herself as well as the daughter of Australian mining magnate, Dalton Rylance. All grist for the mill! The media had a field day, skating as close to libel as they could.
The threat of legal action had called off the hawks. Zara’s distinguished and enormously influential boss at the time, Sir Marcus Boyle, had gone in to bat for her. Corin hadn’t wasted any time, flying to London to arrange top legal representation. Later, when things settled, he had brought Zara home. Apparently, she had been all too willing to come.
He found no pleasure in the knowledge that Zara had had her fingers badly burned. An ill-advised love affair with a billionaire white-collar criminal, no less, though she had denied any serious ongoing relationship right from the start. But was that strictly true? Only Zara and Hartmann would know. What he knew for a fact was that he would never forgive Zara for how she had treated him. His heart might leap at the sight of her. His eyes might forever be dazzled. But a broken heart didn’t easily mend. Heartache more often than not hatched hatred. Obsessive relationships were inherently of extremes. Only he didn’t have it in him to hate Zara. All he could do was prevent her from ever again finding a chink in his armour.
Part of him had wanted to refuse Corin’s invitation to be his best man. As Zara was to be chief bridesmaid, he knew he was taking an almighty risk. Even the sound of her name had the power to hurt him. Not that anyone would ever know. He had become expert at hiding his feelings. In the end, he’d decided he couldn’t possibly let Corin down. It was, after all, an honour. Corin didn’t know the full story of his betrayal at Zara’s hands. Nor would he ever. He and Zara had that secret in common. He and Zara would sit together at the bridal table. Pass for kin on the friendliest of terms.
He had done a lot of living since Zara had fled him. One unsuccessful attempt at putting the past behind him. He and Sally Forbes had become engaged at a big party her parents had thrown for them. The Forbes were a long established pastoral family and close friends. He had known Sally since forever. She was everything a young man in his position should choose. Outback born. A fine equestrienne. Phenomenal energy. Very attractive—lustrous nut-brown hair, dancing hazel eyes, well educated, confident and outgoing. Trained from girlhood to take her place as mistress of some large pastoral establishment. Like Coorango. It might have worked if the thought of Zara and what he had felt for her—what he had felt for a woman—hadn’t dogged his every step. In the end he and Sally had broken up. She had since married a mutual friend, Nick Draper, some said on the rebound. He hoped not. Sally and Nick remained his friends. Better yet, they looked happy with each other.
“Too much of you goes on inside your head, Rick. I never really know what you’re thinking.”
He felt bad about that. He couldn’t get past Zara. Or the ache in him.
Sometimes he couldn’t believe the passage of years. Could it possibly be five? Zara had made an attempt at bridging the deep gulf between them, writing many letters. The latest had been sent from London. That was shortly before she’d started to appear on the front page of the London newspapers. The temptation to read her letters had been powerful. He’d had to wrestle long and hard with the urge to slit the envelopes and devour the contents but he had come to think of it as a betrayal of himself. Of his self-esteem. Accordingly, the letters, tied in a thick bundle and shoved away in the back of a bureau drawer, had finally been consigned, not to the shredder, but fire. Fire seemed appropriate.
The past was off-limits.
Such a pity he couldn’t erase memory.
Chapter Two
THE Rylance Mediterranean-style mansion was some house. Dauntingly vast, it was set in five acres of landscaped gardens that at the rear led past a turquoise swimming pool and a pool house big enough to hold a family, down to the river, deep, broad and thrillingly dangerous in flood. In spring and summer the banks were overhung by prolifically blossoming trees. The front of the house sat at the centre of a sweeping cul-de-sac with only two very expensive estates to either side.
He had been a boy when he first visited the house. At ten, Outback children—at least those whose parents could afford it—were sent to boarding school to receive the best possible education. It was a tradition. He and Corin had been enrolled at birth in the same prestigious boys’ college their fathers and their grandfathers before them had attended. They were to start Grade Five together in the coming year.
His bonding with Corin had been one of those instant things. Friends and kinsmen right from the start. Corin’s beautiful little sister, Zara, had appeared to him like the princess in his own little sister Julianne’s fairy stories. For one thing, she wore a white dress with embroidery all over it, the like of which he had never seen. Her long gleaming dark hair had been pulled back from her face, held with a wide blue satin ribbon but left to slide like a waterfall over her shoulders and down her back. For Jules, who was six at that time everyday gear was asexual—T-shirts, shorts or jeans, boyish cap of dark curls. That was the norm on the station for all the kids.
He had been irresistibly and utterly captivated by Corin’s sister, who even then had dizzying power over him. He had a theory that she had established herself so early and so vividly that it had been impossible for him to see her as she really was. But, for all the excitement and attendant dangers of living on a vast Outback station, meeting little Zara Rylance, a cousin of sorts, had been one of the big moments of his childhood.
“This is Zara, Garrick. My jewel of a daughter!”
Corin and Zara’s beautiful mother Kathryn had smilingly introduced them, perhaps amused by his open-mouthed reaction. The little girl, to his astonishment, had sweetly and composedly given him her hand. How graceful was that? How adult!
Of course her mother had taught Zara her polished manners. Kathryn Rylance had been such a gracious woman of luminous poise. Who could possibly have imagined that not all that many years later she would be dead, killed in a spectacular crash when her powerful sports car became airborne and went over a bridge? The entire extended family had been stunned and saddened. He remembered his own strong-minded, highly articulate mother loudly deploring the fact that Dalton Rylance had remarried a relatively short time later.
“Young enough to be his daughter, Daniel, would you believe?” she’d addressed his father, her eyes the deep and brilliant blue she had passed on to her son sparkling in condemnation. “What is to happen to those children, so deprived of their loving mother? That callous monster Dalton will be no comfort at all. Little Zara will be the one to suffer the most. Mark my words. Are you listening to me, Daniel? With Zara around, Dalton and this new Mrs Rylance will never be able to forget Kathryn. I know you don’t like my saying it, but I’ve always believed our dearest Kathy was in such distress—”
At that point his mother, who had gained a reputation for looking ageless, had broken off, quickly swivelling her burnished head.
His father had caught sight of him, hovering at the door, and called out his name. “It’s all right, Garrick. Come in.”
Just as he was hanging on what his mother was about to say! Everyone knew his mother had not been impressed by Leila Rylance. She made no secret of it. In fact she was very outspoken. Not surprising perhaps when she’d had considerable affection for the tragic Kathryn who Zara so closely resembled.
The spectacular hand-forged iron gates, ebony offset with gleaming brass scrolls, parted on command. Then slowly closed behind them. They were cruising up the broad driveway lined by towering Cuban palms. An extraordinarily dramatic display of bromeliads flowered at their feet in long narrow beds that formed an allee that reached to the circular drive. Manicured lawns spread away to either side, a lush green never
