'I'm sorry you're going to be loaded with Fletch as your partner, Tammy, but we had to make him a groomsman. He is my brother and it was safer to include him in the wedding party than try seating him anywhere else at the reception. Being such an arrogant pig he's bound to offend whatever guests shared his table. Stuck at the end of ours, he shouldn't upset anyone, and since you'll be at the other end, you won't have to put up with much of him for long.'

Celine's apologetic, semi-pleading speech was doing a rerun through Tammy Haynes's mind as the limousine carrying the five bridesmaids set off for the church. Although they'd all been friends with Celine since the beginning of high school, none of them had ever met Fletcher Stanton. He'd always been referred to as 'my brother, the brain,' doing 'his thing' overseas, and largely absent from his younger sister's life.

Having flown home to Sydney only yesterday, he'd begged off the wedding rehearsal, pleading jet lag, making Celine gnash her teeth over his lack of caring for her wish for everything to go perfectly on her big day. 'No consideration. Thinks he can just waltz through anything and get it right,' had been her vexed mutter. 'He could have come a day earlier, but I bet he thought it was beneath his intelligence to rehearse anything.'

His formidable intelligence clearly did not win any brownie points from his sister, though it did have to make him a stand-out kind of guy, Tammy thought, her curiosity piqued despite Celine's criticisms of her brother. There weren't too many people in the world who'd achieved what Fletcher Stanton had.

Quite recently there'd been an article about him in Time Magazine, headlined Technological Wizard of th