Element Of Risk

Perdita groped desperately for a chair. Shivering, she collapsed into it, clutching the receiver with white-knuckled fingers.

‘Died?’ she managed to repeat.

‘Yup, tough, poor woman. She was only thirty-seven. Luke Dennison was a couple of years younger. They were married when he was twenty-one. His parents were both dead and I suppose he needed a wife.’

‘Probably,’ Perdita agreed tonelessly. ‘I have to go, Frank. Can you send me the details?’

‘Yeah. It’ll be a big bill, I hope you realise. Usually I don’t have much difficulty with these cases even when there’s a veto, but this was a humdinger. I had a hell of a time tracking down the information. Files were missing or lost, people didn’t know or wouldn’t talk, and it turned out to be a real challenge. I’d say that someone did their best to make sure no one was able to trace anything. Still, we got there.’ He sounded professionally pleased with himself. ‘OK, I’ll courier everything off straight away, if you’re still sure you trust couriers.’

She would have trusted the mail, or copies of the documents on the fax, but Frank had his idiosyncrasies, and one of them was a passion for security and a vast mistrust of agencies that moved information.

Perhaps he was right; when she had first contacted him he had told her that he didn’t do anything illegal and she believed him, but she had a feeling that her ideas of illegal and Frank’s possibly didn’t coincide. She didn’t know how he had got this information, and she wasn’t going to ask.

‘Thank you,’ she said levelly.

‘That’s OK. Glad to get it done. It was starting to take over my life.’ He hung up.

Take over his life? Perdita had been waiting for those names for ten years. And now that she had them, the beginning she had anticipated was turning into something else, a nightmare she didn’t know how to deal with.

Eventually, when the dialling tone impinged, she set the receiver down and looked at her watch.

‘Oh, panic!’ she muttered, leaping to her feet. She had no time to think, none to dwell on this news, or even to sort out her emotions. But mingled with the grief and the anger and the bewilderment there was another, one she had never expected to feel: a keen, almost brutal sense of betrayal.

For ten years she had been alone and lost, and for those years Natalie and Luke had been happy. Her hand lingered for a moment on the thin gold locket. Whether they’d known it or not, their happiness had been built on her misery.

Setting her mouth, she forced herself to pick up her bag, weighed down by the usual assortment of necessities and the ever-present book on landscape gardening. Perdita had always prided herself on her professional outlook, and she wasn’t going to let the complete upheaval of her life make her late.

Five more months! They stretched out like an eternity.

‘What have I done?’ she muttered as she opened the door. ‘Oh, what have I done?’

CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_c61d08e0-6cd6-5c51-a0ab-3759a6211dfd)

ELEVEN years—a lifetime ago, the last time she had been to Pigeon Hill—she had walked this road beneath a boiling Antipodean sun, tattered shorts and a T-shirt clinging to coltish limbs, her hair shaded by a Huck Finn hat, jandals on her narrow feet. Then the road had been metalled, and her legs had been white with dust by the time she got to Pigeon Hill, the station named after the looming, bush-clad hill where the large, slow-flying native pigeon flourished.

She certainly had never imagined returning to Pigeon Hill in a car that cost more money than she could have visualised at seventeen; then her sights had been set on a job in a shop, and eventually marriage and children.

If a hotel in Wellington hadn’t failed to give Luke Dennison a message, that was probably exactly what would have happened.

Because the hotel staff had failed she was a mature, worldly woman with a famous face and body, and a secure future. She should, Perdita supposed, her full lips compressing with the irony of it, thank that unknown person who hadn’t done his or her job properly.

Suddenly realising that she was veering towards the wrong side of the road, she twisted the steering-wheel a little too impatiently. She hadn’t driven on the left for some years; it would pay to concentrate on her driving, not what had happened so long ago.

Five letterboxes loomed ahead like a cluster of ragged beehives. Suspended from the top bar of the gate was a neat sign that said Pigeon Hill. Beneath it in smaller letters was painted L.D.E. Dennison. Perdita’s stomach clenched.

Breathing deeply, she braked. The car rattled over the cattle stop and along the road winding across a wide green paddock towards a cluster of roofs. The three farm cottages belied their name; sheltered from the southerly winds by the blue, forested hill that was Pukekukupa, they were substantial houses, built for families.

A couple of hundred metres before the first one, the well-kept track divided. Perdita took the fork that led to the homestead. Nestled behind its plantations of trees, all that could be seen of it was the pale orange bulk of the roof.

