Praise for Nikki Logan
‘Superb debut. 4.5 Stars.’
—RT Book Reviews on Lights, Camera … Kiss the Boss!
‘Now, here is an Australian writer who manages both to tell a good story and to capture Australia well. I had fun from start to finish. Nikki Logan will be one to watch.’
—www.goodreads.com on
Lights, Camera … Kiss the Boss!
‘This story has well defined and soundly motivated characters as well as a heart-wrenching conflict.’
—RT Book Reviews on Their Newborn Gift
About Nikki Logan
NIKKI LOGAN lives next to a string of protected wetlands in Western Australia, with her long-suffering partner and a menagerie of furred, feathered and scaly mates. She studied film and theatre at university, and worked for years in advertising and film distribution before finally settling down in the wildlife industry. Her romance with nature goes way back, and she considers her life charmed, given she works with wildlife by day and writes fiction by night—the perfect way to combine her two loves. Nikki believes that the passion and risk of falling in love are perfectly mirrored in the danger and beauty of wild places. Every romance she writes contains an element of nature, and if readers catch a waft of rich earth or the spray of wild ocean between the pages she knows her job is done.
Once A Rebel…
Nikki Logan
For Tracy Scarparolo.
And to Dan, the best office-mate and friend a girl could have.
Table of Contents
PROLOGUE
www.remembermrsmarr.com
Front row seats for a Beethoven symphony
Bungee jump in New Zealand
Run a marathon
Ride like The Man from Snowy River
Hunt for a dinosaur fossil
Commune with the penguins in Antarctica
Float in a Hot Air Balloon
Climb the Sydney Harbour Bridge
Take a gondola ride in Venice
Climb Everest
Abseil down a cliff face
Be transported by a touch
Get up close and personal with dolphins
Take a cruise
Hold my grandchild
www.rem—
SHIRLEY keyed the first letters of the web address into her browser before it auto-completed the rest. She visited enough that it knew exactly where she wanted to go.
www.remembermrsmarr.com
The simple site opened and she spent the first moments—as she always did—staring at the face of her mother, captured forever in time in a delighted, head-thrown-back kind of joy. Exactly as she would have wanted people to see her. Exactly as her students did see her. And exactly how Shirley chose to remember her now, with the benefit of distance.
Clicking through to the list she knew was on the next page only disappointed.
Still nothing in the first column—the one headed ‘HT.’
After all this time.
Hayden Tennant had been her mother’s all-time favourite student. He’d been the one—hurt and grieving—to suggest the tribute website in the first place. So that they could each do the items on her mother’s bucket list. All the life experiences an unlicensed drunk-driver had robbed her of.
Hayden had pledged.
He’d vowed in that gorgeous, thick, grief-filled voice.
Yet every single square next to every single item on www.remembermrsmarr.com was empty where Hayden’s initials should have been.
Today was an extra sucky day to be staring at the list and finding it empty. Because today was ten years since Carol-Anne Marr had taken her last breath. How many weeks had passed before he’d forgotten all about it?