for him.
‘Bloody ingratitude,’ Glen had stormed. ‘I took him in off the streets, gave him the best education in New Zealand and then sent him overseas to university, made him what he is, treated him like a bloody crown prince—and he betrays me.’
Impossible to imagine Nick—tall, harshly good-looking, wearing his expensive clothes with casual elegance—living on the streets! Yet everyone knew the story. Still raw with guilt at the memory of her response to Nick’s unsparing kiss, Cat had asked, ‘If he was a street kid, how on earth did you meet him?’
Glen had shrugged. ‘Well, he wasn’t living on the street; he shacked up with some girl in a hovel.’ For a moment he’d looked uncomfortable. ‘He baled me up outside the agency one day and asked for a job. I said, “Why should I give you a job?” And he said, “Because you’re the best, and I plan to be better than you one day.” He was only fourteen, but I could tell he meant it. I liked that, so I sent him off to my old school.’
Cat, who’d had first-hand experience of the casual cruelty of adolescents at an expensive boarding school, had asked, ‘How did he deal with that?’
‘With style and arrogance,’ Glen had said indifferently. ‘Had everyone eating out of his hand within a week. I knew he would; I recognised that steely self-confidence straight away, and it took me only ten minutes to see that he was brilliant. He worked like a demon, graduating with the highest grades, an A bursary and a whole new set of social skills. Blazed through university like a rocket! Now he’s thrown the whole lot away to go on a wild-goose chase into the internet. It’s going to collapse, and he’ll go down with it.’
But he hadn’t. Nick had ignored the gossip, ignored Glen’s frustrated anger, and shown that he knew how to use determination and his ruthless intelligence to push his fledgling company to heights beyond anyone’s guessing. Within a few years he’d ridden the eagle to become a multimillionaire.
Now, no longer a player only in the South Pacific, he was expanding into communications technology. He was set, so one business writer had pronounced tritely but apparently truthfully, to conquer the world.
Glen, who’d respected power, had eventually welcomed him back into the fold, only to be killed a few months later in a car accident.
That was when Cat had discovered that he’d appointed Nick to oversee the trust he’d set up for her. Still numb from the double deaths—for her mother had died only a month before Glen—she’d been relieved when Nick had treated her with remote courtesy. Except, her inconvenient memory reminded her, for a few searing moments after the funeral, when what had begun as a comforting touch had been transformed into desperate passion.
That desperate kiss had sent her fleeing overseas, and the only communication she’d had with him since then had been via her solicitor.
Soft mouth tightening, Cat obeyed the familiar buzz of the crossing signal. Now it was time to face Nick Harding again, woefully unprepared as always. Clad in a silk suit three years out of date, she swallowed to ease her dry throat, but there was nothing she could do about the butterflies in her stomach; they threatened to mutate into a herd of dinosaurs as she turned into the splendid foyer of his headquarters.
Tensely, Cat gave her name to the receptionist.
After a discreet glance at the wedding ring on Cat’s hand, the woman said, ‘Mr Harding’s expecting you, Mrs Courtald. Take the lift to the fourth floor and his personal assistant will meet you.’
His personal assistant was altogether more intimidating; elegant in a severe midnight-blue suit, she waited by the lift door, her face revealing nothing but polite enquiry. ‘Mr Harding won’t be long,’ she said as she ushered Cat into an impressive ante-room. ‘Can I get you some coffee while you’re waiting?’
Cat’s stomach lurched. ‘No, thank you.’
Coffee grew on the hills of Romit, a large island to the north of Australia—delicious, fragrant coffee that drew its superb flavour from red earth basking beneath a tropical sun. Cat never drank it now without being propelled back to a land torn apart by a bloody civil war that had left thousands dead.
But Juana lived, and it was for Juana she’d come here. Another bubble of foreboding expanded slowly in her stomach.
‘Do sit down,’ the personal assistant urged. ‘Mr Harding won’t keep you waiting for long.’
Smoothing out her frown, Cat sat in a chair and picked up a magazine, glancing at it without registering a word. Desperation had driven her to this place; she’d been turned down by bank after bank, the loans managers shaking their heads with professional solemnity and refusing her with equally professional courtesy—and insulting speed.
A blur of motion lifted the hairs on the back of her neck. She looked up, her skin prickling.
Like a panther, all noiseless, graceful intimidation, Nick strolled into the subdued luxury of the office and surveyed her with flat, unblinking eyes burnished the tawny colour of old gold—eyes that flicked across her face, then down to the finger on which, driven by some obscure need for protection, she’d pushed her wedding ring. Unworn for the past year, it weighed her hand down.
Driven by a need to establish some sort of physical parity, Cat stood up. For a horrifying second she thought the floor lurched beneath her feet. He reached her just as she clutched the back of the chair and dragged a deep breath into her lungs.
His hand closed around her upper arm, lean fingers gripping hard. ‘Careful!’ he barked.
She froze.
Shock splintered in his eyes, but the flare of emotion lasted less than a heartbeat; almost immediately a smile, as aggressive as it was humourless, curled his beautiful, chiselled mouth.
Oh, God, she thought hopelessly. Memories of him were seared on her brain, carved into her heart. She’d never forgotten his voice—deep, textured, a voice that could turn instantly to ice. It had featured in her dreams, tormenting her through endless nights.
‘Hello, Cat,’ he said with chilling courtesy.
Although a little harsher in feature, even more brazenly handsome, he hadn’t changed much. Broad-shouldered, narrow-hipped and long-legged, radiating male power and authority, Nick Harding still dominated every room he walked into, taking up all the space and all the air, so that she breathed quickly and shallowly while her heartbeats thudded in her ears.
And he still looked at her with utter and complete contempt in his lion-coloured eyes.
Cat fought back a flash of mindless panic. How many times in two years had she dreamed of meeting Nick again, imagined it in loving detail in those drowsy moments between sleep and wakefulness when her defences were down?
Hundreds.
And now it was happening and she couldn’t think, couldn’t do anything but respond with helpless intensity.
Nothing had changed.
‘Hello, Nick,’ she said thinly, acutely aware of the personal assistant’s glance sliding cautiously from Nick’s tanned, gypsyish face to Cat’s clammy one.
He said, ‘Come on through,’ and stepped back to let her go ahead. ‘No interruptions, Phil, please.’
Tension sizzled
