Bargaining for Baby by Robyn Grady

workers amid thousands of sheep getting the excitement of shearing season underway. Sydney kept changing—higher skyscrapers, more traffic, extra tourists—yet the scene she pictured here might have been the same for a hundred years.
    When they stepped into the building, Maddy suddenly felt very small and, at the same time, strangely enlivened. She rotated an awe-struck three-sixty. “It’s massive.”
    “Eighty-two meters long, built in 1860 with enough room to accommodate fifty-two blade shearers. Thirty years on, the shed was converted to thirty-six stands of machine shears, powered by steam. Ten manual blade stands were kept, though, to hand shear stud sheep.”
    “Rams, you mean?”
    “Can’t risk losing anything valuable if the machinery goes mad.”
    She downplayed a grin. Typical man.
    Their footsteps echoed through lofty rafters, some laced with tangles of cobwebs which muffled the occasional beat of sparrows’ wings. Through numerous gaps in the rough side paneling, daylight slanted in, drawing crooked streaks on the raised floor. Dry earth, weathered wood and,beneath that, a smell that reminded her of the livestock pavilion at Sydney’s Royal Easter Show.
    Maddy pointed out the railed enclosures that took up a stretch of the vast room. “Is that where the sheep line up to have their sweaters taken off?”
    He slapped a rail. “Each catching pen holds enough sheep for a two-hour shearing stint. A roustabout’ll haul a sheep out of the pen onto a board—” he moved toward a mechanism attached to a long cord—powered shears “—and the shearer handles things from there. Once the fleece is removed, the sheep’s popped through a moneybox, where she slides down a shute into a counting pen.”
    “Moneybox?”
    He crossed the floor and clapped a rectangular frame on the wall. “One of these trap doors.”
    “Must be a cheery job.” She mentioned the name of a famous shearing tune, then snapped her fingers in time with part of the chorus and sang, “‘Click, click, click.’”
    When his green eyes showed his laughter, a hot knot pulled low at her core and Maddy had to school her features against revealing any hint of the sensation. A wicked smile. A lidded look. Being alone with Jack was never a good idea.
    “A great Aussie song,” he said, “but unfortunately, not accurate.”
    Reaching high, he drew a dented tin box off a grimy shelf. Maddy watched, her gaze lapping over the cords in his forearms as he opened the lid. Her heart skipped several beats as her eyes wandered higher to skim over his magnificent shoulders, his incredibly masculine chest. When that burning knot pulled again, she inhaled, forced her gaze away and realized that he’d removed something from the tin—a pair of manual shears, which looked like an extra large pair of very basic scissors.
    “A shearer would keep these sharper than a cut throat,” he told her. “The idea wasn’t to snip or click— ” he closed the blades twice quickly to demonstrate “—but to start at a point then glide the blades up through the wool.” He slid the shears along through the air.
    “Like a dressmaker’s scissors on fabric.”
    “Precisely.” He ambled over to a large rectangular table. “The fleece is lain out on one of these wool tables for skirting, when dags and burrs are removed, then it’s on to classing.”
    He found a square of wool in the shears’ tin and traced a fingertip up the side of the white fleece. “The finer the wave, or crimp, the better the class.”
    When he handed over the sample, their hands touched. She took the wool, and as she played with the amazing softness of the fleece, she was certain that a moment ago his fingers had indeed lingered over hers.
    “After the wool is classed, it’s dropped into its appropriate bin,” he went on. “When there’s enough of one class, it’s pressed into bales. In the beginning, the clip was transported by bullock wagons. From here to the nearest town,