CONTENTS

      PROLOGUE

      CHAPTER ONE

      CHAPTER TWO

      CHAPTER THREE

      CHAPTER FOUR

      CHAPTER FIVE

      CHAPTER SIX

      CHAPTER SEVEN

      CHAPTER EIGHT

      CHAPTER NINE

      CHAPTER TEN

      PROLOGUE

      FOR over twenty years Owen Carter had tried to forget he had a daughter. Not that he had seen her, not for a second. Not until this day of sorrows; of leaden skies and driving rain. He had journeyed over a thousand miles to sit in the back pew of a lovely old stone church never free of the unshakeable bond that tied him to Cassandra. Her tragic death at the age of forty-three had never been foreseen, now tormented by his memories, he attended her funeral, staring longingly into a face so like Cassandra’s the pull to go to the young woman was enormous. He almost sprang up, but he didn’t dare. Not now.

      His daughter was his beautiful Cassandra all over again. The same silky black cloud of hair, the same extraordinary eyes, iris-blue, violet, purple. In Cassandra it had depended on the clothes she wore and the intensity of her moods. On this tragic day, tears starting down her cheeks as she followed her mother’s flower-decked casket, his daughter’s eyes were almost navy, the very white skin, which contrasted so strikingly with her hair, as pale as milk. They had never met but he would have known her anywhere.

      It was Cassandra, come back to him.

      His eyes so riveted to his daughter, must somehow have broken through her miasma of grief. She turned her head abruptly as if she felt his look, fully focusing on him. It was a deep, direct look so much like Cassandra’s a slight keening broke from him and his broad shoulders crumpled like someone had delivered a king hit to his solar plexus. His daughter. My God! The great love, so deeply rooted in his heart it never saw the sun, suddenly sprang into frantic bloom. Nothing would stop it.

      Surely the gods had punished him enough? He had cloistered both of them in his heart, Cassandra and Eden, thinking in some tortured way he’d been protecting the child. Now that was all over as the dynamic force that was in him rose to the challenge. She’s mine, he thought triumphantly. My own flesh and blood. My daughter. The daughter denied me.

      Hear me, Cassandra, he cried silently, channelling his thought to the lily draped casket.

      This is my daughter. I’ve come to take her home.

      CHAPTER ONE

      LANG and Owen left the meeting together.

      “That went well,” Lang remarked with satisfaction, moving through the lunchtime crowd with such smooth confidence people found themselves quite happy to go around him.

      “If it did it was thanks to you,” Owen admitted with open affection. “I thought I was a tough negotiator but you’ve overtaken me. Nowadays you’re the key player.”

      “But isn’t that the way you want it?” Lang glanced sideways at his partner’s face. Although Owen looked as fit as ever, indeed he looked what he was, a handsome highly successful man in his prime, the old punch was gone. For the past six months it seemed Owen was no longer driven by his vast business interests. Somehow he had removed himself from his life in the fast track, his focus clearly elsewhere.

      It was odd. Perturbing. As were the monthly trips to the state capital Brisbane, the reasons for which Owen had never divulged. Not that he had to. Owen Carter answered to no one. Not him, his former protégé, now his partner, not his wife, Delma. Last month when he had taken over Owen’s role at a business meeting in Singapore he’d found himself unable to contact Owen for a vital forty-eight hours. Their normal practice was to keep one another abreast of all that was happening but on that occasion Owen had simply gone A.W.O.L. But to where?

      Lang had seen it as a big shift in the balance of their relationship and it upset him. Over ten years ago, straight from university with an honours degree in commerce and the university gold medal, he had applied for a job with Carter Enterprises, which he quickly secured over a dozen older, highly qualified applicants. He loved the thrill of big business and the high-flying ventures as much as Owen did. He knew he could handle anything Owen threw at him. Which Owen did, the work amounting to quite an overload. But Owen had liked him. Trusted him. They understood one another. Nowadays he had become honorary “family.” Owen was allowing Lang to operate at the very top level virtually without input from himself.

      There had to be a story. They’d all noticed the big change in Owen but not even Delma had come close to asking what it was all about. If Owen hadn’t looked so marvellously fit they might have suspected illness. The only other possible reason for all these mysterious trips away was a love affair, which was quite absurd. In the twelve years Owen had been married to Delma, a very attractive woman some ten years his junior, Owen had never looked sideways at another woman though there were plenty that looked longingly at him. The fact was, and Delma admitted it, she had masterminded a strategy to land Owen. Why not? He was handsome, rich, available. Who was he going to leave all his money to? He needed a wife and heir and Delma had convinced him that she would be perfect.

      The marriage had turned out to be durable but not, in Lang’s perceptive eyes, what one could call happy. Strictly speaking, it hadn’t been a love match. A fact never outwardly acknowledged by either of them but always running on a subterranean current. With a less than ardent husband always preoccupied with business Delma had taken to mild flirtations. Never too overt, Owen for all his calm detachment wasn’t the man to cuckold. But recently Owen had become a man of mystery. To track him would have been the greatest insult but Lang found himself frequently pondering exactly what was going on in Owen’s life. Owen was a married man with a wife and young son. He was highly regarded in big business and the tropical north where he lived. Why would a man like that want to complicate his life with a secret affair? Providing, of course, the mystery in Owen’s life was a woman.

      Whatever Owen’s story, his early life before coming north, he never spoke of it. Otherwise he spoke of anything and everything with