Her mouth dried with anticipatory dread; she had to fight the temptation to turn around and drive down the road, the three and a half hours back to Auckland, then get on to a jet to take her as far from New Zealand as possible. The seatbelt tightened across her chest as her foot hit the brake.

‘Oh, no, you don’t,’ she muttered fiercely, easing it off.

A tunnel of greenery led into a wide, gravelled forecourt in front of a gracious, two-storeyed wooden house built in the colonial Georgian style that had been fashionable seventy years before. As she pulled up and stopped the engine, moisture trickled disgustingly down Perdita’s spine and dampened her palms. Surreptitiously wiping her hands on a handkerchief before she got out, she forced air into her deflated lungs.

She knew who waited for her inside the homestead. Over Frank’s objections she had written to Luke Dennison a week ago to tell him that she was coming, and why.

‘He’ll run,’ Frank warned.

‘Not Luke Dennison.’ The idea was laughable.

The private investigator had given her a sharp look, but he hadn’t asked the question that was so clearly hovering on his tongue. Instead, he’d grunted and said pessimistically, ‘Then he’ll be waiting at the door with a battery of high-powered solicitors waving writs and a couple of policemen.’

‘I’ll take that chance.’

Now, looking at the perfectly proportioned house, after all these years still intimidated by its air of formal classicism, she wondered whether Frank had been right. Perhaps she should have simply arrived unannounced.

Sheer, cold willpower got her across to the path, and between low box hedges to the panelled front door with its graceful fanlights. Licking parched lips, she rang the doorbell.

To her astonishment Luke Dennison himself opened the door. Her great, gold-speckled green eyes skidded across his face, recreating the countenance of the man who had haunted her for the last eleven years, ever since that last visit to Pigeon Hill.

Four inches taller than Perdita, lean and lithe, perfectly proportioned, his rangy frame was made impressive by the hard muscles of physical labour. He blocked the doorway, watching her with a predator’s frightening, disciplined concentration. Neither the eyes that searched her face, eyes the colour and consistency of aquamarines, nor a beautifully cut mouth, softened the angles of his striking, unhandsome face. A straight blade of a nose gave him an air of patrician arrogance.

Dennisons had lived in this place for over a hundred years, lords of all they surveyed, and it showed.

‘Hello, Luke,’ Perdita said, her tone remote and rigidly controlled.

‘Perdita.’ Deep and textured to the edge of roughness, he had the kind of voice that could stroke indolently through a woman’s defences. However, there was no note of lazy sensuality in it now. Like hers, it was totally lacking in expression, as invulnerable as the compellingly hewn bone-structure of his face, as devoid of emotion as the icy, crystalline eyes. ‘Come in.’

Comprehension hit her like a blow as soon as she stepped through the door. The house was empty.

The mixture of fear and anticipation that had boosted her for the last five months drained away, leaving her limp with sour reaction, but unsurprised. After all, she hadn’t expected it to be easy. Long lashes veiled her eyes, giving her a sultry, enigmatic look.

‘The office, I think,’ he said, standing back so that she could precede him down the passage and into an expansive room where the latest in computer technology blended in odd harmony with kauri bookshelves and the rich colours, muted by time, of a Persian carpet.

Just inside the door Perdita stopped, regarding the man in front of her with relentless eyes. ‘Where are they?’ she said with sudden, betraying anxiety.

‘Would you like a drink?’ he asked, walking across to a cabinet. Instead of the careful gait of most big men he moved with an economical, animal grace that was peculiarly his.

‘No, thank you. Where are they?’ In spite of herself her voice trembled.

‘Sit down.’

She lowered herself into the wing chair, the last traces of nervousness replaced by a resentment that heated her skin and eyes. Although she expected him to loom over her, try to intimidate her with height and the blunt threat of his male strength and power, he too sat down, his pale eyes fixed on her face in a scrutiny that was controlled and ironic.

‘I’ve seen your photograph hundreds of times,’ he remarked, an undernote of sarcasm permeating the words, ‘and imagined that it was all done with make-up, but I was wrong. You are exquisitely beautiful.’

‘My looks are not important,’ she said, her voice held level by willpower. He was trying to make her angry— and succeeding only too well. But a fit of temper would compromise her self-command, and he’d take advantage of any weakness. She met his gaze with her own. ‘Where are the children?’