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      CHAPTER ONE

      ‘WIN, what’s wrong?’

      Winter looked up guiltily from the mug of coffee she was nursing, well aware that she had not been concentrating on her friend’s chatter.

      She and Heather had known each other for almost ten years now. They had met when they both started taking their toddler sons to the same playgroup, and it was this initial meeting which Heather was discussing now, suggesting that they make arrangements to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the day they had first met.

      ‘We’ll go somewhere really special,’ Heather had been saying. ‘Not the hotel—not with you working there.’

      And Winter had known from the way Heather’s voice had changed that she had not only been thinking of Winter’s work at the hotel where she was in charge of the reception and office staff, but also of her relationship with Tom Longton, its owner.

      This was confirmed when Heather asked her uncertainly, ‘It’s not Tom, is it? I thought you and he…’

      ‘No, it’s not Tom,’ Winter confirmed. There was no point in not telling Heather what had happened, she admitted. After all, she knew that her son Charlie wouldn’t lose any time in telling Heather’s son Danny about his wonderful news. Wonderful to Charlie, that was. She thought it was far from wonderful. In fact, she thought it was just about the worst possible news she had heard in a long time.

      ‘James is coming back,’ she said bleakly, then added when Heather looked questioningly at her, ‘Charlie’s father.’

      Heather’s face registered her shock, and Winter smiled grimly to herself. Heather’s shock was nothing to that which she herself had experienced when Charlie had made his announcement at breakfast four days ago. The words had been delivered in the truculent-cum-defiant tone he seemed to adopt so often these days when he spoke to her.

      Perhaps she should have expected this sudden sharp change in him. After all, he was thirteen years old now, not a child really any longer, but it still hurt her that the closeness they had shared when he was a baby and then when he was young was something he now seemed to want to reject.

      It hadn’t been easy, bringing him up by herself after the divorce, but she had thought that he was happy with her; that she had more than compensated for his lack of a father, especially a father like James, who had shown more resentment and irritation to his baby son than love.

      ‘But I thought he was in Australia,’ Heather commented. ‘Charlie’s been the envy of every other child in his class since he spent that holiday over there with him the year before last.’

      Winter sighed.

      ‘Yes…well, it seems he’s decided to leave. I’ve no idea why, nor do I know why he should choose to come back here.’ She gave a tiny shrug. ‘He always was ambitious, and he’s been very successful. The computer software business he started in Australia seems to have done very well, and I can’t deny that financially he’s certainly been very generous.’ She gave another tiny, unhappy shrug. ‘According to Charlie, he’s now decided to uproot himself completely from Sydney and to come back over here.’

      ‘Permanently?’ Heather asked her.

      Win shrugged again.

      ‘I’ve really no idea,’ she admitted. ‘He and I… we don’t keep in touch on any personal level. After all, there’s no reason why we should.’

      ‘Apart from Charlie,’ Heather pointed out. ‘He worships his dad, doesn’t he?’

      Win winced inwardly at her friend’s comment. Heather had never met James. Win had only started attending the mother and toddler group after the divorce, on the advice of her doctor, who was concerned that she was becoming too introverted, too isolated in her fiercely protective love of her little boy.

      ‘He seems to,’ she agreed, and then, perhaps because the bombshell of news that Charlie had dropped on her was still upsetting her so much, breaking through the normal constraints and self-control, she burst out angrily. ‘Although I’ve no idea why. After all, for the first six years of his life, James totally ignored the fact that Charlie existed.’

      Heather gave her a sympathetic look. Although Winter was not the kind of woman to open her heart casually or easily, they had known one another for too long for Heather not to be aware of the circumstances surrounding Winter’s divorce, and slowly, over the long painful months when Winter had first been on her own, she had gradually disclosed to Heather the bare facts of her marriage and its subsequent breakdown.

      It must, Heather had thought then and still thought now, be one of the most traumatic things a woman could ever have to deal with; to discover that your husband was being unfaithful to you was bad enough, but to discover it at a time when you were still recovering from a difficult birth, when you were exhausted from constantly nursing and worrying about a very frail and sickly baby, and when on top of that you were barely twenty years old and your parents had been totally opposed to your marrying so young in the first place, must have been very hard indeed.

      Not that Winter had been sympathy-seeking or looking for other people’s pity. She wasn’t that sort. Fiercely independent, and in some ways almost too determined to stand on her own two feet without asking others for anything, she had given her confidences as painfully and reluctantly as a miser giving away his gold.

      Winter