Emotion was welling up in him, as powerful as the desire building in him again. Words shaped in his mind.
I will not lose her—not now. I will not.
It was his last conscious thought as passion was rekindled between them, consuming all in its heat.
I will not lose her…
Luke stirred. Something was wrong. Very wrong. He reached out his arm, feeling only cold sheets. His eyes flared open, going immediately to the en suite bathroom door. It was standing open, no one inside. His eyes swept the room.
No Talia.
And no handbag, no shoes, no jacket, no dress. No discarded underwear slipped from her eager body as he’d taken her to his bed, to sate himself on her and change his life for ever…
No trace of her existence.
Except the note propped on the desk.
Face stark, he got up and walked towards it. Something was tightening around his guts, like a boa constrictor throwing its coils around him to crush the life from him.
Luke—I have to go. I didn’t want to wake you.
That was it. Nothing else. For a long moment he just stared at it as the breath was crushed from his lungs. Then, wordlessly, he screwed it up and dropped it into the bin.
He walked into the en suite bathroom refusing to feel a single emotion.
TALIA SAT IN the back of the taxi, staring at her phone. It was signalling a low battery, and she was glad of it in a cowardly way. Her brain was not working properly. It seemed to be split in two, and neither side would connect with the other. She was still with Luke, folded against his body, dreaming of Caribbean islands.
Islands to escape to…islands to set me free…
Free from what her eyes were forcing into her head as she reread her mother’s repeated pleading texts.
Darling, phone me! You must phone me. You absolutely must!
She could not face making the call. Yet fear was biting at her out of nowhere. Her mother had never sounded so desperate…
But before she phoned her she must get to her flat, set her phone to charge and then shower—wash Luke from her. And she must change into her day clothes—what she thought of as her prison clothes.
A shaft of anguish pierced her. She silenced it. She had to. There was no choice but to bury it way down deep. Her prison door had opened—but for a fleeting moment only. Now it was slammed shut again and that fear was biting at her.
Something was up. What could have made her mother so desperate?
The taxi driver pulled up at her apartment block and she paid him, clambering out on shaky limbs, bare feet crammed into high heels. She slipped the phone into her bag and hurried to the exterior doors of the block.
The doorman stepped towards her, holding up a hand. ‘I’m sorry, Miss Grantham, but I’ve orders to prevent anyone entering,’
She stopped short. Stared blankly. ‘Orders?’ she echoed, her voice blank.
‘Yes, miss,’ he said. ‘From the new owners.’
She tried to make sense of what he’d said. ‘Someone’s bought the block from Grantham’s?’ she said stupidly.
He shook his head, looking at her with a touch of sympathy. ‘No, miss. Someone’s bought Grantham’s—what’s left of it.’
Talia’s mother flung herself at her.
‘Oh, darling, thank God—thank God you’re here! Oh, what is happening? How did this happen?’
She was hysterical, and Talia was on the verge of hysteria herself.
How she had got herself from central London to her parents’ house she hardly knew. Her brain had simply ceased to function. Now, the only thing she could do, besides tightening her arms instinctively around her clingy, crying mother, was say, ‘Where’s Dad?’
Her mother threw back her head. Her hair was unstyled, her make-up absent—she looked years older than she did in the carefully presented image Talia was used to seeing.
‘I can’t contact him!’ Hysteria was present in her voice still. ‘I phone and phone and nothing happens! I can’t even get through to his office—it rings out! Something’s happened to him. I know it has. I know it!’
Gently, Talia set her mother aside. ‘I have to find out what’s going on,’ she said.
There was a stricken note in her own voice, and she was not sure how she was still managing to function, but she knew that above all she needed to discover what had happened to her father’s company. To her father…
Five minutes on the Internet later and she knew. It was blazoned all over the financial press.
Grantham Land goes under:
LX Holdings picks over the carcass!
She read the article in shock. Disbelief. Yet her disbelief was seared with the hideous knowledge that everything was true, whatever her desperate hope that it was not. Her father’s company had gone under, collapsing under a mountain of hitherto concealed debts, and all remaining assets acquired by a new owner.
Like her mother—sobbing jerkily on the sofa while Talia hunched over her laptop—Talia tried to phone through to her father’s office. The call rang out, unanswered. Unlike her mother, she then tried to find a number for the company that seemed to have bought what was left of Grantham Land, but LX Holdings did not seem to exist—certainly not in the UK.
She started to search for overseas companies, but realised how little she knew of corporate matters. The press didn’t seem to know much either—the adjective employed in their articles to describe the acquiring company was ‘secretive’.
As for where her father was… Talia knew with bleak certainty that filled her entirely that he had gone to earth. He would not easily be found. As to whether he would bother to get in touch with his wife and daughter…
Her mouth tightened to a whip-thin line. She turned her head towards her mother, huddled in a sodden mass of exhausted hysteria. Would her father care?
She knew the answer.
No, he would not. He had abandoned them to whatever would be the fallout from this debacle.
Fallout that,
