She looked at her watch again. Where was everybody? Copper hated hanging around waiting for things to happen; she liked to make them happen herself. Crossly, she sat down on the top step, very conscious of the silence settling around her, broken only by the mournful caw of a raven somewhere down by the creek. She would hate to live anywhere this quiet.

This was Mal's kind of country. She remembered how he had talked about the outback, about its stillness and its silence and its endless empty horizons. It was easy to imagine him out here, rangy and unhurried, beneath the pitiless blue sky.

Copper frowned. She wished she could forget about Mal. He belonged to the past, and she was a girl who liked to live in the present and look to the future. She had thought she had done a good job of filing his memory away as something secret and special, to be squirrelled away and taken out only when she was alone or down and wanted to remember that, however unromantic she might be, she too had had her moment of magic, but the long drive through the interior had inevitably reminded her of him. His image was out, like a genie from its lamp, and just as impossible to bottle up and ignore.

It wasn't even as if she had ever believed in love at first sight. Copper was the last person who had expected to meet a stranger's eyes and know that her life had changed for ever, and yet that was how it had been. Almost corny.

She had been at the centre of the crowd, as usual, and Mal had been on the edge, a solitary man but not a lonely one. He had a quality of quiet assurance that set him apart from everyone else on the beach, and when he had looked up, and their eyes had met, it was as if every love song ever composed had been written especially for her…

Copper sighed. Three warm Mediterranean nights, that was all they had had. Three nights, on the other side of the world, more than seven years ago. You would think she would have forgotten him by now.