Mathew Bond didn’t do things without a reason.
Nor did he get involved.
Thirty years ago, aged six, Mathew had been a kid in a nice, standard nuclear family. He had a mum and a dad and a big sister, Elizabeth—Lizzy—who bossed him and played with him and made all right with his world. Sure, his father was a busy banker and his mum was corporate as well, but he and Lizzy felt secure and beloved.
That all changed one horrendous night when a truck driver went to sleep at the wheel. Mathew was somehow thrown out into the darkness. The others … Who knew? No one talked of it.
He’d woken in hospital, with his Great-Aunt Margot holding him.
‘ Mum? Dad? Lizzy?’
He remembered Margot’s tweed coat against his cheek and somehow even at six, he hadn’t needed her to tell him.
After that, his grandfather had simply taken him over. Mathew was, after all, the heir to Bond’s. From the warmth, laughter, the rough and tumble of family life, he’d been propelled into his grandfather’s austere existence, and he’d been stranded there for life.
He learned pretty fast to be self-contained. He had two weeks every summer with Margot, but even then he learned to stay detached. He needed to, because when the holidays ended he woke up once again in his great, barren bedroom in his grandfather’s mausoleum of a house. He’d learned some pain was unbearable, and he’d learned the way to avoid it was to hold himself in.
His aunt Margot cried at the end of each summer holiday but he didn’t. He didn’t do emotion.
And now … He’d come down here trying to figure how to keep himself contained while Margot died. Instead, Margot was dithering over whether to die or not, his self-containment was teetering and a girl/woman in pink sequins was messing with his self-containment even more.
So why had he kissed her?
Lunacy.
Margot was right, he conceded, in her criticism of the women he dated. Inevitably they were corporate colleagues who used him as an accessory, the same way he used them. Sometimes it was handy to have a woman on his arm, and sometimes he enjoyed a woman’s company, but not to the point of emotional entanglement.
And not with a woman who wore her heart on her pink spangled sleeve.
It was Margot causing this confusion, he decided. His distress for his great-aunt had clouded his otherwise cool judgement. Well, that distress could be put aside. For the time being Margot had decided to live.
Because of Allie?
Because she had renewed interest, he told himself. So … He simply had to find her more interests that weren’t related to the circus.
The circus meant Allie.
No. The circus was a group of assets on a balance sheet and those assets were about to be dispersed. Allie was right. Carvers, a huge national circus group with Ron Carver at its head, was circling. The bank had put out feelers already and Carvers could well buy the circus outright.
Keeping Allie on?
This was not his business. Allie was nothing to do with him, he told himself savagely. The way she’d felt in his arms, the way she’d melted into him, had been an aberration, a moment of weakness on both their parts.
He didn’t want any woman complicating his life.
He didn’t want … Allie?
He jogged on. Soon he needed to head back to Margot’s, get himself together and go to the circus.
Actually he was already at the circus. He’d been jogging and thinking and suddenly the circus was just over the grassy verge separating fairground from sea.
And he could see Allie.
Allie was standing by the circus gates, talking vehemently to a policeman.
The policeman had a gun.
Yeah, okay, policemen with guns didn’t normally spell trouble, though they usually kept them well holstered. Maybe this was a cop organising tickets for his kids to see a show. Or not.
The gun, the body language and the look on Allie’s face had Matt’s strides lengthening without him being conscious of it, and by the time he reached them he figured this was trouble.
The cop looked young, almost too young to be operating alone, but then, Fort Neptune wasn’t known for trouble. The towns further along the coast would be teeming with holidaymakers. The bigger towns had nightclubs. The police force would be stretched to the limit, so maybe it made sense to leave one junior cop on duty in this backwater.
What was wrong? He was surveying the circus as he jogged towards them.
The big top looked okay but something was different. He took a second to figure what it was, then realised a section of the cyclone fencing forming the camels’ enclosure was flattened. The truck’s doors were wide open but the truck was empty.
No camels.
He reached them and Allie gripped his arm as if she feared drowning.
‘The camels …’ she gasped. ‘Matt, you need to stop him.’ She sounded as if she’d been running. Instinctively his arm went round her and held, drawing her into him.
‘Stop what? What’s happened to the camels?’ he asked, holding her tight.
‘They’re at large,’ the cop snapped. ‘Wild animals. You’re holding me up, miss. I need to be out looking.’
‘The crew’s out looking,’ she said, distressed. ‘And they’re not wild.’
‘The report I received said three wild animals.’
‘Tell me what’s happening,’ Matt said in the tone he used when meetings were threatening to get out of control. ‘Now.’
There was a moment’s silence. The cop looked as if he was barely contained. He was little more than a kid, Matt thought, and a dangerous one at that. Any minute now he’d be off, sirens blazing, on a camel hunt. Wanted, dead or alive …
‘Someone broke into the enclosure,’ Allie managed. ‘They used bolt cutters to drop the cyclone fencing. But I don’t understand why they’ve run, why they didn’t just back into the truck. They’re tame,’ she said again to the cop. ‘They’re pussy cats. Who told you they’re wild?’
‘No matter,’ the cop said brusquely. ‘I’ll find them.’ He moved towards his car, but suddenly Matt was squarely between cop and car.
‘I’m not sure what’s going on,’ Matt said mildly, but he motioned to the gun. ‘But if you plan to shoot anything—anything—without a life or death reason—then I’ll have your superiors down on you like a ton of bricks.’ He’d started soft but his words grew firmer and slower with each syllable. This was Mathew Bond, Chairman of Bond’s Bank, oozing authority at each word. ‘That’s a promise. Allie, is everyone out looking?’
‘Yes.
