Kate herself had never breathed a word to a living soul about what had happened on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast on that unseasonably hot September day. It was far too humiliating.
‘Of course I love Brendan.’ She injected surprise into her voice at the question. ‘He’s an easy guy to love.’ A thoroughly nice, thoroughly safe, thoroughly dependable guy. Not a heartless, high-flying, sweep-you-off-your-feet powerhouse like Jonathan Savage. Brendan was a gentle, steady, reliable, average sort of guy—average height, average looks, average temperament—with a better than average job as a tax accountant, running his own successful business.
There had been nothing average about Jack. Jonathan Savage, she corrected, with a hardening of her mouth.
Nothing steady or reliable either.
Poor Charlotte... Kate’s eyes misted as she thought of her sister.
‘There!’ Madame Yvette rose to her feet. ‘All finished. The gown will be ready for you to pick up by the end of next week, dear. Let me help you out of it now...’
Kate glanced at her watch as the beautiful silk and lace wedding gown was removed and whisked away. ‘Oh, heck, Mel, I’ll have to fly. I’m on duty at three!’
It was nearly that already.
‘You go ahead.’ Melanie waved her away. ‘I have to buy my mother a birthday present, to take home at the weekend.’ It was her afternoon off from the crèche.
Kate nodded, thanked her for coming, then dashed out to where she’d parked her car, uttering a string of curses when she found a parking ticket on the windscreen.
Her parking meter had expired! Furious with herself for not sending Melanie out during her fitting to feed in extra coins, she flounced into the driver’s seat and sped off in the direction of the hospital. She knew she could well end up with a speeding ticket as well, but better that than being late. She prided herself on her punctuality.
The doctors’ car park looked aggravatingly crammed with cars as she bowled through the self-opening gates. Lowly residents didn’t have reserved spaces. She would just have to drive up and down the rows of cars until she found a vacant spot.
Her eyes lit up as she spied a clear space. She swung the car into the vacant bay with a sigh of relief—only to groan in frustration when she saw the sign in front of her. ‘Nursing Director Only.’ Damn! She’d wasted precious seconds. She backed out again far too fast...and heard the sickening crunch of metal on metal.
‘Oh, no!’ she moaned, slamming her foot on the brake. She hadn’t seen the car passing behind her, and the driver, naturally, wouldn’t have been expecting her to back out a mere second after she’d nosed her way in! ‘Damn, damn, damn!’ she fumed. She had no one to blame but herself!
She jumped out of the car, hoping the other driver would be someone she knew so they could settle any damage details later. Hoping that the damage, if any, was minimal.
The driver of the other car—an expensive-looking BMW, she noted in dismay—was already stepping out of the driver’s seat, unfolding his considerable frame.
Just her luck to strike a big gun, she thought with a sinking heart. He was obviously a visiting consultant or professor, not a mere resident like herself. Worse, he was a doctor she didn’t know. A man of imposing presence, with the height and build of a gladiator—a sophisticated gladiator in a charcoal-grey suit.
‘What the hell were you thinking of, backing out like that?’ he roared, bending down to examine a large dent in the side of his car. ‘Look what you’ve done! This is a brand-new car!’
‘I’m sorry,’ Kate mumbled. Anyone would think she’d done it on purpose! A snap glance revealed that her own car had suffered no damage at all—thanks to the solid rear bumper bar. ‘I—I noticed that I’d swung into a reserved space, and I was just...’ She trailed off as he straightened and they came face to face for the first time.
A devastating swooshing sensation swept through her, as if all her blood and everything else inside her were rushing from her body. As if she were dissolving. Liquefying. The car park spun. Her head spun.
It couldn’t be.
She stared, trying madly to pull herself together, trying madly to stay upright.
It was Jack!
No, not Jack... Icy reality clawed its way back, swamping that initial, distressingly emotional reaction.
‘Jonathan Savage,’ she hissed through her teeth.
A very different Jonathan Savage from the bronzed, half-naked Samson who’d plucked her from the sea five years ago...
CHAPTER TWO
‘KATE, don’t waste this glorious sunshine. You go ahead down to the beach,’ Diana urged. ‘I’ll join you after the police have been. They said not to touch anything, so there’s nothing you can do here, and they won’t want us both underfoot.’
‘Are you sure?’ Kate glanced over the chaos around them.
‘Quite sure. I feel bad enough as it is, bringing you all the way up here to Queensland for nothing. I thought Charlotte’s briefcase would have been safe here at my beach-house, locked away in a cupboard.’
Kate and her sister’s friend Diana—a high-powered merchant banker just back from a two-year assignment in London—had arrived at Shelly Beach less than an hour ago to find that burglars had robbed Diana’s beach-house in her absence. Everything of any value had gone. The TV set, the video, the microwave, the radio.
And Charlotte’s briefcase. The briefcase Kate’s sister had entrusted to Diana’s care two years ago, shortly before her shock suicide. It was the reason Diana had brought Kate up here—so she could hand it over to Kate in private.
The briefcase contained highly delicate papers, Charlotte had confided to Diana. Papers she wasn’t ready to deal with yet and didn’t want to leave lying around at the family home for her father to find, or at the hospital where she’d worked.
‘Could you look after it for me for a while?’ she’d begged Diana. ‘If I’m hit by a bus or anything,’ she’d added—jokingly, Diana had thought, ‘you can hand it over to Kate. She can decide what to do with it. But not for a year or so, OK? Let the dust settle.’
And now the briefcase was gone, along with whatever personal papers Charlotte had locked away inside. For Diana’s sake, Kate hadn’t shown how dismayed she was that the last clue to her sister’s tragic suicide had gone.
Not that we need any more clues, she reflected darkly. Jonathan Savage is to blame for my sister’s death. If he hadn’t walked out on Charlotte... if he hadn’t been so cruel and uncaring...
Her eyes hardened as she thought of the note Charlotte had scribbled before drifting into that last deadly sleep: ‘I can’t live with the pain. Johnnie, forgive me.’
The pain of losing him...
Charlotte—hard-nosed, self-centred, blazingly ambitious Charlotte, who’d never been seriously interested in any man before, let alone head-over-heels in love—had been crazy about Jonathan Savage. They’d worked at the same hospital...trained together...spent most of their spare time together. And then he’d walked out on her, just like that, flying off to America without a backward glance.
It had devastated Charlotte. In her despair, she’d messed up a vital interview a week later, losing the surgical registrar position she’d craved for so long and worked so hard for.
For Charlotte, that must have been the last straw. Three weeks later she’d swallowed a bottle full of lethal pills. And even then she’d been thinking of him. ‘Forgive me,’ she’d written...as if she’d been freeing him of any blame or possible self-recrimination.