Children of Destiny Books 4-6 (Texas: Children of Destiny Book 10)

by Ann Major

  Otto laughed. "I was always so careful about my image. Too bad you weren’t as careful about yours. But imagine, me choosing her, an American and a little nobody—even if her father was a senator—when I could have any of a dozen princesses. But she is a very beautiful woman. A delicate, fragile woman. You and I always did have common tastes."

  "We have nothing in common, you bastard," came Nicholas's raw, angry drawl.

  "Do as I say, or she dies."

  "What do you want?"

  As if he couldn't guess. Because of Nicholas, Otto was involved in a complex tangle of disastrous deals in the spot-oil market. Otto wasn't getting his money because Pelican Oil had filed for bankruptcy. Other companies weren't getting their money, either, and they were refusing to pay. The feds had just seized six ships. Otto had been a key buyer in each of the multiple chains of buyer-seller deals having to do with the distressed cargoes. Six distressed cargoes meant demurrage charges that would run in the thousands of dollars a day. Nearly ninety-three million dollars was at stake to be exact. And Otto owed immense interest payments next week on his vast real estate holdings.

  "Get Velmar Oil to pay on those letters of credit Monday morning."

  "I own only a small interest in Velmar,” Nicholas said softly. Pelican was the weak link in all those chains. Why should Velmar pay money Pelican owes?"

  "It's because of you that Pelican is in trouble,” Otto growled. “Pay them what you owe them."

  "Pelican sold me East bloc oil and didn't deliver."

  "Use your influence. Z.A.K. could issue Velmar a letter of indemnity."

  So there it was.

  "A letter of indemnity when Z.A.K. wasn't even involved?" Nicholas's low rasp rose to a roar. "Do you think I'm mad? You're asking me to ruin my own company, to jeopardize my own deals, to betray my contacts, my suppliers, and everyone I do business with—I'd be washed up in Europe for good—all this to save you!"

  "To save Evangeline."

  "She means nothing to me." Nicholas's voice softened, but even that low tone held a steel edge. "We were always wrong for each other."

  "You mean a great deal to her."

  "You're a liar."

  "Maybe. Maybe not. You knew about Pelican. You stayed out of the deals, hoping to lure me into them by tempting me to recapture markets you took from me. It took me a long time to figure out you had to be behind Z.A.K. and Velmar, too. There was only one man who could play this game better than me."

  "If you thought I was so good, you shouldn't have sold me out in Africa."

  "I was in a tight spot. I made a deal. You were expensive. I had to cut...costs."

  "Cut the throats of my men, you mean."

  "Enough said. I can't wait. I don’t have time to settle this through the courts."

  "Where can I reach you if I need...more time?" Nicholas asked.

  "Portofino. La Dolce Vita. While you scramble, I shall be enjoying champagne, sunsets, and...your woman."

  Nicholas felt his blood rise up his neck, felt it flame in his cheeks as he thought of the two of them together—Eva, always too willing to trust the wrong man. Unsuspecting of any danger, she would be completely at Otto's mercy. Otto would tell her all the bodyguards were for her protection. It would never occur to her they were her assassins.

  La Dolce Vita was Otto's yacht. Two hundred and twenty feet of sleek white aluminum—it had been custom made in an Italian shipyard by one of the world's leading designers. It was a floating palace and a floating fortress with multiple layers of afterdecks, a pool, a helipad. Its security was impregnable.

  "Either pay yourself or get Velmar to pay,” Otto said. “If you don't, then Eva dies. London is a very dangerous city. There are cars, motorcycles, bombs. Maybe you don’t care about her, my friend, but she's still in love with you."

  "The hell you say."

  "Not that her feelings for you will stop me from sleeping with her."

  The line went dead.

  Nicholas held the phone for a long time. Otto was asking him to commit financial suicide to save a woman he hadn't seen in eight years.

  What did one woman matter? One life? Nicholas had learned a long time ago just how cheap a life could be. A hundred men had died because Raoul had trusted Otto.

  He leaned back in his chair and ran both his hands through his thick black hair. His tie was loose and the top button of his shirt was undone.

  He was determined not to think of her.

  Not yet.

