“What are you doing here?” she hissed, keeping her voice to a whisper for a reason she couldn’t have explained.

He shrugged. “I never miss the camp meetings,” he said.

Maggie gave him a look. Damn the man. It had taken her all this while to get him out of her thoughts and now here he was, intruding. Making her feel that strange, sweet malaise that no other man had ever made her feel. “For the preaching, Mr. McKenna?” she asked, sweetly sarcastic.

Tansy went past just then, holding a plate in one hand and dragging a young man along behind her with the other. Maggie knew intuitively that she’d be left to find a place to sleep on her own and made up her mind to wring Tansy’s neck the next time she saw her.

“Actually,” Mr. McKenna answered belatedly, “it’s the horse racing that I like.” He glanced up at the starry sky, the firelight flickering on the rugged planes of his face and catching in the brass medallion at his throat. “Doesn’t look like rain.”

Given the cloudless state of the sky, that seemed like a silly observation to Maggie, but she kept her opinion to herself.

When she met Reeve’s eyes, she saw laughter in their depths. “You don’t believe it can rain,” he accused her.

“There isn’t a cloud in the sky, after all,” Maggie replied.

“Storms strike very suddenly in Australia, Miss Chamberlin.” The blue-green eyes flecked with firelight held Maggie spellbound. “And when they do, they are torrential.”

The ominous words struck a conversely pleasant note deep within Maggie. As sparks from the fire rose toward the black velvet sky, with its spattering of stars, she wondered if this night would be as difficult as the three nights preceding it.

Chapter 7

AS SOON AS SHE WAS ABLE TO MANAGE IT, MAGGIE EXcused herself and escaped Reeve McKenna, anxiously searching the grounds for some sign of Tansy. But there was none; the girl had disappeared into the dense shadows where the flickering fingers of the firelight did not reach.

Now what was she going to do? After a moment’s hesitation Maggie ducked into one of the tents where the gospel was being thundered out with vehemence and fury.

“For the Lord your God is a jealous God!” bellowed the short, well-fed preacher pacing the wooden platform at the rear of the tent. Dozens of people sat, watching and listening, on long, splintery benches. Maggie rolled her eyes.

At that moment, as if the Lord meant to reprimand her personally for being a scoffer, thunder split the sky with a deafening crash. Maggie, lurking by the tent’s opening, started in fear and then slipped outside to look up. The stars, present only moments before, were now gone, replaced by ugly shifting clouds. Lightning veined across the sky in golden streaks, making a pattern reminiscent of shattered glass.