Automatically, Finn lifted his head and turned it in her direction. She was standing a foot from him, enveloping him with an intoxicating combination of heat and scent, confidence and vibrancy. His gaze locked onto hers, and in that instant the overall impression he had of dark, tousled hair, dazzling smile and a short black sequinned dress was pulverised by a punch of lust so strong it nearly knocked him off his stool.
Lost in the soft brown depths of her eyes and unable to look away, he felt his pulse slow right down. The noise and activity of the club faded. His surroundings disappeared. His head emptied of everything but a strange sense of recognition.
Which was absurd, he told himself, getting a grip and blinking to snap the connection. His foundations had been rocked. His defences were weak. Recognition? No way. They didn’t know each other.
But they could.
They could get to know each other very well.
Because the intense attraction that had hit him like the blow of a hammer was not one-sided, he realised as he let his gaze drift over her in a leisurely assessment. She felt it too. Quite apart from the fact that she’d been the one to approach him, he could see it in
the dilation of her pupils and the rapid rise and fall of her chest. In the flush on her cheeks and the accelerated flutter of the pulse at the base of her neck. He could hear it in the hitch of her breath and feel it in the way she was now very slightly leaning towards him.
And it occurred to him then that perhaps there were other ways to achieve the mindlessness he craved. Perhaps a night of hot sex and dizzying pleasure would succeed where alcohol had failed. Just the thought of it was pushing aside his father’s devastating diagnosis and his own reaction to it. Imagine the reality. If he switched his focus and put his mind to it he wouldn’t even have to imagine.
‘Hello,’ he said, giving her a slow smile that had felled many a woman over the years and was clearly no less effective tonight, if the sparkle that appeared in her eyes was anything to go by.
‘Would you mind if I joined you?’
‘I can’t think of anything I’d like more.’
CHAPTER ONE
Fifteen months later
STILL NO NEWS.
Oblivious to the faint thud of music coming from the club below, Finn tossed his phone onto his desk and stalked to the window, frustration boiling through him as he stared out through the Georgian sash window into the dark London night.
It had been two months since he’d found the adoption certificate amongst the papers left behind by the man he’d always considered to be his father, and he was no closer to discovering the truth surrounding his birth now than he had been the moment he’d figured out what he was holding and his life, already shattered by grief, had blown fully apart. The only people who could shed any light on anything were no longer around to ask, and the investigation agency he’d hired—allegedly one of the best in the country—had hit a dead end with every lead.
The paralysis was driving him demented. All he wanted was answers. All he needed was clarity. He’d thought the sorrow and emptiness that had consumed him in the days following his father’s—no, Jim’s—death and the realisation that he was now all alone in the world had been harrowing, but at least there’d been a feeling of closure. At least there’d been a logical, if agonising, process to get through.
Now there was nothing but chaos. Where order and certainty had once ruled Finn’s world, confusion and doubt now reigned. He no longer knew what to believe; facts he’d never once had cause to examine now tormented him day and night. Who was he? Where did he come from?
The questions that spun around his head and left scorching trails of betrayal in their wake were many and relentless. Why had he been adopted? Where and who was his real family? Had he been abandoned? How had he ended up where he had?
And, most crushingly, why had he never been told the truth? There’d been eleven thousand opportunities to explain the circumstances surrounding his adoption, give or take a day or two, and eleven thousand opportunities missed. Why keep it a secret? His father, the man he’d so admired and looked up to, who’d circled the wagons when his mother had died and to whom he’d turned for advice and support back in the early days of his business, had become a stranger overnight.
As a result Finn had no idea how much of his thirty-one years on the planet had been genuine and how much hadn’t. In the absence of fact, his previously staid imagination ran riot. In the darkest moments, when he couldn’t sleep and prowled around his penthouse apartment unable to stop the constant churning of his mind, he found himself revisiting the circumstances of his mother’s death. He’d only been ten when she’d stepped out into a road and been hit by a bus. The driver had sworn she’d seen him coming, had even looked him straight in the eye, but why would she have done it deliberately, a pale-faced, tight-jawed Jim had immediately countered, when she’d had no reason to take her own life and everything to live for?
The coroner had ruled her death an accident and Jim had always unflinchingly maintained this verdict, but in the cool, calm quiet of the early hours of the past couple of weeks the doubts had crept into Finn’s head and taken root. Jim had lied to him about his birth, had lied to him his entire life, and now he couldn’t help thinking, what if he’d been lying about that too? What if his mother’s death hadn’t been an accident? What if every time she looked at him, her adopted son, she was reminded of what she’d never been able to create for herself? What if that had finally become too much to bear? What if she’d deliberately stepped in front of that bus because of him, because in some way he’d failed her, because he’d behaved too badly or somehow hadn’t been a good enough son?
If he’d been able to think logically, rationally, he might have seen this extrapolation for the unlikelihood it was, but logic and reason were long gone. His identity, his history, his entire belief system had been decimated and he didn’t know what to think or who to trust any more. He couldn’t even trust himself. He’d been taken for a fool and deceived his whole life, yet had never suspected a thing. The instincts he’d always considered rock solid and uncannily reliable were clearly worthless, and as a result his ruthlessly efficient decision-making ability had vanished. His concentration was shot and his attention to detail was history. His usually long fuse was now microscopically short, and he was snapping and snarling at anyone who had the misfortune to cross his path.
He neither recognised nor liked the man he’d become, a man who no longer knew his place in a world he’d always dominated, but there didn’t seem to be a damn thing he could do about it. The armour he’d taken for granted had been brutally stripped away and he was all at sea, unanchored and rudderless, and it was hell.
‘Boss?’
Shaking free of his tumultuous thoughts, Finn turned from the window to see the club’s doorman standing in the doorway.
‘Yes?’ he all but growled.
Bob, built like a tank and in possession of an attitude to match, didn’t even flinch. ‘There’s someone looking for you.’
‘Who?’
‘No idea. But she’s outside, asking if anyone knows you.’