The Shining Of Love
Emma Darcy
CONTENTS
A Note from the Author
Fourteen of the world’s unwanted children were gathered into the James family from different countries, and at different ages, some of them suffering from experiences they had been subjected to before being rescued by the two wonderful people who adopted them and turned their lives around.
Tiffany had the easiest path into the family. She had no memory of any other life. Although not Fijian, she had been left on the doorstep of a church in Suva, a newborn baby whose mother could not be found or identified. This never troubled Tiffany. To her mind, she belonged to the greatest family in the world and wanted no other. Every day was an adventure, and life was to be seized and made beautiful. Determined to set up the best possible future for her crippled brother, Tiffany plunged into organising a tourist development on the Gold Coast of Queensland, and it was her zest and optimism for this project that brought her to the man she was to love in the story Ride the Storm, HP#1401.
Rebel was seven years old when she was adopted into the James family. Her English mother had been one of the war orphans shipped to Australia in 1944. Whoever her father was, he was long gone before Rebel was born, and when she was five years old, her mother died and she was fostered out to people who exploited such children. She continually ran away and was labelled as an uncontrollable child by the welfare people. Found and rescued by the James family, she grew into a woman who could take on the world in her own inimitable style, and in the book Dark Heritage, HP#1511, she took on the Earl of Stanthorpe over his treatment of a child. This story is set in England, at Davenport Hall, where Rebel’s mother had been briefly housed before being shipped to Australia. Childhood memories of her mother’s stories took Rebel there. Unbeknownst to her, her mother’s parents had traced their lost daughter to the same place. In the course of her battle to win the hearts of both the earl and the child, Davenport Hall became the meeting ground for Rebel and her maternal grandparents to find each other.
Suzanne was three years old when she was adopted into the James family. She was orphaned by the death of her father in a rodeo event at the Calgary Stampede in Canada. No-one came forward to claim her. She never knew what had happened to her mother. Suzanne’s story reflects the person she has become. It begins in the Australian outback where... But you can read all about it in this book, The Shining of Love.
CHAPTER ONE
THE LOST CHILD couldn’t survive in this searing heat. Not in the unforgiving outback. Not without water. Not without someone to find protection for her. The search was almost certainly futile. It was far too late for Amy Bergen to be found. Not alive, anyway.
Where she had wandered, or what had taken her away from the scene of her parents’ tragic death probably would never be known. It was a depressing thought to Suzanne, and her heart went out to the little girl’s family who had enough grief to carry without the added pain of never knowing the fate of a much loved child.
There was a finality about death that could be accepted. Eventually. But lost.... Suzanne knew the nagging torment of endless wondering all too well.
Her father had died when she was three years old. She knew that for a fact. The wonderful couple who had subsequently adopted her had been in Calgary for the rodeo when it happened, and they had told her the story many times. The Canadian officials had been unable to trace any family for her, so Suzanne didn’t know, and had no chance of ever knowing, what had happened to her mother.
Sometimes she believed her mother had to be dead, because she couldn’t accept a mother who deserted her daughter and never once looked back to find out how she fared. Yet if she was alive, where was she? What kind of life had she led? What kind of life was she living now?
It was the not knowing that hurt the longest. It never went away. It could be submerged for days or weeks or months, but it always crept out again in lonely moments. Or when something like this happened.
Suzanne ruefully thought she could do with a bit of cool Canada right now. Central Australia would have to be the starkest contrast to the country on the top half of the North American continent, but she had chosen to make her life here and she was content with her choice.
She drove through the township of Alice Springs with all the car windows open. It didn’t help much to lessen the heat in the car, but there was no point in switching on the air-conditioning while the interior was still like an oven. She used a towel on the steering wheel to prevent her hands from burning, and despite the protective seat cover, she felt as though she was sitting in a sauna.
Fortunately it was no great distance from the community services complex, where she held a morning clinic for the aboriginal women and their children, to the medical centre that claimed the rest of her working hours. Today was not the kind of day that stirred people to any unnecessary activity and there was little traffic in the streets. Five more minutes and she would be out of this oppressive heat and inside her blissfully cool office.
The thick mass of her wavy black hair was sticking to her neck by the time she alighted from her car. She pushed it up with her arm, wishing she had tied it into a high ponytail. There was not the slightest waft of a breeze. She let it drop to her shoulders again as she walked along the path from the car park to the main entrance of the medical centre.
Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed a man stepping out