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      CHAPTER ONE

      CHRISTY opened the kitchen door and stepped out into the garden. The air smelled of snow. She breathed it in slowly, savouring the crisp scent of it, and looked at the leaden winter sky.

      A thin curl of smoke from her father’s bonfire smudged the skyline before mingling with the greyness of the cloud. Beyond the garden lay a vista of fields broken by clumps of woodland, backed by the slopes of the Border hills, their peaks already whitened by the first fall of snow. Everything lay intensely still beneath the cold January air. It was all so very different from London and the life she had lived there, but it was familiar as well. After all, she had spent the first seventeen years of her life in these Border hills. And the last eight away from them, apart from brief visits home.

      She reached the bottom of the garden and stood for a moment watching her father as he threw the last of the rubbish on his bonfire. He was wearing the same tweeds she remembered from her teenage years, shabby and well worn. He turned and saw her, and smiled affectionately at her; a tall, mild-mannered man who had passed on to her, his only child, his height.

      ‘Lunch is ready,’ she told him.

      ‘Good, I’m hungry. I’ll just damp this fire down and then I’ll be in.’

      If her height had come from her father, then her oval green eyes had come from her mother’s Celtic ancestors, like her rich banner of copper hair, and her quick temper. Scots and English had quarrelled and married across the Border for centuries, but her mother’s family had been Highlanders from Glen Coe, and she had often bemoaned the fact that Christy seemed to have inherited their fierce warring spirit.

      Christy waited for her father to finish putting out the fire.

      ‘You know, Christy,’ he said, ‘it’s good to have you home, although I wish it could have been in happier circumstances. You don’t have to stay, you know. Your mother…’

      ‘I want to stay,’ she interrupted firmly. ‘I would have come home even if Mum hadn’t had to have that operation. You know, in London it’s all too easy to get out of touch with reality, with everything that’s important in life.’ She sighed faintly, a frown touching her smooth forehead. ‘I’ve given up my job, Dad.’

      There hadn’t been time in the frantic telephone call telling her of her mother’s emergency operation for Christy to tell her father her own news, but now that the danger was over and her mother was safely back at home, it was time for her to talk of her own plans.

      Now it was her father’s turn to frown, and Christy looked away from him. She could sense his surprise and concern, and bit down hard on her bottom lip.

      ‘But you seemed so pleased to be working for David Galvin,’ he said. ‘When you came home last summer you seemed so happy.’

      ‘I was. But David has been asked to write the music for a film and to do that he has to go out to Hollywood. He asked me to go with him, but I didn’t want to, so I handed in my notice.’

      She prayed that her father would accept her explanation at face value and not press her any closer. What she had told him was in effect the truth, but there was a great deal that she had concealed from him.

      There was David’s desire for them to become lovers, for a start. She shivered slightly, a frisson of sensation running through her that had nothing to do with the cold. She didn’t love David, but he was a very magnetic and masculine man; she had known that if he continued to press her she might have been very tempted to give in to him—and how she would have hated herself if she had done so. She wasn’t blind, or a fool; she knew that David was almost consistently unfaithful to his wife Meryl, and that Meryl accepted his infidelities as the price of being married to a man whose artistic abilities had made him world-famous by the time he was thirty years old.

      The sort of affairs David indulged in meant nothing in any emotional sense; he was an intensely sensual and sexual man who enjoyed women and, shamingly, she knew that there had been the odd moment when she had not been sure of her own ability to withstand him should he choose to use the full force of his sexual power against her.

      She had worked for him for four years, and had been accepted by Meryl and his children almost as an honorary member of the family. She knew what his brief affairs did to them, and the last thing she wanted was to inflict further hurt on them, so she had done the only thing possible: she had run away.

      He had flung that at her in their final confrontation. She had told him just before Christmas that she was resigning. There had been no need for him to ask why, and she remembered how his mouth had compressed with anger and mockery. There was an almost childish side to him that loathed being thwarted or denied anything he had set his heart on, and he had wanted her. Consequently he had used that skilful tongue of his mercilessly to destroy her defences, bringing her close to the edge of tears and total self-betrayal, but somehow she had managed to hang on to her self-control. A small, bitter smile twisted her mouth. She knew whom she had to thank for that self-control, for that hard-won ability to refuse to give in to her feelings. It seemed that she was doomed to be unlucky in the men in her life.

      She had spent Christmas alone, refusing Meryl’s pleas to join them in their huge Wimbledon house, as she had done at other Christmases, and then, just when she had felt that her loneliness and misery might cause her to give way, she had received a telephone call from her father telling her of