back was as straight as ever, her chin elevated and those stunning green eyes proud.
‘Why do I get the feeling this is not to be a—penitent confession—brought on by sober reflection?’ he murmured a little wryly.
Aurora took her hand back. ‘Because you really have only yourself to blame, Mr Kirwan. You and your secretary, that is. This preoccupation with guarding you from “groupies” is what brought this all about. I find it a little hard to believe that any kind of a real man needs to go to those lengths anyway, but, be that as it may—if I could have got in touch with you by any other means, I would not have had to resort to this.’
‘Hang on—resort to robbing me, do you mean?’ he queried quizzically.
‘No. Reclaiming my property,’ she stated.
‘Really, you’re going to have explain better than that, Aurora Templeton.’ He paused and narrowed his eyes. ‘Why does that name ring a bell?’
‘From the number of messages I left on your answering machine that you ignored?’ she suggested with irony. ‘But you also bought this house from my father,’ she explained. ‘This was my bedroom.’
Luke Kirwan blinked.
‘And this,’ Aurora continued, turning towards the fireplace, ‘was my secret cache from the time I discovered it when I was about twelve.’
He followed her across the room and ducked his head to look into the fireplace. He observed the brick and the empty cavity in the wall, put his hand into it and whistled softly. ‘I see,’ he said as he straightened.
‘Good!’ Aurora said briskly. ‘Now, you may or may not have been aware that I was overseas at the time the house was sold—’
‘I had no idea Ambrose Templeton had a daughter,’ he said, and pulled a handkerchief from his pocket to wipe his hands.
‘Well, he does,’ she said flatly, ‘and I can prove it. But I didn’t even know the house had been sold until I got home, just a few days before he took off on his round-the-world voyage. And it was only after he’d left that I remembered the cache and something that was very precious to me in it.’
‘Why the hell didn’t you just say so?’ Luke Kirwan demanded.
‘I would have, if I could have got here first—to make sure no one got to it before I did.’
‘What was this precious something?’ he asked with a frown. ‘A heroin haul or the crown jewels?’
‘Very funny, Mr Kirwan.’ She eyed him sardonically. ‘No, but precious enough to me. And when I couldn’t get past your secretary, not to mention being treated as if I were a piece of rubbish even after telling her who I was; and when I could never find you home, I remembered I still had a laundry key, and I decided to take matters into my own hands. Don’t you think you might have done the same?’ she asked gently.
He blinked. ‘So—you didn’t use the front door?’
‘I didn’t have a front door key,’ she said simply. ‘I’d left all my other keys with my father. As a teenager, the laundry door was my—’ she grimaced ‘—preferred way of coming home when I was late.’
He was silent for a long moment, watching her narrowly. Then he said abruptly, ‘Did you know I was supposed to be away that night?’
Aurora took her time. This was the tricky bit because if she didn’t tread carefully, she could involve Bunny. She frowned at him. ‘Were you? What a pity you weren’t. I was kicking myself for not taking into consideration that you had to be an extraordinarily light sleeper. I swear I didn’t make a sound and, believe me, I’ve had a bit of practice at it, but…’ She shrugged.
‘You didn’t make a sound,’ he said slowly. ‘And I came home early because I was ill. I got up to go downstairs to find an aspirin or something when I saw this strange light at the bottom of the stairs.’
Aurora smiled suddenly. ‘I haven’t had much luck, have I?’
He considered, then gestured with his forefinger. ‘There’s still something that doesn’t quite gel, Aurora Templeton. What was it you thought you left behind in that cache that was so precious you couldn’t tell anyone about it? I really think I need to see it,’ he said pensively, ‘before I can believe this story.’
‘You can’t because it—they—weren’t there after all. My diaries,’ she said simply.
‘Your…diaries?’
She nodded. ‘My innermost thoughts and secrets that I would hate any strange, prying eyes to see.’
He took a long moment to think around this, then said with a frown, ‘If they’re not there now, what’s happened to them?’
‘I think my father must have removed them,’ she replied. ‘Like any conscientious parent, he probably went through a stage of wondering whether I was on drugs or whatever. I did go through a slightly wild stage,’ she confided, ‘although certainly not that wild. But I’m now faced with the lowering thought that he probably knew about the cache all along. And my guess is that he packed the diaries up and forgot to tell me.’ She sighed ruefully. ‘We had so little time together and he was so excited before he left. He’s sailing round the world single-handed. I don’t know if you knew?’
‘I didn’t deal with him personally. Can you check it out with him?’
‘Yes. He’s got a satellite telephone on the boat.’
‘So that explains that,’ he said slowly. ‘You must have confided some pretty intimate thoughts to your diaries to be so paranoid about getting them back unseen by other eyes?’
The slightest tinge of pink entered Aurora’s smooth cheeks. ‘Would you like any old stranger reading your diaries?’ she countered, however.
‘I don’t keep one, so I don’t know,’ he replied with the glimmer of a smile. ‘What do you do for a living, Miss Templeton?’
She told him, adding, ‘I also have an afternoon music programme that I compere three times a week. In between times I volunteer my time as a radio operator for the local Coastguard Association. I’m really quite respectable.’
‘So you say,’ he commented. ‘But, seeing I don’t know you from a bar of soap and neither does anyone else, apparently, just how did you get into this party?’ he enquired.
‘I came with Neil Baker—he’s my programme director and a friend of yours, apparently. It, at the time,’ she confessed with a glint of mischief in her eyes, ‘seemed like divine intervention, when he invited me because he’d broken up with his girlfriend—and I told you the rest of it.’
‘Ah, Neil,’ he murmured, ‘yes, he is a friend.’ But he continued to study her thoughtfully and in a slightly nerve-racking way.
‘Does that set your mind to rest about me, Mr Kirwan?’ she asked. ‘Look, I apologize. The whole thing was rash and misguided—I’m a little prone to that kind of thing but, I can assure you, your secretary did brush me off like a troublesome if not to say somehow shameful fly; I did leave messages for you that you never responded to and I did call to see
