Table of Contents
Cover Page
Excerpt
About the Author
Books by Valerie Parv
Title Page
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Copyright
Harry moved her away from him.
“Would you say a kiss like that means something?”
Lisa wished the ground would swallow her up. “Why are you doing this?”
“To show you the dangers of reading too much into things. It’s still a mistake to get entangled with me. I thought you understood.”
She scrubbed her mouth with the back of her hand. “You’re a cad, Harry.”
“Shall I put it in writing?”
“There’s no need. I doubt if I’ll forget again as long as I live.”
Valerie Parv
was a successful journalist and nonfiction writer until she began writing for Mills & Boon in 1982. Born in Shropshire, England, she grew up in Australia and now lives with her cartoonist husband and their cat—the office manager—in Sydney, New South Wales. She is a keen futurist, a “Star Trek” enthusiast, and her interests include traveling, restoring dollhouses and entertaining friends. Writing romance novels affirms her belief in love and happy endings.
Books by Valerie Parv
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Island of Dreams
Valerie Parv
CHAPTER ONE
LISA ALEXANDER tapped her pen against her teeth. She should take notes, but it was much easier to lose herself in the easy, uncomplicated beauty of Thursday Island. The oven-like heat, the cobalt and sapphire colours of the ocean, and a pearling lugger riding at anchor, looked more like a scene from South Pacific than a potential tourist destination at the northernmost tip of Australia.
In the distance the islands of the Torres Strait floated in a haze of blue on blue while the golden blaze of the sun sparked diamond points of light off the azure waves.
Lisa sighed. How did a granddaughter of the Russian steppes get to be so lucky? But for her parents’ life-changing decision, made the year she was born, she could have been surveying the travel possibilities in Vladivostock instead of tropical Australia.
Suddenly a figure crossed her line of vision and she tensed as every nerve-ending in her body shrilled a silent protest. Unwillingly her lips formed his name. Harry Blake.
From this distance she couldn’t see his face, but there was no mistaking his lean, muscular shape which gave an impression of tallness although he was only an inch or so taller than herself. Spare, almost triangular in shape, he had wide shoulders, tapering to a narrow waist and hips. One shoulder was slightly higher than the other, the result of a sporting accident in his youth. When she had last seen him a superbly cut business suit had disguised the slight flaw. His present khaki work clothes concealed nothing. Open-throated, his shirt revealed dark hair V-ing downwards, while his moleskin trousers rode low on his hips, held in place by a dark leather belt angled as rakishly as a cowboy’s gunbelt.
Her throat dried with more than the tropical heat. She had resigned herself to never seeing Harry Blake again. Unprepared, she reeled from the shock of the unexpected encounter. What was he doing on Thursday Island?
An instinctive reaction had driven her into the shade of a wongai tree and she backed against it, her brain whirling. Once she would have raced forward without a second thought, flinging herself into his arms with a cry of greeting. But she wasn’t nineteen any more, and even then Harry hadn’t welcomed her affection. She chewed her lower lip, wishing she had the courage to walk up and shake his hand as if they were merely old acquaintances meeting by chance.
‘Fancy running into you here,’ she would say, her tone cool and composed.
His husky reply echoed in her imagination. ‘Well, if it isn’t little Lisanko Nikitayevna Alexandrov.’
He had always teased her about her full name. ‘It’s simply Lisa Alexander these days,’ she would reply. ‘And I’m not so little any more.’
She allowed herself to imagine how his grey eyes would rove over her olive limbs as the wind whipped the cotton sundress against the slender outlines of her legs. A white leather belt cinched the dress in at her waist, accentuating the swell of her breasts. Her figure was no accident, having been honed by careful diet and hours of aerobics classes. Would he notice the change?
Her colour heightened as she remembered him poking a teasing finger into the soft teenage flesh above her waist. ‘Too many piroshkis,’ he had said. She had laughed, but had foresworn her mother’s rich Russian cooking ever afterwards. At nineteen such comments tended to sting.
Puppy-fat and puppy-love. She had shed one and was fairly sure she had buried the other. So why did the sight of Harry Blake now, when she was a mature career woman of twenty-four, set her pulses racing and her heart hammering in her chest?
While she’d wrestled with her memories he had walked on and now leaned against a railing, staring out to sea. If she retraced her steps back to town he would never know she had glimpsed him. She swung around, tempted to put the thought into action. Her business with Harry was finished a long time ago.
A movement behind her caught her eye and she suppressed a groan. The Torres Strait islands boasted a population of four thousand people at best. The odds against meeting any two individuals here were astronomical. But not only was Harry Blake here, but behind her was Tyler Thornton, the journalist she had come to Cape York to avoid. She was still in shadow, but if he continued on his purposeful way he would spot her in seconds.
The phrase ‘caught between a rock and a hard place’ sprang to mind as her head swivelled between the two men. Which one was the lesser of two evils?
Her feet made the decision for her. Before she fully realised what she meant to do she found herself closing the gap between herself and Harry.
