COLESATINthe back seat of the Thorpe Industries SUV, diagonally behind his sexy driver—hisdriver, Cole mentally reminded himself—dark sunglasses over his eyes. He had to stop looking at her, but his eyes kept bouncing from her lovely profile to her slim shoulder, to the one hand he could see on the steering wheel. She drove with cool competence, easily manoeuvring the big car in busy traffic. Her eyes darted between the rear view and side mirrors, and he found it hard to believe that the cool, remote woman behind the wheel was the same one who’d been crying just twenty minutes before.
Judging by the mortification in her green eyes, crying wasn’t something she did often. Or at all. What had set her off? They’d been trading glances, and he’d seen the awareness of him in her eyes. He’d introduced himself, her phone had rung and she’d tossed coffee over him. Had she been scared he’d yell at her, lash out at her, fire her? Was that what had caused her to become emotional?
His curiosity burned a hole in his stomach lining, and he fought to keep the urge to demand an explanation behind his teeth. She was his employee. He had no right to that knowledge and the best way to show her respect was to pretend nothing had happened.
But he couldn’t. Partly, yeah, because of that curiosity—an anomaly in itself, because people generally weren’t interesting enough for him to dive into their psyche—and partly because he wanted to comfort her, to make everything that upset her go away.
The urge to take her in his arms and shield her from the world terrified him. He’d never been protected, and even as a child he’d been expected to take, and deal with, life’s vagaries, disappointments and lack of fairness. He didn’t coddle people—didn’t know how—so his need to protect and remedy whatever ailed her confounded him.
Cole swallowed his sigh and turned his head to look out of the window, catching a glimpse of a low-income suburb on the side of the road. He was now in the southernmost city in Africa, last week he’d been in Chicago, two weeks before he’d been in Hong Kong. As well as visiting Thorpe Industries’ regional offices, he was also managing his internationally acclaimed, billion-dollar hedge fund.
His candle was now a stub the size of a thumb nail.
Cole slipped his index finger and thumb under his sunglasses and pushed them into his closed eyelids, and an image of his older brother meditating in his orange robes flashed behind his eyes.
Did Sam ever think about crisscrossing the world in the Thorpe private jet, wearing five-thousand-dollar suits or the long work days and the responsibility of being the CEO of Thorpe Industries demanded? He’d walked away from his privileged life of being the highly educated, driven, feted first-born son of Grenville Thorpe—the famous industrialist—to join a Buddhist monastery and Cole wondered if he regretted his decision.
Cole dropped his fingers and opened his eyes, but the events of the past six months rolled through his mind in a series of snapshots. His father’s death a year ago had been a shock, not because Cole felt any grief for the man he’d never known, but because Grenville dying of a heart attack had put a mortal dent in his plans to take revenge on the father who’d ignored him all his life.
For five years before Grenville’s death, or more, he’d been quietly and surreptitiously buying up Thorpe Industries shares and had amassed a big block of shares in the multinational company his father had owned and operated. He’d been a few months off staging a hostile takeover—his father wouldn’t have been able to ignore him or that—when Grenville had died of a heart attack on his yacht off the Amalfi coast. Sam, his brother, had inherited all of Grenville’s assets and Grenville’s shares in Thorpe Industries.
Cole, unsurprisingly, hadn’t been mentioned in the will.
Since Cole hadn’t had the same desire to ruin Sam as he had Grenville, he’d stepped back and re-evaluated his plans. His only aim in acquiring Thorpe shares had been to look his father in the eye as he’d told him that he’d no longer be ignored or dismissed.
But death had whipped his revenge out of his hands.
Then Sam, on the six-month anniversary of their father’s death, had swapped his Armani suits for orange robes, his single life as one of the world’s most eligible bachelors for abstinence, and material abundance for one meal a day and sleeping on a thin mat, covered only by his robes. Cole had had no problem with Sam reinventing his life—that was his choice—but what had possessed Sam to transfer every asset he owned, and everything he’d inherited from Grenville, including his controlling interest in Thorpe Industries, to Cole? How dared he? What on earth had his brother been thinking?
