LITMIR.BIZ

       PROLOGUE

      SARAH SAT AT her desk, twiddling her thumbs, bored to tears. Thank God it was Friday. Only a couple of hours to go and the working week would have ended, as would her tedious stint in Contracts and Mergers. Sarah hadn’t become a lawyer to spend her days filling out forms and asking people to sign on the dotted line. Anyone could do that. It didn’t take four years of study, doing a law degree.

      When she’d been offered a job at the prestigious legal firm of Goldstein & Evans, Sarah had imagined herself becoming the champion of the underdog, righting wrongs and representing innocent people in court. Instead, in the seven weeks since she’d joined the firm in January, she hadn’t even come close to setting foot in a court. She’d spent one week in Conveyancing, two in Trustees and Wills and then two in the family law section, which had not been to her liking at all. Still, at least it had been more interesting than what she’d been doing this last fortnight.

      Sarah was infinitely grateful that next week she would be moving on to the criminal and civil defence team, which was more her cup of tea. They had a pro bono section where some of the lawyers—usually the new ones, she gathered—were assigned to people who needed but could not afford legal representation. Sarah was looking forward to that.

      Meanwhile, she rolled her eyes as they returned to her laptop where she’d been filling in time, doing some research on a client who was coming in to sign a sales contract at three o’clock. For a diamond mine, no less! His name was Scott McAllister and he was supposedly some hotshot mining magnate whom Bob—her current mentor—said she should have known. Apparently he’d been on the TV a lot lately, because of a nickel refinery that was going bust, whose threatened closing down would cost a lot of jobs. Sarah wasn’t a great watcher of news programmes so she didn’t have a clue who he was.

      The Internet, however, had a reasonable amount of information on Scott McAllister. One of Australia’s youngest mining magnates, he had his finger in a lot of mining pies, having interests in iron ore, gold and coal as well as nickel and aluminium. And now diamonds, she added to the list. Apparently, he’d got his start after his prospector father had died over a decade earlier, the son soon discovering that two of his parent’s seemingly worthless purchases of land held hidden treasures. One had some decent-sized deposits of iron ore underneath which had originally looked like useless rock. The other was chock-full of brown coal.

      Bingo! Good old Dad. Luck, it seemed to Sarah, had played a big part in this McAllister’s success. Not according to Bob, however, who insisted their client was a very astute man, who had a history of buying rocks of his own and turning them into diamonds, for want of a better word.

      ‘Several reports stated that the diamond mine he’s buying today is all mined out,’ Bob had told her earlier today. ‘But a man like McAllister wouldn’t be buying it if that were the case. Clearly, he knows something that the present owners don’t know.’

      He’d sounded full of admiration for the man. Sarah wasn’t quick to admire any man. But she’d looked him up just the same out of sheer curiosity.

      Clicking onto a different site, she encountered a photograph of him that didn’t tell her much other than he was very tall and very well built. It had been snapped at a work site where all the men, including the owner, were wearing yellow safety vests and yellow hard hats. The caption underneath disclosed it was a recent photo, taken at the nickel refinery last month during a strike. It was impossible to see what McAllister really looked like as he was also wearing sunglasses. Amazing how much the eyes told you about a man’s looks. What she could see of his face was large and tough-looking, with suntanned skin, a strong nose and a squared jaw that could have been carved out of granite. A frown on his high forehead gave him a thoughtful look, but the set of his mouth was hard and uncompromising. He was reputedly only thirty-five, but he looked older. Not married, she’d also read, and decided that wasn’t surprising. He didn’t look like the type of man many women would take to, despite his wealth.

      Bob’s phone started to ring. Muttering a swear word under his breath, he swept it up to his ear. Thirty seconds later he swore even harder.

      ‘Sorry,’ he apologised to her. ‘But McAllister has arrived early and the other parties aren’t here yet. Neither have I finished reading through this damned complicated contract. Look, could you do me a favour and go down and welcome him? Take him up to the boardroom on the next floor and get him a coffee, or a drink or whatever he might like. You’re good at that sort of thing.’

      Sarah had no doubt she was. She’d been doing nothing much but getting coffee for Bob and his cohort since she started in this section. Might as well have been a waitress as well as a clerk. But her mother had taught her good manners, and excellent social skills. So she just smiled and said it would be her pleasure.

      He beamed back at her. ‘You are such a good girl,’ he said.

      Sarah might have taken offence if Bob had been any less than the sixty-three years he was. She was twenty-five years old. Twenty-six this year. Hardly a girl!

      Rising, she smoothed down her skirt and pushed her hair back from her face before making her way from the office and along the hallway to Reception, glad in a way to have something to do. And to be honest, she was quite curious about the man she was about to meet, curious to see what he looked like without those sunglasses.

      She spied him straight away, sitting all alone on one of the black leather two-seaters that dotted the large reception area. Dressed in a dark grey business suit, a white shirt and a rather dreary navy tie, he was leaning back with his arms outstretched along the back of the couch, his right foot hooked up over his left knee. His shoes, she noted, were clean but far from new. Fashion, she realised, was not one of this man’s long suits. Maybe mining magnates didn’t care about such things.

      Disappointingly, his eyes were closed, but she could see the rest of him more clearly. His hair was dark brown and cut very short on top, and even shorter at the sides; a very macho look, which suited him. His nose was bigger than she’d originally thought, but his face could handle it. His mouth was wide and his top lip on the thin, slightly cruel side. His bottom lip was fuller, though not full enough to soften his hard face.

      Even before he opened his eyes, Sarah knew Scott McAllister wasn’t a traditionally handsome man but there was something about him that she found perversely appealing. Odd, since she’d never been attracted to big macho-looking males, always finding them physically intimidating. She much preferred lean, elegantly handsome men who had more brains than brawn.

      She stopped a metre short of his feet and cleared her throat. ‘Mr McAllister?’ she said, a sudden burst of nerves making her voice higher than she would have liked. Her drama teacher at school had once called her voice

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