Free The House of Adriano by Nerina Hilliard Page B

she had had to take them at a hotel far more expensive than she would have dreamed of in the normal way, and there had also been the expense of telephone calls by the tourist agency to book the rooms. Running away, she discovered, cost quite a lot.
    Early the next morning she went out to buy a newspaper to look down the columns in search of a room or a small flat. There were plenty advertised, but complications set in when the prospective landladies or landlords realised she had a child with her, but eventually, after three days’ searching, she did manage to find a tiny flat and they moved in. It was not as good as the one they had had in Sydney and more expensive.
    The next thing was to find a job. She found one fairly quickly, but it was nowhere near so good as her previous one had been. Unfortunately she could not give Marius Jenton and the Southern Cross as a reference, so she had to rely on references from the firm where she had worked prior to that, making the excuse that she had left to get married and now that her husband was dead had to get another job to support Peter. Luckily nobody knew how old Peter was, so the question of how many years it was since she had supposedly left to get married was not questioned, but it did make it difficult to get a well - paying job, since prospective employers took it that she was out of touch with office routine, but in the end she found something fairly satisfactory. The only trouble was that after only one day’s work she found herself cordially detesting her immediate superior, the man she worked for - and that too she blamed on Duarte.
    The arrangements for Peter’s schooling were not quite so convenient as before, either, but they managed. That was something else to blame on him, though. They had been so happy together before he had come on the scene. She had been earning a good salary and she had enjoyed her work. She and Peter were still happy together, of course, but her life seemed in a turmoil. She could not settle down somehow and she was constantly haunted by the question of whether or not she had done right.
    She did not regret in the least her most illegal and reprehensible decision to take the law into her own hands and run away - after all, anything was worth it to score off Duarte Adriano - but she did sometimes wonder if Peter himself would thank her for it when he became old enough to understand. Jenton had been quite right when he said that Duarte could give Peter far more than she could. Then she would tell herself not to be such an idiot. Of course she had done right. It was what Eric would have wanted too.
    Anyway, it was too late to change now, unless she voluntarily returned, and she could not see herself doing that, surrendering her victory to a man she disliked so much, and so she slowly settled down into her new life, but all the time adding fresh fuel to her antagonism of the man she had run away from because everything was not as good as it had been before.
    Much as she disliked him, though, she found she could not quite help herself thinking of him, especially one morning as she waited on the kerb to cross the road. It was teeming with rain and freezing cold and she pulled her raincoat more closely around her. It was much colder down in Melbourne, as she had noticed when she first arrived, and now, almost six weeks later, there was a distinct nip in the air as it began to chill down towards winter, although she had been told that such low temperatures were unusual for the time of the year.
    It was a powerful, black car, passing by as she stood on the kerb, that made her think more vividly than ever of Duarte Adriano ... of the time when another large black car had slid to a stop at her side while rain pelted down in another city.
    She knew by now of course that he had been appointed Peter’s legal guardian. She bought the Sydney papers every day and always scanned them closely, especially the law notices. It had not exactly come as a shock when