LITMIR.BIZ

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       Chapter Twenty

       Epilogue

       Extract

       Copyright

ONE

      Luke Hargreaves had never seen such an unholy mess in all his life. Uprooted trees competed for space amidst the smashed and splintered building debris. Dangerous electrical and glass hazards lay strewn everywhere. Only one out of the dozen buildings that made up the five-acre property where the Tropicana Nights had sprawled for forty years had survived intact.

      Holy crap. The resort was never going to recover from this.

      It was hard to believe standing underneath the perfect untainted blue of a tropical north Queensland sky, listening to the gentle kiss of waves as they lapped at the crescent beach fringing this idyllic tourist spot, that weather could be responsible for such violence.

      That the light breeze could build to cyclonic, that the cloudless sky could blacken with ominous intent and the calm ocean could rage and pound.

      Sure, cyclones were one of the hazards of living on the northern Australian coastline and the resort had sustained damage in the past from such events that regularly stalked the coast from November to March.

      But never like this.

      This one had been a monster and Crescent Cove’s number had been up.

      A decade in the UK had anaesthetised him to the dangers of tropical storms, but, looking at the destruction now, it was a miracle no one had been killed.

      All thanks to Claudia.

      Luke’s gaze trekked from the devastated resort to the devastated figure standing on the beach, her back to the ocean as she surveyed the damage. Avery had told him Claudia was taking it all in her stride. But he knew Claudia Davis well. Too well. And her look of hopeless despair was evident even from this distance.

      Somehow inside his head, despite the march of time, she’d always been a skinny six-year-old with blonde pigtails and skinned knees. And there was something just as gut-wrenchingly innocent about her today. Her ponytail fluttering in the gentle breeze, her petite frame encased in the God-awful polyester Tropicana uniform that hadn’t changed since the seventies, that damn stupid clipboard she always carried around clutched to her chest.

      The intense little wrinkle of her brow as if she was trying to wish it all better from the power of her mind alone.

      He sighed. He was not looking forward to this.

      He shucked off his shoes and stripped off his socks leaving them at the row of lopsided palm trees that formed a natural demarcation between beach and land. Or what was left of them anyway.

      Crescent Cove’s beloved palm-tree avenue, which hugged the long curve of beach, was looking equally devastated. Whole trees had been ripped out by the roots, plucked clean from the ground and thrown around as if they’d been mere matchsticks, some still lying on the path or beach wherever they’d been hurled.

      It would take a lot of years to build it back to its former glory.

      The hot sun beat down on Luke’s neck, a far cry from chilly London, and he shrugged out of his jacket too. He undid his cuffs and rolled up his sleeves on his business shirt. He turned his phone to silent and slipped it in his back pocket. He didn’t want to be disturbed when he spoke to her and he’d already had three urgent texts from the office.

      Taking a deep, fortifying breath, he stepped onto the beach and headed towards the woman he’d known nearly all his life, his footsteps squeaking in the powdery sand.

      * * *

      Claudia stared at the wreck before her, a sense of helplessness and despair overwhelming her. She should have known that only a cyclone named Luke could cause this much damage.

      She refused to give into the harsh burn of tears scalding her eye sockets.

      She would not cry.

      Crying was for wimps and she was not a wimp. She’d spent a year of her life renovating her beloved family resort and just because it lay in a shambled ruin in front of her didn’t mean it was time to give into a fit of girly histrionics.

      She held tight to the comfort of her clipboard. They would recover from this. They had to.

      But how? a little voice asked somewhere in the back of her brain, bleating away in time to the distant drone of generators that had filled the air for days now. The same voice she’d been hearing every time she stood on the beach and was confronted by the true horror of the destruction of the only home she’d ever known.

      Well, there was the main resort building—the original structure—for a start. Even now its white stucco façade gleamed beneath the full morning sun like a beacon amidst the rubble, its sturdy stone construction having somehow miraculously survived Mother Nature’s fury with only minimal damage.

      How, Claudia had no idea.

      How had the dinosaur—or White Elephant as Luke had coined it—managed to survive when the newer edition bungalows, made to the highest ever cyclone specifications, had perished?

      It didn’t make any sense. It had been four days since Cyclone Luke, a huge category-five juggernaut, had crossed the coast right on top of them, and it still didn’t make any sense.

      None of it did.

      Tears threatened again and Claudia blinked them back. She refused to cry as Avery had done. Tears wouldn’t get the Tropicana back on its feet and Claudia was determined to hold it all together if it killed her. She’d been doing that since Luke had deserted her to run the place by herself, since their respective parents had handed the keys over to them and entrusted twenty years of their life’s work to their children.

      She would not be cowed by the mammoth task ahead of her just as she’d refused to be cowed by Luke’s ultimatum this time last year to have the resort turned around in twelve months—or else!

      She hadn’t needed him to elaborate on his threat—and it really hadn’t been an issue because she had turned it around. They’d had a bumper summer, there was money in the bank and they’d been poised to welcome their best ever winter season in over a decade.

      And then along came Cyclone Luke. As determined as the other Luke in her life to take away everything she’d ever known and loved.

      ‘Bloody hell, Claude. You’re never going to recover from this.’

      Claudia blinked as the eerily familiar voice behind her caused everything inside her—her heartbeat, her breath, the metabolism in her cells—to come to a standstill.

      Luke?

      She turned and there he was. Standing right there. Every tall, lean, clean-shaven inch of him. Close enough to touch. Close enough to feel a very familiar pull down deep and low.

      Luke.

      The boy she’d hero-worshipped, the teenager she’d crushed on, the man who’d disappointed her more than she’d ever thought possible when he’d turned his back on their legacy.

      You’re never going to recover from this?

      His words were like a jolt to the chest from a defibrillator and then everything surged back to life. Her lungs dragged in a swift harsh breath, her heart kicked her in the ribcage with all the power of a mule, her cells started metabolising again at warp speed.

      You’re never going to recover from this?

      Oh, no! He had to be kidding. This had to be a monumental joke. A very bad one.

      But no, here he was, in a freaking business shirt and

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