CONTENTS

      CHAPTER ONE

      CHAPTER TWO

      CHAPTER THREE

      CHAPTER FOUR

      CHAPTER FIVE

      CHAPTER SIX

      CHAPTER SEVEN

      CHAPTER EIGHT

      CHAPTER NINE

      EPILOGUE

      CHAPTER ONE

      IT WAS funny about love, he thought. It never died. Or his particular kind of love didn’t: his was unconditional, irreversible. He’d had it once. He’d never found it again. Not since Christine. Always, always, Christine!

      If he lived to be one hundred he doubted if he could ever forget his childhood sweetheart, the love of his life, the impossibly beautiful Christine Reardon. Such was their bond right through childhood and their teens—his wretched and—let’s face it—unrequited love for her was never going to leave him. He was still spellbound by the very sight of her, though she had used him shamefully. For a man with guts and pride aplenty, that made him feel really bad.

      He had learned to love early. Both he and Christine were Outback born and reared. Both were the children of pastoral dynasties—bush aristocracy, as it were. That in itself had forged a powerful connective link. He was Mitchell Claydon, heir to Marjimba Station, she was the granddaughter of the so recently late, unlamented Ruth McQueen, whose wake he and half the Outback were at present attending.

      The interment, under a blazingly hot sun, was mercifully over, but the wake, held at the McQueens’ historic homestead Wunnamurra, dragged on and on as it befell everyone to pay their respects to such a powerful pioneering family.

      For two hours now he had stood suffering blackly—he hoped it didn’t show—longing to cool off with a cold beer, not endless cups of tea or the whisky the boys in the library were having. An irreverent thought, maybe. Ruth’s funeral was a momentous day in their part of the world—vast Outback Queensland, an endless source of fascination to most of the country who led city lives. Ruth, ex-matriarch of the McQueen dynasty, was not your normal much mourned grandmother. Ruth in her lifetime had had a patent on seriously ruthless behaviour, but she’d had the aura and financial muscle to somehow pull it off.

      He’d never liked her. In fact he’d come close to loathing her, so how could he be expected to mourn her passing? Wasn’t the reason Christine had run away from him to escape her grandmother’s clutches? Or so Chrissy had claimed. One way or the other, Christine’s flight had been swift and terrible for a girl who up to that time had declared her endless love for him. The fervour with which she’d said it still rang in his heart like a bell.

      “How I love you, Mitch!” That tone should have been kept for worship. Her face had been luminous as a pearl above him, her thick braid undone, silken hair glistening even in the scented darkness of their special place, a pink lily pond few other people came to or even knew. Her beautiful hands had always smelled of boronia, caressing his naked chest, spiralling downwards, in delicate stroking circles that had made his blood run molten, his body shaking with the fine tremors of blind passion.

      An inferno of desire! He would have done anything for her. She had power, great power, in the age-old manner of beautiful seductive women. It was this that had mesmerized him. Kept him captive so he never saw all the other girls who tried to win his attention.

      Christine. Always Christine.

      Her ardent declarations had turned out to be utter lies. She had betrayed him and played him, scorning the love she’d proclaimed so sublime. The grief and the anger Mitch felt had gone so deep they still burned brightly. So why, then, couldn’t he forget her? Wash his hands of her? Get on with his life?

      It hadn’t worked out like that at all. God knows he’d tried. And now he stood in Wunnamurra’s very grand drawing room watching the assembled family saying goodbye to the last of the mourners. There was much solicitous air-kissing, diplomatic condolences, though the departed Ruth had been disliked with a passion. Not that Ruth had minded while she was alive. In fact she’d actively encouraged such strong sentiments in those she considered her inferiors, and they included the entire Outback at one time.

      Vale, Ruth! Arrogance and snobbery personified.

      Kyall was an entirely different story. No one could tarnish Kyall McQueen’s image. Kyall had been his friend from earliest childhood, as was Kyall’s fiancée, Sarah Dempsey—Sarah Dempsey—head of Koomera Crossing’s Bush Hospital.

      Ranged beside Kyall and Sarah on the fare-welling line were Kyall’s mother and father, Enid and Max, a mightily dysfunctional couple if ever there was one, and beside them Kyall’s problematic young cousin, Suzanne, dragged home from boarding school. But the ultimate object of Mitch’s attention this long, terrible day was the stunning young woman standing protectively beside Suzanne like some exotic long-legged water-bird.

      Christine. His only love! Hell, weren’t they great days, when love had surged sweet and absolutely irresistible? So irresistible it sometimes seemed to him his emotional life hadn’t taken one single step forward. As for Chris? Her life had gone ahead in great leaps and bounds. It was a long hike from awkward adolescent, head ducking, shoulders slouching in an effort to hide her height, to fêted international model who regularly bagged the cover of well-known international magazines.

      The moment he’d laid eyes on her that morning she’d been walking with immense style down Wunnamurra’s grand divided staircase. That catwalk training had been devastatingly successful, he’d