heard the laughter echoing back, and sighed. She couldn’t blame Freya one bit. She, of all people, knew what madness it was to marry into this family.
Darius arrived the next day, apologising with a fictional tale of business dealings. Not for the world would he have admitted that he’d been forced to leave Herringdean, return to the mainland and check into a hotel to put on a fresh suit. Normally, no power on earth could force him to change his plans and he resented it. Another thing for which Harriet Connor was to blame.
He found her mysteriously disturbing because she seemed to haunt him as two people. There was the girl who’d briefly charmed him with her instinctive empathy for his feelings about the isolated place. And there was the other one who’d interfered with his plans, destroyed his dignity with her stupid hound, and committed the unforgivable crime of seeing him at a disadvantage. He had dismissed her from his mind but she seemed unaware of that fact and popped up repeatedly in one guise or another.
A fanciful man might have defined her two aspects as the Good Fairy and the Bad Fairy. Darius, who wasn’t fanciful, simply called her ‘that wretched female’.
His father greeted him in typical fashion. ‘So there you are at last. About time too.’
‘An unexpected matter that required my attention.’
Amos grunted. ‘As long as you sorted it out to your advantage.’
‘Naturally,’ Darius said, brushing aside the memory of lying on the sand. ‘Then I got here as soon as I could. I’m glad to see you looking better, Father.’
‘I am better. I keep saying so but my womenfolk won’t believe me. I suppose Freya talked a lot when she collected you from the airport.’
‘I asked her questions and, like a good nurse, she answered them.’
‘Nurse be damned. She’s here as my stepdaughter.’
‘If you say so.’
‘What do you think of her?’
‘She seems a nice girl, what little I’ve seen of her.’
‘She cheers the place up. And she’s a good cook. Better than that so-called professional I employ. She’s doing supper for us tonight. You’ll enjoy it.’
He did enjoy it. Freya produced excellent food, and could crack jokes that lightened the atmosphere. She was pleasant to have around, and Darius found himself wondering why more women couldn’t be like her instead of invading other people’s private property with their sharp remarks and their dangerous dogs.
Awkward. She’d said it herself, and that was exactly right.
After supper, in his father’s study, the two men confronted each other.
‘I gather things aren’t too good?’ Amos grunted.
‘Not for me or anyone else,’ Darius retorted. ‘There’s a global crisis, hadn’t you heard?’
‘Yes, and some are weathering it better than others. That contract you had the big fight over, I warned you how to word the get-out clause, and if you’d listened to me you could have told them where to stuff their legal action.’
‘But they’re decent people,’ Darius protested. ‘They knew very little about business—’
‘All the better. You could have done as you liked and they wouldn’t have found out until too late. You’re soft, that’s your trouble.’
Darius grimaced. In the financial world, his reputation was far from soft. Cold, unyielding, power-hungry, that was what people said of him. But he drew the line at taking advantage of helpless innocence, and he’d paid the price for it; a price his father would never have paid.
‘But it’s not too late,’ Amos conceded in a milder tone. ‘Now you’re here there are ways I can help.’
‘That’s what I hoped,’ Darius said quietly.
‘You haven’t always taken my advice, but perhaps you’ve got the sense to take it now. And the first problem is how you’re going to deal with Morgan Rancing.’
‘I must tell you—’
‘I’ve heard disturbing rumours about some island he owns off the south coast of England. They say he’ll try to use it to cover his debts, and I’m warning you to have no truck with that. Don’t give it a thought. What you must do—’
‘It’s too late,’ Darius growled. ‘Herringdean is already mine.’
‘What? You agreed to take it?’
‘No, I wasn’t given the chance,’ Darius snapped. ‘Rancing has vanished. Next thing, I received papers that transferred ownership of Herringdean to me. His cellphone is dead, his house is empty. Nobody knows where he is, or if they do they’re not talking. I can either accept the island or go without anything.’
‘But it’ll be more trouble than it’s worth,’ Amos spluttered.
‘I’m inclined to agree with you,’ Darius murmured.
‘So you know something about it?’
‘A little. I need to go back and inspect it further.’
‘And you’re counting on it to pay your debts?’
‘I don’t know. But in the meantime I could do with an investor to make a one-time injection of cash and help me out.’
‘Meaning me?’
‘Well, as you’re always telling me, you’ve survived the credit crunch better than anyone.’
‘Yes, because I knew how to treat money.’
‘Like a prisoner who’s always trying to escape,’ Darius recalled.
‘Exactly. That’s why I came to live here.’
He pushed open the door that led out onto the balcony overlooking the view over the bay that now glittered with lights against the darkness.
‘I talked to a journalist once,’ Amos recalled. ‘She asked me all sorts of tom-fool questions. Why had I chosen to live in Monte Carlo? Was it just the tax relief or was there something else? I brought her out here and became lyrical about the view.’
‘That I would have loved to hear,’ Darius said.
Amos grinned. ‘Yeah, you’d have been proud of me. The silly woman swallowed it hook, line and sinker. Then she wrote some trash about my being a man who appreciated peace and beauty. As though I gave a damn about that stuff.’
‘Some people think it has value,’ Darius murmured.
‘Some people are fools,’ Amos said firmly. ‘I’d be sorry to think you were one of them. You’ve got yourself into a mess and you need me to get you out.’
‘Two firms I did business with went bankrupt, owing me money,’ Darius said grimly.
