by Victoria Fox
What Tom hadn’t known. What none of them had known.
Reuben van der Meyde was her real father.
Never had Tom imagined a person to be capable of such vile trickery. All the meetings they’d had, all the cheques they’d sent, and it had been van der Meyde all along. He supposed it was justice of a sort. Tom had consented to any guy taking on the job, so what difference did it make if it was Reuben or the next jock? They were all liars, each one as bad as the next.
‘I don’t hate you,’ Aurora had whispered that day she returned, shaken and feeble, weak and tear-stained, his baby. She’d regarded him with pity, knowing he was living a falsehood so tightly wound it was impossible to escape. ‘But I can’t see you. Not yet.’
He had to understand. There was so much to explain, so much he couldn’t yet fully articulate, but he had to respect her wishes. Waiting was all he could do.
She’d been in Europe. Assumptions about her absence in the press, not least concerning the supposed divorce, were distressing. In January, she wrote for the first time. Aurora promised to see him when she got back. There was just one last thing she had to do before she came home.
Home.
Tom clung to it: the first step.
There would be many more. However long, whatever it took, Tom Nash vowed he would never stop climbing.
The boy’s voice was tentative, the word a stranger to his lips.
‘Mummy?’
Margaret Jensen followed Ralph out on to their Covent Garden roof terrace. The sun was shining. From here she could see across London, from the rooftops to the glass tower of Centre Point, the river and the gold spire of Big Ben.
‘What is it, sweetheart?’ She knelt to Ralph’s level and touched his cheek.
It hadn’t been easy. Telling her son the truth was the hardest thing she had ever done.
‘You have to listen to me very carefully. ’
Ralph’s little face had been so frightened and confused. The way she’d held him tight as she could and found the only words that made sense. That she loved him, that she’d always been here and always would be here, that she’d never stop loving him as long as she lived.
The words she had imagined saying so many times, but never had the right before now.
Mr V had been forced to publicly confess his housekeeper’s significance: that she was mother to his child. The admission was small fry compared with accompanying revelations in the press, but it was enough. Margaret could not forget the panic of that night; she never would. Even now she would wake in the small hours convinced she was back there, trapped on the island, terrified nothing had changed. And then she would remember. Things were different now.
Margaret had run from that place as if her life depended on it—and it had. As soon as she reached the mainland, she had contacted her lawyers, moving quickly because Mr V had his means: it would only be a matter of time before he tracked them down. But, as Margaret started to build the case against the man who had made her live a lie for nearly a decade, so her confidence swelled. She elected to keep Cacatra’s secret to herself, instead maintaining to her lawyers that Reuben had enjoyed what he deemed to be an ill-advised night of passion, and Ralph was the result. Reuben had been too ashamed to admit the boy’s mother was his lowly housekeeper and so he had forced her anonymity, threatening her with taking the child away if she objected.
Unsurprisingly, the moment her lawyers approached with the terms, Mr V was the epitome of cooperation. Only he understood the weapon Margaret possessed. Only he knew its impact. And only he knew that at the slightest rumble or objection, she would not be afraid to use it. Mr V’s cheques came in regularly and always on time. It was the perfect arrangement.
‘Can we go to the park?’ Ralph asked now, bobbing up and down on his toes.
The boy would never know the inheritance he had lost. It was better that way. If Margaret had learned anything from her time on Cacatra, it was that no amount of riches, no amount of celebrity, or power, or possessions, was a passport to happiness.
‘Of course we can, darling.’
It wasn’t Margaret’s fault Enrique Marquez had got distracted. The trick was you always had to focus, never lose sight of the prize. Even if it took you eight years.
They went back inside. Yes, they could go to the park. Now, they could do anything.
Reuben van der Meyde exited the Washington space observatory. His assistant returned with a giant hot dog and Reuben shovelled it into his mouth, sausage bursting with grease and yellow mustard trickling down his chin.
