Rescued by the Brooding Tycoon (2 page)

‘Get him off me. He’s soaking.’

‘Phantom, get down!’ Harriet cried.

He did so but only briefly, hurling himself at Darius again, this time with a force that took them both down to the ground. As he lay helplessly on the sand, Phantom loomed over him, licking his face and generally trying to show friendliness. He looked aggrieved as his mistress hauled him off.

‘Bad dog! I’m very cross with you.’

Darius got to his feet, cursing at the wreck of his suit.

‘He wasn’t attacking you,’ Harriet said in a pleading voice. ‘He just likes people.’

‘Whatever his intentions, he’s made a mess,’ Darius said in an icy voice.

‘I’ll pay to have your suit cleaned.’

‘Cleaned?’ he snapped. ‘I’ll send you a bill for a new one. Keep away from me, you crazy animal.’

He put up his arm to ward off another encounter, but Harriet threw her arms protectively around the dog.

‘You’d better go,’ she said in a voice that was now as icy as his own. ‘I can’t hold him for ever.’

‘You should know better than to let a creature that size run free.’

‘And you should know better than to wear a suit like that on the beach,’ she cried.

The undeniable truth of this soured his temper further, leaving him no choice but to storm off in the direction of the helicopter. He guessed his pilot had seen everything, but the man was too wise to comment.

As they lifted off, Darius looked down and saw Harriet gazing at the machine, one hand shielding her eyes. Then Phantom reared up again, enclosing her in his great paws, and at once she forgot the helicopter to cuddle the dog, while he licked her face. So much for being cross with that stupid mutt, Darius thought furiously. Clearly, he was all she cared about.

He thought of how he’d stood on the beach, alone, peaceful for the first time in months, and how clumsily she had destroyed that moment. He wouldn’t forgive her for that.

From this high point on the hill overlooking Monte Carlo, Amos Falcon could see the bay but, unlike his son, he failed to notice the beauty of the sea. His attention was all for the buildings on the slope, tall, magnificent, speaking of money, though none spoke so loudly as his own house, a sprawling, three-storey edifice, bought because it dominated its surroundings.

It was money and the need to protect it that had first brought him to this tax haven years ago. He’d started life poor in a rundown mining town in the north of England, and got out fast. Working night and day, he’d built up a fortune of his own, helped by marrying a woman with wealth, and he’d left England for a more friendly tax regimen as soon as he could, determined that no government would be allowed to rob him of his gains.

‘Where the devil is he?’ he muttered crossly. ‘It’s not like Darius to be late. He knows I want him here before the others.’

Janine, his third wife, a well-preserved woman in her fifties with a kind face and a gentle manner, laid a hand on his arm.

‘He’s a busy man,’ she said. ‘His company is in trouble—’

‘Everyone’s company is in trouble,’ Amos growled. ‘He should be able to deal with it. I’ve taught him well.’

‘Perhaps you spent too much time teaching him,’ she suggested. ‘He’s your son, not just a business associate to be instructed.’

‘He’s no business associate of mine,’ Amos said. ‘I said I’d taught him well, but he never quite learned how to take the final, necessary step.’

‘Because he has a conscience,’ she suggested. ‘He can be ruthless, but only up to a point.’

‘Exactly. I could never quite make him see… Ah, well, maybe his recent troubles will have taught him a lesson.’

‘You mean his wife leaving him?’

‘I mean that damn fool divorce settlement he gave her. Much too generous. He just let her have whatever she demanded.’

Janine sighed. She’d heard him ranting on this subject so often, and there was no end to it.

‘He did it for the children’s sake,’ she pointed out.

‘He could have got his children back if he’d played hard, but he wouldn’t do it.’

‘Good for him,’ Janine murmured.

Amos scowled. He could forgive her sentimental view of life. After all, she was a woman. But sometimes it exasperated him.

‘That’s all very well,’ he growled, ‘but then the world imploded.’

‘Only the financial world,’ she ventured.

His caustic look questioned whether there was any other kind, but he didn’t rise to the bait.

‘And suddenly he had a pittance compared to what he’d had before,’ he continued. ‘So he had to go back to that woman and try to persuade her to accept less. Naturally, she refused, and since the money had already been transferred to her he couldn’t touch it.’

