LEAH DIDN'T STOP swimming till a full twenty laps were behind her.

Satisfied with her workout, she stroked over to the side of the pool and grabbed the silver handles on the ladder. As she hauled herself upwards out of the water, her gaze connected with her left thigh and the rough ridges of white skin that criss-crossed it.

Leah didn't look away, as she usually did. Instead, she forced herself to study the scars in the early morning sunshine.

They had faded quite a bit over the past two years. But they were never going to go away, she accepted as she climbed out on to the tiled pool surround and reached for her towel.

Leah sighed. She wished her disfigurement didn't bother her so much. It seemed pathetic to be upset about a few wretched scars when the car accident that had produced them had taken the life of her mother.

Nothing compared with that tragedy, not even Carl leaving her a few months after the accident. Though she'd been shattered at the time.

Leah clutched the towel tightly in her hands, rubbing at her scars less than gently as she recalled the expression on Carl's face when he'd taken his first good look at her scarred leg. He'd been utterly revolted. And repulsed.

He'd made excuses not to make love to her for weeks after she came home from hospital, till finally he'd announced that he wanted a divorce, saying it was because she had changed.

Leah agreed that she had. During the long, painful weeks she'd been in hospital, she'd found a different person inside herself. A better person, she liked to think. A person with more character, and insight, and compassion.

Carl claimed she'd become far too serious and was no fun any more. Leah's desperate argument that she'd just lost her mother and was naturally feeling sad made no impression on him at all.

His leaving her had nothing to do with her personality having changed, she thought bitterly. It was all to do with her scars. And her limp.

Well, the limp had long gone but the scars would never go. Not the scars on her legs. Or the scars on her heart.

Still, she'd finally come to terms with Carl's calling it quits on her. After all, what woman would actually want to stay married to a man who could not tolerate a wife who was no longer physically perfect?

Which, before the accident, she had been. Or so she'd been told all her life.

Leah had been the image of her mother, a natural blonde with lovely green eyes, perfect teeth and skin, and a very pretty face and figure. Leah had grown up taking her good genes for granted. Taking her privileged lifestyle for granted as well.

As the only child of one of Sydney's most successful stockbrokers, she'd never wanted for a thing. She'd been spoiled rotten all her life, her pampered upbringing producing a precious little society princess who thought the world was her oyster. Working for a living had never been on Leah Bloom's agenda. She had a monthly allowance, plus a credit card. Why work nine to five in some dreary job?

When people had asked what she did for a living, she had told them she was an aspiring writer, a minor ambition that had come to her during her last year at school when her English teacher complimented her on one of her creative writing assignments. She'd even attended a fiction-writing course at one stage, bought herself a computer and started a chick-lit novel, which was little more than a diary of what she did every week.

Which meant extremely silly and shallow, Leah decided in hindsight.

How could it be anything else when her life was silly and shallow, every day filled with shopping and charity luncheons and idle hours spent in beauty salons getting ready for the evening's outing. By the time Leah was twenty-one, she'd been to more parties and premieres and black-tie dos than she could count.

Falling in love and marrying Carl had been the icing on her seemingly never-ending cake. He'd been attractive and charming and rich. Very rich. Leah's family didn't mix with any other kind.

Carl had been thirty when they married, the heir to an absolute fortune made in diamonds. She'd been twenty-three.

They'd only been married for six months when the accident happened. Way too short a time for Carl to fall out of love with her. Leah had long come to the conclusion that she'd just been a trophy wife, a decoration on his arm to show off, a possession that he'd only valued when she'd been glitteringly perfect.

Once she'd become flawed, he hadn't wanted her any more.

"Mrs B. said to tell you breakfast will be ready in ten minutes," a male voice called out.

Leah glanced up to see her father leaning over the balcony that adjoined the master bedroom.

Dressed in his favourite navy silk dressing-gown and with a tan that a summer of swimming and yachting had produced, her father looked much younger than his sixty-two years. Of course, he did keep himself very fit in his home gym. A thick headful of expertly dyed brown hair didn't hurt, either.

"That's the only reason I come home every weekend, you know," she replied. "For Mrs B.'s cooking."

This was a lie, of course. She came home every weekend to spend time with her father, to feel his parental affection, up close and personal.

