He jabbed at the button on his remote. Another picture: Lexi snorting cocaine. And another. And another. They’d all been taken at the same party, during freshman week at Harvard. The “friend” who took them had been persuaded years before (with the help of a fat check) to hand the chip from his digital camera over to Lexi. She should have destroyed it at the time. But some crazy impulse made her keep it, locked away in the safe at her apartment. A reminder of the “Party Girl Lexi” she had left behind, the old, promiscuous self she had shed like a snake’s skin since falling in love with Max.
Falling in love.
Only one another person knew the code to that safe.
Max was still talking. He made eye contact with each board member in turn. When he came to Lexi, he looked through her as if she were a ghost.
No wonder you were so anxious to ship me off to Dark Harbor. How long have you been planning this, you bastard?
“It’s not only our shareholders. We have to think about the damage this can do to Kruger-Brent internally. I’ve already had e-mails from the heads of the Dubai, Kuwait and Delhi offices, all threatening to quit if Lexi becomes chairman. Tristram, have you gotten any calls?”
Tristram Harwood nodded grimly. America might be prepared to forgive its favorite daughter her youthful indiscretions. But Kruger-Brent operated all over the world, in Muslim and Hindu countries. Having a woman chairman, a deaf woman chairman, was bad enough. But this sort of stigma? It would cripple them.
Lexi sat and watched in silence while the men around her debated her future. Only it wasn’t a debate. It was a show trial. The verdict, guilty, had been decided before she ever walked into the room.
Of course it was Max who had betrayed her. He’d played her, just like August said he would. Images of their lovemaking, the wild, pagan passion of the last six months, swept unbidden through Lexi’s mind. Was it all just a game to him? Part of his battle plan? It must have been. And yet his desire, his love for her, felt so real.
She weighed her options:
I could tell them. I could tell the board it was Max who stole those pictures and made them public. Max who precipitated this crisis. Max who got us all into this mess.
But even as she thought it, Lexi knew she would never do that. The market had already lost its faith in her. Kruger-Brent’s share price would plunge this morning as a result. If Max’s name was tarnished, too, investors would have nothing to cling to. The company would fall out of Blackwell-family hands. It might even collapse altogether.
Kruger-Brent was the one great love of Lexi’s life. She could not allow it to go under.
She looked at Max. That’s what you were counting on, wasn’t it? You knew I wouldn’t turn you in. You knew I love this company too much.
She hated him for what he’d done to her. But she hated him even more for what he’d done to Kruger-Brent. To secure the chairmanship for himself, he’d put the entire firm in jeopardy.
Lexi got to her feet.
“Enough.”
She held up a hand for silence. The muttering ceased.
“It’s clear that you all feel the same way. Therefore, for the good of the company, I will withdraw my name from the chairmanship ballot. I will formally resign from Kruger-Brent this afternoon.”
The attorneys’ shoulders slumped visibly with relief.
Max opened his mouth to speak. But when he looked into Lexi’s eyes, the words died on his lips. The things he wanted to say meant nothing now: I’m sorry. I still love you. He’d had to destroy her in order to win Kruger-Brent for Eve. It was his destiny, his life’s purpose. He’d had no choice. One day, he hoped, Lexi would see that. She would understand.
With a quiet dignity that made August Sandford want to cry, Lexi gathered up her briefcase, turned and left the room.
“Good luck, Max.”
Lexi waited for the elevator doors to close before unclenching her fists. Blood dripped from her palms from where she had dug her own fingernails into the flesh.
Good luck, Max.
Good luck, Judas, you treacherous son of a bitch.
Her Bible studies came back to her.
“And Jesus said, ‘I tell you solemnly, one of you will betray me. But woe to that man, the betrayer! It would be better for that man if he had never been born.’”
Lexi was going to make Max wish that he had never been born.
Her cousin had won the battle.
But the war had only just begun.
BOOK TWO
TWENTY-TWO
LOS ANGELES. FIVE YEARS LATER
PAOLO COZMICI LOOKED AT THE EXQUISITELY DECORATED Bel Air drawing room and scowled.
“Too many flowers. It looks like somebody died.”
