Barbara Hannay - The Pregnancy Discovery

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Barbara Hannay was born in Sydney, educated in Brisbane and has spent most of her adult life living in tropical north Queensland, where she and her husband have raised four children. While she has enjoyed many happy times camping and canoeing in the bush, she also delights in an urban lifestyle—chamber music, contemporary dance, movies and dining out. An English teacher, she has always loved writing, and now, by having her stories published, she is living her most cherished fantasy. Visit her website at www.barbarahannay.com.

For Magnetic Island and

my fortunate friends who live there.

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

EPILOGUE

MEG almost missed seeing the old bottle lying half in, half out of the damp sand.

Most evenings, on her solitary walks along the beach on Magnetic Island, she found a trail of shells, broken coral and driftwood. She often came across fishing floats, pieces of timber from wrecks on the Great Barrier Reef…and bottles.

But this evening, just as she passed this particular bottle, a ray from the setting sun struck its glass. It glinted and winked at her. Meg paused and bent closer. It was then she noticed that the neck was sealed and a little stirring of curiosity, a prickle of anticipation, prompted her to reach down and tug the bottle out of its sandy bed.

At first she thought it was empty. But when she held it up to the fading light, she saw a shadowy cylinder of paper inside and her breath snagged on a sudden gasp.

A letter.

A letter in a bottle.

Her first reaction was excitement, a kind of childish thrill…and hot on its heels came a thousand questions. But then a strange kind of sixth sense buzzed through Meg.

Her heart drummed.

Shivering, she tried to shrug off the unsettling notion that she and the bottle shared a connection—a tenuous, but important link.

The feeling wouldn’t go away.

Around her the tropical night was closing in. All that was left of the sun was a blush of pink along the tops of the island’s hills. The darkening waters of the bay threw themselves gently against the coral sand in a slow slap…slap…slap.

The rest of the world was going about its business, just as it did every evening, but Meg felt different…as if her life had been touched by an unseen hand.

Clutching the bottle to her chest, she hurried back up the beach and along the bush track to the car park. Carefully, she wrapped it in a towel and settled it safely under the passenger’s seat of her Mini Moke. She would wait till she got back to her bungalow to open the bottle with great care and she would read its contents in complete privacy.

And then she would know…

THE last thing Sam Kirby needed was another pretty woman in his life.

His personal assistant, who spent her days juggling his crowded social calendar with his hectic business appointments, had told him so on many occasions.

So when he rushed into his downtown Seattle office straight from his latest corporate battle, he didn’t expect to find a photo of a beautiful, bikini-clad girl smack on top of the paperwork needing his immediate attention.

‘Ellen, what’s this?’ He spun around so abruptly he almost collided with his assistant, who’d been following faithfully at his heels.

Her eyes flicked anxiously to the photo. ‘It came this morning in a courier express package from Australia.’ She picked up several sheets from his desk. ‘The operator of an island holiday resort sent it along with a news clipping and a letter.’

He frowned. ‘If it’s just an advertising gimmick, throw it in the bin. The way things are at present I won’t be free to take a holiday any time in the next decade.’

‘It’s not advertising, Sam. I’m afraid there’s more to it.’

With a grimace of exasperation, he took the clipping Ellen held out. The photo showed a lovely blonde standing on a postcard-perfect, tropical beach. Her name, the caption claimed, was Meg Bennet and she was holding an old bottle.

For a little longer than was strictly necessary, he let his gaze linger on her.

She wore a bikini top and a simple sarong in different shades of blue tied loosely around her slim hips. Her midriff glowed honey-gold and her hair was a pleasing tumble of sunshiny curls.

But she wasn’t just another remarkably pretty girl.

What Sam found unexpectedly interesting, almost magnetic, was the disturbing directness of her smiling eyes as they looked straight out of the page at him.

It bugged him that he couldn’t determine the exact colour of those eyes but, for a heady moment, he thought how interesting it would be to see them close up—just before he kissed her.

‘Sam, your social diary is fully-booked well into next month,’ his long suffering assistant remarked dryly, ‘and that particular young woman lives on the other side of the Pacific.’

‘Too bad,’ he responded with a quick grin and a shrug before he refocused his concentration on the clipping from an Australian newspaper. ‘Love letter found in bottle on tropical island,’ he read aloud and, letting out an impatient sigh, he silently skimmed the rest of the story.

When he finished, he looked at Ellen with a puzzled frown. ‘I don’t understand why we’ve been sent this. Some American airman wrote a love letter to his bride back in 1942 and stuck it in a bottle and now it’s turned up on the Great Barrier Reef almost sixty years later. So what?’

‘Perhaps you were too side-tracked by the photo to notice,’ Ellen prompted. ‘But the story also mentions that they’re trying to trace the American who wrote the letter, or his descendants.’

‘But what has that to do with us at Kirby & Son?’

Ellen straightened her impeccably neat suit jacket.

And Sam felt a nasty jab of alarm. ‘Ellen, what is it?’

She smiled gently. ‘According to this letter from the manager of the island resort, the man who wrote the message in the bottle has been identified and his descendants have been traced.’

‘And?’

‘And his name was Thomas Jefferson Kirby—’

‘My grandfather,’ Sam completed in a choked, disbelieving whisper.

‘Yes.’

‘Whew!’ He closed his eyes for a second or two. Slowly, he looked at Ellen again and shook his head. ‘Tom Kirby died during the war. My father never even knew the poor guy.’

Again he stared at the photo and the bottle in the girl’s hand. ‘Who would have thought?’ He held out his hand for the letter. ‘What else does this Australian have to say?’

As he read, his stomach tightened an extra notch. ‘What’s he playing at? He reckons there was a new will in the bottle and he won’t release the details until someone from my family goes over there.’

‘There’s no way your father could undertake that kind of journey.’

‘Of course he can’t, he’s far too frail, but how the heck does this guy expect me to just drop everything and head off to some tropical island down under?’ Groaning, he clapped a hand to his forehead. ‘I don’t have time to deal with this.’

Ellen looked at her young boss over her half glasses. ‘There’s a lot at stake. Kirby & Son has been in your family for four generations.’