Maggie was enchanted, as she always was by children. Forgetting her own perilous situation, she smiled at the beautiful little girls.

Reeve took her arm and ushered her up the stairs leading to his front door. He glanced backward, as did Maggie, and saw that his tiny admirers were in hot pursuit.

He sighed heavily as he opened the door. “Surely,” he teased, “Goodness and Mercy shall follow me all the days of my life.”

Chapter 9

REEVE HAD NO MORE THAN OPENED THE FRONT DOOR TO his house when another little girl, the same child Maggie had seen playing on his lawn in Sydney, literally hurled herself into his arms with a joyous shriek. “Papa!”

The affection between Reeve and the child was obvious. He held her close. Over his broad shoulder she gave Maggie a thorough, implacable inspection with her blue-green eyes.

Reeve turned slightly, there in that spacious, well-lighted entryway, and said, “Maggie, this is Elisabeth.”

Automatically, Maggie offered her hand. Elisabeth merely looked at Maggie’s face for a moment, not deigning to loosen her arms from around Reeve’s neck. Although this would have been a snub in the adult world, there was no unfriendliness in the child’s manner.

“Hello, Elisabeth,” Maggie said politely, and her smile was genuine.

“She rarely talks,” Reeve pointed out when they had reached an enormous parlor and the silence had stretched out too far for his liking. He set Elisabeth on her feet and she scampered away. “The only thing she says with any regularity is ’Papa.’”

Maggie was so concerned that she hardly took in the understated elegance of her surroundings. “But she must be four, at least—”

Reeve gestured offhandedly for Maggie to take a seat, and then strode off across the long, uncluttered room as she sank into a barrel-back chair facing the massive fieldstone fireplace.

When he returned, he held a glass of some amber-colored liquid in his hand. Maggie resisted a telling glance at the clock on the mantelpiece, but she did arch one eyebrow. It was surely too early in the day for liquor.

Reeve chuckled at her reaction as he sat down in a chair facing hers. “I’m assuming that you would prefer tea to this particular sort of refreshment,” he said, and before Maggie could stiffly confirm that she would indeed prefer tea, a black woman appeared in the parlor, carrying a tray.

The woman set the tray on a table beside Maggie’s chair and left the room again without a word or a look at either Reeve or his houseguest.

“The mother of Goodness and Mercy, I presume?” Maggie asked just to make conversation and wondering to herself just how one should behave in such an unorthodox situation.

Reeve smiled. “I believe Kala is related to them in some way, though she isn’t their mother. The Aborigines define relationships in their own fashion.”