Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Newsletter and Social Media Links
About the Author
Other books by Carole Mortimer
Copyright
Copyright © 2019 Carole Mortimer
Cover Design Copyright © Glass Slipper WebDesign
Editor: Linda Ingmanson
Formatting: Glass Slipper WebDesign
ISBN: 978-1-910597-77-4
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
All Rights Reserved.
Dedication
My husband, Peter
Chapter One
“Where the hell do you think you’re going?”
Rourke gnashed his teeth even as he came to an abrupt halt, knowing better than to try to walk away from his brother Atticus.
“Bathroom,” he answered without turning.
“Then you just walked past one.”
A scowl marred Rourke’s handsome features as he turned in what was one of the spacious marble hallways of the London hotel where his twin brother Logan’s wedding reception was now being held.
Atticus, the eldest of the Steele brothers, wanted to know where Rourke was going?
Anywhere the hell away from the hours of gushing love and happiness that was Logan and August’s wedding! From helping his twin into his wedding clothes earlier today to the best man speech Rourke had just delivered to the assembled guests.
Not that Rourke had anything against love. It was better than hate and some said it kept the earth turning. Rourke was more inclined to think that was due to it orbiting the sun, but he doubted the romantics in the world would agree with him.
Just as he scorned the idea of loving someone with your heart. No one could feel emotion with their heart. It was simply the organ of the body that pumped the flow of blood around the body. People loved because of the endorphins released into the brain when they saw someone they were attracted to and/or possibly fucking. It had absolutely nothing to do with the heart.
Rourke winced as he acknowledged this cynicism wasn’t quite the attitude he should have brought to his twin’s wedding. But years of suffering through an unrequited attraction for a particular woman would do that to a man.
“Are you going to give me a truthful answer or what?” Atticus continued to stride down the hallway, as formally dressed as Rourke in the dark gray morning suit, paler gray waistcoat, a white shirt, and black bow tie. Even Atticus’s long hair had been confined at his nape today.
The jackets of the suits they all wore had tails, for fuck’s sake. The six of them—Logan the bridegroom, Rourke the best man, the other four brothers as groomsmen—all looked like a load of fucking penguins strutting about the place.
“What the hell has put you in such a bad mood?” Atticus demanded when he reached Rourke’s side.
He snorted. “I’m not sure how much time you have before Jenna sends out a search party!”
Atticus smiled at the mention of his fiancée. “Maybe five minutes, if we’re lucky.” He shrugged. “There’s something to be said for having a woman to love and who loves you as much in return. So much so that we instantly miss each other when we’re apart.”
This sickly and nauseating sentimentalism was exactly what Rourke had hoped to step away from, if only for a few minutes. “Yeah, I’ve noticed.”
“Hey, don’t knock it until you try it,” his brother warned. “It was Jenna who noticed you slipping away from the reception after your best man speech and thought it would be a good idea if I followed you.”
“What the fuck for?” Rourke wasn’t even going to qualify the suggestion of him falling in love with an answer.
Atticus’s dark gaze narrowed. “Well, that uncharacteristic aggression, for one thing.”
“And for another?”
“She was wondering if your unusual mood is because you’re more affected by Logan’s marriage than you’ve let on.”
Rourke’s mood wasn’t only due to the hours of sugary sweetness he had been forced to endure today. No, some of it was due to the close proximity of some of the guests. A female guest. Sophie Hammond, in particular. The beautiful woman, ten years younger than Rourke’s thirty-three, who worked as a receptionist at Steele Protectors, the company owned by the six brothers.
She looked absolutely stunning today in a clinging gown the exact same color as her sky-blue eyes. Her hair spilled in heavy and loose bouncy curls down her spine. Long blonde hair Rourke had too often fantasized about coiling around his fist to hold Sophie in place while he bent her over the nearest flat surface and fucked her from behind. Just one of many fantasies Rourke had had about Sophie since she came to work for the brothers’ company three years ago.
Fantasies that would no doubt shock her out of her little vanilla mind if she ever knew about them.
Most especially because it was Rourke thinking them.
Oh, he knew what impression he projected: suave, sophisticated, and most of all, charming. Rourke knew because it was a veneer he deliberately nurtured so that no one saw the darkness in the man behind the mask. The dark needs that would make an innocent like Sophie scream, and probably not in a good way.
Thank God she hadn’t brought anyone with her to the wedding, or Rourke’s charming veneer might have slipped completely when he decided to pulverize the other man into the ground.
As it was, it seemed several members of his family were aware he wasn’t behaving with his normal easygoing manner. “Sorry, but I’m really not following you,” he prompted Atticus. “Affected how?”
