Temptation Island (53 page)

He’d had to escape the yacht; the atmosphere there made him sick. Morons fawning over what van der Meyde was going to like or not like, what was good enough or not good enough, each and every one of them falling over themselves to please a man who couldn’t give a crap, had
never
in his privileged fucking life given a crap, about pleasing other people. Enrique was here for one reason and one reason alone. Revenge.

The sun was setting. Apricot light spilled on to the water as if a great fire burned beneath the surface. Had Enrique
not known better, he’d have said this was what heaven looked like.

A trio of sharp-suited caterers were loading crates on to the boat, pursued by a big, moustachioed bald guy, head of the company organising tonight’s event.

‘Are you gonna put that out, or do I have to make you?’

Enrique dragged deeply. ‘A man’s allowed a smoke—it’s a free country.’

‘You’re in van der Meyde’s country now, son. Put it out.’

He extinguished it on the web of skin between first finger and thumb.

Disgusted, the man pushed past. ‘I’ll be watching you like a hawk tonight, Romero.’ It was the name he’d given the agency.

Enrique grinned. Sure. Let the whole world watch and they’d still be facing the wrong way. Where they ought to be looking was right beneath their feet, to the blinking device he’d fixed earlier in the lower deck. The detonator clipped to the inside of his shirt. One button, one contact, one second was all it took. He closed his eyes and pictured it now, the small black box awaiting his instruction, time running down like sand through a glass.

Shouldn’t he be on that boat?

From the top of the van der Meyde mansion, Margaret Jensen shivered in her plum-coloured evening gown. She glared down at the beach and wrung her hands. Enrique Marquez was a risk—and he had to be, for who planned to execute a stunt as ambitious, as grisly, as this, if they weren’t prepared to lay it all on the line?

‘Can we go see Daddy now?’

Ralph was in the doorway, dressed in a tux and with a toy boat dangling from one arm.

‘In a minute, darling. Your father’s busy.’

‘He’s always busy.’

Margaret crouched, holding him close and inhaling his soapy smell and the softness of his hair. Her son. Beloved.

‘I know,’ she told him. ‘But this is a special night for him. Tomorrow, everything’s going to be different. Just you wait and see.’

Through the open doors of the van der Meyde mansion, Rebecca Stuttgart could hear the bustle and flurry of preparations down below. In less than an hour, four hundred VIP guests would be shown on to the most opulent yacht the world had ever seen.

She and JB were awaiting Reuben’s emergence in the mansion’s lobby.

As she watched her husband, his hands in his suit pockets, his blue gaze cool on the marble floor, she braced herself.

I’m one of them
, Lori had warned: for who else could have sent the message?

The truth comes out
.

The girl was braver than Rebecca had given her credit for. She wasn’t content with bringing JB the truth about her son. Now she wanted to blow the lid on Cacatra.

Rebecca should have been immobilised with fear. It had been her disclosure, after all.

Only tomorrow, she knew, she’d be long gone. Her destination was set, her new beginning planned. Her husband and his fury, the island and its secret—come the morning, they’d be distant memories, carried on the wind.

‘You look amazing.’

Maximo Diaz looped his arms around Lori’s waist and kissed her on the lips.

She could not stand his touch. ‘Don’t.’

He raised her hand and kissed her fingers instead. His eyes were framed by soft lashes and his skin was porcelain. She thought of him growing up in his European castle, Gothic spires buried deep in a pit of ferns, and imagined herself to be trapped there, chained to an underground wall, hearing his vampire tread and the long, lonely cries as he consumed his women, knowing he would live on and on with no end to her suffering, locked in till the end of time.

‘You know the pretend thing turns me on,’ he said. ‘Sometimes I can’t help myself.’

Lori removed herself under the pretext of adjusting her dress, a simple, elegant fishtail silhouette in blazing ochre. Her dark hair was loose, tumbling in jet waves.

They departed their accommodation shortly before six. She had already seen some faces she recognised. Jax Jackson, the Olympic idol, months from London 2012. Stevie Speller and Xander Jakobson. Aurora Nash, the contact of JB’s she had met once and hadn’t liked. Brock Wilde and Fiona Catalan, Hollywood power agents. Clusters of faintly familiar British celebrities, royalty or politicians or both. All had one thing in common. They weren’t him.

