LITMIR.BIZ

       PROLOGUE

      PERDITA GLADSTONE smoothed moisturiser on to her famous translucent skin, then glanced at her watch. Twenty minutes until the taxi came. In five more months this high-pressure life would be over, and oh, how glad she’d be! Modelling had been good to her, but only ever as a means to an end.

      She stared with dispassionate interest at the face that had looked out from a million magazines, been admired on the world’s most noted catwalks, a face almost universally heralded as her generation’s most mesmerising.

      Not that Perdita had ever succumbed to the extravagant ravings of the hype machine. During the last ten years she’d developed a healthy cynicism. When she began she’d been the trendsetter; her dramatic bone-structure, height of six feet and translucent Celtic skin were touted as the look of the decade, the eight or nine pale golden freckles across her nose providing a piquant contrast to the starkly sculptured, sensuous spareness of her face.

      It was the right look at the right time and she owed it to the photographer in Auckland who had taken the first shots for her portfolio.

      He’d insisted she pose for a full-face profile wearing the high headdress of Nefertiti, wife of the Pharaoh of Egypt. The contrast between her heavy-lidded, oriental air of serene mystery and her warm northern European colouring had created an enormous stir. That photograph had taken her all the way from New Zealand to the heights of international fame. And she’d achieved ‘the Perdita look’ as a very nervous seventeen-year-old wearing jeans, a towel around her breasts, and a headdress co-opted from a fancy-dress hire business!

      However, her decade was over. Elfin waifs were set to conquer the fashionable world during the next twelve months, and Perdita was going to take her hefty investment portfolio and substantial bank balance and retire thankfully to the obscurity from which she’d come.

      Brushing back the flood of barely waving, silky amber hair that was her trademark, she pulled a face at her reflection. Obscurity couldn’t come soon enough.

      Outside, the New York traffic thundered past in a hail of tooting, jostling, urgent taxi cabs. And the telephone rang.

      ‘Damn,’ she muttered in a voice that still held faint traces of a New Zealand accent. It had to be someone she trusted; her number was unlisted. And that meant it was reasonably important. Picking up the receiver, she said crisply, ‘Hello?’

      ‘Perdita Gladstone?’ There was more than a trace of New Zealand in this masculine voice. It was pure NewZild, broad and unashamed.

      The breath died in Perdita’s throat. Staring blindly out over Fifth Avenue to the green, interloper’s glory of Central Park, she swallowed as one hand curved protectively around the antique “Victorian locket—another trademark—which she wore on a thin gold chain around her neck.

      ‘Yes, it is I,’ she said hoarsely, giving the simple code she had worked out with him.

      For ten years she had been waiting for this, for half that time searching actively. The last occasion Frank had rung he’d said the name she wanted was very close.

      ‘I’ve got them.’ He always tried to sound deadpan as a good private detective should, but there was no hiding the jubilant note in his voice. ‘Natalie and Luke Dennison. They live at a little place called Manley up in Northland.’

      Shock dimmed the green trees in the park, banished the ever-present throb and hum of the city to a faint, gasping echo. Perdita looked back, down ten years to a place so far removed from this that they might well be on different planets.

      She’d known there was an element of risk in what she was doing; she’d had no idea that it would jeopardise everything she had made of her life.

      ‘Are you there? Miss Gladstone? Perdita?’ Frank’s voice registered a sudden alarm.

      ‘Dennison?’ The voice wasn’t hers. It croaked rather than breathed, and the cool control was lost to a shaky tremor. ‘I’m all right. Dennison,’ she repeated on a long, ragged sigh. ‘Luke Dennison.’

      ‘Yup. He’s a big man in the north—owns a huge cattle and sheep

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