He could have taken that as a punch to the ego. Instead, he decided to take it as a reason to dig his heels in. Why should Jo get everything her way?
‘What do you reckon, kiddo?’ he said. ‘Reckon you’ve got enough pork snags in that esky to feed an extra camper?’
‘Yeah we do, Hux,’ said the kid.
Hux grinned. A twenty-minute flight, along with half an hour lugging heavy gear, both filled by endless chatter from the kid, had been enough for him to realise that if Luke wanted something, his mum agreed. A slightly underhanded strategy, perhaps, but Hux had written too many ‘bad guy takes advantage of no witnesses’ scenes to be easy with the idea of just flying off into the distance and leaving the two of them out here without wheels.
But his strategy worked. An hour later, Jo was off pottering in her ditch with a trowel and a magnifying glass, and he was pricking a panful of spitting sausages and listening to Luke’s list of reasons why water polo was the finest sport ever invented.
It was when the sun was well and truly snuffed out, and the fire just a handful of smouldering embers, the scrub and jump-up and helicopter blanketed in the ink darkness of the outback night, that Hux realised he’d had another motive for inviting himself for a campout sleepover.
Two motives, in fact.
The first was procrastination. Back at Yindi Creek, he had no excuse to not be dealing with the messages and voicemails that had been dropping relentlessly into his phone since the Thursday evening press release. Out here, his phone was somewhere in the helicopter. Out of sight, out of mind.
The second was: he wanted answers. He wanted to have the talk that Jo had denied him fourteen years ago.
The kid had put himself into his swag a while back, after eating his way through a mountain of food. He’d been delighted at the thought of skipping a shower and had zipped himself up with a head torch and a comic. He’d been further thrilled when the dog had insisted, noisily, on being zipped into the tent with him.
‘That’s a great kid you’ve got there,’ he said.
She smiled faintly. ‘Thanks. Although I suspect if you’d not beentheGavin Gunn he might not have been quite so helpful this afternoon.’
He chuckled. ‘He knows more than I do aboutClueless Jones. Nearly talked my ear off when we went to collect the gear.’
‘Huh.’
He looked at her. ‘What does that suspicious little “huh” mean?’
She sighed. ‘Sorry. I wasn’t meaning to sound suspicious. It’s just, Luke and I haven’t been getting on that well. He’s angry with me about … everything, it seems.’
‘He doesn’t seem too angry with you now.’
She looked surprised. ‘I guess he doesn’t. But maybe that’s just because we’re away from home. If he gets a choice between being with me or being with his dad, he always chooses his dad.’
‘Things not amicable, hey?’
‘You could say that.’ Her lips were thin and compressed, so he decided it might be time he left that topic alone.
The head torch had winked out a little while ago and Hux could hear snoring, and although the snores were coming from the dog, not the kid, he figured the kid was just as soundly asleep.
Jo was quiet, sitting in the camp chair with her head tipped back, eyes closed.
They’d spent evenings like this before. Minus a kid, of course, and the parenting discussion—and wasn’t that a thought: Jo had akid—but around a fire, slightly grubby, the two of them the only ones awake and the stars looking down on them like a spellbound audience, waiting for one of them to make their next move.
Beyond them, the vastness of the outback.
Jo stirred. ‘There’s tea, somewhere. You fancy a cup?’
A beer would have gone down a treat, but tea would do. Talks were dry, and all of a sudden he was feeling totally parched.
‘Sure.’
Jo got up and started poking about in the food crate. ‘Green okay?’
He was barely listening. He was thinking about the past, when he’d thought evenings like this would never come to an end. ‘Yeah, thanks. This remind you of old times, Jo?’
She stopped rifling through groceries. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’