‘Come on, Lori,’ said Maximo as she resisted taking his hand, ‘aren’t we meant to be a couple in love?’

‘I’ll never love you.’

‘Sure you will.’ His top lip curled. ‘You’ll learn. And if you don’t, I’ll teach you.’

JB Moreau was calm. Unlike Reuben, he had all his life possessed a capacity for peace, and the more the world around him trembled with fear or unease, the quieter his centre became, like the silent funnel at the heart of a tornado.

He did not want to see Lori Garcia. He did not want to witness her beauty and be forced to turn away. He did not want to watch her on the arm of another man. Yet sometimes life had a way of imposing the unwanted, and in doing so it revealed a new objective.

Despite the hurt she had caused him, despite everything, he could not allow Maximo Diaz to go unanswered. JB knew what he had done to her. He saw the unhappiness in her eyes.

Maximo might be father to her child, but he wasn’t and never would be a lover of women. He was a manipulator, a bully. And he had chosen to fight the wrong battle.

JB knew what he had to do. The man hadn’t known over whose threshold he stepped.

Reuben van der Meyde descended the staircase. His son raced past, arms stretched wide like the wings of an aeroplane with accompanying sound effects, the housekeeper in close pursuit.

‘Get that boy under control!’
he boomed at Miss Jensen, who nodded meekly and grabbed hold of the child’s elbow. She muttered something as they melted into the kitchen quarters. He thought he heard the kid snivelling.

Reuben didn’t have time for this. He needed to get his head down and concentrate on reaching the morning without any major hiccups.

Distilling what was at risk to
a major hiccup
was laughable.

‘Drink?’

JB was in the lobby with his wife. The Frenchman held out a glass of thick liquid.

Reuben nodded. He downed the poison in one. ‘Let’s do this.’

Stevie and Xander’s Jeep approached the beach, slipping into the procession of waiting glitterati snaking its way towards the giant vessel. A navy-blue and shimmering-gold VDM emblem crowned the magnificent yacht. Tiny bulbs were strewn along its enormous flanks and across the bow, beginning to glow with the fading light. Uniformed staff, tiny from this distance, moved across the decks like blood rushing through a vast, complex organism.

Xander took her hand. ‘How are you feeling?’

Stevie gazed straight ahead, cool and collected in her dove-grey Elie Saab pantsuit.

‘Focused,’ she replied. ‘We’re here for a reason, and that reason is B.’

He nodded. ‘I don’t know how far we’ll have to take it. The things we know.’

‘As far as we have to.’ The decision was made. ‘The truth sets Bibi free.’

Preparation was everything, and Aurora Nash was leaving nothing to chance.

Concealing the seven-inch hunting knife in the band of her knickers, pointing it down in the way Billy-Bob Hocker had taught her one summer on Tom’s ranch, she dropped the silver floor-length gown over her head. It rippled down
the length of her body. At the ruched waist she had slivered an opening, concise as a paper cut.

She swallowed back the sickness that had been plaguing her for years.

Was murder all it was cracked up to be?

Was there really such a difference, was there
really
, when it came to that moment of action, that instant of do or die, between sinking a knife into meat and killing a man?

Feelings, she supposed. Compassion. Empathy.

She had neither of those for Reuben van der Meyde.

Arnaud Devereux hadn’t taken much persuading. His conscience had buckled a long time ago. By the time Aurora had arrived in Paris, it was as if he had wanted to tell her. As if he had wanted to give her van der Meyde’s private details. As if with confession came catharsis, and, perhaps, forgiveness for the part he had played.

I’m one of them. Tomorrow the truth comes out
.

Sending the message had been easy. Aurora wasn’t afraid. She knew she was taking on a giant, that a nineteen-year-old girl was no match for a man in Reuben’s position—and it didn’t make the damnedest bit of difference. She had an army behind her, even if they didn’t know it. All the kids like her, the ones who had their suspicions but whose suspicions were too shadowy to pinpoint, the ones who had always sensed something was wrong but couldn’t be sure what, the ones who didn’t know and maybe never would. Tonight she was leading them all into battle.

Crossing to her waiting car, the salty breeze whipping her white-blonde hair and the sun dipping to the ocean like a final farewell, Aurora touched the reassuring contours of the weapon. She hoped that in the last twenty-four hours
she had given Reuben van der Meyde a taste of the uncertainty that had hounded her for nineteen years.

