CHAPTER ONE

      WHEN THE INVITATION arrived Eva Hennessey was away in Prague, dancing the role of Odette in Swan Lake. On her return to Paris a week later, she found her mailbox crammed, mostly with an assortment of bills and dance magazines. She was riding the rickety old lift to her apartment on the fifth floor when the bright sunny Australian stamp caught her eye. Then she read the postmark. Emerald Bay.

      The sharp pang in her chest made her gasp. It wasn’t homesickness. Eva’s feelings about the beach town where she’d grown up were far more complicated. These days, she rarely allowed herself to unpack the mixed bag of emotions that accompanied memories from her youth.

      She always ended up thinking about Griffin Fletcher...and the other harrowing memory that would never leave her.

      She’d worked hard to put that life behind her. She’d had to. Long ago.

      Today, as the hum of Parisian traffic reached Eva from the street below, she let herself into the apartment that had been her home for the past ten years. Nanette, the concierge, had already turned on the heating and the apartment was welcoming and warm. Eva had loved this place from the day she’d first found it.

      Decorated simply in quiet creamy tones with occasional touches of blue, the main living area was dominated by a far wall of windows that looked out over tiled rooftops, chimneys and church spires to the top of the Eiffel Tower. At night, on the hour, the Tower glittered with beautiful lights. It was a view Eva never tired of.

      Stopping for a moment, she smiled to herself as she looked about the space she’d carefully assembled over the years—the beautiful cushion covers she’d