CHAPTER ONE

      ‘YOUR Aunt Lucy has left you everything.’

      Jessica stared at the solicitor across his leather-topped desk. ‘Everything?’ she repeated blankly, her normally sharp brain a little fuzzy with shock.

      She was still getting over the news of Aunt Lucy’s death. Of inoperable cancer, three weeks earlier.

      When she’d protested over not being told at the time, the solicitor informed her this was because no one had known of her existence till her aunt’s will had been found a couple of days ago.

      Jessica had not known of her Aunt Lucy’s existence, either, till the woman herself had shown up at the Sydney Grand a couple of months back and asked to speak to the hotel’s public relations manager, who was none other than Jessica herself.

      It had been an awkward meeting. Jessica had been stunned when the woman abruptly announced she was her mother’s older sister. Jessica’s mother had always claimed she was a foundling, with no known relatives.

      Aunt Lucy had seemed a little stunned herself by the sight of her niece. She’d stared and stared at her, as though she’d been confronted by a ghost. When Jessica was called away to a problem with one of the guests, she’d left the tongue-tied woman in her office with the promise to return shortly. There were so many questions Jessica had wanted to ask. My God, her head had been whirling with them.

      But when she’d returned fifteen minutes later, her Aunt Lucy had disappeared.

      The memory of the woman’s distressed face had tormented Jessica ever since. As had the many questions her aunt’s brief and mysterious visit had caused. Why had her mother lied to her? Why hadn’t her aunt waited for her to come back? And why had she stared at her so strangely, as though her physical appearance offended her?

      Jessica had tried tracing her aunt, but without success. She’d almost got to the stage where she was prepared to hire a private investigator. Only this last week, she’d started searching for one in the yellow pages.

      As sad as her Aunt Lucy’s death was, at least now she might find some answers to her many questions. To which was added the puzzle of why her aunt had made her—a niece she’d only met once—her one and only heir!

      ‘I can see you’re startled by this legacy, Miss Rawlins,’ the solicitor said. ‘But Mrs. Hardcourt’s will is quite clear.’

      ‘ Mrs. Hardcourt?’ Jessica immediately picked up on the title. ‘My aunt was married, then?’

      No wonder she hadn’t been able to trace her. She’d tried Woods, which had been her mother’s maiden name.

      ‘She was a widow. For some considerable years, I gather. She had no children of her own. Your mother was her only sibling. Their parents passed away many years back.’

      Jessica’s heart sank. There went her hope of grandparents, or other aunts and uncles, or even cousins. So she still had no living family who wanted anything to do with her. Her own father—plus his parents and relatives—had abandoned all contact after her mother divorced him.

      Not that Jessica had ever really known them. She’d only been three at the time of her parents’ divorce, and it had been a bitter parting, one her mother refused to speak of afterwards.

      When Jessica had notified her father by telephone of her mother’s death eight years ago—he still lived in Sydney—he hadn’t even had the decency to attend the funeral.

      Jessica’s heart turned over as she thought of that wretched day. It had been raining, with no one at the graveside except herself, the priest and the undertakers. Her mother had had no close friends, having been an agoraphobic and an alcoholic for as long as Jessica could remember. She’d died, of liver and kidney failure, at the age of thirty-eight.

      Jessica wondered anew what had been behind her mother’s self-loathing and misery. She’d thought it was her failed marriage. Now she wasn’t so sure.

      So many questions about her mother’s