CHAPTER ONE

      UNTIL four that afternoon, it was a day like any other.

      At four o’clock Troy Donovan strode past the receptionist’s desk, giving Vera a distracted smile and quite oblivious to the fact that the eyes of every woman in the room had swiveled to follow his progress.

      Vera smiled back. “Your mail’s on your desk,” she said. Vera was very happily married to a civil servant who adored her, but she had long ago decided that the woman who could ignore the cleft in Dr Troy Donovan’s chin, not to mention the breadth of his shoulders and his sexy gray eyes, might as well be in her coffin. How his wife could have left him was more than Vera could imagine.

      “Thanks, Vera.” Troy marched down the corridorenjoying the stretch in his long legs after the hours he’d spent in the operating room, rubbing at the back of his neck under the collar of his open-necked shirt. He was supposed to be at a meeting at four-thirty. He’d have time to glance at his mail and make a few phone calls first. He pushed open the door of his office and shuffled through the neat pile of envelopes on his desk.

      The letterhead on a white vellum envelope leaped out at him. The institute whose name was printed in ornate script on the envelope was located in Arizona, and was the most prestigious center in the continent for pediatric plastic surgery—Troy’s speciality. But why would they be writing to him? Slowly he sat down at his desk and reached for his letter-opener.

      Ten minutes later Troy was still staring at the thick sheet of vellum. He was being offered a job. A plum job. A prize job. The very pick of the crop. A job that any craniofacial surgeon in the world would yearn after. Teaching, surgery, opportunities for research—it was all there, and at a salary that made him blink.

      A new start. A new country, a new hospital, a whole group of new people. None of whom would know about Lucy or Michael.

      He could sell the house where he and Lucy had lived during the four brief years of their marriage. Where he had stayed by himself for the twelve months since she had gone. Sell it. Be rid of it and all its memories. Start afresh.

      He buried his head in his hands, feeling the longfamiliar pain rip at his guts. Twelve months since she had left him, and not for one day of those months had he been without her presence. It walked down the hospital corridors beside him. Perched on the stool by the west window in the kitchen, the evening sun burnishing the mahogany curls. It lay alongside him in the big bed where they had taken such pleasure in each other.

      Why move to another country? He’d only take her with him.

      Jarring as an electric shock, the telephone shrilled in his ear. Automatically he picked up the receiver. “Donovan speaking.”

      Vera said, “There are two people