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      CHAPTER ONE

      HEART thudding more noisily than the small plane’s faltering engine, Rafe Peveril dragged his gaze away from the rain-lashed windows, no longer able to see the darkening grasslands of Mariposa beneath them. A few seconds ago, just after the engine had first spluttered, he’d noticed a hut down there.

      If they made it out of this alive, that hut might be their only hope of surviving the night.

      Another violent gust of wind shook the plane. The engine coughed a couple of times, then failed. In the eerie silence the pilot muttered a jumble of prayers and curses in his native Spanish as he fought to keep the plane steady.

      If they were lucky—damned lucky—they might land more or less intact …

      When the engines sputtered back into life the woman beside Rafe looked up, white face dominated by great green eyes, black-lashed and tip-tilted and filled with fear.

      Thank God she wasn’t screaming. He reached for her hand, gave it a quick hard squeeze, then released it to push her head down.

      “Brace position,” he shouted, his voice far too loud in the sudden silence as the engines stopped again. The woman huddled low and Rafe set his teeth and steeled himself for the crash.

      A shuddering jolt, a whirlwind of noise …

      And Rafe woke.

      Jerking upright, he let out a sharp breath, grey eyes sweeping a familiar room. The adrenalin surging through him mutated into relief. Instead of regaining consciousness in a South American hospital bed he was at home in his own room in New Zealand.

      What the hell …?

      It had to be at least a couple of years since he’d relived the crash. He searched for a trigger that could have summoned the dream but his memory—usually sharply accurate—failed him.

      Again.

      Six years should have accustomed him to the blank space in his head after the crash, yet although he’d given up on futile attempts to remember, he still resented those forty-eight vanished hours.

      The bedside clock informed him that sunrise was too close to try for any more sleep—not that he’d manage it now. He needed space and fresh air.

      Outside on the terrace he inhaled deeply, relishing the mingled scent of salt and flowers and newly mown grass, and the quiet hush of the waves. His heart rate slowed and the memories receded into the past where they belonged. Light from a fading moon surrounded the house with mysterious shadows, enhanced by the bright disc of Venus hanging above a bar of pure gold along the horizon where the sea met the sky.

      The Mariposan pilot had died on impact, but miraculously both he and the wife of his estancia manager had survived with minor injures—the blow to the head for him, and apparently nothing more serious than a few bruises for her.

      With some difficulty he conjured a picture of the woman—a drab nonentity, hardly more than a girl. Although he’d spent the night before the crash at the estancia, she’d kept very much in the background while he and her husband talked business. All he could recall were those amazingly green eyes in her otherwise forgettable face. Apart from them, she had been a plain woman.

      With a plain name—Mary Brown.

      He couldn’t recall seeing her smile—not that that was surprising. A week or so before he’d arrived at the estancia she’d received news of her mother’s sudden stroke and resultant paralysis. As soon as Rafe heard about it he’d offered to take her back with him to Mariposa’s capital and organise a flight to New Zealand.

      Rafe frowned. What the hell was her husband’s name?

      He recalled it with an odd sense of relief. David Brown—another plain name, and the reason for Rafe’s trip to Mariposa. He’d broken his flight home from London to see for himself if he agreed with the Mariposan agent’s warnings that David Brown was not a good fit for the situation.

      Certainly Brown’s response to his offer to escort his wife back to New Zealand had been surprising.

      “That won’t be necessary,” David Brown had told him brusquely. “She’s been ill—she doesn’t need the extra stress of looking after a cripple.”

      However, by the next morning the man had changed his mind, presumably at his wife’s insistence, and that evening she’d accompanied Rafe on the first stage of the trip.

      An hour after take-off