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      CHAPTER ONE

      SHE WAS IN a very dark, very smoky, very crowded room, crammed with unfamiliar faces, most of them contorted into frighteningly threatening grimaces. Panic surged through her in waves. She wanted to turn and run and yet for some reason her feet remained locked to the floor. Alien sounds and scents filled the air; she was overwhelmed by the despairing conviction that she could never, ever escape from the place of torment her inner consciousness told her her surroundings were, and then miraculously a door opened; light flooded the room and a man stood there his arms open wide to encourage her to run to him, his face in the shadows, but she knew without seeing his features who he was, and his name was torn from her lips on a glad cry as she ran for the haven of his arms.

      ‘Daddy …’ She cried his name again, her relief suddenly, horrifyingly turning to terror as he stepped into the light and she saw that he was not her father at all but someone else—a stranger—dark and forbidding, unknown to her and yet somehow recognised by her inner senses … recognised and feared. She screamed, and screamed again, and it was the sound of her own pain and fear that eventually jolted her out of the fantasy world of her nightmare and back to reality.

      The nightmare. Lissa shuddered deeply, touching her damp skin with trembling fingers. It was years since she had been tormented by it—well three years at least, she amended mentally … since she had made the break from home and come to live in London. Sighing faintly she glanced at her watch. Six-thirty … There was no point in trying to get back to sleep now. She would have to get up in another hour anyway.

      She padded through the bedroom of her small flat and into the kitchen busying herself making a mug of coffee. The fragrant scent of the beans soothed her sensitive nerve endings, the warmth of the drink stealing into her chilled fingers as they closed round the mug. It was still only January and the central heating hadn’t come on yet. She shivered violently in her nightdress and pattered back to her room, sliding under the duvet; snuggling its comforting warmth all around her. Amanda would have laughed and said something silly, like the best way to keep warm in bed was to share it with a man. When Amanda said things like that everyone laughed. Her sister had a way of saying the most outrageously suggestive things with an innocence that robbed them of their sting. Even after three years of marriage and two children Amanda still looked like a little girl, with her mop of blonde curls and her large blue eyes. Or at least she had done. Deep shudders of mingled guilt and pain racked her as she sat huddled beneath the bedclothes. Dear God even now she could hardly believe it was true; that that midnight call three days ago had actually happened … That her sister, her brother-in-law and both sets of parents had been killed outright when a freak thunder-storm had struck the light aircraft her brother-in-law had been piloting.

      She had not seen much of her sister since her marriage—nor of her parents. There had been duty visits of course, but there had always been an air of uncomfortable restraint about them. She knew her parents had never forgotten, nor really forgiven her for what she had done. It was useless for her aching heart to protest that she was innocent. They would never have believed her. Tears formed in her eyes and fell unheeded rolling down her cheeks. Was she crying for her sister, or for herself Lissa asked herself cynically. She and Amanda had never been particularly close. There were four years between them, Amanda being the elder, and to Lissa as a child it had often seemed that whilst some Fairy Godmother must have looked down into her sister’s cradle and given her the gift of a happy life; hers had been blighted by the machinations of some mischievous spirit who had ensured that she was destined always to be in trouble.

      It had taken her years of exhaustive self analysis to understand that she was not to blame; that those things which she saw in herself as hopeless inadequacies because they did not mirror her sister’s virtues, were not necessarily that. It was stupid to have the nightmare now, after so long had passed … Why had she had it? Why? Did she really need to ask herself that question, Lissa mocked herself. Of course not. She knew exactly why she had dreamed so horrifically of that party, of that long ago night, of Joel Hargreaves, her sister’s brother-in-law, and now, with her, co-guardian of the two little girls who had been orphaned in the plane crash that had robbed Lissa herself of parents and sister … just as it had robbed Joel of brother and parents.

      She had not been able to believe it when she received the phone call from Amanda’s and John’s solicitors. She had gone to see them immediately, taking time off work to do so, and had been stunned to hear of the tragic accident that had taken place while Amanda and John were visiting John’s parents in Miami.

      If Joel hadn’t

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