The Magnate's Tempestuous Marriage. Miranda Lee

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       PROLOGUE

      SARAH SAT AT her desk, twiddling her thumbs, bored to tears. Thank God it was Friday. Only a couple of hours to go and the working week would have ended, as would her tedious stint in Contracts and Mergers. Sarah hadn’t become a lawyer to spend her days filling out forms and asking people to sign on the dotted line. Anyone could do that. It didn’t take four years of study, doing a law degree.

      When she’d been offered a job at the prestigious legal firm of Goldstein & Evans, Sarah had imagined herself becoming the champion of the underdog, righting wrongs and representing innocent people in court. Instead, in the seven weeks since she’d joined the firm in January, she hadn’t even come close to setting foot in a court. She’d spent one week in Conveyancing, two in Trustees and Wills and then two in the family law section, which had not been to her liking at all. Still, at least it had been more interesting than what she’d been doing this last fortnight.

      Sarah was infinitely grateful that next week she would be moving on to the criminal and civil defence team, which was more her cup of tea. They had a pro bono section where some of the lawyers—usually the new ones, she gathered—were assigned to people who needed but could not afford legal representation. Sarah was looking forward to that.

      Meanwhile, she rolled her eyes as they returned to her laptop where she’d been filling in time, doing some research on a client who was coming in to sign a sales contract at three o’clock. For a diamond mine, no less! His name was Scott McAllister and he was supposedly some hotshot mining magnate whom Bob—her current mentor—said she should have known. Apparently he’d been on the TV a lot lately, because of a nickel refinery that was going bust, whose threatened closing down would cost a lot of jobs. Sarah wasn’t a great watcher of news programmes so she didn’t have a clue who he was.

      The Internet, however, had a reasonable amount of information on Scott McAllister. One of Australia’s youngest mining magnates, he had his finger in a lot of mining pies, having interests in iron ore, gold and coal as well as nickel and aluminium. And now diamonds, she added to the list. Apparently, he’d got his start after his prospector father had died over a decade earlier, the son soon discovering that two of his parent’s seemingly worthless purchases of land held hidden treasures. One had some decent-sized deposits of iron ore underneath which had originally looked like useless rock. The other was chock-full of brown coal.

      Bingo! Good old Dad. Luck, it seemed to Sarah, had played a big part in this McAllister’s success. Not according to Bob, however, who insisted their client was a very astute man, who had a history of buying rocks of his own and turning them into diamonds, for want of a better word.

      ‘Several reports stated that the diamond mine he’s buying today is all mined out,’ Bob had told her earlier today. ‘But a man like McAllister wouldn’t be buying it if that were the case. Clearly, he knows something that the present owners don’t know.’

      He’d sounded full of admiration for the man. Sarah wasn’t quick to admire any man. But she’d looked him up just the same out of sheer curiosity.

      Clicking onto a different site, she encountered a photograph of him that didn’t tell her much other than he was very tall and very well built. It had been snapped at a work site where all the men, including the owner, were wearing yellow safety vests and yellow hard hats. The caption underneath disclosed it was a recent photo, taken at the nickel refinery last month during a strike. It was impossible to see what McAllister really looked like as he was also wearing sunglasses. Amazing how much the eyes told you about a man’s looks. What she could СКАЧАТЬ