then they’d walked in, hand in hand. ‘We’re so sorry, Penny, but we have something to tell you...’
Matt was already slicing the first cake but at her silence he glanced up. Maybe the colour had drained from her face. Maybe she looked how she felt—as if she was about to be sick. For whatever reason, he put the knife down.
‘What?’
‘I...’
‘It’s okay,’ he told her, obviously making an effort to sound calm. ‘They’re very nice lamingtons but this isn’t a society fund-raiser where everyone’s spent the last three hours thinking about what to wear. Some of these guys have shorn forty sheep since they last ate, and they intend to do forty more before their next meal. Calories first, niceties second. Help me, Penny.’ And then, as she still didn’t move, he added, ‘Please.’
And finally her stunned brain shifted back into gear. She shoved away the sour taste of failure that followed her everywhere.
Fuel. Hungry workers who’d been head down since dawn.
Cute little lamingtons? She must have been nuts.
What then? Hot. Filling. Fast.
She had it.
‘Ramp the ovens up,’ she snapped and headed for the freezer. ‘All of them. High as you can go. And then wash your hands. I need help and you’re not touching my food with those hands.’
‘We don’t have time...’
‘We’ll be ten minutes late. They have a choice of a late smoko or eating your disgusting cake. You choose.’
* * *
He could order her aside and chop up the fruitcake the team despised—or he could trust her.
He went for the second. He cranked up the ovens and headed for the wash house. Two minutes later he was back, clean at least to the elbows.
By the time he returned, Penny had hauled sheets of frozen pastry from the freezer and was separating them onto baking trays.
‘Three ovens, six trays,’ she muttered. ‘Surely that’ll feed them.’ She indicated jars of pasta sauce on the bench. ‘Open them and start spreading,’ she told him. ‘Not too thick. Go.’
Hang on. He was the boss. This was his house, his kitchen, his shearing team waiting to be fed. The sensible thing was to keep chopping fruitcake but Penny had suddenly transformed from a cute little blonde into a cook with power. With Matt as an underling.
Fascinated, he snagged the first jar and started spreading.
Penny was diving into the coolroom, hauling out mushrooms, salami, mozzarella. She didn’t so much as glance at him. She headed to the sink, dumped the mushrooms under the tap and then started ripping open the salami.
‘Aren’t you supposed to wipe mushrooms?’ he managed. To say he was bemused would be an understatement.
‘In what universe do we have time to wipe mushrooms?’ She hauled out a vast chopping board and, while the tap washed the mushrooms for her, she started on the salami. Her hands were moving so fast the knife was a blur. ‘I could leave them unwashed but I have an aversion to dirt.’ She gave herself half a second to glance with disgust at his boots. ‘Even if you don’t. You finished?’
‘Almost.’ He poured the last jar over the pastry and spread it to the edges. ‘Done.’
‘Then I want this salami all over them. Rough and thick—we have no time for thin and fancy.’ She hauled the mushrooms out of the sink and dumped them on a couple of tea towels, flipping them over with the fabric to get most of the water out. World’s fastest wash. ‘Back in two seconds. I’m getting herbs.’
And she was gone, only to appear a moment later with a vast bunch of basil. ‘Great garden,’ she told him, grabbing another chopping board.
He was too stunned to answer.
They chopped side by side. There was no time, no need to talk.
And suddenly Matt found himself thinking this was just like the shearing shed. When things worked, it was like a well-oiled machine. There was a common purpose. There was urgency.
His knife skills weren’t up to hers. In fact they were about ten per cent of hers. He didn’t mind. This woman had skills he hadn’t even begun to appreciate.
Wow, she was fast.
It was the strangest feeling. To have a woman in his kitchen. To have this woman in his kitchen.
She was a society princess with a pink car and a poodle and knife skills that’d do any master chef proud.
Her body brushed his as she turned to fetch more mushrooms and he felt...
Concentrate on salami, he told himself and it was a hard ask.
But three minutes later they had six trays of ‘pizza’ in the oven.
‘The herbs go on when it comes out,’ she told him.
‘We won’t have time to garnish...’
‘Nothing goes out of my kitchen unless it’s perfect,’ she snapped. She glanced at the clock. ‘Right, it’s nine minutes before ten. This’ll take fifteen minutes to cook so I’ll be exactly ten minutes late. I hope that’s acceptable. Come back at eight minutes past and help me carry it over.’
He almost grinned. He thought of his shearing team. Craig was the expert there, and Matt was wise enough to follow orders. Did he have just such an expert in his kitchen?
‘How can it be ready by then?’ He must have sounded incredulous because she smiled.
‘Are you kidding? I might even have time to powder my nose before I help you take it out there.’
* * *
Taking the food over to the shed was an eye-opener.
A campfire had been lit on the side of the shed. There were a couple of trestle tables and a heap of logs serving as seats. Three billies hung from a rod across the fire.
The fire was surrounded by men and women who looked as filthy as Matt—or worse.
One of the men looked up as Penny and Matt approached and gave a shrill, two-fingers-in-the-mouth whistle. ‘Ducks on the pond,’ he called and everyone stopped what they were doing and stared.
‘Hey.’ It was hard to tell the women from the men but it was a female voice. ‘You idiot, Harry. Ducks on the pond’s a stupid way of saying women are near the shed. What about Marg and me?’
‘You don’t count,’ one of the shearers retorted. ‘You gotta have t... I mean you gotta have boobs and legs to count. You and Margie might have ’em but they’re hidden under sheep dung. Put you in a bikini, we’ll give you the respect you deserve.’
‘Yeah, classifying us as ducks. Very respectful.’ One of the women came forward and took plates from Penny. ‘Take no notice of them, sweetheart. I’m Greta, this is Margie and the rest of this lot don’t matter. If they had one more neuron between them, it’d be lonely.’ She glanced down at the steaming piles of pizza. ‘Wow! Great tucker.’
And then there was no more talk at all.
The food disappeared in moments. Penny stood and watched and thought of the two frittatas she had ready to go in the oven.
How long before the next meal?
But Matt had guessed her thoughts. He’d obviously seen the pathetically small frittatas.
‘There are a couple of massive hams in the cool room,’ he told her. ‘We can use your pretty pies as a side dish for cold ham and peas and potatoes. Penny, you saved my butt and I’m grateful, but from now on it doesn’t matter if it’s not pretty. At this stage we’re in survival mode.’
And she glanced