him. He told me the day before he died that our local bushfire brigade needed better firefighting equipment to keep our town safe from bushfires. A new truck would be good. But new trucks cost a lot of money.
I’m sure that if you come and be our judge we would make a lot of money. If you can come, you could stay at our house as we have a spare bedroom. Below is my email address if you think you can make it. I hope you can. Please let me know soon, as the concert is only three weeks away.
Yours sincerely
Felicity Harmon.
PS. I used a pink envelope because I thought it might stand out and have a better chance of finding you.
PPS. If it does, please come!
Please come! That was a laugh. Wild horses couldn’t keep him away.
If Greg Harmon had still been alive, Nicolas would not even have dreamt of going back to Rocky Creek. He would politely have declined Felicity’s undeniably touching plea, then have posted her a large, disappointment-saving cheque.
But the carrot had been waved, hadn’t it? Serina was now a widow. How could he not return?
She’d always been his Achilles’ heel. Always driven him crazy. One day, she’d probably be the death of him.
It was a prophetic thought…
SERINA stared with disbelieving eyes at her daughter. Felicity’s bald announcement over breakfast that she’d secured Nicolas Dupre as the judge of her school’s fund-raising talent quest had rendered her temporarily speechless.
‘But how did you know where to contact him?’ she finally managed to blurt out.
Felicity’s impossibly smug expression reminded Serina quite fiercely of her father. Her biological father, that was, not the man who’d raised her.
‘I didn’t,’ Felicity replied. ‘I wrote him a letter and addressed it care of Broadway, New York. And he got it!’
Serina scooped in a deep breath whilst she prayed for calm.
‘And?’
‘I gave him my email address and he sent me a reply last night.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me all this last night?’
‘His email didn’t come till after you’d gone to bed.’
‘Felicity! You know I don’t like you being on the Internet after I go to bed.’
‘Yeah, I know. Sorry,’ she apologised without a trace of guilt in her voice.
Serina glared at her daughter. Felicity was a wilful child and far too intelligent for her own good. On top of that she was a brilliant pianist. Mrs Johnson often said she was the most talented musician she’d taught since…
Serina swallowed. This couldn’t be happening to her!
‘Felicity, I… ’
‘Mum, please don’t be mad at me,’ Felicity broke in. ‘I had to do something or no one would’ve come to our talent quest except for the parents. This way lots of other people will come. We might even make enough money to buy one of those brand-new fire trucks. One which has sprinklers on top like Dad always wanted. I’m doing this for Dad, Mum. He can’t do it from heaven, can he?’
What could Serina say to that? Nothing, really. Felicity had adored Greg, had been devastated by his death. She’d been the apple of Greg’s eye and he’d never known the truth about his daughter’s parentage. Serina had managed to keep her guilty secret from everyone, even Nicolas himself, who’d broached the subject of his possible paternity when he’d returned briefly to Rocky Creek a decade ago to attend his mother’s funeral.
Fate—and genetics—had helped her with her deception and denials. First, she’d carried her baby for ten months, something that happened occasionally on the maternal side of her family. Her great aunt had had a couple of ten-month pregnancies. On top of that, her daughter had been born with dark hair and eyes, the same as herself and Greg, not with Nicolas’s fair colouring. Also, Felicity had been little more than a baby at the time of Mrs Dupre’s death, so she hadn’t started taking piano lessons. There was no evidence of her then having taken after Nicolas, nothing at all to make him suspicious. Even now, everyone in Rocky Creek thought Felicity had inherited her musical talent from her. Given that her relationship with Nicolas had broken up years before, this was only logical. Who would imagine that the very respectable Serina Harmon would have gone to Sydney and made mad passionate love with her ex-boyfriend a mere month before her wedding? It was unthinkable!
But then, Nicolas had always made her to do the unthinkable.
She would have done anything for him at one stage. Anything except abandon her family when they’d most needed her.
How could she have gone to England with him after her father’s stroke? It had been impossible. Nicolas had been stunned when she’d refused, then furious. He’d claimed she didn’t love him enough.
But she had. Too much. In a way, the power of her love for Nicolas had terrified the life out of her. She wasn’t herself when she was with him. She became his slave, a nothing person with no will of her own. He only had to take her in his arms and she was reduced to being a robot, incapable of saying no to him.
Knowing this, she’d made her initial stand against him over the phone. Nicolas had just won a concerto competition in Sydney and the prize would take him to England to study and perform. He’d rung her immediately and insisted she accompany him, though there’d not been an offer of marriage, she’d noted. She’d be his travelling companion as well as his personal assistant—and, most of all, his extremely accommodating love slave.
‘I can’t go with you, Nicolas,’ she’d choked out even as the tears had run down her cheeks. ‘Not now. I have to stay in Rocky Creek and help run the family business. There’s no one else, only me.’ She’d had no brothers or sisters to help, having been an only child. And her mother had had to stay home and nurse her father.
Nicolas had raged at her for ages—raged and argued. But she’d stayed firm that time. Much easier with him so far away. When he’d threatened to return to Rocky Creek to persuade her, she’d claimed he would be wasting his time, adding the desperate lie that she was sick to death of their long-distance relationship anyway. In truth, since he’d gone to Sydney to study, she only saw him on the odd weekend when he came home, and during holidays. He sometimes didn’t even come home for those. More than once he’d gone away to a music camp.
‘I want a normal boyfriend,’ Serina had wailed. ‘One who isn’t obsessed with music. And one who lives in Rocky Creek! Greg Harmon’s always asking me out,’ she’d added quite truthfully.
‘Greg Harmon! He’s old enough to be your father!’
‘No, he’s not.’ Greg did look older than he was. But actually he was only in his late twenties, a local fellow who worked as a teacher in nearby Wauchope High School, where both Serina and Nicolas had studied. Although she had never actually been in any of Greg’s classes—he taught agriculture and woodwork—she’d always known he fancied her.
He’d started asking her out the moment she’d graduated from school.
‘He’s a very nice man,’ Serina had snapped defensively. ‘And very good-looking. Next time he asks me out, I’m going to say yes.’
It had almost been a relief when Nicolas had stormed off to England by himself. But then she’d never heard from him again: no letters or phone calls begging her forgiveness; nothing but a bitter silence.
Serina had taken a long time to get over Nicolas. But, in the end, sheer loneliness had forced her into saying yes to Greg’s persistent requests to take