Beresford's Bride. Margaret Way

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      CHAPTER ONE

      AT SEVENTEEN she was as pretty as a Persian kitten. At twenty-two she was dazzling, the sort of shining ashblonde men couldn’t take their eyes off.

      Zoe all over again.

      Then again, she wasn’t, he mused, as the image of the mother was superimposed on his mind. She was several inches taller, her body very willowy and slender where Zoe’s petite frame was almost lush. But the same familiar sex appeal was there. The same chemistry that left men dazzled. She was walking away from the elevator with two good-looking guys about his own age flanking her, obviously paying court. They were doing the talking, she was doing the laughing, one arm raised to fan her long waterfall of hair.

      He lost seconds.

      The one thing he hadn’t counted on was his own reaction. It shocked him as much as some blinding encounter. His stomach muscles clenched and the blood in his veins began a slow burn. How too damned extraordinary! He gave himself a moment to regain his habitual detachment. This was young Toni, remember? Antoinette Streeton. He had known her all her life even if she had been too young to catch his attention.

      Toni was the only daughter of the late Eric Streeton and the notorious Zoe Streeton Von Dantzig LeClair. The Streetons had owned and worked Nowra Station since the turn of the century. Nowra was their nearest neighbour some hundred miles to the northeast, and Eric Streeton had been a lifelong friend of his father and uncles. In fact, Eric Streeton had been best man at his parents’ wedding. The entire family had taken it very hard when Eric Streeton had lost the battle with septicemia a few years before. A deep gash ignored until it was too late. That was Eric. At that time he and his son, Kerry, had been on their own. Zoe had walked out on him when the children were adolescents, returning to sweep Antoinette off to Paris after her final year at boarding school. It was supposed to have been a treat, six months at most. Antoinette stayed with her mother for the best part of five years. Neither had come home for Eric Streeton’s funeral. They’d been too busy cruising the Greek islands with one of Zoe’s admirers, later to become her second husband, Von Dantzig. These days Zoe was on to numero tre. That was the Frenchman. He really didn’t want to think about it, feeling the same quiet rage now as he had then, the same sadness at the way Eric had been treated. The vast Outback, sparsely populated but closely linked, had felt the same way. Now Zoe’s daughter was walking toward him, the light catching some sparkling thread in her short evening dress. It was a very simple garment, figure—skimming, but a showcase for her lovely body and limbs. Her years in Paris showed. She looked enormously chic, finished in a way other beautiful young women of his acquaintance were not. The two guys were waving goodbye like old friends, one whipping out a small black notebook and scribbling something on a page. A telephone number, address? God, shades of Zoe! It touched a raw nerve.

      She was moving into the main foyer, drawing all eyes. She must have felt his observation because her head turned quickly as though she was following a beam. He stood up, abandoning the evening paper, trying to dispel the odd mood that had settled over him.

      He was even more formidable than she remembered, tall, lean, darkly, aggressively handsome. A man’s man but with a powerful sexuality that made him dangerous to women, СКАЧАТЬ