Page 1 of Strictly Business

CHAPTER ONE

SHE was sitting alone at the bar with her back to him, so he wasn’t sure why she caught his attention. Perhaps it was because she seemed so different from the rest of the under-thirty-fives who packed the Hippo Bar for Friday night cocktails. No laughter or mad flirting for her.

She was staring at her empty cocktail glass, stirring what was left of the ice cubes with a tiny back straw, oblivious to the happy commotion going on all around her.

Her clothes were different, too. No tight hipster jeans or bare midriff, no tattoos or piercings or spangly glitter.

Her shiny dark hair was caught up in a simple knot and her dress, something dark and feminine with one shoulder bare, offered a clear view of the graceful line of her neck and shoulders. Her skirt wasn’t especially short but it managed to reveal rather shapely legs.

He wanted to see her face; if it matched the rest of her it was, at the very least, elegant.

And then, miraculously, she turned and his lungs compressed as if he’d free-dived to the bottom of the Coral Sea. She was quite,quitelovely.

Her eyes were clear grey, her nose classic and her mouth lush. She’d dusted her eyelids with smoky hues and had drawn a fine black line to skim her lower lashes. The make-up gave her a dramatic, dusky allure.

A disturbing fantasy flashed into living technicolour in his head. He saw her in a different setting, somewhere remote, far away from this city and she was leaning towards him, her dark eyelashes spiky and wet... her cheeks flushed, her pink lips softly parted... and her eyes were begging him to make love to her.

He cursed softly at his foolishness and spun on his heel, eager to move on, to find a quieter, less crowded bar. But he made the fatal mistake of glancing back over his shoulder.

And this time, he was touched more by her air of solitude than her beauty. Her gaze was fixed on a spot in the distance, and yet she was staring at it without interest, as if she was seeing something else, some inner turmoil.

He recognised that look. He knew the loneliness hovering like a shadowing hawk behind her lovely eyes. There were many times he’d felt that.

Tonight was one of them.

Each year, this anniversary became more and more difficult and he’d chosen to fly north to Cairns a few days earlier than his business commitments required, simply to avoid spending this particular night in Sydney.

He’d planned to spend the night alone – content to be a sightseer, wandering this sultry, tropical city at whim, hoping to blank out bad memories by renewing his acquaintance with the sights and sounds and smells of the far north. A solitary stranger in town.

But now he’d seen the girl at the bar.

And his plans had to change.

Alice was trying to be brave.

It wasn’t easy to sit alone in a bar on her thirtieth birthday. Alone, for heaven’s sake! She had a right to feel down. Seriously down.

The annoying thing was that she had no one but herself to blame – she’d run away from her birthday party. Not the party her workmates had wanted to throw, but the family gathering her mother had insisted on arranging.

Very early in the night, Aunt Bettina voiced the family’s collective thoughts.

‘Poor Alice,’ she’d said, her voice choking, while her eyes became moons of sympathy. ‘Married before twenty and divorced before thirty. It’s a crying shame.’

No one – repeat, no one – not a single member of the Madigan family had ever been divorced. Louisa, the family’s genealogy expert, had researched on the web, so she was certain of this.

No one had been infertile either. And if the men in Alice’s family had ever indulged in extra-marital affairs, their women kept very quiet about it. It was an unspoken family law that Madigan women hung onto their husbands.

Alice had committed all three crimes – infertility, an unfaithful husband and a divorce. She was the family failure.

She’d had been trying hard to feel good about herself in spite of these disasters. She’d survived a wrecked marriage with her ego intact –just. She knew that she was better alone than she’d ever been with Todd. And she’d learned the bitter lesson that a woman shouldn’t rely on others – certainly not a husband or babies – to make her happy or to give meaning to her life.

It was up to her.

She’d come a long way in the past six months. But tonight her family made her feel like an obliterated body in a single vehicle crash. No hope. Dead on arrival.

As celebrations went, her party had been a flop. And as soon as the cake was cut she’d made her excuses, claiming that her workmates, who hung out at the Hippo Bar on Friday nights, were waiting for her.

The only problem was that her friends weren’t expecting her and by the time she arrived they’d moved on to a nightclub somewhere, and Alice didn’t have the heart to track them all over town on their phones.

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