fly out to Dream Island first thing Saturday morning,’ he pronounced firmly.
Megan’s eyes widened. ‘But you haven’t even booked yet. How do you know you’ll get a booking for next Saturday? Or even a flight?’
‘Don’t you worry your pretty little head about that. I’ll organise everything. Come Saturday, we’ll be on Dream Island.’
‘How long will we be gone for?’ she asked.
James was about to say a week. He really couldn’t afford to be away from the office for longer than that at the moment. He’d just started up a new addition to his business: a casting agency to cater for the increasing number of movies being made in Australia. But then he remembered that he wasn’t just whisking Megan away to have a twenty-four-seven sex-fest with her. He wanted to get her pregnant.
He’d forgotten that for a moment!
He quickly worked out the dates from what she’d told him about her period. Her peak time for conceiving would be a fortnight from today, give or take a few days either way. If they didn’t leave Sydney till Saturday he’d have to extend their holiday to at least ten days, just to be on the safe side. He couldn’t rely on getting her pregnant after they came back. She might go back into her shell when she returned. No, he would have to strike whilst his wife was hot. Which she was—very hot.
‘I thought ten days,’ he said.
She suddenly began to look worried again, for some reason.
Despite his earlier resolve to keep his hands off, he swiftly gathered her back into his arms, and kissed her again. It was worth the pain to feel her melt against him once more. Still, it was going to be a long week, sleeping beside her in bed and not being able to touch her. Knowing him, he was sure to try something and spoil everything. Better to keep her at arm’s length.
A sudden idea occurred to him.
‘Remember how great our wedding night was?’ he said, and she nodded, her eyes glistening a little. ‘Why don’t we try to re-create that?’
‘But…but…how?’
‘If you remember, we hadn’t seen each other for a few weeks before our wedding day. That time apart made our getting together again extra-special. I know it’ll only be a few days this time, but we could do something similar. You could sleep down here till we go. And have your meals down here. If you promise to eat, that is. What do you think?’
‘I think it’s a very romantic idea,’ she said, but with reservation, he thought.
‘I can be romantic, you know,’ he said teasingly.
‘Can you?’
‘Not often, I admit. But I can try.’
‘Won’t Roberta think it a bit strange if I don’t come up to the house for meals?’
‘I’ll explain what we’re doing.’
She blinked, then nodded. James smiled. That was another thing he really liked about Megan. She didn’t argue with him.
‘Great. Look, I’d better hotfoot it into the office and see to that booking post-haste. Don’t forget to eat some of this food. I’ll pick something up at work. Bye, darling.’ He squeezed her shoulder as he gave her a peck on the cheek. ‘See you tonight.’
‘No, you won’t.’
‘You’re right. I won’t. Damn. Still, it’s not that long till Saturday.’ Just a bloody eternity!
‘What happens if you can’t get a booking?’
‘I’ll get a booking,’ he said with a scowl. ‘Even if I have to buy the whole damned island!’
Chapter Five
WHICH he would, Megan accepted ruefully as she watched him hurry out of the pool house. James Logan was not a man to fail in anything he did. He was a man amongst men. A winner.
Megan knew more about her husband than he might realise she did. When he’d left her home alone during the six weeks between their engagement and wedding, she’d spent many hours checking him out on the internet, feeding her insatiable curiosity about the powerful man she’d fallen madly in love with and was about to marry. She’d read every item of news which related to him; every single article written about his background, his professional and his private lives.
There was one heck of a lot.
Although she already knew that James’s father was transport magnate Wayne Logan, Megan hadn’t known that Logan senior was a self-made billionaire who’d begun life as a lowly truck driver, becoming a multimillionaire by the time he was thirty. Of course, his marriage to the daughter of his wealthy boss had given him a leg up on the ladder of success, a strategy Megan was familiar with. Megan suspected her own mother had married for money, not for love. She was sometimes ashamed of the way her extremely materialistic mother did nothing but spend her poor father’s money.
At least Wayne Logan had pulled his weight, proving himself an astute businessman by building up his ailing father-in-law’s trucking company into the biggest in Australia. After his father-in-law passed away, Logan had gone on to bigger and better things, expanding his transport empire overseas, buying container ships and a couple of airlines, as well as more trucks.
Logan’s marriage had produced two sons. Jonathon, the elder by five years, had been killed in a car accident a few weeks after his twenty-third birthday. The Porsche he was driving—he’d run off the road and hit a telegraph pole—had been a birthday present from his doting father.
James didn’t figure largely in any articles about the Logan family until he was twenty-five, at which point he’d burst into the media spotlight—not because he’d followed into the family business as his older brother had, but as the highly successful manager of several singers and actors whose previous manager had been arrested for embezzlement three years earlier. Facing financial ruin, they’d all clubbed together at that time and turned to James for help. James had set up shop as a civil litigation lawyer after leaving university, raking up business by dropping pamphlets through letter boxes.
It came out later than none of them had known James had only been twenty-two at the time. James had always looked older than he was.
But help them he had. Not by suing the man who’d fleeced them—an impossible course of action after the gamblingaddicted fool had committed suicide—but by talking them into taking him on as their manager. James had always had the gift of the gab, it seemed, and a passion for the entertainment business.
It was history now that under the original contract they’d signed with him James had taken no commission for the first year, provided they did what he said, no questions asked. With little to lose—all of them were in danger of fast becoming ‘has-beens’ and ‘never-wases’—they’d all agreed to his terms.
Within three years, every one of James Logan’s clients was a success story and James was raking it in. His new company, Images, quickly became the most famous management agency in Australia, and he was dubbed ‘The Makeover Man’.
That was his basic modus operandi. James made people over; gave
