Set against the brutal, breathtaking beauty of the Gulf, The Long Way to Stay is a slow-burn rural romance about a charming man with a locked-up heart, a runaway who has finally found something worth staying for, and the long, aching distance between wanting a thing and being brave enough to keep it.
The Three Brolgas Station sits at the far edge of the Gulf. Tig Corrigan means to give it three months and not one day more. Come for the wet season, be a governess for the kids and be gone before the dry. She has left a dozen places just like it. She is very, very good at leaving.
She has not encounter anyone like Heath McCready.
He’s the caretaker of the station and has a wide, easy smile, the sort of man who can charm a whole district and never once let them see what it costs him. Behind the charm is something quieter and darker, and far more dangerous to a woman like Tig. The type of widower who has forgotten how to say the things that really matter but in the dark of night, he builds Tig things he will not explain, to try and convey his feelings. He stands a careful half inch too close in the torchlight and when they work side by side, enough for them both to feel the pull, the passion that neither of them will admit out loud.
Then there is Heath’s children 12, 10, 8 and 5; watching, lining their salmon Crocs up beside hers at the door, slipping their small hands into hers as though they have every right. There is a flood that shuts the road and strands the six of them together, and a house that starts, terrifyingly, to feel like home.
Tig knows exactly how this ends. She has always known. Loving Heath McCready means loving a borrowed house, on a borrowed station, on a handshake agreement, with a grief he cannot put down, four children who cannot afford to lose another mother, and a man who will fight for every last one of them and has never once learned how to fight for her.
She should get in the ute. She should leave, but she is not at all sure, this time, that she can.