by Riley Banks
BJ ignored the Do Not Disturb light on Charlotte’s room, inserting a plastic master key into the door slot. The door beeped twice and the lock clicked open.
Good. She hadn’t put the chain across the door.
Not that it would have stopped him if she had.
It was dark inside - far too dark for ten in the morning - but the heavy damask curtains were designed to block out the harsh Arabic sun. The only light spilled from the hallway across the carpet.
Charlotte lay in the middle of the king-size bed, her form only just visible in the poor light.
She was curled into a tight ball, like an armadillo in hibernation; so inanimate that, if he didn’t know better, he would have sworn she was dead. She had not moved – not to change positions and certainly not to answer her phone, which had rung almost non-stop for the last twenty odd hours.
Her rejection of Damon’s calls should have brought him satisfaction but any pleasure was swallowed up by the phone call he had just ended.
Since Charlotte wasn’t answering, Damon thought it logical to call BJ and beg for Charlotte’s release, even going so far as to offer himself in her place.
As if Damon had anything BJ wanted or needed.
Unfortunately, Damon’s call couldn’t have come at a worse time; piggy-backing on the tail end of an irate call from his father demanding BJ put an end to the Dubai trip.
Damon’s call had stirred the hornet’s nest of BJ’s already wounded ego.
He eyed the bed, wondering how deep Charlotte’s catatonia went.
If I climbed into bed with her, would she resist? Would she fight back?
The thought of Charlotte struggling excited him more than he wanted it to but he pushed the thought out of his mind, moving with purpose to the top of the bed.
He was shocked to find her eyes open but if she was aware of his presence, she gave no indication. Her brown eyes were as lifeless and unmoving as glass marbles.
‘Get up, Charlotte,’ BJ said, looking down with a complex mixture of yearning, pity and loathing.
On some level, he realised he was responsible for her depressive state but BJ was not accustomed to feeling guilt, nor was he comfortable with its implications. It was far easier to lash out than to deal with the emotions her transformation stirred within him.
He prodded her shoulder – tentatively, as if afraid physical contact would bring about a melancholic infection.
When she still didn’t move, anger broke like a monsoonal wave. ‘Jesus fucking Christ. I’ve got better things to do than stand here and beg you to get up.’ A large part of his fury was hurt pride. Watching her sink into her black hole had done nothing to ease the sting of rejection.
He longed to walk away, to leave her in Dubai to wallow in self-pity. As much as he still wanted to possess her, he also wanted to lash out, to inflict on her the same pain she had inflicted on him.
But there was the order from his father.
The rest of his anger was a direct result of Damon’s call.
His conscience battled within him. He was torn between sweeping her in to his arms and crushing his fist into her beautiful face.
In the end, his hand reached for the vase without conscious thought. He threw the flowers on the floor, clasping the heavy vase in his tightly clenched fist, still not one hundred percent sure what he intended to do with it.
A second later, he upended it over Charlotte’s head, a cascade of water soaking her through to the skin.
The effect was instantaneous. She spluttered and spat like a wildcat forced to take a bath.
‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing,’ she said, leaping to her feet, her previously unresponsive eyes blazing.
‘Putting an end to your pity party,’ he said, feeling both relief and wicked satisfaction.
‘Now get dressed. We’ve got a plane to catch. There are some people in Sydney just dying to meet you.’
‘I can’t believe you’re leaving me.’ Anita knew she was being selfish but she still couldn’t help it. ‘I don’t want to be alone.’
Fat tears squeezed out from underneath her dark, sleep encrusted eyelashes.
‘You’re not alone, Nita. You have two bodyguards and a team of private nurses waiting on you, hand and foot,’ Damon said, gently mussing her hair, making her feel like she was eight again.
‘I’m still not stable,’ she said, her hand automatically moving to the thick bandage still encircling her ribs.
‘The doctor said you’re doing great,’ Damon counteracted.
‘What if he finds me?’ Her chin wobbled and Anita wondered when she had gone from simply despising her father to being terrified of him.
Damon squeezed her hand. ‘He won’t. I promise.’
It pissed Anita off that Damon had a rebuttal for all her arguments. Worst of all, it made her want to play dirty and she had one last guilty trump card up her sleeve.
‘You’re choosing her safety over mine,’ she said, putting as much contempt into the word as she could, making it obvious that she didn’t approve of his efforts.
Anita knew she was being manipulative but she had to do something to stop her brother chasing Charlotte, the gold-digging bimbo, half way around the world.
‘Jesus, Anita. I’m not choosing anything of the sort,’ Damon said, angrier than she had ever seen him. ‘Stop thinking about yourself for five seconds and think about Charlotte. Two of her friends are dead thanks to our family. Dad had no trouble ordering your death and he sure as hell didn’t have a problem ordering Mum’s. You think Charlotte is safe? You think she stands a chance on her own against The William S Club?’
‘Charlotte’s not our problem. She’s not family.’
‘I know you don’t give a crap about her but think about me. I gave up everything to make sure you were safe. Dad not only fired me, he cut me off without a cent.’
‘If you need money...’
