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it would be a cold day in hell before he left her for another woman.
    But this girl – Michelle. It’s definitely Michelle – she seemed to have a much clearer idea of the boundaries. She also seemed nice, sunny natured, a good sort of chick to have around. Perhaps he could overlook the tattoo and the hair?
     
    Brett Cranley had not grown up poor. His father had run a successful dry-cleaning business and his mother, Lucille, was a hairdresser. What Brett had done was grown up quickly. Both his parents were dead by the time he turned fourteen, his father from a car accident on Christmas Eve, hit head-on by a drunk driver, and his mother from breast cancer. It was Lucille’s death that had affected him the most. An only child, Brett had always adored his mother. And while the loss of his father was shocking and sudden, Lucille Cranley’s protracted illness, her pain and fear, her desperate, dashed hopes of remission, had profoundly changed Brett’s psyche. The teenage boy lost his faith, not only in God and modern medicine, but in other people altogether.
    There was no point in loving people, because the people you loved would eventually be taken away from you.
    There was no point relying on people, because they would let you down.
    There was only one life: this life. And in this life, you were on your own.
    These were the lessons Brett Cranley learned from his parents’ deaths.
    In some ways they changed him for the better. Having always been a rather lazy pupil, with no fixed goals or plans for his future, Brett suddenly threw himself into his studies. Living with his aunt Jackie and her two children, who were jealous of his good looks, intelligence and modest inheritance, and made sure he knew he was tolerated rather than loved within the family, Brett spent hour after after locked in his room, cramming for exams. When he won a place at a prestigious boarding school on a mathematics scholarship, his aunt didn’t want him to go.
    ‘It’s six hundred miles away, Brett. You won’t know a soul. Won’t you be lonely?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Your mum wanted you to live here, with us. She thought that’d be best for you.’
    ‘She was wrong.’
    Aunt Jackie looked pained. ‘It was what she wanted. I promised her …’
    ‘It doesn’t matter what she wanted,’ Brett said angrily. ‘She’s dead.’
    ‘Brett!’
    ‘I’m alive and I know what’s best for me. I’m going to St Edmund’s.’
    In the end Brett had had to apply to the executors of his father’s will to release funds for his education and had petitioned the family courts to be allowed to go away to school. He never returned to his aunt’s house, or to Burnside, the Adelaide suburb where he’d spent his childhood. It was the first of many battles that he would win in his determined pursuit of wealth and worldly success, the only ‘security’ that meant a damn in Brett’s book. By his sixteenth birthday he was fully legally independent, the top performing scholar at the top school in Sydney, and the youngest-ever applicant to be awarded a place at ANU, the Australian National University in Canberra, for applied mathematics.
    ANU was to change Brett Cranley’s life. Not because he graduated with first-class honors and went on to Melbourne Business School to begin an MBA he would eventually be too successful to have time to finish. But because it was at ANU that he met the two women who transformed him from a boy into a man.
    The first was a professor’s wife by the name of Madeleine Jensen. Maddie spotted the dark, angry-looking boy on campus in his first week in Canberra.
    ‘Who is that?’ she asked her husband. Professor Jamie Jensen was the head of the math faculty at ANU, a quiet, scholarly man considerably more interested in Fermat’s Last Theorem than he was in his wife’s sexual needs. Or any other needs, for that matter.
    ‘That’s Brett Cranley. The prodigy, or so they say. Ridiculous to send a child of that age away to college in my