LITMIR.BIZ

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      CHAPTER ONE

      LUCAS VIEIRA was mad as hell.

      His day had not gone well. Not gone well? Lucas almost laughed.

      An understatement.

      His day had been chaos. Now, it was rapidly turning into catastrophe.

      It had started with a mug of burned coffee. Lucas had not even known there could be such a thing until his P.A.—his very temporary P.A.—had brewed a pot of something black, hot and oily and poured him a cup of it.

      One taste, and he’d shoved the thing aside, flipped open his cell phone to check his messages and found one from the same fool of a reporter who’d been badgering him for an interview the past two weeks. How had the man gotten his number? It was private, as was the rest of Lucas’s life.

      Lucas cherished his privacy.

      He avoided the press. He traveled by private jet. His two-level penthouse on Fifth Avenue was accessible only via private elevator. His estate on the ocean, in the Hamptons, was walled; the Caribbean island he’d bought last year was festooned with No Trespassing signs.

      Lucas Vieira, Man of Mystery, some wag had once called him. Not exactly true. There were times Lucas couldn’t avoid cameras and microphones and questions. He was a multi-billionaire, and that stirred interest.

      He was also a man who had risen to the top in a profession where lineage and background had significant meaning…

      And he had neither.

      Or, rather, he did—but not the kind Wall Street generally preferred. Not the kind he would discuss, either. The only questions he would ever consider were those that concerned the public face of Vieira Financial. As for how Vieira Financial had come to be such a powerhouse, how Lucas had come to be such a success at thirty-three.

      He had tired of being asked, so he’d finally offered a response in a recent interview.

      “Success,” he’d said, in his somewhat husky, lightly accented voice, “success is when preparation meets opportunity.”

      “That’s it?” the interviewer had said.

      “That’s it,” Lucas had replied, and he’d unclipped the tiny mike from the lapel of his navy wool Savile Row suit jacket, risen to his feet, walked past the cameras and out of the studio.

      What he would never add was that to reach that point, a man could permit nothing, absolutely nothing, to get in his way.

      Lucas frowned, swung his leather chair away from his massive Brazilian rosewood desk and stared blindly out the wall of glass that overlooked midtown Manhattan.

      Which brought him directly back to today, and how in God’s name was he going to keep to that credo?

      There had to be a way.

      He had learned the importance of letting nothing come between a man and his goals years ago when he was a boy of seven, a dirty, half-starved menino de rua—a kid living on the streets of Rio. He picked tourists’ pockets, stole whatever he could, ate out of restaurant trash bins, slept in alleys and parks, although you didn’t really sleep when you had to be alert to every sound, every footfall.

      There was no way out.

      Brazil was a country of extremes. There were the incredibly rich who lived in homes that defied description, and the incredibly poor, the favelados, who eked out an existence in the favelas, the shanty towns, that clung to Rio’s hillsides. Lucas was not even one of them. He was nothing. He was vermin. And what seven-year-old could change that?

      All he had was his mother. And then, one night, a man she’d brought home took a look at Lucas, trying to make himself invisible in the corner of their cardboard shack, and said forget it, he was not going to pay good money to lie with a puta while her kid watched.

      The next day, Lucas’s mother walked him to the dirty streets of Copacabana, told him to be a good boy and left him there.

      He never saw her again.

      Lucas learned to survive. To keep moving, to run when the cops showed up because they’d as soon beat the crap out of you as not. Then, one night, somebody yelled, “Bichos!” but Lucas couldn’t run. He was sick, half-delirious with fever, dehydrated after vomiting up what little was in his belly.

      He was doomed.

      Except, he wasn’t.

      On that night, his life changed forever.

      Some do-gooding social worker was with the police. Who knew why? It didn’t matter. What did matter was that she took him to a storefront that housed one of the few organizations that saw street children as human. There, they pumped him full of antibiotics, gave him fruit juice to drink and, when he could keep that down, food. They cleaned him up, cut his hair, dressed him in clothes that didn’t fit, but who gave a damn?

      The clothes were free of lice. That was what mattered.

      Lucas wasn’t stupid. In fact, he was bright. He’d taught himself to read, to do math. Now, he attacked the

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