She dredged her memory and recalled that the driveway had gates that could possibly be locked too—and this adjacent wall was inside those gates. But hang on! Further along the pavement, hadn’t there been a pedestrian gate? No—just a gateway. Yes! So all she had to do was climb over the wall…How the hell was she going to do that, though?
She tensed as the back door opened, and slipped into some shadows as a kitchen hand emerged and deposited a load of garbage into a green wheelie bin and slammed it shut. He didn’t see her and went back inside, closing the door, but his use of the wheelie bin gave her an idea. She could push it against the wall, hoist herself onto it and slip over it to the house next door.
As with just about everything that had happened to her on this never-ending day, it wasn’t a perfect plan.
Firstly, just as she was about to emerge from the shadows and move the bin to the wall, more kitchen hands emerged with loads of garbage. This led her to reconsider things.
What if she did manage to get over the wall and someone came out to find the bin in a different position? But she couldn’t skulk around this service courtyard for much longer. A glance at her watch told her she’d already been there for twenty minutes.
She was biting her lip and clenching her fists in a bid to keep calm, almost certain she would have to go through the kitchen again, when something decided the matter for her.
She heard a male voice from the kitchen, calling out that he was locking the back door. She even heard the key turn.
She closed her eyes briefly, then sprinted to the bin, shoved it up against the wall, took her shoes off and threw them over. She looped her purse over her shoulder and, hitching up her dress, climbed onto the bin. Going over from Narelle’s side was easy, thanks to the height of the wheelie bin. Getting down the other side was not so easy. She had to hang onto the coping and try to guess what the shortfall was.
It was only about a foot, but she lost her balance as she dropped to the ground, and fell over. She was picking herself up and examining her torn tights and a graze on her knee when the driveway gates, with the sound of a car motor behind them, began to open inwards.
She straightened up and stared with fatal fascination at a pair of headlights as a long, low, sleek car nosed through the gates and stopped abreast of her.
The driver’s window was on her side, and it lowered soundlessly. She bent her head, and as her gaze clashed with the man behind the wheel things clicked into place for her.
‘Oh, I see,’ she said bitterly. ‘You own this place. That’s how you knew it was safe to park in the driveway!’
‘Got it in two, Liz,’ Cam Hillier agreed from inside his graphite-blue Aston Martin. ‘But what the devil you think you’re doing is a mystery to me.’
CHAPTER TWO
‘WHO IS HE?’
The question hung in the air as Liz looked around.
She was ensconced on a comfortable cinnamon velvet-covered settee. Across a broad wooden coffee table with a priceless-looking jade bonsai tree on it was a fireplace flanked by wooden-framed French doors. Above the fireplace hung what she suspected was an original Heidelberg School painting, a lovely impressionist pastoral scene that was unmistakably Australian. Tom Roberts? she wondered.
There were two matching armchairs, and some lovely pieces of furniture scattered on the polished wooden floors. The windows looked out over a floodlit scene—an elegant pool with a fountain, tall cypress pines, and beyond the lights of Sydney Harbour.
Not as spectacular as his great-aunt’s residence, Cam Hillier’s house was nevertheless stylish and very expensive—worth how many millions Liz couldn’t even begin to think.
Its owner was seated in an armchair across from her.
He’d shrugged off his jacket, pulled off his tie and opened the top buttons of his shirt. He’d also poured them each a brandy.
As for Liz, she’d cleaned herself up as best she could in a guest bathroom. She’d removed her torn tights, bathed her knee and applied a plaster to it. She’d washed her face and hands but not reapplied any make-up. It had hardly seemed appropriate when she had a rip in her dress, a streak of dirt on her jacket and was shoeless.
She’d been unable to find one shoe in the driveway—until they’d discovered it in a tub of water the gardener was apparently soaking a root-bound plant in.
So far, the only explanation she’d offered was that she’d seen someone at the party she’d had no desire to meet, so she’d tried to make a quick getaway that had gone horribly wrong.
She took a sip of her brandy, and felt a little better as its warmth slipped down.
She eyed Cameron Hillier and had to acknowledge that he was equally impressive lying back in an armchair, in his shirtsleeves and with his thick dark hair ruffled, as he’d been at his great-aunt’s party. On top of that those fascinating, brooding blue eyes appeared to be looking right through her…
‘He?’ she answered at last. ‘What makes you think—?’
‘Come on, Liz,’ he said roughly. ‘If this story is true at all, I can’t imagine a woman provoking that kind of reaction! Anyway, I saw you fix your gaze on some guy, then go quite pale and still before you…decamped. Causing me no little discomfort, incidentally,’ he added dryly.
Her eyes widened. ‘Did you get mobbed?’
He looked daggers at her for a moment. ‘No. But I did get Narelle to search the powder rooms when I realised how long you’d been gone. She was,’ he said bitterly, ‘riveted.’
‘And then?’
He shrugged. ‘There seemed to be no sign of you, so we finally assumed you’d called a taxi and left.’
‘Meanwhile I was lurking around in the service courtyard,’ Liz said with a sigh. ‘All right, it was a he. We…we were an item once, but it didn’t work out and I just—I just didn’t want to have to—to face him,’ she said rather jaggedly.
Cam Hillier frowned. ‘Fair enough,’ he said slowly. ‘But why not tell me and simply walk out through the front door?’
Liz bit her lip and took another sip of brandy. ‘I got a bit of a shock—I felt a little overwrought,’ she confessed.
‘A little?’ he marvelled. ‘I would say more like hysterical—and that doesn’t make sense. You laid yourself open to Narelle suspecting you of casing the joint. So could I, come to that. One or the other or both of us might have called the police. Plus,’ he added pithily, ‘I wouldn’t have taken you for a hysterical type.’
Ah, but you don’t know the circumstances, Liz thought, and took another fortifying sip of brandy.
‘Affairs of the heart are…can be different,’ she said quietly. ‘You can be the essence of calm at other times, but—’ She stopped and gestured, but she didn’t look at him because she sounded lame even to her own ears.
He surprised her. ‘So,’ he said slowly, and with a considering look, ‘not such an Ice Queen after all, Ms Montrose?’
Liz didn’t reply.
He frowned. ‘I’ve just remembered something. You’re a single mother, aren’t you?’
Liz looked up at that, her eyes suddenly as cool as ice.
He waved an impatient hand. ‘I’m not being critical, but it’s just occurred to me that’s why you’re temping.’
‘Yes,’ she said, and relaxed a little.
‘Tell me about it.’
She cradled her glass in both hands for a moment, and, as always happened to her when she thought of the miracle in her life, some warmth