‘You’d never have made that mistake,’ Janine observed wryly, perhaps thinking of the pre-nuptial agreement she’d had to sign before their wedding five years earlier. ‘Never give anything you can’t take back, that’s your motto.’

‘I never said that.’

‘No, you’ve never actually said it,’ she agreed quietly.

‘Where the devil is he?’

‘Don’t upset yourself,’ she pleaded. ‘It’s bad for you to get agitated after your heart attack.’

‘I’m over that,’ he growled.

‘Until the next time. And don’t say there won’t be a next time because the doctor said a massive attack like that is always a warning.’

‘I’m not an invalid,’ he said firmly. ‘Look at me. Do I look frail?’

He rose and stood against the backdrop of the sky, challenging her with his pose and his expression, and she had to concede the point. Amos was a big man, over six foot, broad-shouldered and heavy. All his life he’d been fiercely attractive, luring any woman he wanted, moving from marriage to affairs and on to marriage as the mood took him. Along the way, he’d fathered five sons by four mothers in different countries, thus spreading his tentacles across the world.

Recently, there had been an unexpected family reunion. Struck down by a heart attack, he’d lain close to death while his sons gathered at his bedside. But, against all the odds, he’d survived, and at last they had returned to their different countries.

Now he had summoned them back for a reason. Amos was making plans for the future. He’d regained much of his strength, although less than he claimed.

To the casual eye, he was a fine, healthy specimen, still handsome beneath a head of thick white hair. Only two people knew of the breathless attacks that followed exertion. One of them was Janine, his wife, who regarded him with a mixture of love and exasperation.

The other was Freya, Janine’s daughter by an earlier marriage. A trained nurse, she’d recently come to stay at her mother’s request.

‘He doesn’t want a nurse there in case it makes him look weak,’ Janine pleaded, ‘but if I invite my daughter he can’t refuse.’

‘But he knows I’m a nurse,’ Freya had pointed out.

‘Yes, but we don’t have to talk about it, and you can keep an eye on him discreetly. It helps that you don’t look like a nurse.’

This was an understatement. Freya was delicately built with elegant movements, a pretty face and a cheeky demeanour. She might have been a dancer, a nightclub hostess, or anything except a medical expert with an impressive list of letters after her name.

An adventurous spirit had made her leave her last job in response to her mother’s request.

‘I was getting bored,’ she said. ‘Same thing day after day.’

‘You certainly won’t get that with Amos,’ Janine had remarked.

She was right. After only a few days Freya remarked, ‘It’s like dealing with a spoilt child. Don’t worry. I can do what’s necessary.’

Luckily, Amos liked his stepdaughter and under her care his health improved. It was she who now came bouncing out onto the balcony and said, ‘Time for your nap.’

‘Not for another ten minutes,’ he growled.

She smiled. ‘No, it’s now. No argument.’

He grinned. ‘You’re a bully, you know that?’

‘Of course I know that. I work at it. Get going.’

He shrugged, resigned and good-natured, and let her escort him as far as his bedroom door. Janine would have gone in with him, but he waved her away.

‘I can manage without supervision. Just keep your eyes open for Darius. I can’t think what’s keeping him.’ He closed the door.

‘What’s going on?’ Freya asked as the two women walked away.

‘Goodness knows. He was supposed to arrive this morning but he called to say there’d been an unexpected delay.’

‘And then all the other sons, Leonid, Marcel, Travis, Jackson, just a few days apart. Why is Amos suddenly doing this?’

‘I can only guess,’ Janine said sadly. ‘He puts on this big act of being fully recovered, but he had a scare. He’s seen that his life could end at any time, and he’s…getting things sorted out, is how he puts it, starting with changes to his will.’

‘Funny, he’s so organised that you’d think he’d have fixed that ages ago.’

‘He did, but I believe he’s taking another look at all of his lads and deciding—I don’t know—which one will manage best—’

‘Which one is most like him,’ Freya said shrewdly.

‘You’re very hard on him,’ Janine protested.

‘No more than he deserves. Of all the arrogant—’

‘But he’s very fond of you. You’re the daughter he never had and he’d love you to be really part of the family.’ She paused delicately.

‘You mean he wants me to be his daughter-in-law?’ Freya demanded, aghast. ‘The cheeky crook.’