Robbie Templeton kissed him indulgently on the top of his bald head. “The flowers are perfect. Everything’s perfect. Relax, babe. Have a drink.”
Tonight was Robbie’s fortieth birthday party. With typical altruism, he had decided to mark the milestone with a charity event that he hoped would raise a million dollars for the Templeton/Cozmici AIDS Foundation. Stars from the worlds of classical and pop music, as well as a smattering of Hollywood movie actors, would soon be pulling up to Robbie and Paolo’s wrought-iron gates, where a huddle of eager paparazzi was already gathered. The sprawling Bel Air estate had been home to classical music’s happiest couple for the past three years. The real-estate agent described it as “a French Country manor,” a turn of phrase that had reduced poor Paolo to paroxysms of laughter.
“’Ave you ever been to France?”
It was in fact a vast, vulgar, wedding cake of a house, smothered in enough climbing roses to make Martha Stewart wince. The gardens came complete with a fake stream powered by a hidden electric pump and a faux-medieval bridge. It was the epitome of tackiness: brash, American, suburban. Disney. But it was also incredibly comfortable, boasted heart-stopping views from almost every room, and-crucially-afforded total privacy. Robbie and Paolo had been blissfully happy there.
“Ah, Lex, there you are. Would you please tell Monsieur le Grinch here that the house looks awesome?”
“The house looks awesome.”
It was hard to believe that Lexi Templeton was thirty years old. Skipping down the stairs in a vintage gray Hardy Amies ball gown, with diamonds gleaming at her ears, neck and wrists, her skin still shone like a teenager’s. She wore her hair long and loose, another girlish touch that belied the steely businesswoman within.
After Lexi left Kruger-Brent five years ago in a storm of scandal, most business pundits wrote her off. Overnight, her picture stopped appearing on the front covers of magazines. Lexi made no statements, responded to no rumors, approved no messages through “friends” or “insiders.” She stopped attending celebrity parties, charity auctions, gallery openings. Word was that she’d left America, but no one knew for sure. As the months went by, people ceased to care.
But those who assumed Lexi had crawled under a rock to lick her wounds had profoundly underestimated the strength of her ambition, not to mention the resilience of her spirit.
Ten days after Max’s coup, Lexi awoke to the sound of horns blaring outside her new, rented apartment. The media had driven her out of her old place. The noise was muffled at first, as if everything had been covered with a fresh fall of snow. But during the next few days, the snow slowly started melting. Sounds became sharper, crisper. Lexi delighted in each one like a newborn child. Water gushing from the faucet in her bathroom made her laugh out loud. Vendors cursing on the street below brought a lump to her throat. Strangest of all was her own voice. It didn’t seem to belong to her at all.
Dr. Cheung was elated. “Congratulations, my dear. I’m only sorry that so much of what you’re hearing at the moment is so unpleasant.”
Like everyone else in America, Dr. Cheung had seen the pictures and read the reports. They were hanging the poor girl out to dry.
Lexi, however, seemed unfazed: “Don’t worry about me, Doctor. I can hear again. That’s all that m
atters.”
And it was. Suddenly Lexi felt invincible. Raising capital against her Kruger-Brent stock-despite the drop in value, Lexi’s stake was still worth over $100 million-she quietly started her own real-estate company, Templeton Estates. She began buying up cheap tracts of land in Africa, following the same business plan she’d intended to adopt as chairman of Kruger-Brent. Within two years, the company was outperforming almost all of its African competitors. This year Lexi had finally had the immense satisfaction of watching Templeton’s market share in Africa overtake Kruger-Brent’s.
Only one company, Gabriel McGregor and Dia Ghali’s Cape Town-based Phoenix Group, consistently outperformed them. But then Phoenix had had a five-year head start on Templeton. No one could deny that for a five-year-old business, Templeton Estates had made one hell of a mark.
