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me?’ Was I bragging?
    With one hand balancing Dad’s dinner, Lucy threaded her free arm through mine, the affectionate gesture taking me by surprise. ‘I’d lap him, lick him and rub myself all over him covered in scented oil if I were you. Take advantage of him while you can.’
    I laughed out loud. ‘Watch out, Nick.’
    My phone buzzed in the back pocket of my jeans. After retrieving it I acknowledged the caller with a sigh and hesitated before pressing the answer button.
    ‘Hello?’
    ‘Cate, will you please meet me? I really need to talk to you.’
    I consulted my watch without speaking then eyed Lucy’s questioning gaze.
    ‘Babe?’ the person on the other end said.
    ‘Give me about twenty minutes.’
    ‘Meet you at the billabong?’
    ‘Ok.’
    I pressed “end” and slid the phone back into my pocket.
    ‘Who was that?’ Lucy asked. But something told me that she already knew.
    ‘Oh, um, just a last minute wedding thing. I’ll take this in to Dad.’ I took the casserole from her.
    ‘Should we catch up later? Nick mentioned something about dinner.’
    ‘Yep, sure, if I’m up to it.’

    ‘So you’re really going to marry him?’ Roy asked me as we sat secretly in our private place by the billabong in the national park twenty minutes later. It was cold, freezing actually, as the snow-tipped wind whipped sharply from the white-peaked mountains.
    We sat subdued for a minute. A frog croaked in the mid distance and then a small splash from an overgrown gold fish, as it nipped at a lowly hovering dragon fly, rippled the otherwise still water.
    I didn’t even know why I’d answered his call earlier and I didn’t know why I had agreed to meet with him. I guessed that I wasn’t out of the habit of saying “how high” whenever Roy Ellis said “jump”. And I also wondered how true the feelings of love that I felt for him were while I sat shivering and he looked as warm as toast in his thick leather jacket, not once offering it to me. How could I condone such egotism?
    The frog croaked again, punctuating the awkward beat of stillness between us as I contemplated telling him about the baby. I sat, centring my gaze upon a pink water lily that lay unmoving on the middle of the billabong, and took a breath.
    ‘You don’t love him like you love me. Like I love you,’ he said with, what I translated to be, an afterthought.
    I gave him a long, focussed look. ‘I’m pregnant,’ I confessed without removing my gaze. His eyes widened so much so that I thought that they may pop right out of his head. ‘Don’t worry, Roy. You’re safe. It’s Nick’s.’
    ‘Didn’t take you long to move on.’
    Derision escaped through my chattering teeth. ‘I haven’t moved on.’
    ‘What if there was no baby? Would you marry him then?’
    I couldn’t answer him truthfully, mostly because I didn’t know for sure, and he knew it.
    ‘Please, don’t do this,’ he begged me as he took my cold face in his warm hands. He kissed me deeply, and it was only now that we had been apart that everything that I’d been trying to convince myself about Roy, about how bad he was for me, melted away under his warm fingers in this freezing creek-side haven. ‘Please, Cate,’ he murmured into my lips. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Please don’t do this.’
    ‘Would you marry me if I chose you? Do you have the energy to pretend with me for the rest of your life?’ He let me go, answering my question. ‘That’s what I thought. You don’t want me. You wouldn’t want this baby if it were yours, either, so why the charade?’
    He kissed me again but I separated myself from him and put on my most persuasive front. ‘This is not a game, Roy. I can’t make this decision as if there was no baby because the baby is the only person here that should have priority. I can’t trust you. Nick will look after me, he loves me, always has. He even loved me while I was at my most disastrous with you.I never have to worry