Arnaud hadn’t known who her real parents were. One man definitely did. Once she had taken the information she needed, she was going to make him pay with his life.

No punishment she could inflict on Reuben would ever equal his crime.

But Aurora had always been willing to try.

Book Five

Departure

57

Reuben felt better the instant he set foot on his 400-foot-long triumph. Like a castle, his defence, it was a rock-solid reminder of his supreme wealth and influence.

And it looked bloody impressive.

‘I gotta say—’ a grinning TV exec, first on the boat, clapped him on the back ‘—she’s a beautiful thing.’

‘Ain’t she?’

‘You’re a lucky man, van der Meyde.’

‘Sixty years of luck.’

‘And sixty more, I don’t doubt.’

Guests continued to arrive, seeping on to the vessel like contagion. Reuben focused on showing them the great man they were expecting: cool, calm and unflustered, the entrepreneur who had made billions and eclipsed them all for money and power ten times over.

It was a novelty, for one night only, for these VIPs to be made to feel inferior. He had realised some time ago that they embraced it.

Obscene in its adornments, the grand saloon was a lofty half-oval space, strung with lights and filled with the tinkle of polite discourse. A marriage of classic romanticism and contemporary design, it combined gleaming wood panels, a traditional fireplace, an old ship’s clock on a conventional mantelpiece—nods to the intrepid ventures of Columbus and da Gama, notions of discovery and breakthrough—and charcoal parquet, aluminium porthole windows, a spotlit canopy and current, clean furnishings, which brought the van der Meyde vessel to the cutting-edge of modern interiors. It was a clever mix, a fusion of past and present, and typified everything Reuben imagined himself to be: integral to history and at the same time making it.

Stevie was sickened when she considered what had paid for it.

Lori Garcia was at her side. The supermodel was full of sweet conversation, innocent of the place and its evils.

‘I loved
Goodbye, Vegas
,’ she was saying. ‘Was that your first project with Xander?’

‘It was how we met.’

‘I saw you there at the Frontline Fashion night. Before things took off for me,’ she prompted. ‘You might not remember.’

Stevie smiled. ‘Of course I remember.’

Maximo Diaz joined them as the yacht eased from its station with a gentle tug. Severed from the shore, Stevie felt the menace of their floating island, a capsule, adrift, the clink of crystal and merry voices concealing a reality that was treacherous as the ocean beneath.

‘Let’s hope it’s smooth sailing,’ he said cheerfully.

‘Let’s hope,’ she replied.

Aurora disliked the feel of Reuben van der Meyde’s sweaty palm in hers. She had disliked it when she had first been on Cacatra, but she disliked it more now.

‘Champagne,’ he commanded.

A dark-haired Hispanic waiter, dressed in white and oddly familiar—perhaps he’d modelled—materialised. Reuben thrust the flute of Rémy into Aurora’s hand.

She enjoyed watching him struggle, no doubt surprised she had put in an appearance in the aftermath of Sherilyn’s death, and felt like she had when she was seven and playing Squash the Bug with Farrah by the pool. Reuben was the beetle, fat on its back, lolling on a broken shell.

Revoltingly, he touched her arm. ‘We were sad about your mother,’ he wheedled. ‘Sherilyn was a wonderful woman.’

The champagne tasted like acid.

‘Thank you.’ She had to force any scrap of gratitude from her mouth. With a tight smile, all she could muster, she adjusted her stance, feeling the handle of the knife press against her skin. Security had been rigorous, but not for her. What danger could a teenage girl pose?

If only he knew
.

‘Happy birthday,’ she told him, raising her glass.

Reuben raised his in return. ‘It’s gonna go with a bang.’

Enrique Marquez passed the gleaming baby grand piano, a tray of golden flutes high on his shoulder. Guests swarmed, plucking drinks blindly and without thanks, their rich, powdered faces scouting out others of their kind with practised ease, never once deigning to glance his way. Little did they know he had all their lives, each and every dirty-rich
one, in the palm of his hand. Given a sniff of his intentions, they would be down on their knees and begging for mercy.

It was a glorious thought. Enrique remembered the device, buried in the engine room, and imagined for a thousandth time the instant before detonation. It was too quick. He wished it could last longer so he could savour it more.