She’d left Australia a college girl, but her college days were now over. With graduation had come the slow, sad process of severing friendships in Honolulu and leaving Aunt Margaret’s house, where she’d lived for five years. Now the future held a teaching career in Providence, a small town northwest of Brisbane across the rain forests of Queensland’s Great Dividing Range. She looked around excitedly for her father and mother, and smiled when she remembered how happy they’d been about her plans to teach in Australia. It had been touch and go, that decision. If Ronald George hadn’t been coming here to teach himself, if he hadn’t prodded her... She shifted from one navy pump-clad foot to the other. Her blonde hair curled in short wisps around her delicate oval face with its wide green eyes and creamy complexion. Those eyes were quiet and confident and just a little mischievous even now as she approached her twenty-fourth birthday.
