through you, not around you.