CHAPTER ONE

      THE little ferry edged towards the dock and the deckhand expertly threw the rope round the bollard and tightened it. The gangway slapped down between the land and the boat and everyone began to disembark. Terry Younger stopped for a second and looked around the little bay with the seagulls mewing above the brightly painted cottages across the road and their backdrop of wooded hills.

      She took a deep breath of the tangy fresh air and it hit her throat like champagne, invigorating and bracing. The cool wind whipped her short fair hair across her eyes and she brushed it away impatiently, and stepped ashore. Then, hoisting her rucksack more securely on her back, she tugged her case behind her over the rough terrain, a frisson of excitement mixed with apprehension shivering through her for a second. She stopped and looked across the quayside: steep hills rose quickly behind the little village of shops and cottages fringing the bay and beyond them the vague purple outline of mountains. The Isle of Scuola on the west coast of Scotland couldn’t be more different to the leafy suburbs of London that she’d left behind—this was it, then, a fresh start, a future that was hers to make of what she would, and find a measure of the peace she craved after the turmoil of a terrible year.

      Dumping her baggage by the wall of the dock, Terry looked around at the small group of people waiting to meet the passengers from the ferry. She’d been informed that her new colleague, Dr Brodie, senior partner in the Scuola medical practice, would be picking her up—according to the woman in the medical agency, he was a large, elderly man with white hair. There didn’t seem to be anyone of that description here yet—he must be running late, but, no matter, she would sit on her case until he arrived.

      After five minutes the ferry had turned round and begun to chug back to the mainland and there was no one left by the quayside except a man in biking leathers sitting astride a motorbike and talking on a mobile. Terry stood up impatiently—she liked to be punctual herself and the later Dr Brodie was the more nervous she was becoming about her new job.

      Another ten minutes went by and the man who’d been on the bike was now pacing irritably up and down the quay and looking at his watch. His leathers gave him a tough streetwise appearance and emphasised his tall muscular figure as he strode impatiently in front of Terry. For a second she was cruelly reminded of Max—damn his memory. Wasn’t there a hint in the appearance of this man on the quayside of the bad-boy image Max had liked to project? She shut her eyes as if trying to block out a picture of Max swaggering towards her—sexy, arrogant, sure of her love and supremely selfish. She shuddered—she wanted nothing more to do with that sort of man. She snapped open her eyes again and set her mouth grimly. She hadn’t come to Scuola to remember him or anything that had happened to her because of him…she had to push all that to the back of her mind.

      The biker stopped for a moment in front of her to pull off his helmet, revealing ruffled dark hair, and gazed dourly back at the mainland. Terry flicked a closer look at him—he was quite a striking man, and someone with rather a short fuse, she guessed, full of pent-up energy. As he turned to resume his frustrated pacing, a pen dropped out of his pocket and Terry bent down to pick it up.

      ‘We both seem to have been left in the lurch,’ she said, handing it to him.

      He turned, looking at her with startling blue eyes, as blue as sapphires, Terry thought suddenly—and of course she realised that he was nothing like Max at all. Max’s eyes, although sexy, had often been calculating, as if assessing just what he could gain from you. This man’s face had an engaging, open look. His eyes swept over her, taking in her petite figure and resting for an intense moment on her face. The hairs on the back of her neck prickled with a sudden flash of self-consciousness under his scrutiny.

      ‘Ah, thank you,’ he said, taking the pen from her, then he added brusquely, ‘I think the person I’m meeting must be on the next ferry—if he isn’t on this one I’ll have to go. Damn nuisance but I can’t wait.’ He had an attractive voice, fairly deep and with a definite Scottish lilt. He leant against a stone wall that jutted out onto