All the glib phrases she might have used deserted her as she reached for his arm. ‘Harry, it is you.’
As he turned to her his grey eyes softened. For all the surprise he showed, he could have been waiting for her. ‘Hello, Lisa.’
She risked a glance over her shoulder. Tyler Thornton’s steps had faltered and he stood under the tree, watching them warily. ‘I need a favour,’ she told Harry softly.
‘Name it.’
‘There’s a man following me and I’d rather not have to speak to. him.’
His head never lifted but his eyes flickered to the man behind them and back to her face again. ‘Tyler Thornton?’
‘Do you know him?’
‘I know him.’ The disgust in his voice told his own story. ‘We worked for the same newspaper years ago.’
‘He’s hounding me about a story. I’ve told him I can’t help him, but he won’t leave me alone.’
‘Then it’s time Mr Thornton learned how to take no for an answer.’
To Lisa’s consternation, Harry’s arm slid around her shoulders and he pulled her to him, his lips brushing her hairline in an affectionate gesture.
She tensed. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Putting on a show for our audience.’
So that was all he was doing—convincing Tyler Thornton that this was a deliberate mee
ting. Knowing it was an act didn’t stop her senses flaring into overdrive, until she forced herself to relax. ‘Is this better?’
‘Much better.’ Keeping his head close to hers, he steered her away from where Thornton stood, and back in the direction of the town.
Arm in arm, they walked along the main street. As they turned a corner Lisa glimpsed Thornton watching them open-mouthed. He hadn’t counted on her having a protector on the island.
Protector or predator? All of a sudden she realised what she had done. She might have known Harry well when she was a teenager and he’d practically lived with her family, but she hadn’t seen him in over five years. People changed, and she had virtually thrown herself into his arms.
He felt the shudder which rippled through her. ‘It’s all right; you’re safe with me. Safer than with Thornton, at any rate.’
She ignored the frisson of excitement which followed the shudder, refusing to recognise it as a product of Harry’s closeness. It was the unexpectedness of finding herself in his arms which made her skin feel electrified. Her feelings for him were dead and buried by Harry himself, so it couldn’t be anything else.
‘Here we are,’ he said into her ear.
He opened a door, standing aside to let her precede him. She found herself confronted by a circle of black faces regarding her with friendly curiosity. They were in a pub which a tour guide had pointed out to her earlier. It was a favourite haunt of the island’s Aboriginal people.
Disconcerted, she looked at Harry. ‘Won’t they mind our coming in here?’
He grinned at a black man leaning against the bar. ‘Will you mind if we come in here, Dan?’
The man smiled back. ‘I’ll mind like hell, Harry. Lowers the tone of the place.’ He switched his gaze to Lisa and nodded his approval. ‘Now the lady’s another matter. She adds a bit of class.’
‘Sorry, we’re a matched set,’ Harry said evenly. He steered her through the room, exchanging greetings as they went, until they emerged into a beer garden shaded by lush palm-trees and thickets of bamboo. ‘Wait here. I want a word with Dan, then I’ll bring you a cold drink.’
Through a set of glass doors she saw him approach Dan and gesture towards the street entrance. Dan nodded and raised his glass in salute. A few minutes later Harry returned, carrying a large glass of amber liquid and a smaller one which he set in front of her. ‘I got you a shandy. Is that all right?’
The combination of beer and lemonade was a welcome thirst-quencher in the tropics, where she knew better than to order fancy cocktails. ‘Perfect,’ she said, raising the glass to her parched lips. The foaming liquid cooled her throat and she cupped her hands around the dewy glass, enjoying its chill feel against her fiery skin.
Suddenly a commotion erupted in the bar behind them. Startled, she looked up to see Dan and another man apparently engaged in an all-in brawl. There was a lot of scuffling and swearing, and dust rose in a cloud around them. The street door opened and Tyler Thornton appeared on the threshold.
Harry had chosen their table carefully, she saw now. From where they sat they could see everything happening inside, while being screened from view themselves by the trees.
‘What’s going on?’ she asked, unnerved by the sudden eruption into violence.
Harry sipped his beer calmly. ‘Nothing to worry about. But I don’t think Thornton will stick around long, do you?’
Understanding dawned and her eyes widened. ‘You asked Dan to stage a brawl to put Thornton off coming here?’
‘Not exactly. I only said we needed a little privacy.’
‘Very resourceful, your Dan,’ she murmured, nonplussed by Harry’s idea of a diversion. It was working, she saw, as Tyler rapidly withdrew and the door swung shut behind him. Instantly the combatants dusted themselves off and went back to their beers, laughing and slapping each other on the backs. One of them gave Harry a thumbs-up sign which he returned.
‘You did all that for me?’ she asked, bemused.
‘What else are friends for?’ His shoulders lifted in an uneven but eloquent shrug. ‘Now suppose you start at the beginning.’
