Luke sat in his office. Beyond the window he could see Lake Lucerne. He had deliberately chosen this place for his base because of its very quietness.
Throughout his entire career he had striven to draw as little attention to himself as possible. The financial press called his company ‘secretive’ and he liked it that way. Needed it that way. He’d needed to amass the fortune he’d required for his purpose as unobtrusively as possible.
His corporate structure was deliberately opaque, with shell companies, subsidiaries in several jurisdictions, and complex financial vehicles all designed with one purpose in mind: to amass money through careful, assiduous speculation and investment without anyone noticing, and then, once his fortune was sufficiently large, to hunt his enemy to destruction.
And now his enemy was defeated. Destroyed utterly. Wiped off the face of the earth—literally, it seemed. For, like the sewer rat he was, he’d gone to ground.
Luke had a pretty shrewd idea of where he’d gone, and it was not a place where he would feel safe. Those from whom his quarry had borrowed money in his final desperate attempts to stave off the ruin rushing upon him were not likely to be forgiving of the fact that he could not repay them at all.
He tore his mind away—that was not his concern. His concern was what to do with the rest of his life.
He felt his guts twist. His face hardened with a bleakness in his expression that he could not banish.
Weeks had passed since the night that had transformed his existence—when he had so rashly thought, for those brief hours, that he had started his new life, free at last from the punishing task he had set himself. He still could not accept what she had done—could not accept how totally, devastatingly wrong he had been about her.
I thought she felt as strongly as I did! I thought what was between us was as special to her—as mind-blowing, as amazing and as lasting—as it was to me. I thought we had started something that would change our lives.
That twist in his guts came again, like a rope knotting around his midriff. Well, he had thought wrong, hadn’t he? That incredible night had meant nothing to her—nothing at all.
She walked away with barely a word—just that brutal note. How could I have got it so wrong? Got her so wrong?
In the punishing years since he’d set out to wreak vengeance upon the man who had driven his father to an early grave he’d had no time for relationships—only those fleeting affairs. Was that why he’d got this woman Talia—the name echoed tormentingly in his head...Talia—so wrong?
What do I know of women? Of how they can promise and deceive?
With a razored breath he reached jerkily for the file lying in front of him. He flicked it open, seeking distraction from his tormenting thoughts.
The photos inside mocked him, but he made himself stare at them—made himself read the accompanying detailed notes and scan down the complex figures set out in the financial analysis provided.
With an effort of mind he forced himself to focus. The rest of his life awaited him. He had better fill it somehow.
His acquisitions team were busy stripping what flesh remained on the carcass of his prey, disposing of any remaining assets for maximum profit—which they would do, he knew, with expert efficiency. He had left them to it. His goal had been to destroy his enemy, not make money out of his destruction. He had plenty more of the money that he’d amassed—enough to give him a life of luxury for as long as he lived. Now all he sought were ventures to invest in that would be for his own enjoyment. And this project, displayed in the photos in front of him, would do as well as anything else.
His mouth twisted and thoughts knifed in his head. The photos showed palm trees, an azure sea, the verdant greenery of the Caribbean.
I would have taken her there...
The thought left a hollowness in its wake, an emptiness that would not leave him.
* * *
Talia stared out of the window of the low-cost carrier’s plane that was winging her to Spain. Dread filled her. Her mother was at the Marbella villa, where Talia had taken her in those first nightmare days after her father’s disappearance and financial ruin.
It had been painstakingly explained to her by the blank-faced lawyer who had summoned her to her father’s former City HQ, where she’d been able to see through the glass door all the deserted offices being dismantled and stripped of their furnishings by burly men. Her father’s ruin encompassed not only the corporate assets, but Gerald Grantham’s personal assets too.
‘Your father put everything he owned into the company—initially for tax advantages and latterly to shore up the accounts. Consequently...’ the man had looked impassively at Talia, who had stared back at him white-faced ‘...it all now passes to the acquiring owner.’ He’d paused, then said unblinkingly, ‘Including, of course, the riverside mansion in the Thames Valley and all its contents.’
Talia had paled even more, as the man had gone on.
‘Vacant possession is required by the end of the week.’
So she’d taken her mother to Spain, thanking heaven that the villa seemed to have been spared. It appeared to be owned by a different corporation—an offshore shell company her father had set up.
In Spain, she’d tried to sort out the pathetic remnants of what they had left—which was almost nothing. All their bank accounts had been frozen, and all the credit cards. Had it not been for Talia’s secret personal account—the one she’d opened in defiance of her father’s diktats—she would not even have been able to buy air tickets or food. Or to pay Maria, the only member of staff in Spain she’d been able to keep on. She needed Maria as her mother’s only support when she went back to London to see if there was news about anything else she could salvage.
But it had turned out to be the reverse. Now, with dread mounting in her, she knew she would have to give her mother the worst news of all. The Marbella villa was being taken from them...
They had been given a fortnight to get out, and in that time Talia was going to have to find them somewhere else to live and keep her mother from collapsing totally. It would finish her, she knew, to lose the villa as well as everything else—as well as her husband. Which was a loss she simply could not and would not believe.