Jayne Bauling - Ransacked Heart

Cover Page

Excerpt “I didn’t misjudge you, Maria .” Luke spoke contemptuously. “There was no chance of my doing so, the way you flaunted your relationship with Jones. But I was curious enough to consent when he brought your name up when we started looking for a new program manager.” “What a shock for you when I accepted the position,” Maria snapped. Luke laughed. “But I wanted it to happen. Haven’t you realized that I have plans for you?”

About the Author JAYNE BAULING was born in England and grew up in South Africa. She always wrote but was too shy to show anyone until the publication of some poems in her teens gave her the confidence to attempt the romances she wanted to concentrate on, the first published being written while she was attending business college. Her home is just outside Johannesburg, a town house ruled by a seal point called Ranee. Travel is a major passion; at home it’s family, friends, music, swimming, reading and patio gardening.

Title Page Ransacked Heart Jayne Bauling www.millsandboon.co.uk

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

Copyright

Luke spoke contemptuously.

“There was no chance of my doing so, the way you flaunted your relationship with Jones. But I was curious enough to consent when he brought your name up when we started looking for a new program manager.”

“What a shock for you when I accepted the position,” Maria snapped.

Luke laughed. “But I wanted it to happen. Haven’t you realized that I have plans for you?”

JAYNE BAULINGwas born in England and grew up in South Africa. She always wrote but was too shy to show anyone until the publication of some poems in her teens gave her the confidence to attempt the romances she wanted to concentrate on, the first published being written while she was attending business college. Her home is just outside Johannesburg, a town house ruled by a seal point called Ranee. Travel is a major passion; at home it’s family, friends, music, swimming, reading and patio gardening.

www.millsandboon.co.uk

‘CAN you believe it, Maria? The two of us together again!’

Maria McFadden turned sparkling eyes on the fair man who called himself Florian Jones.

‘You might not be sounding quite so enthusiastic this time next week,’ she cautioned him laughingly.

‘I won’t let you rain on my parade,’ he retorted. ‘We were always good together.’

The tiny inner frisson of unease that silenced her laughter was unexpected, and she hesitated before responding, examining the message of her senses and dismissing it. Somehow Florian’s words must have summoned the memory of that first time they had worked together, long years ago, and that sensation of a shadow falling on her had come from the past.

Her stilted smile reappeared, placing a dent at one corner of her mouth, but she warted a few seconds longer, making sure that the ghost had retreated again. This was Taiwan. Her present and her foreseeable future lay here, and they looked good.

Taipei itself looked beautiful from the high balcony on which she and Florian stood, by night a glittering bowl from which the hum and roar of its mind-numbing traffic rose to compete with the sounds of the party going on in the large room behind them.

‘But this time I’ll be your boss. The job may go under different titles on different stations around the world, but essentially that’s what I’ll be from Monday on. even if you do earn more than me.’ No longer haunted, Maria offered the eventual reminder mischievously, and Florian grinned.

‘In a sense,’ he allowed carelessly.

‘Oh, you’re the star,’ she conceded mockingly, currently in a mood to indulge his ego. ‘But not tonight, my friend.’

‘No, it’s your night,’ Florian agreed generously.

‘And as the party is for me, let’s get back to it,’ she suggested happily. ‘It was sweet of Giles to think of it.’

‘The real boss, when you remember that commercial radio is about money,’ he emphasised. ‘And sweetness doesn’t have much to do with it, my love. You’re an important lady, now that we’re getting so competitive. Someone told me that even the ultimate big boss himself was planning to look in this evening—probably to inspect your body and soul, now that he owns them.’

‘You’re exaggerating as usual. I never committed those when I signed my contract.’

‘Nevertheless, we’re talking ownership here,’ Florian insisted as they turned towards the open door. ‘He owns us, the studios from which we broadcast and the building they’re in, although by now he must have recovered whatever his original investment was several times over. You have to hand it to the man. He’s only thirty-four, and he’s done the same thing all over the Far East, taking over struggling and usually amateur or pirate radio stations like this one once was, and putting in people like me who pull commercial sponsorship because we draw listeners. His other interests are all sound-orientated too; he owns recording studios all over the region, for instance—that sort of thing, with the emphasis on sound as a commodity. Big bucks, darling. I guess we could call him a sound entrepreneur.’

‘That’s what radio is all about—sound.’

Maria paused in the doorway, surveying her new colleagues and their partners, a handful of them local people but mainly men and women from all over the English-speaking world, because radio people had a gypsy tendency to move on every few years. You met up again every so often, as she and Florian had done now. The Taipei job was only unusual in that it would be a new experience to work in a country where English was not the official language, but the presence of a large population of Westerners, the bulk of them American, ensured high listenership figures even with the competition provided by the existence of other English-language stations.

Maria had loved radio with a passion from early childhood, her faith in its power to survive unimpaired through all the years when television threatened to make it obsolete, and justified now that it was enjoying an upsurge in popularity in so many countries, thriving new stations almost daily news at present.

‘He’s here,’ Florian observed from just behind her.

A question died unspoken as she saw him. Her heart stopped, and when it beat again the shadow had returned, if shadows had weight, because this one oppressed her, but only momentarily. Then she was able to take the mental step that brought her out into the light again.

Her eyes blazed.

Once he had possessed the power to disturb her, but no longer. Now there was only hatred left.

The extent of her fury disconcerted her fleetingly, fully alive and as fulminatingly intense as ever, despite all the years that had gone by since she had last felt like this.

‘That’s Luke Scott, Florian!’ she said sharply.

‘Sure, didn’t Giles ever mention him?’ Florian was surprised.

Maria’s tenderly passionate mouth tightened. Did Florian think she would be here if the name had occurred in the almost six months of correspondence between her and Giles? But perhaps he did. Florian was renowned for many things, but sensitivity wasn’t among them.

‘No, and neither did you,’ she said tautly, her party mood a distant memory. ‘Florian, don’t you remember? That—that man had me fired from that very first job, the one you organised for me back in South Africa when I left school!’