wouldn’t be in the least surprised if the secretive little bitch knows where her mother is.” Heath Cavanagh spits anger and venom. Definitely not Daddy anymore. “Corrinne takes her everywhere. Tells her everything. Where’s your mother, girl?” he thunders.
In a flash, the secret forces within Nicole gather. It’s as though she can see through her mother’s sightless eyes. Searing whiteness. Nothing.
“Gone forever,” she says.
CHAPTER ONE
NICOLE WAS NEARLY twenty minutes late arriving at the Bradshaws’ splendid East Side apartment, although, Carol had confided earlier, she was the guest of honor. Today was her twenty-sixth birthday and Carol had arranged one of her “little dinner parties,” which usually turned out to be sumptuous affairs with glamorous and often famous people in attendance and “someone special” for her to meet. Carol, who had all but adopted her as the granddaughter she’d never had, was determined to find her the right husband and thus keep her in New York, or at the very least within easy traveling distance. That didn’t include far-off Australia, the home of her birth. The Outback was worlds away from New York, the fabulous hub of the New World.
The Bradshaws had taken her under their wing almost from the time she’d arrived in New York two years before, fresh from a three-year stint in Paris where she’d been living and studying painting. As fate would have it, the Bradshaws were visiting a SoHo art gallery the same afternoon Nicole took shelter there. The rain was coming down in buckets with intermittent booms of thunder. As she’d removed her head scarf, Carol Bradshaw, standing nearby, had burst out with, “What lovely hair! Like a glass of fine wine held up to the light.”
From that chance meeting a genuine, mutually rewarding friendship had evolved. The Bradshaws had lost their only child, a brilliant young man with the expectation of a full life ahead of him, to a freak skiing accident when he was about Nicole’s age; now stepping in to fill that gap was Nicole, a young woman reared in the isolated Australian Outback but severed from her country by a family trauma about which she hardly spoke.
Just once in the early days did Nicole confide in Carol about her mother’s tragic death, saying only that she was killed in a car accident when Nicole was twelve. She never divulged that the accident was on her family’s huge historic cattle station. She never said it was she who had led her poor grandfather, now dead from shock and grief, to the four-wheel drive at the bottom of Shadow Valley; she who first sighted the bodies in the sizzling heat. Her beautiful mother thrown clear of the wreckage, body splayed over an enormous boulder, sightless eyes turned up to the scorching sun; the man’s body still behind the wheel of the vehicle, windshield smashed, blood all over his face, just as dead. The man was David McClelland, whom her mother had jilted, on the eve of their wedding to marry Heath Cavanagh, a distant cousin and the black sheep of the family.
So many lives ruined all in the name of love!
The coronial inquest had brought in an open finding, leaving both families to endure years and years of cruel speculation, not the least of it the tricky question: who was Nicole Cavanagh’s real father? Everyone knew about the old love triangle, comprising Corrinne Cavanagh and the two young men who’d loved and fought over her. Inevitably doubts about Nicole’s paternity were sown. Rumor had it the victims of the accident may have been arguing—which was likely, given the highly explosive situation that promised to get worse. Corrinne may have made a grab for the wheel, causing McClelland to lose control of the vehicle. The vehicle went over the escarpment plunging to the floor of Shadow Valley. Heath Cavanagh’s account of his movements was accepted—one of Eden’s stockmen vouched for him in any case—but the enmity between Heath and David was legendary. Two neighboring pioneer families, once the greatest friends, had been estranged for several years after Corrinne had jilted her fiancé, David McClelland. Somehow the families had patched it up in a fashion to accommodate Nicole, who was the innocent victim of all this unhappiness. This allowed her to form a deep attachment to the young scion of the McClelland family, Drake. But the early estrangement was nothing compared to the bitter war that broke out after the tragedy.
Without the evidence to prove it, everyone in Koomera Crossing and the outlying cattle stations held Heath Cavanagh responsible, as though he were a demon capable of being in two places at one time. Either that, or it had been a murder-suicide, which no one wanted to believe. Nevertheless no one was really satisfied with the theory of death by misadventure. As a result the speculation continued to run wild.
Nicole told her American friends none of this. Like her, they’d known family tragedy, but not so much as a whiff of scandal had touched their respected name. In the Bradshaws, Nicole saw two handsome, aristocratic people in their mid-sixties who were friends when she truly needed them, alone as she was in another country. They became like family to her.
It was the Bradshaws who had found her her light-filled SoHo loft with its vast industrial windows. The Bradshaws who had introduced her to their wide circle of friends, a good many with sons and daughters her own age. When the Bradshaws saw her paintings, they’d insisted on helping her to get them shown. Through his contacts, Howard Bradshaw had even engineered her TV appearance that afternoon. Brief but important. She’d been introduced as a “sunny, up-and-coming young Aussie artist.” As near-perfect a misnomer as Nicole could think of, for her background was too full of black trauma. One day she reasoned she would confide in Carol fully, but not yet. The past was too close. Too filled with grief. Grief was the worst illness of all.
Carol came to the door to greet her, her face warm and welcoming, shining with pleasure.
“Nikki, dear!” They kissed. Not air kisses, but real displays of affection.
“So sorry I’m late. Traffic, forgive me.”
“Of course. You’re here. We watched your guest spot. You came over wonderfully well. So beautiful and articulate. Howard and I are proud of you.”
“It would never have happened without you and Howard,” Nicole said, smiling, then arm in arm with Carol accompanying her across the spacious and sumptuous entrance hall. A magnificent neoclassical parcel gilt console stood along one wall, overhung by an equally magnificent black lacquer and gilt mirror with two antique English gilt figurine lamps to either side of an exquisite flower arrangement. The Bradshaws were wealthy on a scale that made her own family’s fortune modest by comparison. She could see the elegantly dressed people gathered in the living room, which Carol had recently had made over—God knows why, for it had been beautiful before. Several heads were already turned in their direction. A little knot of people broke up, parting to either side.
Shock sucked the breath from her lungs as she felt the color drain from her cheeks. She put out one hand, then the other. Her mother was staring at her intently from across the Bradshaws’ opulent living room. The most marvelous apparition, astonishingly young and beautiful, a half smile caught on her mouth, her whirling auburn hair floating around her bare white shoulders.
The long years were as nothing. Yesterday. Whoever said time heals all wounds? Someone incapable of great depths of emotion. True love is eternal. Unchanging. It endures beyond death.
The apparition was very slender and delicate, like a fine piece of porcelain. She was wearing Nicole’s favorite color—violet-blue—with an all-over glitter of silver. A beautiful, feminine gown. Shimmering, light as air. Romantic.
Just like hers.
Rapture drained away as pain and despair flooded in. The long wall facing her, she saw now, was set with tall mirrored panels to reflect the chandeliers, the museum-quality antiques and the paintings. There was no apparition. She’d had no miraculous acquisition of psychic powers.
