with them.
Although their businesses lay in different fields, they’d been rivals for years. All four of them were strong, ultra-wealthy men with hard noses for business. There had been nothing friendly about their interactions. Tonight, he suspected they would have to find a way to breach their usual silent antagonism.
All four of them were feeling the pressure. They were in the eye of the storm and the sooner they found their way out of it, the better.
Two weeks later
Elizabeth Young stepped into her West Village apartment with a very real sense of relief. After a week away in Rome, she welcomed the return to the space she called home.
She loved her apartment, set in the heart of New York’s oldest district. While it wasn’t the largest piece of real estate around—she earned excellent money but not that excellent—she had never lived with such contentment anywhere else.
For perhaps the dozenth time since she’d landed at JFK, she checked her cell phone, telling herself it was concern for Piper that had her looking and not the looming possibility of her ex-husband getting in touch.
It was hearing Piper vocalise his name that had her so on edge. The beautiful Australian had been openly prying her with questions. Elizabeth didn’t blame her. In Piper’s shoes she would have been curious too. Three of the men implicated in the Celebrity Spy! scandal had called on her services so it was only natural the fourth would require her assistance too.
Dante did say Xander must call you too.
Were those Piper’s words? They had definitely been something along those lines and had forced Elizabeth to confront what she had spent almost a fortnight in denial about.
Benjamin, Zayn and Dante had all said they’d been recommended to her by Xander. He’d passed her details to them.
She had no idea how her ex-husband knew what she did for a living or how he’d got her details. Leviathan Solutions was run in utter secrecy on a strict word-of-mouth basis.
She assured herself that just because he’d recommended her to the other men it didn’t mean he required her services for himself. His situation was different from the others. Timos SE had been solely owned by the Trakas family for generations.
As a company, it owned countless beauty and clothing lines that were sold around the world. Their customer base couldn’t care less about the scandal. They had no shareholders to pacify or stock markets to tumble from. Xander didn’t need to marry to preserve a family image...
In those first few raw days after he’d dumped her, she’d lived in a cold uncomprehending fog. She would wake hoping it had all been a bad dream and stretch her fingers out, hoping to find him there.
On the fourth day she’d checked her cell phone for the hundredth time, praying for word from him. At that exact same moment her mother had walked into her room. Elizabeth had looked from the cell in her hand to the woman who’d raised her, and the rose-coloured glasses she’d worn all her life had slipped off.
Romance and everlasting love were myths. Her parents were prime examples of this truth and she’d been a naïve idiot to think she would be any different.
From that moment her life changed. Everything.
Over the subsequent years she’d refused to think of the man who’d broken her heart. As far as she’d been concerned, he didn’t exist, which worked for three years until she stumbled on a profile article about the newly appointed head of Timos SE, Xander Trakas. Xander had managed the seemingly impossible and broken into the American market.
Reading it, she’d learned exactly how wealthy he and the Trakas family were, and how powerful; on a par with the Onassis family. It was through this article she’d learned about Ana Soukis. His childhood sweetheart. Xander and Ana had been going to marry but Ana had tragically died in a car accident before they could exchange their vows.
Xander had been twenty when Ana died. The same age he’d been when he’d married her, the lying, cheating dirtbag.
Either he’d married Elizabeth when he was engaged to another woman or he’d married her when he should have been grieving the love of his life.
She’d burnt the article and thanked her lucky stars the lying, cheating scumbag had dumped her before it had been too late to get an annulment. She didn’t think she would have been able to handle a divorce.
As much as she’d hated herself for doing it, she’d kept an eye out for his name over the years. Xander had never remarried. And why should he? He had women falling off his arm; even more women than she had thought possible if one believed Celebrity Spy!
Of all the men in the eye of the scandal’s storm, Xander was the least affected. He had no need to find a wife.
She shouldn’t be thinking of him, she told herself crossly, slipping into her bathroom and putting the plug in the tub.
After a fourteen-hour flight she felt grubby and completely out of sorts.
If Piper hadn’t said what she had, Elizabeth wouldn’t even be thinking of him.
Determined to shove him from her mind, she thought of Piper instead and wished with all her heart she could warn her away from Dante. Elizabeth hadn’t matched them together. Their marriage was being born from a one-night stand that had resulted in a pregnancy. Elizabeth’s services had been required only to make the poor woman over and turn her into a shining, sparkly wife who would look good on Dante’s arm.
If she’d been asked to match Dante with anyone, Piper would have been the last woman on the list. She was much too sweet and naïve for the world she was being thrust into.
Just as she, Elizabeth, had once been too sweet and naïve.
She stripped naked and stepped into the steaming, frothy water, then lay back and closed her eyes.
Her cell rang.
Every atom in her body froze. Including her brain.
Then her heart kick-started, hammering against her ribs as if demanding attention.
Breathing deeply and keeping her eyes squeezed shut, Elizabeth did something she had never done before and ignored it.
Eventually it rang off to voicemail.
A short vibration a moment later told her the caller had left a message.
She opened her eyes and gazed up at the white ceiling she had painted herself, and willed her body into calm.
It didn’t have to be him. It could have been anyone. Her clients were the richest of the rich and not used to waiting for anyone. Most had no concept of personal space or personal time, not when it came to anyone but themselves. To them, she was employed to do a job and if they wanted to call her at ten p.m. on a Friday evening then she should damn well be available to take the call.
She would check the message when she got out and call whoever it was back. Her business was her baby and the one thing in her life she was proud of. She’d built it up from scratch and...
The cell rang out again.
This time her heart flew
