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somewhere.’
    ‘Where in Australia are you thinking of going?’ asked Mia.
    Daisy swallowed, her eyes dark against her pale, anxious face. She looked so worried Jensen felt genuinely sorry for her; she must have been dreading making this announcement. ‘Sydney,’ she murmured. ‘That’s where Scott’s from originally.’
    Jensen watched their father carefully rearrange his facial expression, replacing shock with his standard look of indulgence when it came to Daisy. Shaking his head, he said, ‘Daisy, I can absolutely see the attraction. I really can. You think the grass will be greener, but take it from me, it won’t be. Now come on, admit it, you haven’t thought this through at all, have you? It’s nothing but a sun-filled dream that your irresponsible housemate has put into your head.’ Smiling, he reached across the table to pat her hand, but Daisy snatched her hand away.
    ‘No, Dad, you’re wrong. And I knew you wouldn’t take me seriously. It’s what you always do. You patronize me and rubbish anything I come up with.’
    ‘Sweetheart, that’s simply not true.’
    ‘It is true! It’s what you do all the time. It’s why I need to get so far away from you!’ She let out a small cry and pushing back her chair, she rushed from the room.
    In the awkward silence Daisy left behind her, Jensen glanced at Tattie and thought, welcome to my world.

Chapter Seven
    Expect the unexpected .
    Twice now in one day Owen had experienced something out of the ordinary. First the racing sofa, and then, as if waiting for him, a peacock had been standing guard at The Hidden Cottage when he’d arrived.
    As welcoming committees went, it hadn’t been the friendliest; the peacock, on seeing Owen step out of his car, had let rip with an ugly screech and put on a dramatic show of male supremacy with its magnificent plumage.
    ‘Hey, why don’t you put your feathers away and give me a hand?’ Owen had told the bird as he’d carried what little luggage he’d brought with him up to the house. The peacock had given him a long hard stare with its beady eyes and then shaken its tail feathers some more and screeched some more. To which Owen had responded with, ‘Pardon my bad grammar, but in the words of Shania Twain, that don’t impress me much.’
    The peacock had made its feelings vocally very clear for the next five minutes, plainly regarding Owen as a no-good interloper. ‘Right, fella,’ he’d said when he’d had enough of the awful din and addressed the bird in his sternest voice, ‘if you and I are going to get along, we have to get things straight from the outset. You may have treated this as your patch in the past, but this is my home now, which means my rules apply. You either accept that, or you ship out. Got it?’
    The bird must have decided these were terms it couldn’t accept and had sloped off into the bushes with its tail feathers lowered, leaving Owen to get on with letting himself into the house and savouring the moment of his long-awaited arrival.
    Now, several hours later, having explored and unpacked the few things he’d brought with him and cooked himself a supper of bacon and eggs, he topped up his glass of red wine, put on a fleece and went outside. In the fading light, as he stood on the veranda, the wooden floor creaking beneath his feet, he breathed in the soft honeyed night air. I’m here, he thought. I’m really here. It might not seem much to anyone else, this significant moment, but for him it was beyond special. He couldn’t really put it into words. It was an emotion. And when all was said and done, could you really put an emotion into mere words?
    He could just imagine some of his friends rolling their eyes at such talk, but he’d always been a soppy old devil; he couldn’t be trusted to watch Bambi without making a fool of himself. Bea, his ex-wife, used to say it was one of his most endearing qualities. When he’d told Bea about his plans to come here, she’d wished him