‘I’m not an invalid,’ he said firmly. ‘Look at me. Do I look frail?’

He rose and stood against the backdrop of the sky, challenging her with his pose and his expression, and she had to concede the point. Amos was a big man, over six foot, broad-shouldered and heavy. All his life he’d been fiercely attractive, luring any woman he wanted, moving from marriage to affairs and on to marriage as the mood took him. Along the way, he’d fathered five sons by four mothers in different countries, thus spreading his tentacles across the world.

Recently, there had been an unexpected family reunion. Struck down by a heart attack, he’d lain close to death while his sons gathered at his bedside. But, against all the odds, he’d survived, and at last they had returned to their different countries.

Now he had summoned them back for a reason. Amos was making plans for the future. He’d regained much of his strength, although less than he claimed.

To the casual eye, he was a fine, healthy specimen, still handsome beneath a head of thick white hair. Only two people knew of the breathless attacks that followed exertion. One of them was Janine, his wife, who regarded him with a mixture of love and exasperation.

The other was Freya, Janine’s daughter by an earlier marriage. A trained nurse, she’d recently come to stay at her mother’s request.

‘He doesn’t want a nurse there in case it makes him look weak,’ Janine pleaded, ‘but if I invite my daughter he can’t refuse.’

‘But he knows I’m a nurse,’ Freya had pointed out.

‘Yes, but we don’t have to talk about it, and you can keep an eye on him discreetly. It helps that you don’t look like a nurse.’

This was an understatement. Freya was delicately built with elegant movements, a pretty face and a cheeky demeanour. She might have been a dancer, a nightclub hostess, or anything except a medical expert with an impressive list of letters after her name.