“The child is so fair. She can’t be of your tribe. Nor of your race.”
“That’s true. But she needs food. We should give her something to eat.”
They turned and walked to the camp site together. “It was good that you found her, Tom. If the old woman was alone...”
“Yes. The child would have died,” he said with the emotionless resignation with which he viewed death. Suzanne was suddenly struck by a possibility that squeezed her heart. “Tom, we’re over five hundred kilometres from the Gunbarrel Highway.”
“That also is true.”
He tipped some water into a mug and brought it to where Suzanne stood stock-still, holding the child with mounting emotion. It had been eighteen months ago. So far away. It couldn’t be...
“Who is she, Tom?”
“I’ve had a long time to think about it. I knew the old woman, Suzanne. From when I was a boy. She was childless and always walked alone. Perhaps, to her in her old age, she believed the child was a gift.”
He gently stroked the little girl’s cheek. Her lashes slowly fluttered open. She had green eyes. Tom put the mug to her lips and let her drink sparingly. Although she obviously wanted more.
“But I think this is the child you asked me to find, Suzanne,” he said quietly. “The one that was lost.”
“Amy,” she whispered. “Amy Bergen.”
And the child looked at her with Leith Carew’s eyes, as though the name struck some distant chord of memory.
The realisation came to Suzanne that her life was once more linked to the man who had refused to say goodbye to her. The man who had said there would be another time and place for them. She wondered if Leith Carew still thought about that. Whether he did or not, it was now inevitable that their paths would cross again.
CHAPTER FOUR
WITHIN HOURS of being notified that his niece may have been found, Leith Carew flew from Adelaide to Alice Springs to make an official identification.
There was little doubt in anyone’s mind as to the outcome. None in Suzanne’s. The photographs in the police file had been conclusive. The features of the child were the same as those of the two-year-old Amy Bergen, who had been lost eighteen months ago. Apart from which, she responded to the name, although her language was a garbled mixture of aboriginal words and pidgin English.
Suzanne heard the commotion outside her home when Leith Carew arrived, accompanied by the chief of police and other various authorities. Representatives of the media had been camped in the street ever since the news had broken. It was a big story and they intended to make the most of it, but the clamour of their demanding voices frightened the little girl, and she was Suzanne’s first consideration.
Four days of travelling with Tom and Suzanne was too little preparation for the adjustment from a primitive life in the desert to the bewildering strangeness of civilization. The child was stronger now from their careful nurturing, but Suzanne was concerned about the mental and emotional upheaval that this experience might have caused.
She had clung to Suzanne like a limpet from the moment they had hit Alice Springs. Prying her loose for a medical check had been traumatic enough. Handing her over to an uncle she almost certainly didn’t remember would undoubtedly be even more traumatic for her.
Suzanne tried to stay relaxed as Tom admitted the official visitors to her home, but she felt every nerve in her body tighten when Leith Carew stepped into the living room. He seemed to fill it with his strong presence, and Suzanne could not deny the tug of attraction she felt, despite all that had happened since they last met.
There was an immediate vibrancy in the air between them, an awareness that pulsed with memories and the possibilities of what might have been. Suzanne felt her skin tingle. Whether it was excitement or a sense of premonition, she didn’t know. In her mind and heart was a recognition that this man was important in her life.
His green eyes held a look of reserve. He stood very erect, shoulders squared, body rigid, his face wiped of all expression. “Mrs. Forbes,” he acknowledged her in the most minimal manner of greeting.
“Mr. Carew,” she returned stiffly, her manner affected by the memory of how fiercely she had spurned any further connection with him, the cutting words of condemnation she had used, her violent dismissal of his feelings. And her own.
“It’s kind of you to receive us here.” It was a polite recitation, nothing more.
He challenged the interest in her eyes with a relentless impassivity, as though needing to prove to her and himself that she had no power to affect him any more. He was comprehensively armoured against any form of rejection from her today, Suzanne thought, telling herself it was only to be expected.
“We didn’t want the child disturbed any more than she has to be,” she offered softly, hoping to put him more at ease.
It was a vain hope. “So it was explained to me,” he said, and in a pointed and deliberate dismissal of her, he dropped his gaze to the child cradled against her shoulder.
She, of course, was the prime focus of his interest, yet his attention seemed more directed at the way Suzanne had the child clasped in her arms. Suzanne had the distinct impression he would have preferred anyone other than herself to be involved in this situation.
A woman stepped up beside him, a tall, blond, beautiful woman who slid her arm possessively around his. It was not his sister. His only sister was dead. The woman was far too young to be his stepmother. The way she looked at Leith Carew evoked a weird little lurch in Suzanne’s heart.
He glanced at the woman then returned a hard, glittering gaze to Suzanne. “This is my fiancée, Danica Fairlie,” he announced. “Danica, this is Mrs. Forbes.”
“How do you do?” the blonde said with polite formality.
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