Cole would have asked him but Sam, according to his London-based lawyer and point of contact, was currently unavailable. Sam was fine. He stood by his decision to transfer everything to Cole, he had no interest in the outside world and was living his best life.
Cole had wanted the company, the lawyer said, so Sam had given it to him.
Yeah, but he hadn’t wanted Thorpe Industries like this—it meant nothing without the sweet taste of revenge. Now it was, simply, a pain in his backside.
Cole flipped his phone over and over, thinking that Grenville had to be doing cartwheels in his grave. His worshipped firstborn—not an exaggeration—had renounced everything, including his name, and his despised and shunned second-born son now owned all his worldly possessions. Despised? No, that was wrong. You had to care about someone or something to despise them, Grenville hadn’t been able to gather enough energy to hate him. He’d been discounted and discarded, not worthy of his father’s notice.
Cole’s phone buzzed and he looked down at the screen, sighing when he saw the identity of the caller. He ignored the call and allowed it to go to voice mail. Somehow, along with his company, apartments and all his material possessions, Cole had also inherited the responsibility of Sam’s long-term girlfriend, Melissa. He now owned the aristocratic blonde’s apartment and he’d continued Sam’s tradition of paying her a hefty monthly allowance.
Cole didn’t mind her having the apartment and cash. She and Sam had been together for a long time and she’d expected to marry him some day. She deserved some sort of compensation for the trauma his brother had put her through. But, over the last couple of months, despite sharing nothing more than a few dinners and attending a mutual friend’s wedding together, the press had started linking them together, treating them like a couple.
Not on, Cole decided. He’d had a couple of serious relationships in his early and mid-twenties, all of which had fizzled away. He wasn’t good at being part of a couple, he pushed people away when they asked for emotional intimacy. He’d been raised by an unemotional mother, had been ignored by his father and had had little contact with his brother. He was better on his own, was used to his solitary life, and when he got back to London he’d present Melissa with an exit package of a couple of million and ownership of the flat. That would ease the sting of severing her ties to the Thorpe family.
Hopefully, getting rid of Thorpe Industries would be as easy. Early on, he’d decided that dismantling the company and selling its assets to local business people was the most logical and efficient way to rid himself of the Thorpe empire.
While he could get a lot from spreadsheets and balance sheets, Cole knew that the best way to gather information was to get his boots on the ground, to make his own assessments. He’d spent many weeks crisscrossing the world, visiting all Thorpe companies and inspecting the assets he’d received from Sam. He’d put Sam’s London and Hong Kong apartments on the market, sold his yacht and private helicopter and his art collection was due to be sold at auction in a few months. Cole intended to put a portion of the proceeds he realised into a fixed-term investment in case Sam decided he didn’t want to be a monk any more, but the rest he intended to distribute to various charities. He had his own apartments, art and car collections—he wasn’t into yachts—and he didn’t need his brother’s pass-me-downs. He had enough of his own money. He didn’t need Sam’s or his father’s.
His African assets were fairly straightforward and he didn’t foresee any complications.
Lex looked in the rear-view mirror and caught Cole’s bleak expression—she should think of him as Mr Thorpe but, because she’d seen his ridged stomach and his bare chest, she couldn’t. She wished she could ask him what was bothering him, why he looked as if he carried the weight of the world resting on his impressively wide shoulders.
He looked so damn lonely...
Despite knowing it wasn’t her place—drivers didn’t speak to owners of companies—Lex knew she was going to say something, although she knew not what. All she knew was that she was desperate to distract him and needed to pull him back from whatever dark place he’d wandered into. It wasn’t her place or part of her duties, and he might tell her to mind her own business, but nobody should look that...thatdesolate.
But she already had two black marks against her—tossing coffee and crying—and she didn’t want to give him an excuse to hand her another one, so her question couldn’t be personal. So, what should she say? Ah, just around the next bend was a decent view of Table Mountain: she could point it out and ask him if he’d visited Cape Town before. The city was an innocuous, friendly subject.
Cole Thorpe, despite having all the money in the world—that was a limited-edition luxury watch on his wrist—looked as though he needed a friend.