Abbie brushed her blonde hair distractedly back from her face. She had nothing to say to her father, and she wasn’t interested in his messages, but she couldn’t help but wonder why he had started ringing her again.
Putting the last of her work tools away, she headed up to the veranda. Mario was in Jess’s arms, and as he saw his mother walk towards them his eyes lit with excitement and he held out his arms to her.
With a smile, Abbie reached to take her baby. He snuggled in against her and she kissed him, breathing in the clean scent of his skin. Mario was twenty-one months now, and adorable. He was the one thing in Abbie’s life that made everything worthwhile.
‘Do you want to get off now, Jess? You’ve got a date tonight, haven’t you?’ she asked as she cuddled the child.
‘Yes. If you are sure you can manage, that would be a great help.’
‘Absolutely. You go and have a good time.’
For a moment Abbie stood and watched as the young woman strolled towards her four-wheel drive. At eighteen, Jess was the youngest member of her staff, and also the hardest working. Not only was she a qualified child-minder and a superb horsewoman but she helped out a lot around the stables. Sometimes Abbie wondered how she would manage without her.
She waved to Jess as she reversed and pulled away down the long driveway.
Darkness was closing in now. The stables were on a lonely track leading down to a deserted cove. Her nearest neighbours were miles away, and very few cars passed this way. Usually Abbie didn’t mind being on her own; she enjoyed the solitude. But for once as Jess’s car disappeared she was acutely conscious of her isolation.
It was probably the approaching storm that was making her feel so on edge, she told herself as she went back into the house. Plus all these phone calls from her father.
As she stepped inside, her eyes were immediately drawn towards the phone, where a flashing light proclaimed there were now ten messages.
Whatever her father wanted, she wasn’t interested. She would put Mario to bed and delete the calls later, she told herself as she headed for the stairs.
The child went down into his cot easily. Abbie set the musical mobile playing above his head and watched over him until he fell asleep. Then, leaving the night light on, she crept from the nursery to her bedroom across the corridor to shower and change.
Abbie had just put on her silk dressing-gown and was about to go back downstairs to make herself a drink when the phone in her room rang again, and the answer machine clicked on.
‘Abbie, where the hell are you?’ Her father’s irate tones seemed to fill the house. ‘Have you received any of my messages? This is important.’
It was strange how just hearing his voice made her nervous. She supposed it was all those years of conditioning—of being afraid to ignore his commands.
Wrapping her dressing gown more closely around her body, she reminded herself fiercely that her father no longer had a hold over her—he couldn’t hurt her any more.
‘Do you hear me, Abigail?’
He probably wanted to summon her back to Vegas to host one of his parties. She shuddered at the thought. She’d escaped from that life over two years ago—she would have thought he’d got the message by now. His bullying blackmail tactics no longer worked. She wasn’t going back.
She was on her way across her bedroom to switch off the machine when she heard him mention a name—a name that made her freeze and the world start to zone out as darkness threatened to engulf her. Damon Cyrenci.
For so long she had tried to block that name out of her mind, pretend he had never existed. And the only way she had been able to do that was by filling her every waking hour and making herself so bone-tired that personal thoughts were a luxury. But, even so, sometimes in the silence of the night he would come to her as she slept and she would see his darkly handsome face again. Would imagine his hands touching her, his lips crushing against hers, and she would wake with tears on her cheeks.
‘I’ve lost everything, Abigail—everything—to Damon Cyrenci, and that includes the stables because they are part of the company’s assets.’
Through the turmoil of her thoughts, Abbie tried to concentrate on what her father was saying. The stables were hers, weren’t they?
‘And he’s on his way out there now to look over his property.’
The words hit her like a hurricane at force five. Damon was on his way here! Her heart raced—her body felt weak. Damon—the love of her life, the father of her child, the one man she had given herself to completely. The memories that went along with all those facts twisted inside her like a serpent intent on squeezing her very soul. And along with the memories there was a fierce longing—a longing that had never really gone away, a longing that she had just learnt to live with.
She sat down on the bed behind her; it was either sit down or fall down. Damon was coming here. It was all she could focus on.
What would he look like now, what would he say to her? Would he still be angry with her? What would he say when he discovered he had a child?
Had he forgiven her? The wrench of yearning that idea brought with it was immense.
As the phone connection died, she buried her head in her hands.
She remembered the day she had first met Damon. She remembered that the blistering heat of the midday sun had come nowhere near matching the heat he had stirred within her. She remembered shading her eyes to look up at him as she’d climbed out of the pool. He was tall—well over six-foot-four and he had been wearing a lightweight suit that had sat perfectly on his athletic build.
‘You must be Abbie Newland?’ he had said quietly, and the attractive accent had added fuel to a fire that had quietly and instantly started to blaze inside her.
He was ten years older than Abbie, Sicilian, with thick dark hair and searing, intense dark eyes, and to say he was good-looking would be an understatement of vast proportions. He was quite simply gorgeous.
‘I’m Damon Cyrenci. Your father said I would find you here.’
The disappointment inside Abbie was almost as intense as her attraction for him. Because this was the man her father had ordered her to date. The command had infuriated her, but she wasn’t at liberty to refuse; her plan had been to snub him, then just walk away. Then she could honestly tell her father that he hadn’t invited her out. But, as soon as her eyes met with the handsome Sicilian, her body didn’t want to comply with that idea at all.
‘Do you want to join me for a drink?’ He nodded over towards a bar that was cocooned in the tropical shade of the gardens.
‘Maybe just for ten minutes,’ she found herself saying. ‘I haven’t got much time.’
‘Why, what else have you got to do?’ The question had been asked with a glint of humour, and it had been apparent right from the outset that he had judged her as little more than a social butterfly.
She didn’t really blame him. To the outside world, that was probably exactly how her life appeared,