‘I don’t give a shit about the money, Anita. Look at me. I’m a mess. I can’t sleep. I can’t eat. I am worried sick about her. They’ve got some plan for Charlotte and I have no idea what it is but I can guarantee you, it’s not good. It’s never good when they’re involved.’
Everything Damon said about Charlotte Burke rang true. Anita knew she sounded like a selfish bitch but she was terrified.
Knowing your own father wanted you dead didn’t exactly put one’s mind at ease.
‘I’m scared,’ Anita said, coming as close as she ever had to admitting her fears.
‘I know. I’m scared too. And if Charlotte had any idea what she was up against, she would be too.’
‘So you’re going to Sydney?’
She attempted to smile but there wasn’t much warmth in it. In fact, Anita was sure, if she had a mirror in front of her, it would have looked downright scary.
Damon nodded.
‘What’s the plan from there? What will you do when you find her?’
He shrugged. ‘I have no idea. I just pray to God I’m not too late.’
Chapter Forty-Four:
Mark had a headache forming at the base of his skull; a headache the size of Everest.
He knew what had caused it; his editor was putting pressure on him for another story.
‘Give me something real to print instead of that sanitized shit you’ve been sending out,’ Montgomery had said when he called at 7am.
Sanitized shit?
As far as Mark knew, he was the only journalist who had contravened the non-disclosure agreement. He had leaked the attack on Burke, the murder of Evans and the apparent suicide of Robertson.
They were the juiciest stories Mark had ever written.
Before Nepal, he wrote entertainment pieces – celebrity interviews, concert reviews and movie critiques.
Meaningless crap.
Now, he risked getting his ass sued for breach of contract. Thank God the Harvey lawyers hadn’t pounced yet.
Montgomery’s incessant appetite for information had yielded another unexpecte
d windfall. Just yesterday Mark had stumbled onto some information about the Harvey family.
It could be nothing or it could be huge.
‘Can I sit here?’
Mark looked up from the folded copy of The Times to see Charlotte Burke, the subject of his first leaked story, staring down at him.
Her tone was neither friendly nor accommodating; instead holding all the welcome of a porcupine poised for attack.
‘Sure. Take a seat.’
She plonked herself on the leather sofa opposite, the puffy cushions emitting a tiny pfft as a cloud of air escaped.
Mark could feel a dozen eyes on them: the six remaining journalists.
Those who had stayed had become like the crew staying behind on the Titanic; the rest of the rats fleeing the sinking ship in their droves.
Two were dead, one had disappeared in Paris and five had abandoned ship in Portofino, after Robertson threw herself off a cliff.
Just this morning, another four left, preferring to fly out on commercial airliners back to London than to carry on with the press trip.
And who could blame them?
It had become a standing joke – and the subject of many wagers. Who would still be standing come Sydney?
Mark ignored the stares, just as he was determined to ignore Charlotte.
For her part, she seemed just as keen to keep her distance.
There was no animosity in their silence, just a mutual desire to be left alone, and why wouldn’t there be? It wasn’t like they were mates. They weren’t even casual acquaintances. Mark might have written an article on Burke but they had never engaged in a conversation beyond the eight little words they had just exchanged.
He settled in for the long flight ahead, taking the opportunity to catch up on some much needed sleep, his dreams, as usual, returning him to Nepal, to Eden’s waiting arms.
The ground shifted beneath him, jolting him awake with all the force of a giant upending a house. Seismic activity was nothing new in Nepal. It killed hundreds of people every year.
Groggy and disoriented, he leapt to his feet. ‘Earthquake,’ he shouted, whacking his head on the low ceiling.
‘It was just turbulence.’
At first he thought it was Eden speaking and his brain grappled to understand how they could be experiencing turbulence in the middle of an earthquake. But then he recognised Burke. She was kind of hard to miss, like a modern-day Helen of Troy.
His sleep-deprived brain could imagine men going to battle over her beauty.
Technically, they already had.
She had sent one man mad and pitted two brothers against each other.
Mark wondered if Burke knew the effect she had on men. She didn’t court the attention. It just followed her like a biblical plague, leaving a wake of destruction in her path.
He sat back down, ignoring the warmth in his cheeks as Burke hid a smile behind her hand. She wasn’t laughing with him. She was laughing at him.
‘For a second there, I forgot where we were,’ he said, hating how lame the excuse sounded.
‘If you weren’t on a plane, where were you?’
‘Nepal. I’d do anything to be back there instead of on this farce of a trip.’
‘You can say that again. It’s a goddamn joke. Complete waste of time if you ask me. Nobody is writing a damned thing.’
Mark didn’t know a lot about Charlotte but he knew she had won a few awards for her investigative pieces. Not that he had read them. He’d just heard a couple of the other journos bitching about her being up herself because she’d won some big awards.
Charlotte’s good at research.
An idea began to germinate and the words were off his tongue before he really had time to think how they would be perceived.
‘Hey, you’re pretty good at what you do,’ he said. ‘Maybe we should hook up -’
In hindsight, Mark couldn’t blame her for the reaction; not given everything that had happened over the last week.