‘Don’t call him a crook,’ Janine protested.

‘Why not? No man builds up the kind of fortune he did by honest means. And he’s taught his sons to be the same. Anything for money, that’s how they all think. So if one of them can talk me into marriage he’ll cop the lot. Was Amos mad when he thought of that? Nothing on this earth would persuade me—there isn’t one of them I’d ever dream of—ye gods and little fishes!’

‘Don’t tell him I told you,’ Janine begged.

‘Don’t worry. Not a word.’ Suddenly her temper faded, replaced by wicked mischief. ‘But I might enjoy a good laugh. Yes, I think it deserves that.’

As she hurried away her mother heard the laughter echoing back, and sighed. She couldn’t blame Freya one bit. She, of all people, knew what madness it was to marry into this family.

Darius arrived the next day, apologising with a fictional tale of business dealings. Not for the world would he have admitted that he’d been forced to leave Herringdean, return to the mainland and check into a hotel to put on a fresh suit. Normally, no power on earth could force him to change his plans and he resented it. Another thing for which Harriet Connor was to blame.

He found her mysteriously disturbing because she seemed to haunt him as two people. There was the girl who’d briefly charmed him with her instinctive empathy for his feelings about the isolated place. And there was the other one who’d interfered with his plans, destroyed his dignity with her stupid hound, and committed the unforgivable crime of seeing him at a disadvantage. He had dismissed her from his mind but she seemed unaware of that fact and popped up repeatedly in one guise or another.

A fanciful man might have defined her two aspects as the Good Fairy and the Bad Fairy. Darius, who wasn’t fanciful, simply called her ‘that wretched female’.

His father greeted him in typical fashion. ‘So there you are at last. About time too.’

‘An unexpected matter that required my attention.’

Amos grunted. ‘As long as you sorted it out to your advantage.’

‘Naturally,’ Darius said, brushing aside the memory of lying on the sand. ‘Then I got here as soon as I could. I’m glad to see you looking better, Father.’

‘I
am
better. I keep saying so but my womenfolk won’t believe me. I suppose Freya talked a lot when she collected you from the airport.’

‘I asked her questions and, like a good nurse, she answered them.’

‘Nurse be damned. She’s here as my stepdaughter.’

‘If you say so.’

‘What do you think of her?’

‘She seems a nice girl, what little I’ve seen of her.’

‘She cheers the place up. And she’s a good cook. Better than that so-called professional I employ. She’s doing supper for us tonight. You’ll enjoy it.’

He did enjoy it. Freya produced excellent food, and could crack jokes that lightened the atmosphere. She was pleasant to have around, and Darius found himself wondering why more women couldn’t be like her instead of invading other people’s private property with their sharp remarks and their dangerous dogs.

Awkward. She’d said it herself, and that was exactly right.

After supper, in his father’s study, the two men confronted each other.

‘I gather things aren’t too good?’ Amos grunted.

‘Not for me or anyone else,’ Darius retorted. ‘There’s a global crisis, hadn’t you heard?’

‘Yes, and some are weathering it better than others. That contract you had the big fight over, I warned you how to word the get-out clause, and if you’d listened to me you could have told them where to stuff their legal action.’

‘But they’re decent people,’ Darius protested. ‘They knew very little about business—’

‘All the better. You could have done as you liked and they wouldn’t have found out until too late. You’re soft, that’s your trouble.’

Darius grimaced. In the financial world, his reputation was far from soft. Cold, unyielding, power-hungry, that was what people said of him. But he drew the line at taking advantage of helpless innocence, and he’d paid the price for it; a price his father would never have paid.

‘But it’s not too late,’ Amos conceded in a milder tone. ‘Now you’re here there are ways I can help.’

‘That’s what I hoped,’ Darius said quietly.

‘You haven’t always taken my advice, but perhaps you’ve got the sense to take it now. And the first problem is how you’re going to deal with Morgan Rancing.’

‘I must tell you—’

‘I’ve heard disturbing rumours about some island he owns off the south coast of England. They say he’ll try to use it to cover his debts, and I’m warning you to have no truck with that. Don’t give it a thought. What you must do—’

‘It’s too late,’ Darius growled. ‘Herringdean is already mine.’

‘What? You agreed to take it?’