Be that as it may, their calamitous fight had been their only real argument.
“As twins we stick together! One for all and all for one!” This was their childhood swashbuckling mantra when they were heavily into Alexandre Dumas. She and Bella loved each other. They loved Zoe, who as it turned out was not their father’s child, but their late mother’s indiscretion. Their mother of all people! She, who they had regarded as being right up there with Mother Teresa.
“Mother must have been a saint. They say only the good die young.” She had actually said that once to Bella in an effort to curb her sister’s wildness, which went far beyond high spirits. Both of them at the time had believed it to be entirely true.
Now she had to pinch herself hard to remind herself that darling Zoe was therefore illegitimate. She and Bella had argued over whether to tell Zoe or conceal the fact from her. Their fiery debate had had devastating consequences for the entire family.
“If only I could go back in time!” She often found herself breaking the silence to lament. They hadn’t been foolish enough to conduct their argument in public. They had had the sense to retire to a private room to hurl insults at each other, but not the continuing good sense to shut the door firmly. Their heated discussion over Zoe’s legitimacy, a matter that consumed them, had been overheard by an unscrupulous member of the press.
The press and the paparazzi were forever hot on the trail of the Beautiful Balfour Girls, Bella in particular. The journalist must have thought all his coups had come at once. He got off a starkly telling photo of the two of them in the heat of their fury—hers self-righteous, Bella’s impassioned—plus all he had overheard of their argument which was practically verbatim. Next morning, story and photograph had been splashed across the front page of a national newspaper.
Another Illegitimacy Scandal Rocks Balfour Family
Even as she thought of it Olivia cringed in mind and body. When would the soul-searching stop? When would her disgust with herself begin to abate? She had to face the fact she could be left with eternal regret or, as Bella had said lying limply across her twin’s bed,
“Sooner or later, Olivia, we have to pay for our sins. When it comes down to it we’re no different from anyone else.”
What nonsense! Of course they were different. They lived in a stately home for one thing. The family was mentioned in Debrett’s and Who’s Who. To top it off their father was a billionaire. This time they were all paying, from her illustrious father down, when it was she and Bella who had finally toppled the grand Balfour edifice. How shocking was that?
Was it any wonder their father had reinstituted the Balfour Family Rules, a code of conduct that had been passed down from generation to generation within the Balfour family? All eight of Oscar’s daughters through their father’s three marriages, and both their mother’s and their father’s misalliances—had accepted his decision to send them away from the scene of the family humiliation.
“You need to face your limitations, my daughters, and hopefully find your strengths,” he had exhorted with as much gravitas as a hanging judge.
They could have refused. She had certainly considered it. But they didn’t.
“A point very much in your favour,” Oscar Balfour conceded.
Bella had been handed rule one. Dignity.
She had been given her own rule. Rule eight. Humility.
When their father had first handed her rule eight, she had looked back at him in blank astonishment.
“Humility, Daddy? What can you mean?” She felt enormously hurt.
He had taken up valuable time to explain.
Now in a moment of self-clarity she saw she just might have a need to develop that overrated virtue. She knew what people thought of her: aloof, cool to the point of glacial, supremely self-confident, self-assured, really a snob and a bit of a prude, the least approachable of the Balfour girls. Not true. At least, not entirely. The cool bit was in order. She was a private person. Indeed she had a passion for privacy. But at the heart of it she couldn’t do without her defence mechanisms any more than Bella, both of them cruelly robbed of a mother and a mother’s love and guidance when they had barely mastered the trick of abseiling down their cots.
“Doesn’t anyone realise what losing a mother does to a child? The effects are felt forever.”
“God, tell me something I don’t know!” Bella, clad in a gorgeous imperial-yellow silk kimono decorated with richly embroidered chrysanthemums and mystical birds, had cried. In many ways Bella was a bit of a drama queen.
So in the end she and Bella, who really didn’t have a personality disorder as she had so wrongly accused her, accepted their banishments.
“Both of us have to master the rule, Olivia.” Bella, for once, showed meekness.
It was certainly their father’s directive. A cue for obedience if ever there was one. “It will get you safely through life so you never again bring shame on the family name.” He had spoken as if he was throwing them all a lifeline. For herself, she had to confess she ever so slightly resented the fact he had omitted to mention his own part in the debacle. It was his “girls” who had to take the direct hit.
“We have to work out our punishment,” Bella had said, apparently not feeling the same degree of betrayal. “Take it on the chin.”
“Punishment? I prefer to look on it as a challenge.”
A challenge—far, far away from their comfort zone.
“Good grief, Daddy, not Australia!” She had a vision of that very large island continent not all that far off the South Pole. Surely they had sent convicts there?
“Australia, it is!” Her father had fixed her with the piercing Balfour eyes. “You’re to work in whatever capacity is required of you, Olivia. At least you have the Balfour good business head on your shoulders.”
She should have reminded him that had already been established. But to be obliged to work for a man she had only met briefly and had cause to intensely dislike? Could she even do it, much as she was made of stern stuff?
Clint McAlpine, Australian cattle baron, had been the only person in her life outside Bella who had had the temerity to tell her to her face—she had only been showing him her normal demeanour at the time—that she badly needed taking down a peg.
“Come down from your high ivory tower, ice princess,” he’d advised, a satirical twist to his handsome mouth. “Mix with mere mortals. I promise it will do you a power of good.”
She winced at the memory! Just because he was a billionaire like their father didn’t give him the right to tick her off. Maybe for that very reason his image, incredibly vivid, had stuck in her head. It had never diminished. Something she didn’t understand.
There was some distant family connection on her father’s side; that’s how they had met up. Functions, a family wedding. The McAlpines often visited London on business or pleasure or a mix of both. A few years back, her father had bought a large block of shares in the McAlpine Pastoral Company which must have prompted his decision to send her into the McAlpine stronghold. Evidently her father trusted McAlpine as he had trusted McAlpine’s late father, a man of good British stock. He must have been a much nicer man altogether. So now, a scant two days after the Balfour disaster she was on the threshold of taking up her challenge.
At the end of the earth.
Australia.
CHAPTER ONE
Darwin, capital of the Northern Territory, gateway to Australia