She hesitated. He had been very good about helping her to evade Tyler Thornton, but she had no right to intrude on his life. ‘You needn’t concern yourself with me any more,’ she demurred. ‘It was the greatest luck running into you here and you’ve been wonderful, but Thornton has given up now, so——’
‘People like him never give up,’ he cut across her, his tone harsh. ‘And our meeting wasn’t exactly due to luck.’
She stared at him. ‘How can it be anything else? I only found out I was coming to Cape York last week.’
‘To check out a new cruise between Thursday Island and Cairns,’ he supplied. At her startled reaction amusement flickered across his features. ‘Who do you think persuaded the cruise people to invite you?’
‘You? But how? Why?’ She was stammering foolishly but the idea of Harry Blake engineering her visit here was too astonishing for words. She’d thought he never wanted to see her again.
He took a long drink of his beer, and foam flecked his upper lip until he licked it away. Her own mouth felt arid as she observed the movement and she clenched her hands under the table, shocked by the intensity of her feelings.
‘The how is easy. The skipper of Reef Lady is a friend of mine,’ he explained. ‘Through my newspaper connections I got a tip-off that Thornton was after you, so I decided to do what I could to help.’
‘So you arranged for my travel agency to send me here to pick up the cruise,’ she concluded, and his nod confirmed it. ‘That only leaves the why.’
He raked long fingers through the blue-black waves of his hair. ‘It’s no mystery, either. I know you’re alone since losing your folks last year. It was the least I could do for the daughter of a good friend.’
Despite the tropical heat, a chill settled on her spine. He was only returning a favour to her father. For a moment she’d thought…no, she should have known better. Harry Blake had no time for her, a fact he’d made abundantly clear when she’d made the mistake of falling in love with him just before her nineteenth birthday. After shattering her illusions he had disappeared from her life. Their only contact since he’d finished writing her father’s life story had been a letter of condolence after her parents had died.
‘I was sorry about what happened,’ he said.
‘I know.’ She nodded without looking up. She still felt her loss acutely. His note had been the one bright spot in that blackest of weeks after her parents were killed when their fishing boat caught fire not far from Cairns.
She’d waited and hoped for more contact from him but nothing had come. ‘If you were so concerned for my welfare you could have gotten in touch,’ she said sharply.
‘Until now I’ve had no reason to.’
‘You could have written or called to see how I…how we were getting along.’
He didn’t appear to notice her slip of the tongue. ‘I knew how you were getting along. Nick wrote to me regularly until he died.’
This was news to her. ‘Papa never mentioned your letters.’
‘I asked him not to. I always admired your father, Lisa. Not many men have the courage of their convictions as he did.’
She knew he was referring to her father’s defection from Russia with his pregnant wife, Marya, so that their child could be born in the freedom of the West. ‘I know. I miss him terribly. I tell myself his last years were good ones. He really liked working for Cairns City Council and fishing in his spare time.’
‘It’s a long way from his first trip outside Russia, working on the Aswân Dam.’
She smiled. ‘He used to say it was all engineering, and if it made people’s lives more comfortable…’ She tailed off on a shrug which betrayed her Tartar heritage. ‘I’m just glad he and Mama are together.’
‘She couldn’t have gone on without him.’
Lisa nodded. How well he knew her parents. ‘Mama never adjusted to life in t
he West. She was so self-conscious about her Russian accent that she never socialised. The publicity surrounding your book was agony for her.’
Harry looked thoughtful. ‘Yet your father went ahead with the project anyway.’
‘She wanted him to. They both hated the lies and distortions which were written about the family when we came to Australia. They wanted their story told accurately, and that series of articles you wrote about immigrants to Australia convinced them they could trust you.’
‘“Strangers in a Strange Land”,’ he echoed, recalling the title of the series. ‘It collected a swag of awards, but most of all it enabled your father to trust me. His life-story inspired many people.’
She smiled, remembering. ‘I don’t think he expected it to have such an impact, far less be sold to Hollywood.’
Harry’s grimace matched hers. ‘I’m only sorry we had no control over the film once the rights were sold. Divided Hearts remains one of my favourite books.’
‘I still have my autographed copy,’ she said. ‘You wrote, “To Lisanko, may you never have to choose between two loves”.’
‘Sentimental old fool,’ he growled.
Something sharp pierced her core. She did a quick mental calculation. ‘Thirty-two isn’t so old. You make yourself sound grizzled and ancient.’
‘Maybe it’s how I feel,’ he said dismissively.
They were interrupted by a massively built black man wearing an apron tied under his arms over denim work-clothes. In each hand he balanced a plate, setting one in front of each of them. ‘Enjoy your lunch, folks.’
Harry paid him. ‘Thanks, Gunner.’
As the man left she raised her eyebrows. ‘Gunner?’
‘The locals named him for all the things he’s “gunner” do one of these days.’
She laughed but the sound faded as she regarded the food in front of her. Beside an enormous hamburger was a small mountain of fried potatoes.
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