As her company flourished, so Lexi’s own self-esteem started to revive. When Max betrayed her, releasing those awful, degrading pictures, part of her wanted to crawl away and die. Now, with both her hearing and her fortune restored, she found herself taking her first baby steps back into public life. On the spur of the moment, she showed up one night at the opening of a friend’s restaurant in her native New York. Wearing a vintage Bill Blass dress, Lexi utterly stole the show, cutting as dazzlingly glamorous and enigmatic a figure as she had in the old days. Soon afterward the floodgates opened. Once again, men flocked to her. And not just any men. Lexi dated musicians, businessmen, movie stars, always moving on within a few weeks, keeping the tabloids guessing. With the dollar at an all-time low and the economy in the doldrums, America craved glamour and excitement like a crack whore craving a fix. What better way to revive the national spirit than to welcome this conquering, beautiful Blackwell daughter back into the collective American fold?
So she had a wild and crazy youth. So what? Who didn’t?
She can hear again and she’s back on her feet.
Lexi was a star, a fighter, a winner. She had reinvented herself once again. Once again, America was glued to the edge of its seat.
Paolo Cozmici needn’t have worried. The party was a terrific success, with just the right amount of scandal to satisfy Hollywood’s gossip fiends:
A famous music producer got locked in the bathroom with a beautiful singer who was not his wife.
The singer’s name was David.
A movie actress was so wasted climbing into the hot tub that she forgot about the hairpiece she wore to hide her bald spot. When her twenty-year-old boy glanced down and saw what he thought was a dead rat floating between his legs, he passed out. The poor kid nearly drowned.
Michael Schett, this year’s “Hollywood’s Hottest Hunk” according to People magazine, arrived with Playboy’s Miss September, but dumped her like a campaign promise when he laid eyes on Lexi. Unfortunately for Michael Schett, Lexi wasn’t interested.
Michael cornered Robbie Templeton by the bar. “You gotta help me. I’m crashing and burning here. You’re her brother. Tell me how to impress her.”
With his Cary Grant looks, legendary prowess in the sack, and a string of hit movies to his name, Michael Schett was not used to rejection. He hadn’t had a girl dismiss him like this since seventh grade.
Robbie grinned. “Lexi likes a challenge. You could always start making out with me. Maybe she’ll try to ‘turn’ you?”
Michael Schett roared with laughter. He’d known Robbie and Paolo for years.
“Nice try, Liberace. She’s cute, but no girl is that cute.”
“Hey, you know what they say, Michael. You’re not a man till you had a man and didn’t like it.”
In the wee small hours of the morning, once all the guests had gone, Paolo went to bed, leaving Robbie alone with Lexi.
“You know, Michael Schett is really into you.”
Lexi rolled her eyes.
“What? He’s a nice guy. Most women would bite his hand off. Christ, I’d sleep with him.”
“You would not. You and Paolo are fused at the hip and you know it.”
“Actually, we’re fused at the heart. But I know what you mean.”
Robbie was worried about Lexi. On the surface, she seemed to have pulled her life back from the brink. But her continued obsession with Kruger-Brent and their cousin wasn’t normal. As for her working hours, Lexi regularly clocked in days that would put most self-respecting Taiwanese sweatshop workers to shame.
“Work isn’t everything, you know, Lex. Don’t you ever think of settling down?”
Lexi laughed. “With Michael Schett? His movies last longer than his relationships!”
“Okay, fine, forget Michael. But everyone needs love in their life.”
“I have love in my life. I have you.”
“That’s not what I mean. Don’t you want to have children one day? A family of your own?”
“No. I don’t.”
Lexi sighed. How could she explain to Robbie that after Max, she would never love again? He had no idea about her affair with Max-no one did-still less that it was Max who had distributed the pictures that very nearly ruined her. But Lexi knew. She knew love was for fools. Love had blinded her. Because of love, she had lost Kruger-Brent. The only thing that mattered now was destroying Max and taking back her beloved company. As for children, Kruger-Brent was Lexi’s child. She had trusted in Max, and he had torn her child from her arms, ripped it from her breast and carried it off into the wilderness.
She had rebuilt her life and her reputation against the odds. Templeton Estates was a huge success. But inside, the longing for Kruger-Brent corroded Lexi’s life like acid leaking from a battery. It turned every triumph to ashes.
