O'Halloran's Lady. Fiona Brand

       www.millsandboon.co.uk

      To The Lord, who really did renew my strength while

      I was writing this book.

      “Guard me as the apple of your eye; hide me in the

      shadow of your wings.” —Psalm 17

       Acknowledgments:

      Huge thanks to Stacy Boyd, my editor,

       for her patience, expertise, encouragement and grace. Thank you!

       Prologue

      Disbelief and cold fury gripped Branden Tell as he sat in the echoing solitude of a cavernous warehouse. Motes of dust lit by beams of late afternoon sun drifted through the air as he read Jenna Whitmore’s latest romantic suspense novel.

      The words on the page seemed to swim and shimmer before his eyes. But no matter how hard or how long he looked, the truth he thought had been lost in the smoke and fire and confusion of the past kept stubbornly reforming.

      Six ugly letters spelling out m-u-r-d-e-r. Black ink on a pulp page: pointing the finger at him.

      He broke out in a sweat; his heart was pounding as if he had just run a race. He wondered how much Whitmore actually knew. Given that she had not gone to the police but instead had included the details of his past crime in a novel, he had to assume she probably didn’t know much. He was willing to bet she had stumbled on her conclusions by pure, dumb luck.

      He blinked rapidly and tried to think. Would anyone else notice the connections Jenna Whitmore had unwittingly made and link them to her cousin’s death in a house fire six years ago?

      The answer swam up out of the acid burn in his stomach. Marc O’Halloran, the hotshot police detective who had been hunting him with a dogged, relentless focus for the past six years. He would.

      Two months ago, almost to the day, O’Halloran had walked into a security firm Branden supplied with alarms while he had been there delivering a consignment. The second he had recognised O’Halloran, he had turned on his heel and left, but he had felt O’Halloran’s gaze drilling into his back as he walked.

      The close shave had almost given him a heart attack. There was no way O’Halloran could have recognised him, because he had been wearing overalls and a ball cap pulled low over his forehead. He would have looked like a hundred other tradesmen or casual labourers. He had found out later that O’Halloran had been following up on a lead on the fire that had killed his wife and child, checking on who had installed the alarm in his house.

      Six years and O’Halloran was still hunting him.

      The fear that gripped Branden for long, dizzying moments almost spiralled out of control. He had to think.

      No. He had to do something.

      Snapping the book closed, he found himself staring at the photograph of Jenna Whitmore on the back cover.

      She was nothing like her cousin, “The Goddess.” Natalie had been blond, leggy, tanned and gorgeous. Jenna was her polar opposite; dark-haired and pale-skinned with a firm chin and the kind of high, moulded cheekbones that invested her dark eyes with an incisive quality he had always found unsettling.

      In that instant, a crude solution formed. After years of wondering when he would appear in one of Jenna’s books as a hero, or maybe as some interesting secondary character who could become a hero, he had finally made an appearance, as the villain.

      He had mostly read all ten books now, even though he hated reading, because he needed to know if Jenna had written about their shared past. He had found out, just before everything had come to pieces, that Natalie had confided to Jenna that she had a secret friend. For years he had been certain that any evidence that he was linked with Natalie had burned along with everything else in the house, but now he had to assume that Whitmore, who had been close to Natalie, could be sitting on some hard evidence. Since Natalie had been crazy about social networking, it would probably be in the form of emails on Jenna’s computer.

      His fingers tightened on the novel. In all of the books, the hero had never changed. Whitmore had called him Cutler, Smith, James, Sullivan and a whole host of other names, but the name changes didn’t disguise the fact that she was really writing about O’Halloran. The same hard-ass, hero type who had made a habit of ruining Branden’s life through the years.

      His jaw clenched. O’Halloran had even dated then married The Goddess, the girl he should have had.

      The distant sound of sirens jerked his head up. For a split second, he thought that it was too late, that the cops were coming for him. He stared a little wildly at the familiar, ordered gloom of the warehouse, and his desk with its neat piles of forms, installation orders and packing notes.

      Clamping down on the burst of fear, he strained to listen.

      The sirens were receding.

      He remembered the fire that, by now, would be a raging inferno. The chemical warehouse would burn for days, soaking up police hours with roadblocks and evacuation procedures. He was safe, for now.

      But that didn’t change the fact that it was past time he left the country. After the scare two months ago, he had systematically put plans in place: a new identity complete with passport and bank accounts. He had even bought a condo on Australia’s Gold Coast. He just needed a little more time to liquidate assets.

      He stared at Jenna’s face, which, after years of being pretty but slightly plump, had metamorphosed into something approaching beauty. Turning the book over, he studied the cover, his jaw locking. Just to tick him off, the guy they’d put on the cover even looked a little like O’Halloran.

      Old rage, fuelled by his intense annoyance that cutting and running was going to cost him big-time, gave birth to a stunning idea. He didn’t know why he hadn’t thought of it before.

      If he was going to lose his business and his expensive, commercial property, which he hadn’t been able to offload, damned if he would leave Whitmore and O’Halloran feeling like winners. Instead of venting his temper by flinging the book at a wall of boxes filled with the latest generation of security systems and automated gates, he placed it carefully on his desk, checked his wristwatch and sat down at his computer.

      He had