She looked deceptively angelic, smelled of shampoo and was dressed neatly in a pink dress embroidered with ducks. Her shoes were soft leather, her socks clean and white. She had, Logan admitted silently, the noticeable attributes of a child whose mother cared for her. This morning, however, her mother had been noticeably careless.
‘Where are your parents?’ Logan demanded aloud.
‘Jig-jig!’ the baby girl replied, bouncing vigorously on his Italian-shod foot.
‘No, I will not jig-jig.’ Gingerly fitting his hands beneath her tiny armpits, Logan lifted her before she could scramble any higher and set her back on the floor. ‘I don’t have time to jig-jig. I have a company to run. We need to find your parents.’
Again he pressed the buzzer on his desk and, when there was no answer, he marched to his office doorway and glared at the abandoned PA’s desk. If Maria was engaged elsewhere, he would have to call the front desk. Surely someone knew where this child belonged.
Behind him, Logan heard another disturbing giggle.
The little girl was under the desk again, peeking out at him and grinning mischievously, as if they’d begun a new game of hide and seek.
For a moment Logan felt an unexpected warm sensation in his chest. The baby was undeniably cute and he thought of his nephews, his sister’s boys. He really should visit Carissa more often.
But he was snapped right out of this uncharacteristic moment of sentiment when a chubby pink hand reached for the dangling cord attached to his computer.
‘No, kid. No!’
Five years ago Logan had been proud of his rugby tackles, but today, as he hurled himself into a low dive across the office carpet, he knew he was already too slow and too late.
CHAPTER TWO
THE interview was going rather well, Sally thought. She’d made it in the nick of time, her curls restored to their usual disorganized bounciness, and Janet Keaton, Blackcorp’s HR manager, had been incredibly understanding when she’d telephoned to explain about her last-minute babysitting emergency.
‘I really need to complete the interviews today,’ Janet had said. ‘Perhaps you’d better bring your niece with you. Do you think she would sit in the corner of my office while we talk?’
‘I can’t promise she’ll be quiet,’ Sally had warned. ‘But I’ll bring a bag of her toys and her favourite picture books.’
Janet’s voice had been reassuringly warm. ‘Let’s give it a try. I might not be able to reschedule your time slot.’
Fortunately, a rescheduling hadn’t been necessary. Rose, bless her, had become completely absorbed in pushing brightly coloured shapes through holes in a plastic box and then opening the box to take the shapes out, before starting the process all over again. And Sally had become equally absorbed in Janet Keaton’s interesting questions.
She was quizzed about her childhood at Tarra-Binya, about her boarding school days in a big country town and the computer course she’d completed on leaving school. She’d told Janet about her summer holiday jobs on the front desk of Chloe’s art gallery here in Sydney at Potts Point. And that led to Sally explaining about her godmother, Chloe Porter, a well-known figure in Sydney’s art circles, and about her legacy of the terrace house.
‘And you didn’t mind leaving the country to live in Sydney?’ Janet asked.
Sally almost blurted the truth that she’d had to leave, that she’d had to escape her family’s stifling concern, had to prove that she could manage on her own. But she doubted that would impress her interviewer.
‘I’ve always wanted to live here,’ she said emphatically, and this was also very true. ‘It’s been my dream. I spent nearly every summer holiday with Chloe and it was always so much fun. I love Sydney. It’s so cosmopolitan and exciting. I’m really looking forward to making my home here.’
‘A mining consultancy is very different from an art gallery,’ Janet said carefully. ‘What do you know about Blackcorp and the Australian mining industry?’
‘Well…’ Sally took a deep breath and thanked heavens that she’d looked at Blackcorp’s website on the Internet. ‘I know that Blackcorp’s a big operation right across Australia. Mining’s a huge industry and it’s bigger than ever right now. Actually, two of my brothers work in mines. One in Queensland and another in Western Australia.’
Janet nodded and waited for Sally to continue.
‘China’s Australia’s major market,’ she said. ‘And I guess a consultancy like this would be offering support services—accommodation on the mine sites, catering. And there are all kinds of environmental issues to be worked around.’