Seductive Stranger

Hello? Anyone at home?'

It was a woman's voice. Lucy Killane, thought Prue, frowning, and not answering, hoping that the older woman would go away. Josh must have told her. She must be worried about her daughter, but why had she come here? What did she want?

She wants something, you can bet on that! Prue thought cynically.

Maybe she has come to soft-soap me, get me to forgive her daughter and promise not to make a scandal, cause trouble for the Killane family?

'Prue, are you there?'

Footsteps creaked on the stairs; Mrs Killane was coming up and Prue got off the bed, closed her suitcase, flung them with her clothes back into the wardrobe and shut the doors on them. She acted instinctively.

She didn't want Lucy Killane to see that she had started packing, that she was thinking of leaving.

Not just leaving, she thought grimly. Running away! Wasn't that what she would be doing if she left now? Her mother had run away, as far as she possibly could, right across to the other side of the world—but what good had it done her? She had wasted years of her life in bitterness. Prue didn't want to do that. She had seen the consequences of brooding over a wrong done to you—you ended up doing far more damage to yourself than the original injury.

She wasn't going back to Australia, she decided then, in a flash of self-knowledge. She wasn't going to let this overshadow her whole life. Damn the Killanes! Who were they, anyway? It was time somebody taught them that they couldn't just reach out and take what they wanted, wreck other people's lives for a whim!

She had left her bedroom door slightly ajar. Lucy Killane tapped on it before pushing it wide open and looking across the room at her.

Prue stared back, sitting there immovably on her bed, her hands clasped together in her lap to stop them shaking.

'Oh, Prue,' Lucy said huskily. 'I ... I don't know what to say to you!'

She was as pale as Prue herself; her eyes had reddened lids, she had been crying. She looked drawn and haggard, and Prue couldn't help a twinge of compassion for her, because, after all, Lynsey was her daughter and only eighteen, but Prue didn't soften or show any sympathy, it would have made it harder to hang on to her self-control, so she put up a pretence of icy composure, using it as a shield.

'There's nothing useful you can say,' she told Mrs Killane. 'And 1

would rather you didn't say anything at all.'

'I know how you feel. . .' Mrs Killane came further into the room, and Prue frowned.

'I don't think you do, Mrs Killane! Please go, there's no point in talking about it.'

'Oh, Prue, I'm sorry, so very sorry . . .' Mrs Killane put out her hands to Prue, her lovely eyes glistening with tears, her mouth quivering,

'I'm no good with words, I don't know the right thing to say, but I feel so badly..about this . . . it's terrible. How could Lynsey . . .?' Her voice was shaky and thin, it kept dying away, and then another little burst of words would burst out. 'I don't know how she could . .. We had no idea, Prue, I promise you that! Josh didn't suspect, neither did I. I couldn't believe when he told me. He asked if I'd known, but if 1 had, I'd have done something to stop it, and so would Josh!'

She had seized Prue's hands and Prue couldn't quite bring herself to push her away or free herself forcibly; she had to sit there while the other woman clasped her hands, tears running freely now, down her pale, haggard, yet still hauntingly lovely face.

'She's just a child,' she sobbed. 'Just eighteen . . . she doesn't know what she's doing.'

Prue's face tightened. Oh, no? she thought, and Lucy Killane read the angry cynicism in her green eyes and flinched as if Prue had hit her.

'She's in love with love, that's all,' she whispered, as if begging Prue to agree with her. it can't be the real thing, she barely knows him.'

Prue laughed angrily. 'The real thing? Of course it isn't!'

Lucy looked at her with pity and anxiety, and Prue's hackles rose. She didn't want either emotion from the woman who had ruined her mother's life.

'It's just a crush, isn't it?' said Lucy, nodding. 'She's too young to know what real love is! This is because he was a stranger, from the other side of the .world, and in hospital—it seemed romantic and exciting, and she mistook what she was feeling for something else!

Having to keep her visits a secret probably made it twice as romantic.

But I'm ashamed of her, she should have realised what it would do to you!'

'She doesn't care what she does to me!' Prue said savagely, her green eyes flashing. She pulled, her hands free and walked to the window, fighting her temper, but in the end she couldn't hold back her real feelings, they burst out of her. 'You know very well . . . she only wanted David because he belonged to me. If he had been unattached she probably wouldn't have looked twice at him, but she's your daughter, and she prefers to take h

er men from other women.'