Wealthy Australian, Secret Son

Everyone was agog to meet the new mystery owner. So far he hadn’t appeared, but an hour into the afternoon a helicopter suddenly flew overhead, disappearing over the roof of the mansion to land on the great spread of lawn at the rear of the house. Ten minutes later there was a little fanfare that got everyone’s attention. A tall man, immaculately tailored with a red rosebud in his lapel, followed by no less a personage than Ms Diane Rodgers in full garden party regalia, came through the front door.

Even at a distance one could see this was someone quite out of the ordinary. He moved with lithe grace across the colonnaded verandah, coming to stand at the top of the short flight of stone stairs that led to the garden. His eyes surveyed the smiling crowd as he lifted a hand.

Immediately, enthusiastic clapping broke out. Here was their host at last! And didn’t he look the part! They were just so thrilled—especially the children, who had stared up in wonderment at the big silver helicopter with its loud whirring rotors.

How is Dad going to handle this? Charlotte thought.

Her father revealed his class. He strolled out of the crowd, perhaps with a certain swagger, to greet the CEO of the company that had bought the ancestral home. “Come along, Charlotte,” he commanded, as he drew alongside her. “It’s just you and me now. Time to greet the new owner. I very much suspect he’s more than just a CEO.”

Unfailingly, Charlotte supported her father.

“My, he is a handsome man.” Her father pitched his voice low. “And a whole lot younger than I would have expected,” he tacked on in some surprise. “I fully anticipated someone in their late forties at least. Hang on—don’t I know him?”

Charlotte couldn’t say whether he did or he didn’t. Even with the broad brim of her picture hat the slanting sun was in her eyes. But she did manage to put a lovely welcoming smile on her face. They were on show. Anyone who was anyone in the Valley was ranged behind them—every last man, woman and child keen observers of this meeting. This was an historic day. The Marsdons, for so long lords and ladies of the Valley, now displaced, were expected to act with grace and aplomb.

Except it didn’t happen that way.

“Good God, Costello—it can’t be you?” Vivian Randall bellowed like an enraged bull.

He came to such an abrupt halt Charlotte, slightly behind him, all but slammed into him, clutching at his arm to steady herself. She saw the blood draining out of her father’s face. A hard man to surprise, he looked utterly poleaxed.

She, herself, had felt no portent of disaster. No inkling that another great turning point in her life had arrived. She couldn’t change direction. She was stuck in place, with such a tangle of emotions knotted inside her they could never be untied.

There wasn’t a flicker of answering emotion on the man’s striking, highly intelligent face. “Good afternoon, Mr Marsdon,” he said suavely, coming down the stone steps to greet them. Effortless charm. An overlay of natural command. His voice was cultured, the timbre dark. An extremely attractive voice. One people would always listen to. “Charlotte.” He turned his head to look at her. Blazing blue eyes consumed her, the electric blueness in startling contrast to his colouring—crow-black hair and brows, olive skin that was tanned to a polished bronze. The searing gaze remained fixed on her.

She was swamped by an overwhelming sense of unreality.

Rohan!

The intervening years were as nothing—carried away as if by a king tide. The day of reckoning had come. Hadn’t she always known it would? Her heart was pumping double time. The shock was devastating—too excruciating to be borne. She had thought she had built up many protective layers. Now she was blown away by her own emotional fragility. She tried to get her breath, slow her palpitating heart. She felt as weak as a kitten. She raised one trembling hand to her temple as a great stillness started to descend on her. She was vaguely aware she was slipping sideways …

No, no—don’t give way! Hold up!

“Rohan!” she breathed.

He was as familiar to her as she was to herself. Yet he had never given a hint of warning—right up until this very day. It was cruel. Rohan had never been cruel. But it was abundantly clear he wanted to shock her far more than he wanted to shock her father. He wanted to stun her to her very soul. She read it in his dynamic face. Revenge, smoothly masked. But not to her. She knew him too well. So long as there was memory, the past lived on. One might long to forget, but memory wouldn’t allow it.

Her pride broke.

“You do this to me, Rohan?” She knew she sounded pitiful. The immediate world had turned from radiant sunshine to a swirling grey fog. It smothered her like a thick blanket. Her ears seemed stuffed with cotton wool. She was moving beyond complete awareness, deeper into the fog, oblivious to the strong arms that shot out with alacrity to gather her up.

A little golden-haired boy ran out of the crowd, crying over and over in a panic, “Mummy … Mummy … Mummy!”

His grandfather, beside himself with sick rage, tried to catch him. The boy broke away, intent on only one thing: following the tall stranger who was carrying his beautiful mother back into the house.