  “Raoul Girouard.” He whispered his real name. Odd how alien it sounded, but it brought back the past as nothing else could. It was the name he’d gone by as a boy and a much younger man…yet it seemed a stranger's now. Just as his former life seemed a stranger's life instead of his own.

  Had he really ever been von Schonburg's man? He had worked for him, yes, when spot-oil traders had been needed to provide cargoes of oil to countries that couldn't get them through conventional markets. Otto had been just another impoverished aristocrat who'd gotten into the spot-oil business and done reasonably well. Then he'd hired Raoul, and Raoul's brilliance had made him into a billionaire. Otto had invested in everything—from African oil fields to stocks, bonds and art.

  When he’d first gone to work for Otto, a trader could make a million dollars on one deal alone. Raoul had been incredibly successful.

  But the good times hadn't lasted. The game was different now. Smaller. Tougher. More dangerous. It took more skill to play than it had before.

  At the height of his successful partnership with Otto, Raoul had met Eva and fallen in love.

  From the first, she had seemed a dream that was too good to be true. She and her family had represented the kind of loving, stable world to which Raoul had always secretly wanted to belong. His own mother had died when he'd been an infant, and his father had shown him the door when he’d barely been seventeen. After that loveless start, Raoul had been an angry young man. The anger and the hardship had made him reckless. He’d done things he later regretted and because he'd done them, he’d been toughened, changed forever.

  Then he'd met Eva, and her softness had almost made him believe he could erase his whole life and start afresh. But she had never trusted in him, in the man he was. Right from the start, she'd wanted to change him, to smooth away all his rough edges, and he'd let her try. Until he discovered that no matter what he did, he would never be good enough for either her or the Martins.

  He'd been so desperately in love with her, that for her sake, he'd even applied to law school. Without a care how she hurt him, she'd broken off their engagement—to spare her grandmother the pain of having Raoul Girouard for a grandson-in-law.

  His male pride obliterated because the woman he loved thought so little of him, Raoul had been only too willing to leap at the first chance to get away from her. And that had been Africa.

  Because Raoul knew Africa and Arabic, Otto had asked him to go to Rana, a tiny, war-torn North African nation to assess the danger to the newly acquired von Schonburg oil interests there. A nearby terrorist nation had been fighting to seize control of them. Raoul had jumped at the chance, even though at the last minute Eva had begged him to stay.

  Once in Africa, Raoul had analyzed the situation and told Otto he would eventually lose his investment, but Rana could probably put up a fight for a year. Otto had used this information to make a profitable, self-serving deal with the terrorist aggressor nation. Not only had he sold his oil interests, but he'd also sold the vital intelligence Raoul had given him, information that would shorten the costly war from a year to days. The terrorists had moved in fast, trapping Raoul and his men in Rana. Most of them died defending von Schonburg's interests.

  Otto, always so careful about his own image, had spoken to newsmen around the world and twisted the truth, telling them Raoul had sold him and all his men out in Africa. These lies had been printed in all the right papers. Otto had emerged blameless and a much wealthier man.

  But Otto had made one mistake. He hadn't m
ade sure of his kill.

  Not that he hadn't tried.

  A man by the name of Nicholas Jones had been shot on that last brutal day. Badly wounded in the left thigh, Raoul had lain beside Jones's body. When Raoul saw the terrorists checking the papers of all the foreigners' bodies, some instinct had warned him to exchange identification papers with the dead Jones.

  When the terrorists had found Raoul Girouard's papers on Jones's body, they'd stopped asking questions. Raoul's own face had been bloodied beyond recognition. The terrorists had hauled him back across their border to prison, but not before he'd witnessed Otto's bodyguard and hit man, Paolo, sinking a bayonet into Jones's body.

  Raoul hadn't died from his wounds, nor from the starvation diet of the prison camp. Nor from the labor, the heat or the beatings with rubber hoses. He'd met Zak, who was half Somali, half Egyptian. After thirteen months they'd escaped. They both spoke Arabic and knew camels. They'd groped their way across the Sahara from well to well.

