LITMIR.BIZ

      PROLOGUE

      Christmas morning, Melbourne.

      WILL TURNED his six-month-old niece, Caelyn, in his arms so she could watch her elder brothers and sisters open presents. Little Caelyn’s warm, sweet-smelling body nestled snugly in the crook of his arm and her tiny hand curled around his finger.

      “Another year and you’ll be opening your own presents,” Will assured her as he tore the paper off a soft toy. “Look, a lion! Grrr.” He nuzzled the orange mane into Caelyn’s neck until she giggled, her dark-blue eyes flashing with glee.

      Will’s sister Julie crouched before his chair with a camera. “Smile, Caelyn. Smile at your uncle Will.” She snapped the photo and sat back on her heels. “When are you going to settle down and have a family, Will? You don’t want to be like Dad and wait till you’re an old man to have children.”

      No, he definitely did not. Will’s father had been fifty-five when Will was born. By the time Will was old enough to play footy or cricket, William Sr. was walking with a cane. And by the time Will was ten, his father was dead of a heart attack.

      He thought about his big house on the bay just begging to be filled with children’s laughter, and the hollow spaces in his heart seemed to expand. He’d turned thirty-six last month; he had to get cracking. “Soon,” he told Julie. “I’ll be starting a family soon.”

      “You’ll need a wife,” his brother-in-law, Mike, reminded him jokingly, before a water pistol aimed by his eldest boy got him in the neck. “Hey, not in the house!” Mike spun and tickled the laughing child under the arms until he dropped the water pistol.

      Enviously, Will watched Mike cavort with his children as they spilled out of the family room and into the backyard, shrieking with laughter in the summer sun.

      “Will won’t have any trouble finding a wife.” Julie had put down the camera and was handing him a glass of eggnog.

      “Cheers.” Will sipped the frosty drink. Since he’d broken up with Maree four years ago there’d been no one serious in his life. The sporty, carefree girls who hung out at the Surf Lifesaving Club were too young to really talk to, and most women his age were either married already or increasingly set in their ways, even as they searched for some elusive romantic ideal.

      He had tried to find love, and for a while with Maree, he’d thought he had. The years since they’d parted had eroded his belief in happily-ever-after, but not his desire for a family. The tricky part of marriage was finding that special woman who wanted children as much as he. He knew if he just took a rational approach, he could solve the problem.

      After all, he had the rest of his life under control.