This was the new owner of Riverbend! By now everyone was saying his name, turning one to the other, themselves in a state of shock.

Rohan Costello.

Fate had a way of catching up with everyone.

CHAPTER TWO

Silver Valley, summer fourteen years ago

IT WAS one of those endless afternoons of high summer—glorious months of the school vacation, when the heat sent them racing from the turquoise swimming pool in the mansion’s grounds into the river. It meandered through the valley and lay in a broad glittering curve at Riverbend’s feet. They knew they were supposed to keep to the pool that afternoon, but it wasn’t as though they weren’t allowed to take frequent dips in the river. After all, their father had had a carpenter erect a diving dock for their pleasure. Prior to that they had used a rope and an old tyre, fixed to stout branches of a river gum to swing from.

She was twelve, and very much part of the Pack of Four, as they had become known throughout the Valley. She didn’t feel honoured to be allowed to tag along with the boys. She was one of them. All three boys were inseparable friends: her older brother Mattie, Rohan—Mrs Costello’s son—a courtesy title insisted on by their mother, because Mrs Costello was really a miss, but who cared?—and Martyn Prescott, young son of the neighbouring estate, High Grove. Charlotte was their muse.

Although she would have died rather than say it aloud, Rohan was her shining white knight. She loved him. She loved the burning blue looks he bent on her. But these days a kind of humming tension had cut into their easy affection. Once or twice she’d had the crazy desire to kiss him. Proof, if any were needed, that she was fast growing up.

Rohan easily beat them into the water that day, striking out into the middle of the stream, the ripples on the dark green surface edged with sparkles the sunlight had cast on the river. “What’s keeping you?” he yelled, throwing a long tanned arm above water. “Come on, Charlie. You can beat the both of them!”

He was absolutely splendid, Rohan! Even as a boy he had a glamour about him. As her mother had once commented, “Rohan’s an extraordinary boy—a born leader, and so good for my darling Mattie!” In those early days their mother had been very protective of her only son.

“Won’t do him a bit of good, wrapping him in cotton wool.” That irritated comment always came from their father, who was sure such mollycoddling was holding his son back.

Perhaps he was right? But their mother took no notice. Unlike her young daughter, who enjoyed splendid health, Matthew had suffered from asthma since infancy. Mattie’s paediatrician had told their anxiety-ridden mother he would most likely grow out of it by age fourteen. It was that kind of asthma.

That fatal day Charlotte remembered running to the diving dock, her long, silver-blonde hair flying around her face. It was Martyn who had pulled her hair out of its thick plait. It was something he loved to do. Most of the time she rounded on him—“How stupid, Martyn!” was her usual protest as she began to re-plait it.

“You look better that way, Charlie. One day you’re going to be an absolute knockout. Mum and Dad say that. Not Nicole, of course. She’s as jealous as hell. One day we’re going to get married. Mum says that too.”

“Dream on!” she always scoffed. Get married, indeed! Some husband Martyn would make.

Mattie always laughed, “Boy, has he got a crush on you, Charlie!”

She chose not to believe it. She didn’t know then that some crushes get very crushed.

Rohan never laughed. Never joked about it. He kept silent on that score. The Marsdons and the Prescotts were the privileged children of the Valley. Certainly not Rohan Costello, who lived with his mother on the outskirts of town in a little cottage hardly big enough to swing a cat. Their mother said the pair would have to shift soon.

“Rohan is quickly turning into a man!”

At fourteen, nearing fifteen, it was apparent the fast-growing Rohan would easily attain six feet and more in maturity. Mattie, on the other hand, was small for his age. Rohan was by far the strongest and the best swimmer, though she was pretty good herself—but built for speed rather than endurance.

Totally unselfconscious, even with her budding breasts showing through her swimsuit and her long light limbs gleaming a pale gold, with Rohan—her hero—watching, she made a full racing dive into the water, striking out towards him as he urged her on, both of them utterly carefree, not knowing then that this was the last day they would ever swim in the river.

Years later she would shudder when she remembered their odd near-total absorption in one another that summer afternoon. A boy and a girl. One almost fifteen, the other twelve.

Romeo and Juliet.

Martyn appeared angry with them, sniping away. Jealous. Mattie was his normal sweet self. At one stage he called out that he was going to swim across to the opposite bank, where beautiful weeping willows bent their branches towards the stream.

“Stay with us, Mattie,” Rohan yelled, cupping his hands around his mouth.

“What’s the matter? Reckon I can’t do it?” Mattie called back, sounding very much as if he was going to take up the challenge.

“‘Course you can!” she had shouted, always mindful of her brother’s self-esteem, undermined by his sickness. “But do like Rohan says, Mattie. Stay with us.”