CHAPTER ONE

      THAT Tuesday started just like any other. Karrie was showered dressed and ready for work. She had debated whether or not to tie her blonde, gold-streaked shoulder-length hair back in some kind of knot, but had decided against it, and had brushed it into its normal straight, but just curving under at the ends style. Just because Darren Jackson had yesterday warmly remarked ‘I’d love to walk barefoot through your delicately pale, ripening corn-coloured tresses’ there was no need to get paranoid.

      ‘Poetical—but I’m still not going out with you’ she’d replied with a laugh. Darren, who worked in the same office, had been trying to date her ever since she’d started work at Irving and Small three weeks ago.

      Karrie checked her appearance in her full-length bedroom mirror and felt she looked neat and ready for work in her smart burnt orange two-piece. She cast a glance at her—what were they?—‘delicately pale ripening corn-coloured tresses’, and, with a hint of a smile on her sweetly curving mouth at Darren’s over the top description, she left her room and went downstairs.

      Any hint of a smile, however, abruptly departed as she entered the breakfast room. The chill in the air was almost tangible—her parents weren’t speaking. To each other, that was. What else was new? Karrie had grown up in a household where warring glances and icy silences alternating with storming rows were the norm.

      ‘Good morning!’ she offered generally, brightly, striving hard not to take sides.

      Bernard Dalton, her father, ignored her—he still hadn’t forgiven her for leaving his firm and for daring to go and take a job elsewhere. Her mother did not reply to her greeting, but straight away launched into a bitter tirade. ‘Your father was kind enough to telephone me at seven o’clock last night to say he was too busy to make the theatre, as promised!’

      ‘Oh, dear,’ Karrie murmured sympathetically. ‘Er—perhaps you’ll be able to go—um—another time.’

      ‘The play finishes this week. Though I suppose I should be grateful that he rang me personally. The last time he got Yvonne to ring.’

      Yvonne Redding was Bernard Dalton’s hard-worked secretary. ‘Um...’ Karrie was still striving for something diplomatic with which to reply when her father, with never a moment to spare, finished his breakfast and, without a word, went from the room. Karrie had spotted his briefcase in the hall. It would take him but an instant to collect it on his way out.

      ‘Furniture. Just part of the furniture, that’s all we are,’ her mother complained in the silence that followed the reverberating sound of the front door being slammed shut after him.

      ‘Er—Jan was looking well.’ Karrie sought to change the subject. Her cousin Jan was newly out of the hospital after an operation to remove her appendix, and, because Jan’s flat was in an opposite direction from her own home, Karrie had driven straight from work last night to see her. Hence, she had not been around when her father had phoned. She and Jan were the best of friends, and it had been going on for ten when Karrie had eventually returned home. She had thought her parents were at the theatre, but her workaholic father had not been in from work yet and her mother—clearly not at her happiest—had gone to bed early.

      Mrs Dalton it seemed, was too embittered that morning by this latest lack of consideration on the part of her husband to be very much interested in her niece’s progress. And Karrie eventually left her home to go to her office reflecting that never, ever was she going to marry a man of the workaholic variety.

      The further she drove away from her home, however, the more her more natural sunny humour began to reassert itself. Chance would be a fine thing! Well, there was Travis Watson, of course—he was always asking her to marry him. But he knew that marry him she never would. It was true that she hadn’t reached twenty-two without a few possible candidates moving into her orbit—but she had always moved out of theirs. It was a fact too, though, that since she intended to be two hundred per cent sure—and with her parents’ example before her, why wouldn’t she?—that the man she said yes to was going to have to be extremely special in more ways than one.

      She drew up in the car park that belonged to the giant firm of Irving and Small with a hint of a smile back on her lips, glad to be part of the purchase and supply team. With new contracts being secured all the time, it meant her section was often at full stretch, but she enjoyed working there far more than she had ever enjoyed working for her father.

      She