Turning to the great dome, he shielded his eyes against the sun. VDM Communications was pursuing a new frontier in interstellar space travel. Reuben had wasted no time in investing several billion dollars into a project that brought man to the brink of the unknown. He’d conquered this world, damn it. Now it was on to the next. He knew when to cut his losses. And Cacatra, though it broke him, was lost. He could never go back.
The jewel in his crown was tarnished irreversibly; Reuben’s name, as long as it was associated with the place, synonymous with death and violence. The events of that summer night would haunt him till the day he died. Even now, months on, he could scarcely fathom what had been at stake … how close he had come to the end.
Reuben shuddered, crumpling the wrapper and shoving it into his assistant’s hands. The man was taking a call and had to clamp the cell under his ear to receive it. He turned to re-enter the observatory.
Fine, he’d pushed a line with the damn surrogates. Reuben had always known it but he’d done it anyway—that was how he’d got to where he was today, and he sure as shit wasn’t going to apologise for it. Reuben was born a leader: it was in his blood.
No, what appalled him was that Aurora Nash—he could hardly bring himself to think her name—had so nearly brought him down, so nearly exposed Cacatra’s secret and so nearly put a bullet in his head. Reuben wasn’t sure which would have been worse.
He had always imagined himself to be untouchable. Now, he realised he wasn’t. Aurora had demanded answers, and to get them she’d put a revolver to the most powerful man in the world. That was his kind of girl. He was almost proud. But then she was his, after all.
Reuben was lucky. It was in the stars. His and Aurora’s revelation stayed hidden, was hidden to this day, overshadowed by a murderous psychopath who had stolen the limelight for himself and, as a result, the world was none the wiser. Aurora was sensible enough to know that to reveal his secret would mean as much damage to her as it would to him. She no more wanted people to know he was her father than he did she was his child.
His guys had found them in a state of dishevelment, Aurora’s clothes torn, the room in disarray. Conclusions had been drawn—but Reuben never had been one to read the gossip rags.
Of course, he had regrets. Rebecca Stuttgart, dead—but no questions asked because, although the sonofabitch had so nearly brought him down that night, Enrique Marquez was the perfect scapegoat. Reuben had mourned with the rest of them, said what a tragedy it was, what a great woman and wife she’d been, and decided that Marquez would probably have killed her anyway if he hadn’t got there first.
But then there was the boy. Then there was Ralph.
He was the cost Reuben had paid in full. Ralph was the only child he could ever publicly claim to be his: his inheritor, his successor, his future, and the reason he had agreed to put up with his irksome housekeeper for so many years.
Reuben had been forbidden to ever contact the child again. The knowledge broke something in him that he realised must be a heart. Margaret Jensen had enough ammunition to sink him for good, and the problem with knocking up a nonentity was that, when the shit hit, she had nothing to lose. He, on the other hand, did. Reuben van der Meyde had dozens of children all across Hollywood, all across the globe, but none who would ever know they were his.
He put his eye to the scope and adjusted the lens.
The irony wasn’t lost.
It was the longest two
minutes of Stevie Speller’s life. She attempted distraction. She made the bed, brushed her teeth, checked her phone, opened the window …
Outside, on the street, a mother chided her child. Normal people. Ordinary lives.
She and Xander had been in New York for six months. For both of them, Reuben van der Meyde’s party had marked a point of no return. They had moved into a six-storey redbrick in Greenwich Village and were pursuing a quieter life. Hollywood was over.
Xander found it easier to escape the limelight. He was currently at work on his debut novel. He said it was fiction but Stevie suspected it was autobiographical, at least in part. It wasn’t hard to recognise the two school friends, but the boys’ story he was, as yet, holding close to his chest. Xander would share the ghosts of his past when he was ready. They both would.
For Stevie, it had been harder. Marty King couldn’t understand why she was opting out: her presence on Cacatra that fateful night meant she was more bankable now than ever. Though she tried never to think of it, it came back to her in her dreams. How she had so nearly ripped the ground from under Hollywood, the mother of all scandals right there on her lips. She couldn’t decide if she was grateful to JB Moreau for having stepped in when he did, saving her from exposing the truth. She believed he had done so to protect the island, rather than through any loyalty to Xander. Her husband, however, believed different.
