Contents

      CHAPTER ONE

      CHAPTER TWO

      CHAPTER THREE

      CHAPTER FOUR

      CHAPTER FIVE

      CHAPTER SIX

      CHAPTER SEVEN

      CHAPTER EIGHT

      CHAPTER NINE

      CHAPTER TEN

      CHAPTER ONE

      ‘FOR crying out loud, Luke,’ Jack Barnard said sotto-voce as he eyed the retreating, ramrod-straight back of one of the most militant women he’d ever met, ‘why the hell do you put up with that…that gorgon? Getting anywhere near you is like trying to break into Fort Knox!’

      Luke Kirwan grinned and picked up the list of messages his secretary had just presented him with before departing indoors. ‘Miss Hillier?’ he drawled. ‘Believe me, Jack, she’s invaluable for keeping…’ he paused ‘…students of the female persuasion at bay.’

      Jack Barnard stopped looking irritable behind his spectacles and laughed aloud. ‘Don’t tell me they still make a nuisance of themselves? It’s not a problem I would have a problem with, by the way. Herds of sweet young things panting to be in one’s bed. Mind you—’ he looked reflective ‘—with the delectable Leonie Murdoch in one’s life, perhaps not. Is that what this is all about?’ He gestured comprehensively to include the house behind them and the garden around them.

      Luke Kirwan rubbed his blue-shadowed jaw and squinted up at the home he had only recently moved into. It was a two-storeyed, attractive, hacienda-style home perched on Manly Hill, a bay-side suburb of Brisbane. From the terrace, where he sat enjoying a beer with his long-time friend Jack Barnard, who was also his solicitor, they had sweeping views out over Moreton Bay towards North Stradbroke Island. ‘Maybe,’ he said pensively and shrugged. ‘Maybe not. I was looking for an investment when it came on the market, then I thought it might be nice to live here.’

      Jack Barnard regarded his friend quizzically. It was hard to imagine a more unlikely professor of physics—and one of the youngest to gain his chair at the university he taught at. Because Luke Kirwan was about as far removed in looks from the proverbial absent-minded professor as one could get. Tall, lean and dark with a hint of rapier-like strength, he also possessed a pair of brooding dark eyes that made him look arrogant even when he wasn’t—although there was no doubt he could be arrogant.

      Add to this a boundless energy, a fine intellect and the capacity to look through people who bored him with complete indifference—and you had the kind of man women found electrifying, Jack Barnard mused ruefully. He himself, he went on to think also ruefully, was much more the archetypal professor. He was short-sighted and supremely absent-minded.

      But it was on his mind as he surveyed Luke Kirwan that a worm of discontent might be niggling away at his friend. One would have thought that, by now, Luke and Leonie Murdoch might have tied the knot—they were a spectacular couple and had been together for a few years. In fact he, Jack, had been quite sure it was about to happen when he’d first heard about the new house. Now, though, he wasn’t at all sure of it.

      ‘May I point out that you spend very little time at home, Luke, so this could all be quite wasted on you?’ he said, and added delicately, ‘Have you and Leonie fallen out in any way?’

      Luke Kirwan gazed expressionlessly out over island-studded Moreton Bay as it danced and glittered beneath a clear blue sky. Then he transferred that enigmatic dark gaze to his friend and said with a quizzical little smile playing on his lips, ‘Jack, what will be, will be.’

      ‘In other words, mind my own business?’ Jack hazarded wryly.

      ‘In one word, exactly.’

      A week later, Aurora Templeton set her teeth and commanded herself to stop shaking.

      True, she was breaking into someone’s house at the dead of night, but only to remove something that rightfully belonged to her. So it wasn’t stealing. It wasn’t really breaking and entering because she had no intention of breaking anything, as for entering—yes, well, that could be a moot point, she conceded as she shaded the torch with her gloved fingers. But if you couldn’t retrieve your property by any other means, what else were you supposed to do?

      She’d also thought this out thoroughly over the past week, she reminded herself, and now was no time to get the wobblies.

      But the fact was, it was more nerve-racking than she’d anticipated. Despite having lived, not that long ago and for a long time, in this solid, two-storeyed, hacienda-style house set in its lovely garden—which was how she came to have a key and the knowledge that an easement ran behind the house leading to another street—it was impossible not to feel intimidated by the consequences of being caught in the act of what some might consider robbery.

      It was also a heavily overcast night, humid and very still but poised eerily, one couldn’t help feeling, for a good storm.

      All the more reason to get it over and done with, she told herself briskly, and inserted the key into the deadlock of the laundry door. It opened smoothly and noiselessly. Not that there was anyone home, she’d made sure of that.

      The new owner was interstate and she knew that no new burglar alarms, locks or vicious dogs had been installed. Indeed, without a key to the deadlocks, the house was virtually impregnable—all the windows had decorative but effective wrought-iron Spanish grills to protect them, all the doors were thick, solid, hardwood timber.

      She slipped silently through the laundry and kitchen into the hall without the aid of her torch after allowing her eyes to adjust to the darkness, and had to smile faintly at how her teenage years came back to her. The laundry door had been her favourite means of entry when arriving home after her curfew had expired.

      But she put the torch on, although veiled again by her fingers, for one swift glance around the hall in case the new owner had laid his furniture out differently, to see that there was still the same clear path to the bottom of the stairs. Then she froze and flicked it off at a slight sound. Just a tiny knock really, but it was difficult to establish its source.

      And she waited motionless for a few minutes, in her black jeans and polo-neck