Seeing she was upset, Robbie changed the subject.
“You’re in Cape Town a lot these days. Have you come across a guy called Gabriel McGregor?”
Now he had her attention.
“I have. I’ve never met him. He co-owns a company called Phoenix. They’re competitors of ours.”
“Any good?”
“Very good, unfortunately,” Lexi admitted. “He’s a shrewd businessman.”
“But?”
She paused. “I don’t know. Like I say, we’ve never met. But there’s something about him I don’t entirely trust. You know he claims to be related to us? Says he’s a descendant of Jamie McGregor.”
“Isn’t he?”
“I have no idea. I suppose he could be. How do you know him?”
Walking over to his desk, Robbie pulled out a handwritten letter. He passed it to Lexi.
“He and his wife are heavily involved in AIDS relief over there. He wrote asking me if Paolo and I would be interested in working with his charity. I’m flying out to meet with him next week.”
Lexi read the letter, twice. It seemed genuine. But she couldn’t quite shake the feeling of foreboding. Who was Gabe McGregor, really? A lot of people wanted to claim a connection to her family. This man was too rich in his own right to be a fortune hunter. But even so…
She found herself saying: “I’m going out there on business next week, as it happens. I can go and meet him with you if you like?”
Robbie’s face lit up. He’d been trying for years to get Lexi interested in his charity work.
“That’d be great! I can book us on the same flight. It’ll be just like old times. Hey, you remember going to Africa with Dad when we were kids? Those boring old Kruger-Brent tours? Man, Dad never shut up: ‘Jamie McGregor had a diamond mine here, Kate Blackwell went to school here,’ blah blah blah blah blah.” He laughed.
“Of course I remember.”
Those tours with her father felt like yesterday.
Lexi had loved every second of them.
“Jamie! Take Thomas the Tank Engine out of your sister’s cereal right now or you’re going on the naughty step.”
Gabe McGregor fixed his four-year-old son with what he hoped was a stern stare.
Jamie said seriously: “I’m sorry, Daddy. I certainly can’t do that. Thomas has crashed and bust his buffers. Now h
e must wait for the breakdown train to rescue him.”
“Cheer-ohs! Cheeeeer oooooohs!” Collette, Jamie’s two-year-old sister, burst into ear-splitting wails. “Don’t wanna train! My Cheer-ohs!”
“Stop crying, Collette,” said Jamie angrily. “You’re giving Thomas a head-gate.”
“Jamie!” Gabe shouted.
Marching silently over to the breakfast table, Tara McGregor removed the offending train from Collette’s cereal bowl, dried it with a paper towel and handed it to her protesting son. “Any more moaning, Jamie and Thomas is in the trash. Finish your toast and you can have a chocolate milk.”
To Gabe’s astonishment, Jamie promptly forgot about his train and focused on stuffing peanut-butter toast into his mouth. Pretty soon his cheeks bulged like a hamster’s. “Finished.”
“Are you sure he won’t choke?” Gabe glanced worriedly at Tara. “He looks like a snake trying to swallow a rabbit.”
Tara didn’t look up. “He’ll be fine.”
As usual, Tara McGregor’s morning routine was a ridiculous juggling act: cooking breakfast, feeding and dressing the kids, refereeing World War III and helping Gabe remember where he’d put his socks/laptop/ phone/sanity.
Gabe watched his wife frying bacon for his sandwich with one hand while checking e-mails on her BlackBerry with the other. With her glossy red hair, slender waist and long, gazellelike legs, there was an old-fashioned sexiness about Tara that motherhood seemed only to have enhanced. From behind, she looked like Cyd Charisse. From the front, the impression was more innocent and wholesome. Rosie the Riveter meets Irish farmer’s daughter. Pale skin. Freckles. Large, womanly breasts. A smile so broad it had knocked Gabe off his feet the first time he saw it, and still made him want to take her upstairs and ravish her now, six years later.
By nine o’clock this morning, Tara would be at the clinic, up to her elbows in dying babies.
She’s an angel. One in a million. How the hell did a girl that smart and beautiful ever fall for a guy like me?
Mistress of the Game Page 24
