PROLOGUE
MAGGIE TRENT and Jack McKinnon conducted rather unreal conversations at times.
Why this should be so had something to do with the unreal nature of their relationship, Maggie felt. Nothing ever went according to plan in their lives. Their first meeting had been sheer coincidence, their second meeting sheer disaster, their third meeting should have had labels stuck all over it shouting, ‘Spoilt, little rich girl determined to get her own way’—according, at first anyway, to Jack.
They’d parted after that extended meeting, not well, and determined never wittingly to come together again.
Yet just under a year later Maggie began one of her unreal conversations with Jack McKinnon on the subject of their two-month-old son who had started out life known as Trent/McKinnon—it had been written on his wrist band and on the label on his cot. They’d dispensed with the stroke after a week but stuck with the Trent McKinnon.
The gist of their conversation was this.
‘This is a very proper baby,’ Maggie said seriously one evening.
‘I never thought he was a porcelain doll.’
‘No. I mean, he’s very well organized. He does everything by the book.’
Jack frowned. ‘He’s only eight weeks old. How can you say that?’
Maggie was attractively dressed in slim white trousers and a floral seersucker jacket trimmed with green. Her dark gold hair was tied back with a green scrunchie; her green eyes were clear and she was sitting beside a cot.