Free Cherish the Land by Ariel Tachna Page A

happiness didn’t come at such a price.
    He’s worth it , he told himself. And boyfriends come and go. Best friends are forever .
    He just had to keep reminding himself of that until he believed it. He’d dated more than one person while he was in Sydney, and Jason had more than one relationship during vet school, but nothing had shaken the core of their friendship. Not even Jason leaving him to go away to school could weaken that foundation. Seth just had to cling to that and let the rest alone. If he stopped obsessing over Jason, maybe he’d even find a jackaroo of his own.
    The thought turned his stomach. He could imagine being with Jason in every way known to man, but the minute he tried to replace Jason’s face with another, he felt sick. He didn’t trust any other man the way he trusted Jason.
    “You’re awfully quiet,” Jason said, breaking Seth’s train of thought.
    “Sorry, just trying to remember what I learnt about orienting solar panels. It’s been a while since I took that class.”
    “Yeah, I feel that way about some of the small-animal stuff I learnt in my first year of vet school,” Jason said. “I learnt it well enough to pass the class, but I always knew it wasn’t what I was going to do with my life, so I didn’t bother trying to retain it beyond that.”
    “Except that you really don’t need it, and now I do,” Seth said.
    Jason shrugged. “That’s what the Internet is for. You can use Mum’s computer if you don’t have one of your own and look up anything you’ve forgotten or didn’t learn in school. That’s what I do if I need to check something.”
    “I have a laptop,” Seth said. “And I will double-check everything before I start installing anything. I’d do that even if it was my field rather than something I studied for a semester on a whim.”
    “Aren’t you glad now that you did?”
    “Caine has a way of making you glad for everything you do for him.”
    Jason laughed. “Isn’t that the truth! So what are we looking for?”
    Seth settled into an explanation of storage capacities, panel angles, relative exposure, and cost versus output ratios. From the look on Jason’s face, more than a little of it went over his head, but he asked questions occasionally that pushed Seth to consider things from a different perspective. By the time they reached the first hut, the sick tension in Seth’s gut had faded and their easy camaraderie had returned. Maybe the afternoon wouldn’t be all torture.
     
     
    B Y THE time they drove back into the valley for dinner, Seth had managed to forget most of his worries and bask in the warmth of Jason’s presence. They’d only visited two of the dozen or more drover’s huts scattered around the station, but Seth had a much better idea of what he’d need to look up and calculate in order to make Caine’s dream of a generator in each hut a reality. They didn’t need much. Enough for a refrigerator, a lamp, and a space heater, and only the refrigerator would be a constant drain on the stored power. They’d only need the heater in the winter and the lamp on the nights someone was using the hut. The two huts they’d visited that afternoon were both south facing and in full sun most of the day. A couple of solar panels on the roof and a good storage capacity on the associated battery would be plenty. If any of the huts had trees around them that would block the sun for part of the day, they might have to look at different options, but he’d worry about that later. For now, he had something to report for his first day on the job.
    “Neil’s car still isn’t back,” Jason said as they parked the ute. “I hope that doesn’t mean they’ve had bad news.”
    “Yeah, I hope not,” Seth agreed. He knew Devlin Taylor by sight, but little else. The grazier had made his opinion of everything about Lang Downs perfectly clear, so Seth didn’t have much use for him. He didn’t want Jeremy upset, though, and whatever happened with