walked back into the casino. The heat, the constant murmur, the smell of wine and cognac, the fumes of cigars and cigarettes, the heavy perfumes and scented air, oppressed her instantly. But she ignored it. Steadily, she threaded her way towards her father. The pile of chips at his side had diminished. So had the level of cognac in his glass. There was the stub of a cigar in the ashtray, and another was between his thick fingers as he pushed more chips onto a square.
Silently, she took her place behind him. He acknowledged her resumed presence only by a low, perfunctory admonition.
‘You took your time.’
‘I needed some fresh air,’ she said. Her voice was very calm, her manner composed. After all, what else was there for her to be? What else was there to do but what she had been brought here to do, to be a social foil for her father?
Who else was there for her to be except her father’s daughter? Eve Hawkwood.
She wasn’t anyone else. She wasn’t a woman who could weave dreams about a man she had seen for no more than a few minutes walking towards her, who’d made her body still, her heart race, her breath stop. She wasn’t a woman who could kiss that same stranger in the moonlight. It was a fantasy, nothing more, conjured by her own longing for escape.
For a second, piercing and anguished, she felt again what she had felt as she had lifted her mouth to his, felt again the cool slide of his hands to cup her face, long fingers grazing in her hair, felt again her eyes start to shut…
No. Rigidly she held them open again. Made them look, with her habitual composure, her inexpressive indifference, at the scene in front of her, at the spinning whirl of the roulette wheel, the chips conducting their remorseless dance around the table, from player to chequered cloth, to croupier to player. Hypnotic in its remorselessness.
Then, with an awareness of her father’s mood that her instinct for survival and self-preservation had honed since childhood, she saw his shoulders tense.
She looked up from the table.
Blackness drummed in on her. Her hand groped automatically for the back of her father’s chair. Vision blurred, then cleared.
The man she had just kissed was walking towards the roulette table.
For one blazing, incandescent moment, Eve’s heart leapt. Then, like a slow draining, she realised that he was not looking at her.
Not looking for her.
And even as she realised that, she realised too that somewhere, buried deep inside, there had been a hope—frail, pathetic, but there all the same—that the man who had turned her limbs to water with a single glance from his dark, compelling eyes would not let her run from him. Would not let that single, momentary kiss be enough. The slow draining of that frail pathetic hope was complete.
He had not even seen her. Had not even registered her presence.
She was invisible to him.
He had kissed her so short a time ago, but now he did not know her. Did not see her.
But even as she let go of the last remnant of her futile hope, leaving a dry, drained emptiness inside her, she realised why he was not looking at her.
And as she did, a dark, ominous foreboding began to gel inside her.
He was not walking towards the roulette table. He was walking towards her father.
And something about the way he was walking sent a chill down her spine.
Controlled. Purposeful.
Deadly.
The word formed in her mind, and she could not unform it. It hung there, making her stomach pool with cold.
She tensed in every muscle.
Hawkwood had paused in his play. Alexei saw his hand still a moment, before continuing to position the next batch of chips he was pointlessly sacrificing to his own arrogant bluff—the bluff that said he could afford to lose, and go on losing, the way he was tonight.
Alexei knew better. Giles Hawkwood could not afford to lose a penny more. His yacht, his properties, every possible asset, had all been securitised to raise cash to buy up his own company shares wherever he could find them. But he was too late. As of this morning, AC International had agreed to acquire—in a very friendly and mutually profitable merger—an Australian company that just happened to possess a sufficient number of Hawkwood shares to give Alexei the undisputed majority holding.
Giles Hawkwood was—finally—in the palm of his hand.
Powerless, and broke.
He just didn’t know it yet.
And Alexei didn’t have any intention of letting him know it yet.
He wanted to savour the knowledge that he would be meeting his prey for the first—and last—time, and his prey did not even know that he was beaten.
He reached the roulette table, and stopped.
Waiting. Waiting for Giles Hawkwood to make his move.
‘Constantin.’
Eve heard her father say the name, but his reason for saying it did not register. All that registered was that the man whom she had thought a fantasy, whom she had kissed in the moonlight, by the sea’s edge, from whom she had run because there was nothing else for her to do, was now standing a handful of metres away from her, on the other side of the roulette table. The people sitting there had automatically, it seemed, made way for him, and now he stood looking across and down at her father.
For a moment he said nothing, yet Eve felt her stomach pool with cold again.
Then, with a slow welling of disbelief, the name her father had addressed him by registered.
Constantin.
Alexei Constantin.
This was Alexei Constantin.
Shock knifed through her. And hollowing disbelief. She felt herself sway, and grip the chair-back as if it alone kept her upright.
Then her father leant back. Instinctively, automatically, she pulled her hand away.
She never touched her father. Never let him touch her.
He was looking across at Alexei Constantin, who was looking back down at him. His face was unreadable, expressionless. But there was something in it, in the controlled stance of his body, that was completely, absolutely different from the man who had walked towards her on the terrace such a short time ago.
This was a different man.
Her father took a deep inhalation from his cigar, then rested it against the ashtray. His eyes never left the other man’s.
‘So,’ he said, ‘an opportune encounter, wouldn’t you say?’
His voice was grating.
Even, to Eve’s ears, baiting.
Alexei
