Desire
LOUISE BAGSHAWE
headline
www.headline.co.uk
Copyright © 2010 Louise Bagshawe
The right of Louise Bagshawe to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.
First published as an Ebook by Headline Publishing Group in 2010.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library
eISBN : 978 0 7553 5233 3
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Epilogue
Top ten bestseller Louise Bagshawe is the author of fourteen novels, published in more than eight languages, most recently the massive Sunday Times bestseller PASSION. A mother of three, she lives in Northamptonshire.
Visit www.louisebagshawebooks.com for all the latest news on Louise’s books and much more!
Praise for PASSION:
‘Part-thriller, part-love story, it’s Bagshawe at her best’
Sun
‘Just what the doctor ordered. It reminded me of Jackie Collins and I couldn’t put it down’
Daily Mail
‘Totally delicious’
Cosmopolitan
‘More than addictive . . . the perfect thing to get you over the end-of-summer blues’
News of the World
More praise for Louise Bagshawe:
‘If a novel were a glass of champagne, this would be it’
Cosmopolitan
‘You’ll be hooked on this irresistible slice of glitz and glam’
Closer
‘Jam-packed with edgy, sophisticated women and sexy, powerful men, you’ll be hooked by the racy, romantic intrigues, and the twists and turns of the plot’
Woman
‘Her novels are action-packed; her heroines gorgeous; and her writing punchy . . . I love it’
Daily Mail
‘A fiery read that’s impossible to put down’
Now
‘Witty, inspirational and unputdownable’
Company
This book is for my brother James
Acknowledgements
Michael Sissons is, as ever, my agent and rock. I could not do any of this without him. I’m so pleased to be working with Gemma Hirst at PFD and my thanks are due to Fiona Petherham and Jateen Patel. At Headline, I’m truly fortunate to have Marion Donaldson as my editor; her notes are brilliant and immensely improved this book. Marion works with a great team: Sarah Douglas, Louise Rothwell, Clare Stacey, Sarah Jane Coleman, Rosie Gailer and Kate Tindal-Robertson. My thanks to all of them. It’s very comforting to have Headline’s legendary sales force behind me; I’m grateful to James Horobin, Barbara Ronan, Jess Fawcett, Diane Griffith, Ross Hulbert and Nigel Baines, and of course the whole team abroad, especially Sales and Marketing at Hachette Australia and New Zealand where I had such a wonderful time last spring!
Prologue
‘Dangerous,’ the client said. ‘His wedding. There will be hundreds of people. Reporters, photographers. It’ll be high profile.’
Felix smiled thinly. Did this fool think he was an amateur?
‘The higher the better,’ he said. ‘Whenever we do this, there’s gonna be press. At any wedding, people are distracted. Distraction is good.’ He ticked off the advantages. ‘Foreign resort. So no police - not thorough ones, anyway. No forensics. Tired wedding guests who need to get back to the States. It’s perfect.’
‘You can get in?’
Felix was silent. He never discussed his methods.
‘I suppose nobody will know all the staff.’
‘That’s right. They won’t.’
The client looked at him with an ugly mix of longing and desperation. That was how they usually looked in his business.
The sun beat down on the terrace. They were looking over the smooth green lawns of the golf course in one of Malibu’s most expensive country clubs. Felix was sitting drinking mint tea and watching his client fret.
He was enjoying the moment. The last six months had been journeyman stuff for him, small fees. He was not one of the major players, the world’s greats. This job came off a recommendation, for a client who didn’t have connections, from a cocaine dealer he’d paid handsomely. A good investment. Once he was hired - and he was about to be hired - a high-profile job like this might kick him into the big league. The client was a meal ticket, a game-changer.
‘I want the money in advance. The full amount, wired to Switzerland,’ he said. You treated them mean, just like a lover. Let them know who was in control.
‘In advance? You might run away with it.’
This customer was nervous. But then Josh Steen, millionaire producer, was obviously a major hit. This was the high end of the target range. Usually Felix took out South American drug barons, sometimes a minor judge or politician. They were small fry, a piece of cake. Beneath him, really. Josh Steen was risky. He was famous. Not a foreigner, or a nobody. There would be heat on his killer, and the assassin would be risking his own life.
The job was only worth doing for the money. Big money. And the prestige that came with it. A big-league hit took a big-league payday.
So Felix wanted his cash. All of it. Right now. Whereas his client was needy, and emotional, and wanted Steen dead.
‘If I ran away with your fee,’ he said, ‘my reputation would be destroyed. How do you think you found me? Reputation. The business works on word of mouth. Don’t be dumb, OK?’
‘OK. Fine. I’ll wire you the money.’ Of course. Like there was a choice. ‘But there’ll be a lot of publicity if you do this at the wedding. Josh is famous.’
