Christmas Where She Belongs. Meredith Webber

I kill your dog.’

      ‘You brought him here,’ Clancy reminded him, and Mac sighed.

      ‘Indeed I did,’ he said, and Clancy couldn’t miss the regret in his voice.

      She slipped away, thinking not of Annabelle Crane and James but of whether Mac’s regret was for bringing the dog to the city, or was it for getting himself involved with her?

      Although they were hardly involved—he was a lawyer who had contacted the beneficiary of a will, and she was the beneficiary. It was purely a business meeting.

      Maybe!

      Packing took all of fifteen minutes, cleaning out the refrigerator and giving her next-door neighbour the perishables another ten, which left Clancy with two hours and twenty-two minutes to fill before one o’clock.

      She considered using the time to contact her mother, a process that could take easily that long as it involved contacting a neighbour who had a phone, who then raised a flag to indicate there was a message for someone in the commune. It could be that the flag wouldn’t be seen for hours. Or days.

      And if days, she’d be gone before her mother phoned back, and then she’d worry when she couldn’t get hold of Clancy, so all in all it was better to write.

      Two hours and eighteen minutes—decisions didn’t take up much time.

      Well, sitting around was no good because then she’d start thinking, and if she started thinking she’d regret making the impulsive decision. She never made impulsive decisions, knowing they invariably led to loss of control, and being in control was the mainstay of her life.

      Or had been for some time …

      She found some paper and began the letter, telling her mother of the unexpected appearance of Great-Aunt Hester in the family tree, and the strange bequest.

      I’m not going because I still hanker for a father, she wrote, although as she put the words on paper, she wondered if they were entirely true, but because this woman left me her house and dog in good faith, so the least I can do is have a look at the situation, sum it up and make a decision.

      There, that sounded sensible. No need to mention Annabelle Crane being in Carnock.

      Sometimes Clancy thought her mother regretted the break-up with James more than she herself did. But hadn’t it been the shock of James’s visit to the commune, and meeting her mother’s extraordinary friends, that had started the disintegration of their relationship …?

      Determined not to dwell on the past, she finished the letter and went into the alcove in her bedroom that she thought of as her office. Once there, she was able to lose herself in the first item on her ‘to do’ list, the preparation of lectures for the following year. She wanted to make them more challenging, particularly for the first-year students, so they would get a feel for the job they were training to do.

      So, of course, rather than waiting by the front door at one o’clock, she was lost in Lecture Two when the buzzer buzzed.

      Shoving her laptop into its case, she slung it over her shoulder, grabbed the small bag with her belongings, and her handbag, and hit the button to allow Mac and Mike entrance to the lobby. ‘I’ll be right down,’ she said into the intercom, and raced down the stairs, knowing it would be faster than taking the elevator.

      Flushed from her downward dash, she arrived in the lobby to find Mike in trouble again, this time from a tenant Clancy didn’t know, a woman who’d emerged from the elevator with a Siamese cat on a lead.

      ‘He likes cats,’ Mac was saying to the woman, who’d grabbed her pet from beneath Mike’s smiling face and was glowering at Mac.

      ‘Dogs are not allowed in this building,’ the woman said, and she stalked out the door.

      Mike let her go, discovering Clancy instead and rushing up to her to greet her with his front paws on her chest, so with the weight of her baggage she’d have gone flying if Mac hadn’t slung his arm around her to steady her.

      The area of skin beneath the clothes that touched that arm prickled with awareness, then the arm dropped away, while Clancy battled an urge to run straight back up the stairs.

      Control!

      ‘Does he cause trouble wherever he goes?’ she asked, determined to ignore her reactions to the man, and looking at Mike, who was now sitting in front of her doing a perfect dog act.

      ‘Everywhere!’ Mac said in a despairing voice, but Clancy heard the smile behind the words and understood that Mac loved the silly animal, just as Great-Aunt Hester must have.

      Great-Aunt Hester—just thinking about the woman gave Clancy a weird sensation in her stomach.

      She had family! Real family! Or at least she had done …

      Of course, she’d always known her mother had family, somewhere down south, maybe in Victoria, but her mother’s insistence that the fellow members of the commune were the only family she wanted or needed had meant Clancy had never known any of them. Which, by and large, had been okay.

      Mac had taken her belongings and she was following him out the front door towards an ancient, battered, rusting four-wheel drive while she considered all of this. But as he stowed her bags in the back and opened the rear door for Mike, Clancy realised there was one question she hadn’t asked and probably should have.

      With her hand on the doorhandle, she turned to Mac.

      ‘How did you find me?’

      ‘I didn’t,’ he said, with a grin that seemed to light up whatever little corner of the world he was currently inhabiting. ‘Hester found you. I have a feeling she had some kind of agent look into it.’

      ‘An agent? You mean a private detective? She had someone following me?’

      The grin turned into a laugh so the dark eyes sparkled with devilment.

      ‘I very much doubt you were followed,’ he assured her, taking her hand off the doorhandle and opening it for her. ‘As far as I know, most things can be discovered just sitting in an office using a computer. All births are registered, you’d be on a voting register, there’d be school and university records, and a smart agent could probably even find out which dentist you went to.’

      Clancy had ducked past him to get into the car, but turned back to face him, horrified by what he was saying yet knowing it was probably true.

      ‘You think that’s what happened?’

      ‘Almost sure of it,’ Mac said, then he touched her cheek. ‘We’re all in the same boat, about as anonymous as a pop star. Every time you go for a job, someone is finding out all this stuff about you.’

      Clancy wanted to argue, but she knew everything he’d said was true, no matter how uncomfortable it might make her feel. So now she had to wonder just how much this ‘agent’ Mac spoke of had dug up. And was the information floating around the house where Mac now lived alone—apart from Mike?

      Did it matter?

      Deciding it didn’t, she finally climbed into the car. She was going out to see the house. Yes, she’d probably see Annabelle, but that was okay, they’d been quite good friends through university, and beyond all that a little flutter of excitement threading along her nerves reminded her she was finally going to see the place called Carnock, and maybe, just maybe, find out a little more about her father.

      Unfortunately, as Mac got behind the wheel and the flutter along her nerves grew stronger, she had to wonder if it was the thought of seeing Carnock causing it, or this man she didn’t know.

      She’d had flutters aplenty with James in the beginning, although flutters seemed to die natural deaths as a relationship progressed, for which she’d been profoundly grateful. She had to hope, if Mac was causing the flutters, that they would also die away when a relationship didn’t exist.

      Mac was driving out