LITMIR.BIZ

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in two, and neither side would connect with the other. She was still with Luke, folded against his body, dreaming of Caribbean islands.

       Islands to escape to...islands to set me free...

      Free from what her eyes were forcing into her head as she reread her mother’s repeated pleading texts.

      Darling, phone me! You must phone me. You absolutely must!

      She could not face making the call. Yet fear was biting at her out of nowhere. Her mother had never sounded so desperate...

      But before she phoned her she must get to her flat, set her phone to charge and then shower—wash Luke from her. And she must change into her day clothes—what she thought of as her prison clothes.

      A shaft of anguish pierced her. She silenced it. She had to. There was no choice but to bury it way down deep. Her prison door had opened—but for a fleeting moment only. Now it was slammed shut again and that fear was biting at her.

      Something was up. What could have made her mother so desperate?

      The taxi driver pulled up at her apartment block and she paid him, clambering out on shaky limbs, bare feet crammed into high heels. She slipped the phone into her bag and hurried to the exterior doors of the block.

      The doorman stepped towards her, holding up a hand. ‘I’m sorry, Miss Grantham, but I’ve orders to prevent anyone entering,’

      She stopped short. Stared blankly. ‘Orders?’ she echoed, her voice blank.

      ‘Yes, miss,’ he said. ‘From the new owners.’

      She tried to make sense of what he’d said. ‘Someone’s bought the block from Grantham’s?’ she said stupidly.

      He shook his head, looking at her with a touch of sympathy. ‘No, miss. Someone’s bought Grantham’s—what’s left of it.’

      * * *

      Talia’s mother flung herself at her.

      ‘Oh, darling, thank God—thank God you’re here! Oh, what is happening? How did this happen?’

      She was hysterical, and Talia was on the verge of hysteria herself.

      How she had got herself from central London to her parents’ house she hardly knew. Her brain had simply ceased to function. Now, the only thing she could do, besides tightening her arms instinctively around her clingy, crying mother, was say, ‘Where’s Dad?’

      Her mother threw back her head. Her hair was unstyled, her make-up absent—she looked years older than she did in the carefully presented image Talia was used to seeing.

      ‘I can’t contact him!’ Hysteria was present in her voice still. ‘I phone and phone and nothing happens! I can’t even get through to his office—it rings out! Something’s happened to him. I know it has. I know it!’

      Gently, Talia set her mother aside. ‘I have to find out what’s going on,’ she said.

      There was a stricken note in her own voice, and she was not sure how she was still managing to function, but she knew that above all she needed to discover what had happened to her father’s company. To her father...

      Five minutes on the Internet later and she knew. It was blazoned all over the financial press.

       Grantham Land goes under:

       LX Holdings picks over the carcass!

      She read the article in shock. Disbelief. Yet her disbelief was seared with the hideous knowledge that everything was true, whatever her desperate hope that it was not. Her father’s company had gone under, collapsing under a mountain of hitherto concealed debts, and all remaining assets acquired by a new owner.

      Like her mother—sobbing jerkily on the sofa while Talia hunched over her laptop—Talia tried to phone through to her father’s office. The call rang out, unanswered. Unlike her mother, she then tried to find a number for the company that seemed to have bought what was left of Grantham Land, but LX Holdings did not seem to exist—certainly not in the UK.

      She started to search for overseas companies, but realised how little she knew of corporate matters. The press didn’t seem to know much either—the adjective employed in their articles to describe the acquiring company was ‘secretive’.

      As for where her father was... Talia knew with bleak certainty that filled her entirely that he had gone to earth. He would not easily be found. As to whether he would bother to get in touch with his wife and daughter...

      Her mouth tightened to a whip-thin line. She turned her head towards her mother, huddled in a sodden mass of exhausted hysteria. Would her father care?

      She knew the answer.

      No, he would not. He had abandoned them to whatever would be the fallout from this debacle.

      Fallout that, within a week, she would know to be catastrophic.

      * * *

      Luke sat in his office. Beyond the window he could see Lake Lucerne. He had deliberately chosen this place for his base because of its very quietness.

      Throughout his entire career he had striven to draw as little attention to himself as possible. The financial press called his company ‘secretive’ and he liked it that way. Needed it that way. He’d needed to amass the fortune he’d required for his purpose as unobtrusively as possible.

      His corporate structure was deliberately opaque, with shell companies, subsidiaries in several jurisdictions, and complex financial vehicles all designed with one purpose in mind: to amass money through careful, assiduous speculation and investment without anyone noticing, and then, once his fortune was sufficiently large, to hunt his enemy to destruction.

      And now his enemy was defeated. Destroyed utterly. Wiped off the face of the earth—literally, it seemed. For, like the sewer rat he was, he’d gone to ground.

      Luke had a pretty shrewd idea of where he’d gone, and it was not a place where he would feel safe. Those from whom his quarry had borrowed money in his final desperate attempts to stave off the ruin rushing upon him were not likely to be forgiving of the fact that he could not repay them at all.

      He tore his mind away—that was not his concern. His concern was what to do with the rest of his life.

      He felt his guts twist. His face hardened with a bleakness in his expression that he could not banish.

      Weeks had passed since the night that had transformed his existence—when he had so rashly thought, for those brief hours, that he had started his new life, free at last from the punishing task he had set himself. He still could not accept what she had done—could not accept how totally, devastatingly wrong he had been about her.

       I thought she felt as strongly as I did! I thought what was between us was as special to her—as mind-blowing, as amazing and as lasting—as it was to me. I thought we had started something that would change our lives.

      That twist in his guts came again, like a rope knotting around his midriff. Well, he had thought wrong, hadn’t he? That incredible night had meant nothing to her—nothing at all.

      She walked away with barely a word—just that brutal note. How could I have got it so wrong? Got her so wrong?

      In the punishing years since he’d set out to wreak vengeance upon the man who had driven his father to an early grave he’d had no time for relationships—only those fleeting affairs. Was that why he’d got this woman Talia—the name echoed tormentingly in his head...Talia—so wrong?

       What do I know of women? Of how they can promise and deceive?

      With a razored breath he reached jerkily for the file lying in front of him. He flicked it open, seeking distraction from his tormenting thoughts.

      The photos inside mocked him, but he made himself stare at them—made

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