But Leah didn't want to live at home twenty-four seven. Joachim Bloom was far too dominating a personality for that. Leah knew she would find herself giving in to him if she was always around, like her mother had. As happy as her parents had been in their marriage, Leah had always been well aware who was the boss in their relationship.

"Rubbish!" her father retorted. "You're skinny as a rake."

"You can never be too thin," she quipped. "Or too rich," he finished for her. "Which reminds me, daughter, there's something important I have to discuss with you over breakfast, so shake a leg."

"The good one?" Leah shot back at him. "Or the gimpy one?"

Pretending to her father not to care about her scars had become a habit. She didn't want him to know that they bothered her as much as they still did. Or that they were the reason she never went to the beach any more, or swam anywhere else but here, at home, when there was no one around but her father and Mrs B. to see them.

"Very funny," he said with a roll of his eyes, and disappeared back inside.

Leah threw the towel over her shoulder and headed for her bedroom, one of six in the two-storeyed, waterside mansion that she'd been brought up in and which was probably worth many millions on the current market.

Vaucluse was the place to live in Sydney's eastern suburbs.

For a while after his mother's death, her father had thought of selling the house and buying elsewhere, but Leah had talked him out of it. And she was so glad she had. It was a comfort at times, to be around her mother's things. To feel her presence in the rooms.

Such beautiful rooms. Such a beautiful house, Leah thought wistfully as she climbed the curving staircase that led up to the bedrooms.

The thought didn't come to Leah till she was in the shower that her father might have changed his mind about the house. He might still want to sell. Maybe that was what he wanted to discuss with her.

I won't let him, she resolved as she snapped off the water. I'll fight him to the death!

A couple of minutes later, she was running downstairs, dressed in cut-off blue jeans and a pink singlet top, her long damp hair up in a ponytail.

Joachim's heart lurched as his daughter raced into the morning room. How like her mother she was! It was like looking at Isabel in her twenties.

"If you think you're going to sell this house, Daddy," Leah tossed at him with a feisty look as she sat down at the breakfast table, "then you can think again."

Joachim sighed. Like her mother in looks, but not in personality. Isabel had been a soft sweet woman, always deferring to him. Never making waves.

Leah looked soft and sweet. When she'd been younger, she'd even been soft and sweet. But over the past eighteen months, she'd become much more assertive, and very independent. Not hard, exactly. But quite formidable and forthright.

But who could blame her for turning tough, came a more sympathetic train of thought. Carl had a lot to answer for. Fancy leaving Leah when she needed him the most. The man was a weasel and a coward. Joachim wouldn't spit on him if he was on fire.

His daughter had had two alternatives during that awful time in her life. Go to pieces, or develop a thicker skin.

For a while it had been touch and go. Joachim was very proud that Leah had eventually pulled herself together and moved on.

"No, Leah," he told her with a reassuring smile. "I'm not selling the house. I know how much you love it."

Leah's relief was only temporary. Then what did Daddy want to talk to her about?

"What's up, then?" she asked as she reached for a slice of toast from the silver toast rack. "You're not going to make a fuss about my working, are you? I thought you were proud of my getting a job."

Perhaps surprised would have been a better description of her father's reaction. When Leah had first mentioned a year ago that she was going to find a job, her stunned father had asked her what on earth she thought she could do. "Even waitresses have to have experience these days!" he'd told her.

Leah understood his scepticism after she went to have her resumé done. Because there was nothing much she could put on it, except a very average pass in her Higher School certificate — studying had not been high on Leah's society princess agenda — plus that very brief creative writing course. She had absolutely no qualifications for employment other than her social skills and her looks and a limited ability to use a computer.

Which was why the only job she'd been able to find after attending endless interviews was as a receptionist. Not at some flashy establishment in the city, either. She currently worked for a company that manufactured beauty products, and had their factory and head office at Ermington, a mainly industrial suburb in western Sydney.

"I am proud of your getting that job," her father insisted. "Extremely."

Mrs B., coming in with a plate piled high with scrambled eggs, hash browns, fried tomato and bacon, interrupted their conversation for a moment.

"This looks delicious, Mrs B.," Leah complimented her father's housekeeper as she placed the plate in front of her.

Leah was privately thankful that she only had to eat Mrs B.'s breakfast one day a week, or she'd have a backside as big as a bus.