  Before he'd gone to Africa, Raoul had authorized a Swiss bank to pay the note on Sweet Seclusion, his home on the bayou. When he didn't return in two years, the bank quit paying. It had hurt to learn that Otto had bought Sweet Seclusion on the auction block. But what had hurt even more was the discovery that Eva had helped Otto restore it.

  With his name blackened by a scandal so terrible neither Eva nor her family could ever accept him, Raoul had not returned to Louisiana. He'd withdrawn his money from his Swiss account, kept his assumed name and set himself up in business, with Zak as the front man for Z.A.K. World Oil. In the years that followed, deal by deal, Nicholas had worked behind the scenes of his own company to destroy the von Schonburg fortune that he’d helped build. Again and again he'd made better deals in the spot-oil market, always working to steal Otto's markets, to get close to Otto's contacts, to hurt Otto at the only enterprise that really mattered to the man—making money. Recently there had been articles in the London papers that the foundations of the von Schonburg empire were crumbling.

  Companies like Z.A.K. didn't produce or refine oil; they were middlemen, buying and selling cargoes of crude that might not be delivered for months, oil that hadn't even been pumped out of the ground. The right call meant big profits; the wrong calls meant equally huge losses.

  Nicholas had guessed right so often that there were those who believed he was infallible.

  Maybe he'd been too damned good.

  Maybe von Schonburg was right. Maybe all he'd done was place the noose around his own neck. If he did what Otto wanted, Z.A.K., and everybody who worked for Z.A.K., were finished.

  Was one woman worth so much?

  Otto had said he lacked the killer instinct.

  But the man Otto had sent to Africa and betrayed was dead.

  Nicholas Jones was a different breed entirely.

  What was Eva like now? The woman Nicholas read about in the papers attended the smartest London charity balls, lunched at finest restaurants, spent late nights at the best nightclubs, and took ski trips to Saint Moritz.

  She had an expensive antique shop to finance, and Otto was royalty. Did Evangeline want success and status and respect more than anything? The girl he'd known had wanted love.

  Otto and Evangeline. Thank God it was impossible for him to picture them together.

  The only way Nicholas could ever remember Eva was as she'd looked that day he'd last seen her, that soft rainy afternoon when she'd driven to New Orleans and thrown herself into his arms at the airport, and he'd pushed her away. He'd been too furious and disillusioned to listen to her.

  She'd been twenty-two with long red hair, great, dark, tear-filled eyes and a sleek slim body. When he'd pushed her away, he'd felt as if he'd torn a limb off his body and cast it off.

  “I love you,” she pleaded. “I shouldn’t have listened to my family. I was wrong.”

  “It was a good decision—for both of us. If ever there was a mismatched couple, it was us.”

  Her huge, desperate eyes cut his heart out, made the pain of saying that to her so fierce, he'd almost relented. Almost. Instead he’d turned and walked up the ramp to his waiting plane.

  She'd called after him, begging him, but he'd walked on. Whatever her faults, that girl who'd loved too easily and cried too easily, that girl who’d never learned she couldn't please everybody was nothing like the glitzy, social climber he now read about in the London papers.

  One thing about her, however, was unchanged—she still had a penchant for picking the wrong men.

  Eva had been in London a long time. Nicholas read the London papers, so he'd kept up with her struggle to rise in the art and antique world. He'd even learned of her financial problems. They didn't surprise him. No doubt she was too softhearted and disorganized to run an efficient shop.

  Otto was an antique collector. Otto and Eva had a thing for antiques. Now it seemed Otto and Eva had a thing for each other.

  Otto was a collector—not only of beautiful objects—but of people who fascinated him or who might prove useful. It was all too obvious that Otto had kept Eva on the string just in case he ever needed her.

  Nicholas's gaze wandered downward to a tree-lined canal where reddish-gold sunlight sparkled and children played beneath plane trees in a park. He took a deep, bitter breath.

  Eight years was a long time to remember a woman. To remember her arrogant, prestigious family that he'd longed to be a part of. To remember a woman who couldn't really trust or accept him, a woman who valued her family more than the man she professed to love.

  Still, it was odd that the thought of Eva being in danger—because of him—made every nerve ending in his body tense.