Some days Stevie missed acting, but not enough. Instead, she decided to go back to university and pursue a degree in Psychology, a subject she had always wanted to explore. In time, her journey through LA would become a peculiar sort of detour, one from which she’d learned more about human desires and frailties than she could from any book.
Her phone beeped with a message. Bibi Reiner.
She opened it, unable to stop herself smiling.
News? x
Stevie took a deep breath. She padded back into the bathroom, picked up the little white stick and looked. And looked again.
Aurora Nash spent the best part of a year travelling through Europe. After her showdown with Tom, she’d had no choice. LA could never be the same again.
She had started in Asia and the Antipodes, letting her hair grow, wearing no make-up and shapeless, practical clothes and giving up caring what she looked like. She sat on beaches with strangers and shared last cigarettes and found she could be normal if she wanted and that people treated you how your behaviour demanded to be treated, famous or not. In Europe she went through Italy, into Spain and France, through England and then, at last, up to Scandinavia.
Once, in London, walking down Embankment early one morning, she had thought she passed van der Meyde’s son and Margaret Jensen. The half-brother she could never know.
Then again, he was one of who knew how many. It would send her crazy if she let it.
Perhaps she could have taken a leaf from Margaret’s book and forced Reuben into a confession. It had been tempting. But then she’d remembered the people whose lives she would demolish and how it wasn’t her right to do so. All those kids in blissful ignorance. Let them live it. She wouldn’t wish her own discovery on anyone.
Weeks ago, in a bar outside Helsinki, she had heard one of Tom and Sherilyn’s records. This time, the tears hadn’t come. She didn’t need to cry any more.
Returning to her hostel, Aurora had taken a pen and paper and started to write him a letter. It had taken days, countless drafts, before she was happy. Everything she’d wanted to say but had never felt able: all on the line, a clean slate.
Aurora’s world had been obliterated. But it was what she saved from the wreckage that mattered.
She consulted the scrap of paper to make sure, a stalling tactic as much as anything because she knew this was the place. The house was as she’d pictured. It was a wooden building outside Rovaniemi, brown and white, the roof hidden under a drift and a bank of ferns behind. The porch was in need of repair. A plastic swing, discarded, was half buried in the snow. The car out front was scratched, its front tyre flat. Clearly the money this woman had been promised had never made it out of Reuben van der Meyde’s bank account.
Aurora hitched the strap of her rucksack and pushed open the gate. Her hands and feet were freezing, the snow a foot deep.
A new dawn, a new horizon. Life was starting over.
She went to the porch and put her hand out to knock.
Before she could, a shadow came to the door, as if it had been waiting. The catch went. A fair-haired woman answered, eyes so blue, and when they saw Aurora they filled with tears.
They needed no words.
The woman held her arms out and Aurora walked straight into them.
Jacqueline Spark exited her office on North Harper Avenue and hailed a cab to the airport. The thought of visiting Cacatra after everything that had happened wasn’t top on her list of priorities, but if that was where Lori wanted to get married then that was where it was happening.
Since the van der Meyde debacle, Jacqueline and Lori had become, rightly or wrongly, LA’s dream team. Jacqueline had been promoted at One Touch but had soon outgrown her role, electing to break out on her own and embark on a new business. With it, Spark PR was born. Lori Garcia was her first client: world-famous supermodel, muse, mother—and a woman for whom men were prepared to kill. It was a potent combination.
At LAX, Jacqueline bought herself a latte. She was against this, but knew she could not change Lori’s mind. Though Omar Garcia would always be credited to the late Maximo, she could understand Lori’s desire to unite her family. Jacqueline’s job was to make sure her client knew what she was doing. Failing that, to pick up the pieces.
She sipped hot coffee and waited for her flight to be announced.
For the first time in his life, Lance Chlomsky had a girlfriend.
