Trent McKinnon was asleep in the cot.
‘I’ll tell you. He adapted himself to a four-hourly schedule right from the start under extremely difficult circumstances. He burps beautifully and he mostly sleeps between feeds just as the book says he should. He has one wakeful period, after his two p.m. feed, where he’ll accept conversation and he quite appreciates being carried around for a bit. He now sleeps through the eight hours from ten p.m. to six a.m.’
‘Is there anything he doesn’t do by the book?’ Jack asked with a grin. ‘He sounds almost too good to be true.’
Maggie considered. ‘He hates having his hair washed. He gets extremely upset, but even that isn’t going against the book exactly. They do warn that some babies hate it.’
‘Screams blue murder?’
‘Yes. Otherwise—’ she shrugged ‘—there’s nothing he doesn’t do very correctly.’
‘What are you worried about, then?’
Maggie stared down at her sleeping son with her heart in her eyes. ‘I can’t help thinking he would be horrified if he knew how—irregular—his situation was.’
She looked up and their gazes clashed.
‘Born out of wedlock, you mean?’ he said, and for a fleeting moment his mouth hardened. ‘That was your choice, Maggie.’
She inclined her head. ‘That was before—all sorts of things happened,’ she said quietly and ran her fingers along the arm of her chair. ‘That was definitely before I came to appreciate the reality of having a baby and what a baby deserves.’
CHAPTER ONE
MAGGIE TRENT sold real estate.
None of her family or friends particularly appreciated her job, although her mother was supportive, until Mary Donaldson of Tasmania got engaged to Crown Prince Frederik of Denmark and it was revealed that she had worked in a real estate office.
From then on, everyone looked at Maggie Trent with renewed interest, even a little spark of ‘the world could be your oyster too’!
In fact, the world could have been Maggie’s oyster anyway, had she wanted it. She came from a very wealthy background. At twenty-three she was a golden blonde, attractive, always stylish and well groomed.
Nevertheless, she also had a well-developed commercial instinct and a flair for her job in the form of matching the right people to the right properties plus a very real ‘eye’ for the potential in houses that many missed.
This came from the Bachelor of Arts degree she’d done at university along with courses in architecture and draughting, as well as her natural interest in people and her ability to get along with them. She’d been born with great taste.
If she had a creed it was that nothing was unsaleable.
She was enjoying her life and her career far too much, especially with the property boom going the way it was, to contemplate marriage, although there was at least one man in her life who wished she would—not a prince of any designation, however.
But Maggie had two goals. One was to prove that she was a highly successful businesswoman in her own right. She had visions of opening her own agency one day. The other was to allow no man to make her feel inferior because she was a woman. Both these ambitions had been nurtured by a difficult relationship with her father, a powerful, wealthy, often arrogant man who believed she was wasting her time working at all and equated real-estate agents with used-car salesmen.
It was undoubtedly—she didn’t try to hide it from herself—this mindset that saw her take such exception to Jack McKinnon, wealthy property developer, with such disastrous results—not that she’d ever intended to deprive him of his liberty!
She couldn’t deny that was how it had turned out, though. Nor had the fact that she’d been deprived of her liberty at the same time seemed to hold much weight with him at all. In fact, he’d ascribed some really weird motives to it all that still annoyed her to think of…
Anyway, it all started one sunny Sunday afternoon.
She and Tim Mitchell were sipping coffee and listening to an excellent jazz band amongst a lively crowd on a marina boardwalk. Her relationship with Tim was fairly casual. They did a lot of things together, but Maggie always drew the line at getting further involved. Truth be told this was placing undue strain on Tim, but he did a good job of hiding it.