Felix inclined his head. ‘For a businessman, yes. Which is why the wedding is so perfect. You don’t need to take the usual precautions, fake a death that looks natural, like it comes from disease or accident. That’s getting riskier. The FBI would investigate a victim like Steen, and police forensic techniques get better every month. Amateurs are often too smart for their own good.’
‘I don’t understand,’ the customer said, leaning forward. ‘If Josh is killed, and it’s obvious, won’t that lead back to me?’
‘No. That’s the beauty of it,’ Felix said. ‘You can never have a perfect kill. But you can have a perfect suspect.’ He grinned at the client. ‘And at this wedding, it’s going to be the bride.’
Lisa lifted her face to the sun.
God, it was beautiful out here. The lush, subtropical vegetation of the private estate. Sunlight, spilling from the sky and flooding their whole reception.
Everywhere she looked, this party was immaculate. The grounds of the exclusive hotel, reserved for her and Josh, just the two of them. Wait staff, flown in from America, mingled with their well-dressed guests. There was enough Dior and Chanel, enough Louboutins and Manolos, Piaget watches and Hermès Kelly bags to stock the whole of Rodeo Drive. The guests included princes, senators, ambassadors, starlets, and half the moguls from the entertainment industry. In all her quiet, unassuming life, she would never have imagined she’d end up here . . .
Where was Josh? For a moment, she felt a sudden rush of warmth towards her new bridegroom. After all was said and done, he had provided this for her. Regardless of the fights, the controlling, the misery she’d felt, he’d stuck by her, even when the tabloids decided they didn’t like her image. And now they were married, truly married, in spite of it all: Josh’s bitchy sister, the catty wives of his work colleagues. Josh had gone ahead, put his ring on her finger. And here they were in Thailand, under the glorious sun, with an exquisite antique four-poster waiting for them on their wedding night . . .
Perhaps she should give him another chance. At least try to make this work. They hadn’t always been such strangers to each other. Josh was her friend, her rescuer, back in the beginning. If she owed him enough to go through with the wedding, didn’t she owe him enough to give the marriage a chance too?
Lisa took a tiny sip of her champagne and gathered her custom-made Vera Wang gown about her. She wanted to go and find him. Some of the Artemis Studio wives waved at her. They were giggling to each other. Lisa shrugged it off; she wasn’t about to let them spoil her good mood. She wanted to talk to Josh, hug him. Maybe even kiss him. Their wedding night should be the kind of sex they hadn’t had in months . . .
Where was he last? Oh yeah, talking to Peter Mazin, his business partner, over by the gazebo where the string quartet were playing. She walked across the lawn, and guests melted to let the bride past. The pleasant sounds of the musicians, some of the finest in the Los Angeles Symphony, floated above the crowd. The gazebo was tucked into a little corner, out of sight. Josh hated talking business in public. She didn’t resent it if he had his head together with Peter on their wedding day. Workaholism was a part of who he was.
Lisa craned her head. She couldn’t see Peter Mazin, but Josh was there; she could hear the low-pitched sound of his laugh, something she’d relished in the beginning, when he shocked everybody by starting to date her. She walked around the edge of the musicians’ tent, picking her way across the ropes to the little corner of shrubbery where she’d seen the two men last . . .
And stopped dead. Peter Mazin was nowhere to be seen. But her bridegroom was all right. He was leaning over Melissa Olivera, one of Lisa’s girlfriends, wife of Josh’s deputy. Melissa had her expensive gown pulled down around her waist. Her tits, perky and plastic, were exposed to the hot Thai sun, and Josh’s mouth was sucking on her left nipple. Lisa blankly took in the spreadeagled legs, his tailored pants loose at the waist. They’d been married for two hours.
And Josh Steen was already fucking someone else.
Chapter One
Lisa Costello woke up next to her husband’s corpse.
Her nightdress, originally a yellow Chinese silk with delicate embroidery, a priceless heirloom of his mother’s, was soaked with his blood, reddish-brown where it had oxidised. Blood caked everything: her hair, her skin, the diamonds of her engagement ring. It was on the Aubusson rug and the tapestries on the wall.
And, of course, it was all over their marriage bed.
Lisa stared blankly. At first she was too shocked to take it in.
She was still coming to. Her head thudded with the relentless pain of a serious hangover. She was dehydrated; her temples pulsed, blood pumping loud in her skull. Her mouth and tongue were wretchedly dry. So dry she couldn’t even scream.
The last thing she remembered was slamming the door in his face, stumbling towards the bed. She’d been drunk - but not that drunk, surely. She was just drowning her sorrows against the farce of a marriage over before it had even begun.
But this sight was quite real. She was looking at Josh’s body. His carefully styled salt-and-pepper hair was flecked with his own blood; his lower body soaked in it. He’d been stabbed, several times. There was a horrible wound at the side of his throat.