Since the van der Meyde party he’d been hot property, made hotter by his involvement with the police in the early stages of the Maximo Diaz investigation. As the guy who’d found him, Lance had acquired the sort of heroic-slash-dangerous status that proved irresistible to women. With offers now in the pipeline for an autobiography, a charity single and even a walk-on part in one of his best-loved sitcoms, he was riding on air. Not bad for the boy who up until six months ago had resigned himself to never getting to first base with a girl, let alone finding one who was content to give him head all day long.
‘You’re so hot,’ crooned Darnelle, looping her arms around his scrawny rib cage.
Lance scrutinised his pimply face in the mirror. He squeezed one of the whiteheads on his chin and watched with satisfaction as it yielded fudgy matter.
Oh yeah, this was what it was about. When he’d met Juan/Enrique on their training week he never would have dreamed that scary-looking sonofabitch would be responsible for changing his life. But change his life, he had—and most definitely for the better.
Lance ignored the niggling feeling that said he hadn’t been entirely honest with the cops. That Marquez hadn’t been the only one down in the galley that unforgettable night while the tray he’d taken out had been prepared. That JB Moreau had been down there, too. That it had been JB who spoke to him, and JB who told him what to do.
Forget it, it wasn’t important.
He was made.
Lori Garcia kissed her father’s cheek at the flower-strewn altar. Tony took his seat, Omar on his lap, and the gathering fell quiet in preparation for the vows to be said.
Waves pounded the shores of Cacatra, her and JB’s paradise.
This was where it began again: the start of the rest of their lives. JB had been unable to let it go, the closest place to home he had. He was king of this island, and Lori, at his side, its queen.
Their happy ever after.
Lori joined her betrothed. His silver eyes glinted like jewels in a dark place.
JB pulled her close. ‘Do you?’ he murmured.
She smiled at him, never so sure of anything. ‘I do.’
Read on for an exclusive extract from
Victoria
Fox’s next title – Wicked Ambition
Prologue
Palisades Grand Arena, Los Angeles
Summer 2013
IF NOT VICTORY, REVENGE!
It was printed in hot-pink marker on the back of the cubicle door, the lettering neat and penned with precision. Ivy Sewell reached to touch it, her fingertips tentative, tender almost across its surface, as she might in another life have caressed a lover’s cheek. Surrounding the words was a vacant loop, the only unmarked space there was amid a sea of frantically scribbled transmissions, a halo as much a protection as a warning.
Ivy’s hard blue stare locked on to the affirmation. Hers was a malice years in the making, a shoot green in youth that had turned black through adolescence, insidious and strangling as a weed, so that tonight, here, at last, the instant of her retribution had arrived. In the wings, the truth gasped its final throttled breaths; the old order shrugged off a wilted coil. She was deadly. Lethal. Toxic. Poison. And the world prepared to feel her wrath.
There would be before tonight, and after tonight, and nothing would ever be the same again. In the eleventh-floor washroom of LA’s Palisades Grand Arena, on the most televised event in the entertainment world calendar, vengeance was their apocalypse.
Ivy carved a painted fingernail, danger red, into the print, gouging a nub of plaster.
IF NOT VICTORY, REVENGE!
Victory had never been hers. But revenge? Revenge was in her blood.
From inside the stadium she could hear the muted thrum of beats and the united roar of the fans. Ivy closed her eyes, imagining the cries were for her, urging her on, baying for the carnage she was about to unleash. She released her breath slowly, tasting salt and iron, her tongue flicking across the split in her lip where she had bitten too hard in anticipation.
Three women.
Each was here to claim the spotlight. Each was an international superstar, a glittering icon with the world at her feet. Robin Ryder, UK talent-show sensation, the rags-to-riches sweetheart rescued from oblivion. Kristin White, global pop phenomenon with the voice of an angel, who had ditched the princess act after tragedy struck. And Turquoise da Luca, America’s number one female vocal artist and now tantalising toast of Tinseltown.