“He’s your twin, and twins have a special bond—”
Rourke snorted. “He’s my very slightly younger brother—which I take great pleasure in reminding him—and he’s been a pain in my arse, along with everyone else’s, for most of his life. August deserves a medal for taking him on,” he added affectionately.
He really was happy for Logan and August. His twin tended to live life by his own set of rules, and his default mode was to be rude and abrasive, which pretty much pissed off everyone he came into contact with. Even August had wanted to kill him when they first met.
Come to think of it, August deserved more than a medal for marrying Rourke’s twin…
Atticus grinned. “True.” He sobered. “But—”
“There is no but,” Rourke reassured. “Look, in the last few months, I’ve watched you, Logan, and Bryce all fall in love with, admittedly, amazing women.”
The older man snorted. “Now I can definitely hear a but!”
He sighed heavily. “The six of us have been single for so long, I guess a part of me thought it would always be that way.”
“The Steele brothers, perennial bachelors, against the world?” Atticus drawled.
He shrugged. “Something like that.”
“A couple of months ago, I would have agreed with you,” Atticus mused. “Now I can’t imagine not having Jenna’s toiletries in our shared bathroom, her clothes in the closet next to mine, and items of her sexy underwear littering my previously tidy apartment.”
Rourke gave a wince at the latter. “TMI, bro.”
Atticus gave a low chuckle. “Seriously, I’m pretty
sure our parents, especially our mother—who has already started dropping broad hints about wanting grandchildren—would have had something to say if none of us had ever married.”
Yeah, in light of three of his brothers having recently found their soul mates, Rourke could now acknowledge it had been a stupid assumption to have made. But he had made it. Then Logan had fallen in love. Followed by Atticus a few weeks later. Then, just days ago, Bryce had announced he was also getting married to the love of his life. Haydn and Lucan seemed no more interested in being shackled than Rourke was, but there was no guarantee it was going to remain that way, for either of them.
As Sophie didn’t return Rourke’s attraction to her, he had long ago resolved himself to not having the woman he wanted.
Rourke deliberately shrugged off the tension from his shoulders and forced a smile to his lips. “I’m just going outside for some fresh air and then I’ll rejoin you all in a few, okay?”
“If you’re absolutely sure this has nothing to do with your twin now having a closer emotional bond to someone other than yourself?”
He held back a smile. “You know, Atticus, you really suck at this emotional shit.”
His brother laughed again. “I’ve tried telling Jenna that, but she will insist I keep trying.”
“As long as she loves you and you love her, nothing else matters. The rest of us are big enough to look after ourselves.”
Atticus nodded. “But if you do ever need to talk…”
Rourke chuckled. “No offense, but if that ever happens, I think Jenna would be the safer bet.”
“Fair enough,” his brother accepted. “Don’t stay away from the party too long, hmm?”
“I won’t,” Rourke confirmed distractedly as he continued down the hallway.
He had just spotted a familiar blue dress and that even more recognizable long blonde hair as Sophie walked past the end of the hallway in the direction of the hotel’s private garden at the back of the building.
Exactly where Rourke was going.
And also, it seemed, the dark-haired and muscular man walking down the hallway too closely behind Sophie for it to be a coincidence…
“What the hell—!” was all Sophie managed to say before the hand placed over her mouth cut off further speech and she was hauled back against a muscular and much taller body, the man’s other arm like a steel band about her chest to hold her captive.
Being grabbed had knocked Sophie off-balance. One of her high-heeled shoes came off, and she dropped her clutch bag as she fought against being held against her will. She struggled even more as she was pulled back into the heavy foliage that made up most of the unexpected tropical garden at the back of this prestigious hotel.
Sophie didn’t know—yet—whether to be relieved or worried that the garden was deserted except for her and the man holding her captive.
“The Boss wants to know if you have any good news for us?”
Relieved, Sophie decided. Not because she felt safe now she knew the identity of her abductor, but because she didn’t want any witnesses to this conversation. She doubted this man was about to kill her and hide the body. Not until his Boss had what he wanted from her.
But that wouldn’t stop this man from roughing her up a little, if he wanted to.
Maybe more than a little…
Which, considering she was in this hotel as a guest at Logan Steele’s wedding, one of the six brothers who employed her, might be more than a little difficult to explain.
Now that she knew the man didn’t actually intend to kill or rape her, thoughts of the past week crashed down on her in a muddle of memories and emotions.
She hadn’t even wanted to come to the wedding today after the tension she had been under this past week. But not showing up after having accepted the wedding invitation some weeks ago would only have piqued the interest of, and brought about questions from, at least one or two of the six Steele brothers.
Questions Sophie could well do without.