  *

  Hours later, after Nicholas got back to his flat, he went upstairs to his bedroom. His thoughts kept returning to his telephone conversation with Otto.

  My friend, she's still in love with you.

  “Then why the hell is she engaged to you, Otto?”

  Nicholas yanked open a drawer and pulled out a ring with a black onyx stone and a broken golden chain that sparkled against his brown palm. He had given it to Eva and, when he went to Africa, she'd given it back to him as a symbol of good luck.

  It was time he got rid of the thing. He pulled out a black velvet box, black paper and gold ribbon. Then he picked up the phone and dialed.

  A woman answered in German; her voice was light, eager. Too eager. Anya was Otto's beautiful, rebellious daughter. Like Otto, Nicholas collected people who might prove useful.

  "I can't see you tonight, Anya," he said. "Not for a week or two."

  "But..."

  "I will see you in Portofino at the party you're giving your father."

  "What? What about Papa?"

  "Pretend we're meeting for the first time."

  "He’ll be furious.” She laughed huskily. “But how exciting."

  “I knew you’d think so.” He hung up.

  Of one thing Nicholas was sure: Otto wasn't bluffing. Nicholas had till Monday to deliver. Nicholas had to get Eva before then. Or Otto would kill her.

  Chapter Two

  As always, Eva's shop on fashionable Pimlico Road was in chaos.

  Eva had had another of her sleepless nights. She'd awakened, startled from one of her much-dreaded dreams about Raoul. He’d seemed so near, and so dear. So worried about her.

  How could she still dream of him when she longed to forget him and fall in love and marry someone else? But she, who had once fallen in love so easily, had never been able to get over his death. If only she’d known on that last day that she would never see him again. She would have flung herself into his arms and held on until he relented. Instead, she’d let him walk away.

  Her family couldn't understand why she wasn’t able to accept his death and fall in love and marry. And she couldn't tell them that to her he still felt very much alive.

  After her dream, she’d walked her floors till dawn. As a result, she was tired and on edge this morning. So tired she would have loved to scream
or do something else that was equally un-Martinlike.

  At the moment her cat was the center of her shop's crisis.

  The afternoon was dark and rainy, the streets jammed with traffic. Eva hated rain.

  Inside the shop, the phone was ringing. Eva hoped it was fat, little Mr. Jeffries with the bald head and wire spectacles calling, Mr. Jeffries, who owned the magnificent, twelfth-century, illuminated manuscript Eva was trying to buy for Otto. Her shop, Connoisseurs, would be in the black if she only could negotiate this sale. She hoped Mr. Jeffries had a better price than his outrageous sum of nine million pounds.

  On another line, Prince Otto von Schonburg was on hold. Nigel, the shop's manager, had gone to an auction on Bond Street. There were stacks of unpaid bills on Eva's desk. The constant pressure of keeping Connoisseurs afloat was too much for Eva on any morning, but today it was worse than usual.

  Why didn't Zola answer the phone? Lady Vivien Balfoure was waiting in Nigel's velvet-walled, beige office for Eva to return so they could haggle over the price of a certain urn made of the finest Sevres porcelain, an urn that Vivien had coveted for months but Lord Balfoure refused to buy for her.

  The front doorbell tinkled. High heels tripped across marble floors and hesitated before some tempting art object. Doubtless, another customer who needed instant service. And the phone kept ringing.

  While all this was going on, Evangeline was trapped in the warehouse behind Connoisseurs. There were so many important things clamoring for attention. But first she had to rescue Victor from the jammed drawer of an eighteenth-century armoire made of glowing mahogany and padauk, before she bundled it off to her restorers. He had scratched her twice when she'd stuck her bandaged hand inside and grabbed the only thing she could reach—his fluffy black tail.

  What a morning! It had begun at 1:00 a.m. with her nightmare about Raoul. Then on her way to the shop a motorcycle had almost run her down in the rain. As a result she had stumbled over a water hydrant and sprained her wrist. Otto kept bombarding her with telephone calls. He refused to discuss the manuscript. Instead he was carrying on about the motorcyclist, saying that he and his family had received death threats because of an arms conference he was to attend. He was demanding that she drop everything and come to Portofino so he could protect her. Tonight!