Lisa tried to sit up.
That was when she realised she was holding the dagger.
She glanced down, almost unable to release her fingers. A wedding gift from that local aristocrat Josh’s company was dealing with - Prince Samyan, that was his name. It was antique, made of pure gold and decorated in the Thai fashion: a smooth ivory handle, slightly curved. It had been kept very sharp. Sickened, she threw it on the bed, but her fingerprints were still on it, reddened against the white bone.
Desperately, Lisa tried to remember. Something, anything, after the fight. No dice, it was all blank. Jesus. An alcoholic blackout. She panted in terror and looked around, her brain screaming in protest as she turned her head. No broken windows, the doors were sedately in their frames. No burglar had busted in here.
She had murdered Joshua Steen on their wedding night. She had got drunk, and she had killed him. Stabbed him, tried to slit his throat, with one of their wedding gifts. She didn’t remember any of it, but that didn’t matter, did it?
She stumbled from the soaked satin sheets of their ornate four-poster bed and headed to the bathroom, where she vomited, dry-heaving. Almost nothing came up. She had a blurry memory of being sick the night before, after Josh started shouting at her. Maybe she’d emptied her stomach then. She gulped some water from the tap and instantly retched again. Even though she was hideously thirsty, the toxins in her stomach would not even allow her to drink.
She sobbed with confusion and terror. Joshua was a rich man, and he had powerful friends. His family was connected in society.
And they all hated her.
Nobody could understand why one of America’s top movie producers, with thousands of gorgeous, accomplished models and actresses to choose from, would marry a waitress practically half his age. OK, Lisa Costello was pretty, but hardly able to play in the California league. Her mother, who had come from a small English town, was dead, and her father had left the family when she was ten and not been heard of since. Lisa was no match for a man who had dated Oscar winners, athletes and the Vice-President’s cousin.
The American tabloids loved to hate her. They stalked her at the supermarket, took long-range photos of her on the beach. Her non-model’s face, her normal curves, everything was lit in the worst possible way. They ran unflattering pictures of her next to Josh’s ex-girlfriends. THE MOUSE AND THE MOGUL, one of them screamed. JOSH’S JOKE. Lisa wasn’t worthy. And the press never let her forget it.
She’d stayed in the relationship partly to spite them. Because Lisa was stubborn. She wasn’t a quitter. Even when it was clear it was not going to work. Even when she knew she would have to bail out sometime.
She was trapped by the massive fiasco of this wedding, the millions of dollars it cost, the private beach resort, the chartered jets, the society columns and photographers. To cancel at the last minute would have made Josh look like a fool. And she cared about him enough to spare him that, at least.
What was the answer? She’d go through with it, give him his day in the sun, then push for a quickie divorce six months down the line.
How stupid. What a mistake.
She wished to God she had just walked away. Let the celebrity magazines crow how they were right. Who cared? Why did she care? Her younger self wouldn’t have given a monkey’s. But Josh’s universe was seductive, of course it was. Lisa wasn’t a saint. To go from struggling with the rent to this opulent fantasy - yeah, sure it was hard to give that up. And she’d learned habits from her dead bridegroom, like the importance of clothes and caring about what the press said.
Josh hadn’t much approved of her friends, and to her shame, Lisa had dropped them. In truth it was hard to s
tay friends with your mates from the surfer bars and the part-time job at the diner when you suddenly acquired a mansion, a chauffeur and two bodyguards. She had paid the price for her selfishness, for being disloyal and dazzled. As she discovered the bargain she’d made, as Josh’s control-freakery, cruelty and faithlessness became clear to her, she had no allies to back her up. Just some future in-laws who despised her and told her constantly how fortunate she was to be in this man’s life. How amazing it was he’d chosen her for his bed.
Lisa was planning to call it off. But she never pulled the trigger. So the wedding juggernaut rolled on, and she let herself be flattered, and bullied, and bribed into submission. The celebrity florists, the spread in People magazine, the Vera Wang dress, the epic diamond ring. Lisa Costello was a star of the show, and trapped in a glittering cage. Locked into marriage, no way out . . .
Until she saw Josh with Melissa. Actually on her wedding day. Two hours after they’d exchanged vows.
Then - the row. The start of which at least fifty of their guests had seen.
Lisa had stormed up here, to the honeymoon suite, for privacy, to get away from her sniggering bridesmaids and the whispers of the guests. She’d been screaming at him . . .
She lifted her head from the sink. Her reflection was haggard. Her hair was matted, her eyes bloodshot, with dark circles underneath. She was still wearing the ruby-rimmed platinum Blancpain watch Josh had given her; local time was coming up to nine in the morning.
Desire Page 1