As it was, she had escaped the other happy and smiling wedding guests as soon as the official speeches were over and the bride and groom had taken to the floor for the first dance of the reception. Sophie was badly in need of a few minutes to herself before forcing that smile back on her face and returning to mingle and chat with the other guests.
Only to be accosted by this thug the moment she stepped out of the main part of the hotel and into the privacy of the garden.
The man removed his hand from her mouth. “Well?”
“No, I haven’t been able to—”
“No?” the man taunted. “Then take this as a friendly reminder you have one more week to tell us where your father is,” the man’s gravelly voice threatened softly, his breath hot against her throat. “If you don’t, then we’ll have to use other…methods of persuasion than verbal,” he added with obvious relish for what those methods would be. “If I had been Mr. Tillman, I wouldn’t have been generous enough to give you even two days to come up with some answers, let alone two weeks.”
Zachary Tillman.
The businessman her father had worked for exclusively as his accountant for the past fifteen years, until her father’s disappearance just over a week ago.
Sophie hadn’t even known her father was missing until Tillman came to her apartment. At the age of twenty-three, she was far too old to still be living with her father. They did try to have dinner together once a month, which they had done just three nights before Tillman paid his visit to Sophie’s apartment.
The millionaire—billionaire?—businessman had been accompanied by four bodyguards, two of whom had remained outside the apartment—whether to keep Sophie inside or ensure no one else entered, she wasn’t sure—and the other two accompanying their employer inside.
The conversation had started out politely enough, but once Tillman realized Sophie hadn’t even known her father was missing, he had suggested Sophie do everything she could to find him, sooner rather than later. Then he had very generously given her two weeks to do it in, one of which had now passed.
Once Tillman left, Sophie had gone instantly to the apartment her father had moved into not long after Sophie’s mother died. When she received no answer to the ringing of the doorbell, she had let herself in with the spare key.
It was obvious from the state of the apartment that Tillman’s men had already been there. Furniture was overturned, the couch and chairs cut into with a knife and the stuffing pulled out, the mattress in the bedroom too. Every piece of her father’s clothing had been pulled from the wardrobe and drawers and had been ripped and thrown about the room. The kitchen was even worse, not an inch of the floor left uncovered by smashed crockery and appliances.
But a quick look in each of those rooms had also confirmed her father wasn’t lying dead in one of them, thank God.
Except Sophie still had no idea where he could have gone.
He hadn’t contacted her, and his cell phone was either switched off or had been disposed of completely. Sophie had watched enough cops-chasing-the-bad-guys television programs to know that her father’s whereabouts could have been traced by his cell phone. Apparently, so had he.
The phone being of no help, Sophie had contacted those of her father’s friends that she knew of, but none of them had heard from him either.
She didn’t even know where to start on checking with the airlines to see if he had left the country, but knew from working at Steele Protectors that none of those airlines would give out the names of their passengers anyway. Haydn Steele, the computer hacker of the family, could have gotten that information within minutes, but Sophie was doing everything she could to keep this situation off the Steele brothers’ radar.
They were all alpha males, and Sophie had no doubt they wouldn’t hesitate to offer to help her if she explained the situation to them.
But the Steele brothers were also honorable men, and Sophie now knew the work her father had done for Zachary Tillman, and had been doing for years, wasn’t in t
he least honorable. Zachary Tillman had taken great delight in taunting her with the information that her father’s job as the other man’s accountant had involved laundering money from the businessman’s less than legal business activities by syphoning it to accounts on off-shore tax havens.
Until three years ago, it transpired, when Stephen Hammond had decided to start taking his own cut of those illegal transactions. Just small amounts, a few thousand here and another few thousand there. Amounts he had no doubt assumed wouldn’t be missed and which now totaled just over five million pounds.
Sophie wasn’t stupid. She knew the only reason Tillman had told her any of that was because he knew she couldn’t go to the police with that information without also incriminating her father.
It wasn’t fear but shame that motivated her in not telling any of the Steele brothers of her predicament.
Her father had stolen five million pounds from the man he had been employed by for years and who, it now transpired, was no more than a common thug.
Not only had Zachary Tillman noticed that missing money, but he was now demanding it be returned to him, along with the man who had stolen it from him.
Sophie had absolutely no idea where the money or her father were. Probably in the same place, one of those tax havens where the other money was stashed. Where her father would also be sunning himself on a sandy beach and living off his ill-gotten gains, and totally ignoring the fact that he had left Sophie vulnerable to being the one to pay the price for his duplicity.
Her father had changed after her mother died three years ago. The same number of years, coincidentally, Tillman now accused him of having embezzled money from him.
Sophie’s father had always been busy working when she was growing up and so had never been a particularly hands-on parent to start with. But after the death of his wife, he had become even less so, often distracted and impatient when they met up for those monthly dinners.
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