CHAPTER ONE
IFSOMEONEHADtold me six weeks ago that, come November, I’d be aboard a speedboat jetting towards Nick Morgan’s private island in the Indian Ocean, five thousand miles from my flat share in London, with the intention of requesting his help, I’d have stared at them in astonishment and asked what they were on.
For the sake of my older brother, Seb, with whom he’d been friends for years, Nick and I were just about civil to each other whenever our paths crossed, but we didn’t get along.
We’d met when he’d started at our exclusive boarding school in the same year as my brother. They were both thirteen and I was eleven. Seb and I were the children of a multimillionaire financier who had single-handedly funded the school’s new business studies centre. Nick was the clever son of a single mother, who had grown up in poverty and been awarded a free place. He found me impossibly spoilt and shallow, I knew, while I considered him absurdly aloof and uptight.
Since then, our fortunes had dramatically reversed but things between us were still as frosty as ever and, under normal circumstances, hell would have to freeze over before I’d ever seek him out.
But then I won one hundred and eight million pounds on the national lottery—give or take a penny or two—and was very nearly scammed out of half of it, and that changed everything.
‘You need proper professional help, Millie,’ Seb told me when I rang him in a panic, my heart pounding and my palms sweating as the delayed shock of the win, the near miss I’d had with the fraudsters and the realisation of how suddenly vulnerable I was on so many fronts finally hit home. ‘Get in touch with Nick. He does this sort of thing for a living and he’s extremely good at it.’
Seb was right. Over the last decade, Nick had made a fortune from dishing out top-level financial advice and the sales of products he’d developed off the back of it. He’d started his career as an advocate of the high risk, high reward way of making money on someone else’s payroll before switching to a slower, steadier approach to wealth management when he set up on his own. He’d developed an unshakeable reputation for both ability and trustworthiness and, grudgingly, I had to admit that if anyone was the man for the job, it was probably him.
There was just one teeny tiny problem.
‘Nick hates me,’ I said, recalling with a shiver the hard set of his jaw and the chill that appeared in his slate-grey gaze whenever he laid eyes on me these days.
‘He doesn’t.’
‘He does.’
‘Either way,’ said Seb, clearly reluctant to venture down that rabbit hole yet again, ‘how is that relevant?’
‘It might make him less inclined to help.’
‘I very much doubt that. The fees he’d earn would be astronomical. He won’t be able to resist.’
‘But he already has billions,’ I said, all too easily able to envisage a scenario where he coolly heard me out and then baldly refused, as if trying to make some kind of a point, to mete out an unnecessary lesson in humility, perhaps. ‘Is he that driven by money?’
‘He’sonlydriven by money,’ came the dry reply down the line from San Francisco. ‘But seriously, Mills, he’ll take care of you. He’s the man you need. Believe me.’
I didn’t need any man, least of all one who loathed me, nor did I want to be taken care of. When our father lost everything virtually overnight eight years ago, a month before my twenty-first birthday, I’d crash-landed in the real world. Among other things, I’d learned the importance of self-reliance and the value of independence, and now fiercely guarded both. And while men were fine for the rare occasion I fancied a spot of company on a cold night, the only proper boyfriend I’d ever had had unceremoniously dumped me the minute I became penniless. The experience had been crushing and I wasn’t keen to repeat it.
But one hundred and eight million pounds was a mammoth responsibility. I knew nothing of investments other than that as well as up, they could go down, down and down some more, and my brush with the scammers suggested I might possibly have inherited my father’s rash decision-making when it came to handling a fortune. I did need help, I had to admit. And, with Seb’s suggestion flashing like a beacon in my head and the unsolicited offers of advice from people I’d never heard of still coming in thick and fast, I’d eventually thought,better the devil you know.
So I’d emailed Nick, who informed me that if I wanted to see him I’d have to hop on a plane, and now here I was twenty-four hours later, halfway around the world, part furious that I was so desperate for his help I’d had to acquiesce to his summons, part relieved he hadn’t simply told me to get lost.
As the boat I’d picked up in Dar es Salaam sped across the sparkling sapphire water with James, the driver that came with it, at the helm, the small land mass shimmering on the horizon grew and solidified. I shaded my eyes against the bright sun that blazed in a cloudless sky and, in an attempt to distract myself from the nerves that were twisting my stomach because I had no idea of the reception I was going to get, focused on the scenery.
The glorious stretch of curving white sand beach fringed with palm trees that hove into view was like something out of a glossy brochure. It was perfect, alluring, and so mesmerising I barely noticed the water turning to a light jade in colour as it shallowed, or the boat gradually slowing. It was only when we bumped against something solid, jolting me out of my trance, that I whipped my head round to find out what was going on and realised with a quick skip of my pulse that we’d arrived and I had a welcome party.
Of one.
Nick.
Who was standing on the gently bobbing pontoon with his arms folded across his broad chest and looking at me with his habitual inscrutability.
His face was set, his eyes were dark and his jaw was rigid, but that was where the familiarity ended, I noticed, my mouth drying and my skin prickling in a most peculiar way as I took in the rest of his appearance. His usually immaculate hair was longer than normal, and ruffled. Instead of his customary tailor-made suit, he had on a pair of turquoise board shorts, patterned, no less, with a multicoloured tropical plant print. In place of the inevitable pristine white shirt that he always wore with the two top buttons undone was, of all astonishing things, a lemon-yellow polo shirt.
What was going on? I wondered, baffled and not a little unsettled by the unexpected sight of some toned tanned biceps and a pair of long, surprisingly muscled legs. So much colour. Such informality. Could he be ill? And where, in all that was holy, were hisshoes?
‘Nick, hi,’ I said, parking these bewildering questions for later analysis and plastering on a bright smile while deciding to attribute the jitters bouncing around inside me to the long overnight flight.
‘A pleasure to see you as always, Amelia,’ he replied as he deftly caught the rope that James cast in his direction, and pulled it taut.
Despite the distracting flurry of activity and the impressive flexing of muscles, I tensed minutely and inwardly winced at the lie. At any lie, in fact. The closest, most important relationship of my youth—the one I’d had with my father—had turned out to be the biggest lie of all and these days I valued honesty, no matter how brutal.