Jack called for Phryne early the next morning, and was relieved to see her looking almost completely restored. Indeed, the only visible signs of her ordeal were the healing cut on her temple and a slight limp when she walked, and it occurred to him, not for the first time, that she was in fact more resilient than some of his men.
He offered her his arm and walked her out to the car.
"So, what's the plan?" she asked once they were both seated inside.
"We'll take a few of the men and drive up to the farm. They may not be there, but if not we'll turn the place upside down and see what they've left us. I'll also have my men keep an eye on the family members you identified during your investigation, and I'll ask my colleagues in Adelaide to do the same up there."
"You realise of course that I'm coming with you."
He smiled. "I know better than to try and leave you behind."
He pulled over to the kerb and parked in the shade of a tree. Phryne frowned at him, looking out at the surrounding properties. They were on a quiet residential street, still some distance from the City South station.
"Is there a reason we're stopping here?"
He took a deep breath and gripped the steering wheel, staring unseeingly at the road ahead. "I thought perhaps we should talk. Before we go off chasing killers."
Phryne's heart jumped, then sank. She had been dreading this moment. Jack was totally unlike the men she had surrounded herself with for so long. Ever since Rene, she had avoided deep attachments, seeking fun and frivolity without any sense of possession or commitment. Jack was no Rene Dubois, but she doubted that he would ever approach a romantic relationship with anything other than the most serious of intentions. She, on the other hand, had no desire to enmesh herself in the stifling bonds of marriage, even to a man she trusted and admired as much as Jack Robinson. But at the same time, she wasn't sure what she would do without him. Jack, with his unshakeable sense of honour and his unswerving commitment to what was right, had become her rock and her anchor, a stable point of reference in her often chaotic world. Losing him was something she'd prefer not to think about.
So she sat in silence for a long moment before taking a deep breath of her own. "Alright," she said.
The next words out of his mouth were not what she had expected.
"I'm not going to ask you to marry me." He glanced at her sideways. "Unless, of course, you want me to?"
She looked at him sadly, willing him to understand. "Jack, it's not you. I just can't imagine making that kind of commitment to anyone."
He nodded. "I know. That's why I'm not going to ask." He sighed. "But I can't be just another lover to you, Phryne. I can't give myself to you for a day or a month and then walk away as though it meant nothing to me." He turned his head to look at her. "You mean everything to me." He fixed his eyes on the road again before continuing. "And I can't face the thought of you having other men as well as me. I love you, Phryne, and I wouldn't change you for the world. But I can't change myself either. So I'm asking you to decide: do you want me, or not?"
He was a proud man. She could only imagine what that speech had cost him, how long he had thought about just what to say to her. He had laid his position out clearly, leaving no room for misunderstanding. There had been no judgement, no demands, only a choice to be made. She was free to accept him as he was, or to let him go.
"A compromise," she observed, and he nodded. With any other woman it would not have been. With any other woman, to ask for fidelity without offering marriage in return would have been a disgrace and an exploitation. But Phryne was unlike any woman he'd ever known before. He had thought long and hard about this, wrestling with the question of how to reconcile their two very different outlooks on life.
It wasn't their obvious differences that concerned him – if they were polar opposites then it had to be remembered that the two poles between them encompassed the world in all its diversity – but rather their different views on the nature of relationships between men and women. He had always believed that, for better or worse, a man and a woman who sincerely loved one another should commit themselves to each other as husband and wife, forsaking all others for as long as they lived. She, on the other hand, seemed to regard love as nothing more than a game, a momentary diversion. After much reflection, he had come to the conclusion that he could survive without the formality of marriage – after all, prior to his divorce his own marriage had been little more than a sham for years – but he could not live without the fidelity and commitment which marriage supposedly symbolised.
"You were all I could think about," she told him. "All that long way back to Melbourne, I couldn't stop thinking about you. I knew that it I could just make it back to you, then everything would be alright." She turned to look at him, and he faced her squarely. "No-one's ever made me feel like that before." She paused. "You frighten me, Jack."
He opened his mouth to protest, but she cut him off.
"Oh, not in the way Rene did. But to depend so much on another person, to care for them as much as I care for you... I love you, Jack Robinson. And I'd rather be with you than any other man I've ever known. And that frightens me."
She reached out her hand for his, and he turned his palm into her grasp. "But I've never been given to running away from the things I'm afraid of."
He closed his eyes and sighed, smiling for the first time since he had stopped the car. "Very good."
They sat like that for a moment, before Phryne shook herself briskly. "Now, you'd better kiss me, and then let's go catch our killers."
He obliged, then put the car in gear and pulled back into the road.
"Just so we're clear, Miss Fisher, no hanky-panky at the station. Or at any other time when I'm on duty."
She smirked at him, and he realised he'd just given her a challenge. "Spoilsport."