CHAPTER ONE

      THE trilling of the phone ripped into Laura’s unconsciousness. Her hand fumbled about, knocking over the bedside lamp, two paperbacks, a china hedgehog and a mug with its dregs of hot chocolate before connecting with the receiver.

      “Lo?’ she mumbled, drowsily trying to right everything and getting a chocolatey hand for her pains.

      ‘Laura?’

      She sat bolt-upright in bed, suddenly startled and alert. ‘Yes, Max?’ she squeaked.

      It was an unmistakable, honey-on-steel version of her name. L-a-u-r-a. Shivers went down her back. Her hand pressed against her chest, as if that would stop the acrobatics of her heart. Max. The years rolled back...

      ‘I’m coming to see you.’

      She blinked. It was pitch-dark in her small bedsit. She pushed back the flopping mass of unruly black hair which could have been obscuring her view—but it was still dark. When she checked the luminous dial of her clock, her huge, summer-sky-coloured eyes rounded in complete amazement.

      ‘At four in the morning? Oh, for heaven’s sake!’

      She slammed the phone down and hauled the duvet over her head. She had to get up in an hour! Angrily she listened to the muted, persistent ringing, wishing that she’d yanked the whole thing from its socket.

      And then as she lay there, hating Max, wishing he’d give up, she finally put two and two together. There could be only one reason Max wanted to see her: the secret she and her older sister Fay had kept to themselves for the past five years.

      Laura sat up again in horror. Perhaps he knew the truth now. What would he do? Tell Daniel, Fay’s husband? Then what?

      She shuddered, suddenly icy cold. Flinging back the duvet, she launched herself in panic at the phone. Both of them landed on the floor, and her African Grey parrot woke up and started screeching in alarm.

      ‘Shut up, Fred...! Oh, this wretched thing...!’ she wailed in frustration, trying to untangle the cord from her ankle.

      She could hear Max shouting somewhere in the depths of the receiver and felt vindictively sorry that the crash hadn’t burst his eardrums.

      ‘Yes? What?’ she demanded, cross and out of breath.

      ‘What the hell’s going on? Who’s there with you?’ Max yelled, sounding agitated. Fred screamed on relentlessly.

      ‘It’s all right, darling!’ she crooned, anxious for her beloved, neurotic pet’s state of mind. ‘Coo-coo-coo—’

      ‘What?’

      ‘I was speaking to my parrot!’ she snapped, feeling hysterical.

      Fred’s screeching was drilling through her head. She fumbled for the light switch on the fallen lamp and switched it on.

      ‘A parrot.’

      Stung by Max’s slicing tone, she clenched her teeth and tried to ignore the implication that he was dealing with a fool. Max could sneer for England.

      ‘Hang on!’ she cried, wincing as Fred’s screeches scythed through her. ‘I’ve got to calm him down. He’s emotionally disturbed.’

      ‘For pity’s sake—!’

      Cutting him off in mid-curse, she scrambled unsteadily to her feet, thinking that now she was emotionally disturbed too. Dammit, why had Max crawled out of the woodwork?

      Gently she removed the cover on Fred’s night cage, murmuring to him a few soothing words. How nice, she thought wistfully, if someone could do that for her.

      The mollified Fred tucked his denuded head under his wing and she stroked him fondly. She’d rescued him from an animal shelter where she worked on weekends, smitten by the ugly, bald, mangy looking bird...and wanting something to love.

      Her heart contracted. With her dark, Celtic brows zapped together in a fierce scowl, she stared miserably at the phone, unwilling to make contact with Max. She’d got over him. But not the consequences of their affair.

      Max had got her pregnant five years ago, when she had been eighteen and he had been twenty-four. Then he’d moved back to a fiancée he’d had stashed away in Surrey. Then, in a matter of weeks, on to Laura’s sister. Then,