The Lost Lover

Prologue

Casino de Paris

Flora sat on the slim perch, her legs reaching down in an elegant point as she swung back and forth, high above the stage. The jet beads of her bodysuit glimmered in the lights, the turquoise tail feathers behind her, resplendent. This was her favourite of all the songs she performed, the closest in nature to the melancholy ballads of home, and she felt her voice soar effortlessly, high above the flute and first violin. If she were to close her eyes, she might almost be able to persuade herself that she was still in the green, blanketing grasslands of St Kilda, where the sheep grazed beneath vaulted skies. She might hear the echoes of her girlhood friends, laughing in the byres; she might glimpse her parents walking to the tiny kirk as the pale sun set on another day; she might see her lover run up a frozen slope...

But this was no airy, stormy paradise. She was enclosed in a red velvet womb. The air was thick with perfume and smoke; taffetas ruffling as ladies stirred; gentlemen coughing in their starched shirts. Even in the darkness, Paris had its own signatures.

She swung higher in the jewelled birdcage, a whimsical creature enchanting them all. From this vantage point above the lights, she could look out upon the sea of faces and see every single pair of eyes trained upon her. She didn’t need their applause; their open-mouthed wonder told her she was a star. All the pain, loss and heartbreak of the past months had led her here and now Paris lay at her feet, vanquished. But the dream she had stepped into was not her dream.

Her gaze swept lightly over the crowd like a chiffon scarf, falling suddenly upon a face she had never expected to see again. A man from her past, a lover from the mists, he walked inside her shadow, leaving footprints on her soul. He watched intently as she swung above him, a bird of paradise in a parliament of crows.

But he sank from her sight into the white glare of the footlights, gone again by the time she re-emerged.

Lost to her, he was the ghost she could not catch.

Just as she was the woman he could not save.