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view, but there we are.’
    ‘I wouldn’t call him a child,’ said Maddie, catching Brett’s eye and the wild hunger beneath his brooding exterior. ‘He’s very good looking.’
    ‘If you say so, my dear,’ Professor Jensen muttered absently.
    Maddie did say so. Not just to her husband, but to Brett himself when she approached him after lectures a few days later. ‘Are you a virgin?’ she asked him bluntly.
    Brett replied in the affirmative. Since his mother’s death he’d undergone a self-imposed ban on all interaction with the opposite sex. Not that he had no libido. Quite the opposite. But the strength of the physical longing welling up inside him was at war with the terrible fear of loss and abandonment that had become as much a part of him as his own flesh and bones. Brett adored women – both sexually and for the warmth and intimacy they offered, warmth and intimacy that he desperately longed for – but he was afraid of them.
    ‘Do you want to be?’
    Whether it was Madeleine’s directness, her utter lack of guile, or the fact that she was almost old enough to be his mother; or whether it was her beauty, or her own deep sexual need speaking to his, Brett didn’t know. What he did know was that he wanted to go to bed with her. Very, very badly.
    ‘No.’
    ‘Good.’ Maddie smiled. ‘Follow me.’
    Sex opened up a new and glorious world for Brett Cranley. Before long it rivalled ambition as the key driver in his personality. His relationships with women were wildly conflicted: needy, passionate and adoring on the one hand; angry, frightened and controlling on the other; each one a reflection of his feelings for his mother, frozen in suspended animation at fourteen. He and Maddie Jensen remained lovers for over a year, but there were many, many others, too many to count, let alone remember, a sea of faces and bodies and, before long, a trail of broken hearts left in his wake. Brett needed sex like a plant craving sunlight. Both the physical rush and the emotional validation fuelled his confidence and ambition like a shot of adrenaline in the arm.
    He’d been sure of himself before ANU, before Maddie Jensen.
    Now he felt invincible.
    It was in his last year, his last few months at ANU, that Brett Cranley met the second woman who was to change his life forever.
    Angela Flynn was not a student at the university. A shy, sweet, quietly funny eighteen-year-old girl, with no life experience and no particular ambition, she worked in the Belwood Bakery close to the mathematics faculty building. Brett used to see her when he bought his lunchtime sandwich and was immediately drawn to something about her. It was a combination of innocence, kindness and fragility. Angela was so pale she looked almost like a ghost, with her white-blonde hair and amber eyes, oddly translucent beneath her spun gold lashes. She was the sort of girl who looked as if she might faint if exposed to too much sun, or cold. And yet her disposition belied her appearance. As Brett got to know her, he discovered she was a relentless optimist, as hopeful and trusting of the world as he was cynical and dismissive. He also discovered that she was a virgin. For some reason that he couldn’t define, even to himself, this was important.
    His attraction to Angela was different to that with all the other women he had gone to bed with, something that would remain the case throughout their long marriage. He wanted to own her, to protect her, to carry her around with him in a glass case, like a guardian angel. His angel. His Angela. He was sure that his mother would have loved her.
    As it turned out, marrying Angela Flynn was not the easy feat he’d assumed it would be. She had a father, and three older brothers, all of them Irish Catholic, deeply protective and not remotely inclined to let their teenage sister ‘throw herself away’ on a kid not much older than she was and well known to be a player on campus. Nevertheless, Brett persisted, proposing to