CHAPTER ONE

      SOMETIMES the world could change in an instant. One moment everything was exactly the way you planned it to be, and the next it had become a place you barely recognised. This was how it was for Aimi Carteret that sultry summer evening, and it was the second time it had happened in her sometimes turbulent life.

      Just moments before the second cataclysmic event that was to cause such havoc occurred, she was sitting at the large dining table of Michael and Simone Berkeley, enjoying the friendly banter. Beside her sat their son Nick, a man of genuine warmth and kindness. He was a renowned surgeon, like his father, and his father before him. Opposite were Nick’s sister Paula and her husband, James Carmichael.

      Six months ago Aimi had been employed by Nick to organize his hectic life. Besides operating, he had lecture tours, guest appearances on all forms of media, and had even begun to compile a family history. She worked from the study in his home, but did not live in. That was something she never did. Her work and her private life never overlapped.

      Not that she had much of a private life, but that was by choice. Her life had changed dramatically nine years ago, and the mad social whirl she had enjoyed to the fullest had been left behind and never regretted. Guilt had sobered the outrageous teenager, and she had vowed to turn herself into someone she could be proud of.

      She had thrown herself headlong into studying history at university, but making a career out of it had been hard. So she had learned all the skills she needed to become a personal assistant, and had been temping for a high class agency ever since. Coming to work for Nick had allowed her to use her grounding in history, and help him with his research. She had, after much hard work, found a niche for herself where she was able to feel a degree of peace.

      If her old friends could see her now, they would barely recognise her, Aimi thought to herself. She didn’t wear make-up, when once she had used it to enhance her large green eyes, always kept her shoulder-length blonde hair smoothed into a pleat at her nape, and preferred smart suits and casuals to modern fashions.

      When she had been at university, she had even worn glasses. Plain glass, of course. They had been a ploy used to keep people at a distance. She had been at university to work, not play. Her playing days had ended with a tragedy she would never forget. All she had wanted to do was blend into the background and be left alone.

      It seemed strange now to remember how outrageously she had once flirted with the opposite sex. Having inherited her looks from her actress mother, Marsha Delmont, Aimi had had no trouble attracting men, and had enjoyed their company, but she had never taken them seriously and never had any deep relationships with any of them. Her life had been about having fun, but after Austria and the terrible events that had happened there, that had all ended. She had spent the years since proving she could be a person of value.

      Her life was the way she wanted it. She was here in her official capacity as Nick’s assistant, but his parents had welcomed her into their home in the country as a friend. The plan was for her to look through the books and papers in the study for relevant material for Nick’s book, but all Nick’s family would be coming to a barbecue tomorrow, for their annual bank holiday weekend get-together, and he had insisted that she join in the festivities.

      Sitting at the table, listening to the conversation, sometimes taking part, she was glad she had agreed to come. This was how normal people behaved with each other, and it was a poignant reminder for Aimi, who had once thought endless shopping, wild, glamorous parties where drink flowed like water and everything was loud laughter and music was the only way to live. That Aimi would have considered this deadly dull, but the Aimi of today bitterly regretted that she hadn’t wised up sooner. Such was the benefit of hindsight. It showed you what might have been, and damned you