‘Fuck you,’ she said. Her voice was derisive, her brown eyes that had been affable and warm a second ago becoming cold, hard slits in her pretty face. She sprang to her feet, her hand clenching into a tight fist by her side.
She’s going to punch me.
Suggesting a hook up was idiotic. Guys had been hitting on her the whole trip.
No wonder she’d jumped to the wrong conclusion.
‘I didn’t mean it like that. I promise,’ he said, touching her arm in what was supposed to be a reassuring manner but only ended up enraging the beast even more.
‘Don’t touch me.’
Mark wished she’d keep her voice down. People were starting to notice, watching the two of them like they were some freak show at the circus.
He had suffered his share of knock backs over the years but never anything so acerbic. What made it worse; he wasn’t even trying to pick her up. He could honestly say the thought had not even crossed his mind. Before Nepal, maybe, but not since Eden.
‘You’ve got it all wrong,’ he said, desperate to make her understand. ‘I thought we might collaborate on a story.’ He spoke super slow, emphasising every word to make sure she knew he was talking about work.
The slow speech made him sound as if he were talking to a foreigner that didn’t speak the same language.
Judging from her reaction, maybe they didn’t.
‘What are you talking about?’ Everything about her stance was hostile and poised for battle.
‘Work. What did you think I was talking about?’
The last part was more rhetorical than anything else, aimed at soothing her ruffled feathers.
She was still wary but perched her bottom on the edge of the sofa, reluctant and ready to flee at another wrong word.
‘Work?’ She arched an eyebrow suspiciously, as if challenging the simplicity of his suggestion.
‘This is still a press trip isn’t it?’
‘What’s your name and which paper do you work for?’ She fired the questions off with all the subtlety of a cross-examination.
‘Mark Barclay. The Times.’ He unfolded the newspaper on his lap, flicking through until he found the contributor’s page. He pointed at a two inch photograph of himself taken before his trip to Nepal. There were subtle differences but it was still clearly him.
‘See.’
‘Hmm. I suppose it looks legit.’
Her bottom slid back in the chair as a tiny smile danced at the corner of her mouth. ‘So Mark Barclay of The Times, what work did you have in mind?’
Mark thought very carefully about how to make his request, reluctant to be misinterpreted again. ‘I think I might have found something.’
She raised an eyebrow, as if to say, ‘Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard it all before.’
But the minute he said he had found a skeleton in the Harvey closet she was super interested.
Under normal circumstances, BJ travelled with a full entourage – friends, employees and women. Lots and lots of women, often outnumbering the male populace ten to one.
Over the years, his mid-air parties had become legendary.
At thirty thousand feet, far away from prying eyes and societal expectations, his parties often descended into full-blown orgies.
He couldn’t remember the last time he had flown alone.
Not that, technically speaking, he was alone. There were eight journalists in the cabin below and he still had a full crew on board. But it was the first time he had ever been alone in his private suite.
BJ didn’t like it at all.
When he parted company with his companions in Venice, it was because he wanted time to win Charlotte over. He was confident he’d have her in his bed by the end of the day.
Admittedly, he had been a little over-confident in his abilities to woo her and things had not gone quite to plan. Then again, BJ wasn’t used to women spurning his advances. Until Charlotte, he had never had a woman say no.
If he wanted sex, they were only too happy to oblige, eve
n if they weren’t always capable of giving verbal agreement.
In his heart, BJ expected the same from Charlotte, factoring in a day or two for her to get over her crush on Damon and even allowing for a bit of playing hard to get.
Not once had he ever contemplated that she wouldn’t be his.
For a second BJ considered watching the DVD of Charlotte again but the thought of watching her screw his brother made him feel sick to the stomach.
Before Dubai, he could imagine he was in the film – the two of them looked enough alike that he could trick his mind into believing it.
Not anymore.
Maybe it was because they had come so close to having sex themselves that his mind would no longer buy the imitation. Worst still, the memories of those glorious few hours were hazy at best. The cruel twist of Ecstasy allowed enjoyment in the moment but stole away his memories.
Now she was back to playing hard to get.
Playing? She’s made it a fine art, even going so far as the flirt with that dweeb reporter just to make me jealous.
BJ hated that it was working.
He was beyond jealous.
Having gotten so close, having seen the fruit but been denied a taste, Charlotte had become his drug, his addiction.
He would do anything to have her, defy whoever tried to stop him and kill anyone that got in his way.
Chapter Forty-Five:
It was a scorching hot Sydney day; already the mercury had clawed its way into the mid forties. Inside the rusted Holden Camira, the temperature held all the atmospheric delights of a pottery kiln.
The air conditioner had worked once upon a time but now all it did was blow hot dusty air in his face.
Baker gave up wiping his brow.
The heat was so intense that sweat pooled along the cracked leather seat, well on its way to creating a sixth ocean.
Like him, the car was long past its best by date.
The body had more rust than metal and the engine coughed and spluttered whenever the car got above eighty.
But it got him from A to B and it didn’t cost the earth to buy or run.
He was on his way to the airport, having gleaned information from a flirtatious Harvey Inc receptionist.
