Wealthy Australian, Secret Son
Praise for the author:
“Margaret Way delivers … vividly written, dramatic stories.”
—RT Book Reviews
“With climactic scenes, dramatic imagery and bold characters, Margaret Way makes the Outback come alive …”
—RT Book Reviews
“He’s mine, isn’t he?” Rohan ground out. His tone was implacable.
Charlotte wasn’t up to this. She was a lost soul. She was acutely aware of the pronounced pallor beneath Rohan’s golden-olive skin. He was in shock too. She wanted to touch his face. Didn’t dare. She felt sorrow. Guilt. Pity. Remorse. Her heart was fluttering like a frantic bird in her breast. She had to work out how to deal with the whole momentous issue. She needed time to think. She allowed a fallen lock of hair to half shield her face.
“Is that why you’re trembling from head to foot?” he asked curtly. “Christopher is mine. My child.”
Welcome to the intensely emotional world of Margaret Way
where rugged, brooding bachelors meet their match in the burning heart of Australia …
About the Author
MARGARET WAY, a definite Leo, was born and raised in the subtropical River City of Brisbane, capital of the Sunshine State of Queensland. A Conservatorium-trained pianist, teacher, accompanist and vocal coach, she found her musical career came to an unexpected end when she took up writing—initially as a fun thing to do. She currently lives in a harbourside apartment at beautiful Raby Bay, a thirty-minute drive from the state capital, where she loves dining alfresco on her plant-filled balcony, overlooking a translucent green marina filled with all manner of pleasure craft: from motor cruisers costing millions of dollars, and big, graceful yachts with carved masts standing tall against the cloudless blue sky, to little bay runabouts. No one and nothing is in a mad rush, and she finds the laid-back village atmosphere very conducive to her writing. With well over one hundred books to her credit, she still believes her best is yet to come.
CHAPTER ONE
The present
IT WAS an idyllic day for a garden party. The sky was a deep blue; sparkling sunshine flooded the Valley; a cooling breeze lowered the spring into summer heat. A veritable explosion of flowering trees and foaming blossom had turned the rich rural area into one breathtakingly beautiful garden that leapt at the eye and caught at the throat. It was so perfect a world the inhabitants of Silver Valley felt privileged to live in it.
Only Charlotte Prescott, a widow at twenty-six, with a seven-year-old child, stood in front of the bank of mirrors in her dressing room, staring blindly at her own reflection. The end of an era had finally arrived, but there was no joy in it for her, for her father, or for Christopher, her clever, thoughtful child. They were the dispossessed, and nothing in the world could soothe the pain of loss.
For the past month, since the invitations had begun to arrive, Silver Valley had been eagerly anticipating the Open Day: a get-to-know-you garden party to be held in the grounds of the grandest colonial mansion in the valley, Riverbend. Such a lovely name, Riverbend! A private house, its grandeur reflected the wealth and community standing of the man who had built it in the 1880s, Charles Randall Marsdon, a young man of means who had migrated from England to a country that didn’t have a splendid past, like his homeland, but in his opinion had a glowing future. He’d meant to be part of that future. He’d meant to get to the top!
There might have been a certain amount of bravado in that young man’s goal, but Charles Marsdon had turned out not only to be a visionary, but a hard-headed businessman who had moved to the highest echelons of colonial life with enviable speed.
Riverbend was a wonderfully romantic two-storey mansion, with a fine Georgian façade and soaring white columns, its classic architecture adapted to climatic needs with large-scale open-arched verandahs providing deep shading for the house. It had been in the Marsdon family—