www.millsandboon.co.uk

      Prologue

      The room was badly lit and uninviting. It smelled of stale disinfectant and there was a thin film of dust over the tops of the metal filing cabinets. The frosted-glass window overlooked the hospital car park, cars and their drivers dim, obscure shapes moving ceaselessly to and fro.

      The girl seated in the chair watched them dully, while the older woman across the desk from her exchanged looks over her head with the man standing awkwardly in the doorway.

      The room was small. It had originally been a storeroom. Beyond the open door they could hear the normal everyday sounds of the hospital, the muted voices of the nurses, the whir of trolley and bed wheels, the high-pitched cries of the newborn and the murmurs of their mothers….

      The girl spoke, her voice low and filled with exhaustion, betraying, like her drawn white face and the fragility of her too thin body, the strain she had been under.

      ‘And you’re sure that no one will ever know…that no one—’ She paused, catching her trembling bottom lip between her teeth. She was young, acknowledged the woman, barely nineteen, and in many ways she looked younger—in others she looked immeasurably older.

      ‘—that no one will ever be able to find out.’

      ‘No one,’ the woman assured her quietly.

      A nurse carrying a baby walked past the half-open door. The girl winced as she watched her.

      ‘Where…where do I have to sign?’ she asked, her voice cracking slightly.

      The woman showed her, instructing as she was bound to do, ‘You are quite sure that you know what this involves, aren’t you? That once this document is signed there can be no going back…that it won’t be possible for you to change your mind….’ She looked towards the man standing by the door, who nodded his head slightly.

      ‘Yes. Yes, I do know that,’ the girl confirmed. Her words rustled as dryly as the dying autumn leaves outside.

      Her hand was shaking as she leaned over the table and started to sign her name.

      The older woman felt for her, but there was nothing she could do.

      ‘It will be for the best,’ she told the girl gently, when she had finished her signature and lifted her head to stare blindly towards the window.

      ‘You will see. You will be able to make a new life for yourself, start afresh…. Forget…’

      ‘Forget?’ Again the girl’s voice betrayed emotion. ‘I can never forget,’ she whispered passionately. ‘Never… Never. I don’t deserve to forget.’

      ‘It’s over now,’ the woman told her firmly.

      ‘Over?’

      The girl focused on her. ‘How can it ever be over? It can’t. For me it can never be over…never!’

      Chapter 1

      ‘Have you read my report on the approach we’ve had from the Japanese?’

      Bram Soames looked away from his office window, which fronted on to the private enclosed garden of a London square, and turned towards his son.

      Outwardly father and son were very similar in appearance, both tall and broad-shouldered, with athletes’ tough, well-muscled physiques, thick brown-black hair, ice-green eyes and subtly aristocratic profiles inherited—so Bram’s paternal grandmother had always maintained—from a pre-Victorian liaison between his great-great-grandmother and the peer to whom her father owed his living.

      It had been, according to his grandmother, the classic tale of the innocent vicar’s daughter seduced by the notoriously rakish earl.

      Privately Bram was inclined to suspect the features could just as easily have been inherited from some poor relation, but because it was an intrinsic part of his nature to allow others their vulnerabilities and vanities, he had never publicly questioned his grandmother’s version of the story.

      It was also a family tradition that the eldest son always received one of his notorious progenitor’s names; in Bram’s case he had been triply gifted—or cursed—in being christened Brampton Vernon Piers.

      In Jay’s case, of course, things had been decidedly different, but then…

      Outsiders always imagined they must be brothers rather than father and son and typically Bram was tolerant of their assumption, while Jay was invariably irritated by it and often actively hostile towards the person voicing it.

      After all, with only fifteen years between them it was only natural that people should make that mistake.

      Now, as Jay waited for his response, Bram acknowledged that his son wasn’t going to like what he had to say.

      ‘I’m sorry, Jay,’ he said steadily, ‘but it just isn’t on. We’re a small specialist company and to go in for the kind of expansion this scheme involves—’ He paused. ‘We simply don’t have the resources to man that kind of project. I’m a technician and this business is run from that standpoint. This Japanese scheme would potentially involve us in handing over to lawyers and accountants.

      ‘Potentially it could take this business right to the forefront of modern computer technology,’ Jay broke in angrily. ‘Right now we’re a small British-based outfit in the third league. With this Japanese backing—’

      ‘We’re a market leader, Jay,’ his father stated with quiet firmness. ‘If we weren’t, the Japanese wouldn’t be approaching us.’

      ‘But we need to expand!’ Jay exploded. ‘To get into the American market. That’s where the future lies—the mass market. The