CONTENTS

      CHAPTER ONE

      CHAPTER TWO

      CHAPTER THREE

      CHAPTER FOUR

      CHAPTER FIVE

      CHAPTER SIX

      CHAPTER SEVEN

      CHAPTER EIGHT

      CHAPTER NINE

      CHAPTER TEN

      CHAPTER ELEVEN

      CHAPTER TWELVE

      CHAPTER THIRTEEN

      CHAPTER ONE

      ‘YOU did…what?’

      Kayla’s features paled as consternation meshed with disbelief, then magnified into a sense of dread.

      ‘You think it was easy for me to go to Duardo Alvarez and beg?’ Defensive anger rose to the surface, and something else…rage.

      Jacob’s words fell with hammer-like pain, and for a few brief seconds she hovered between retaliatory anger and despair.

      Duardo Alvarez.

      The mention of his name was enough to send ice slithering down the length of her spine.

      Bad boy made good, now billionaire entrepreneur with homes in several major cities around the world.

      Her ex-husband…and the last person on earth likely to help her, or her brother.

      ‘Why in hell would you do that?’

      ‘I had no choice!’ Jacob’s expression revealed a torment that twisted her stomach muscles into a painful ball.

      Oh, dear God.

      The last time she’d seen her ex-husband had been at her father’s funeral. A deeply sorrowful occasion with few genuine mourners, several curiosity-seekers…and she’d been too stunned with shocked grief to do anything other than act on autopilot.

      She hadn’t had contact with Duardo since. Didn’t want any.

      ‘Dammit, Jacob! How could you?’

      He didn’t answer. But then he had no need.

      And right now there was no time for further argument or castigation. In nine minutes she had to catch a train into the city. Or be late.

      Kayla caught up her jacket, slung the strap of her bag over one shoulder and turned towards him. ‘We’ll continue this discussion later.’

      Jacob offered a slip of paper. ‘Duardo’s number. Call him by midday.’

      Hell would freeze over first.

      ‘Please.’ Jacob’s eyes were dark, desperate, and she pocketed the number.

      ‘You ask too much.’ Way too much. More than she could give.

      Without a further word she left the small two-bedroom walk-up for the hard inner-city pavement in one of the city’s less salubrious suburbs. Old terraced houses lined the street, each in various stages of decay and neglect.

      A far cry from her former life.

      Five years ago the Enright-Smythe family had numbered high among Sydney’s rich and famous. Kayla, at twenty-two, held a degree in business management and had took out a handsome salary for a token position in the ‘firm’.

      A member of the ‘young social-set’, she attended every party in town, spent an outrageous sum on clothes, travelled, and was seen on the arm of a different man every week.

      Until Duardo Alvarez entered the field.

      In his mid-thirties and cloaked in sophistication, on the rise within the city’s financial sector, his youthful past hinted at association with the shady underbelly of NewYork.

      He was everything Kayla’s parents didn’t want for their only daughter.

      All the more reason, in her year of tilting at windmills, coupled with boredom, for deliberately setting Duardo in her sights.

      He excited her. So, too, did a sense of the forbidden. Winning him over became a game. Holding him off took enormous self-restraint. She succeeded, and in a moment of sheer madness she accepted his proposal to fly to Hawaii and marry him.

      Seventy-two hours later the marriage was over.

      Courtesy of Benjamin Enright-Smythe’s ultimatum and her mother’s death…a heart attack which put Blanche Enright-Smythe into Intensive Care and took her life.

      A tragic loss for which Benjamin attributed the blame to his daughter, referring privately and publicly to the marriage as Kayla’s folly.

      Her father’s denunciation speared a stake through Kayla’s heart and left her racked with guilt at the thought that her whirlwind marriage might have contributed to Blanche’s death. Confidante and friend, Blanche had always been there for her, frequently acting as a calming buffer between two clashing personalities…Benjamin’s arrogance and Kayla’s defiance.

      In the devastating numbness that followed Blanche’s funeral, she stood at her father’s side, comforted Jacob and somehow managed to get through each day. Wanting, needing the comfort of the one man who could help ease her grief…her husband.

      Medical results indicated Blanche had been dealing with heart disease for some time, evidence Benjamin refused to accept in his demented quest to wreak revenge on the man he blamed for Blanche’s death.

      It proved a heart-wrenching time, with divided loyalties whittling away at Kayla’s emotional heart. She was painfully aware of Benjamin’s fragile mental state and Jacob’s need for comfort and stability.

      How could she give her personal life priority at such a time?

      Yet how long could she expect Duardo to be patient? Benjamin’s ultimatum—Leave this house, and you’ll never be welcome inside it again—almost tore her in two.

      Family. Something her mother had considered to be sacrosanct.

      Except Benjamin was hell-bent on denigration, dredging up written proof that acquisition of the Enright-Smythe empire was part of Duardo’s agenda. And that Kayla had merely been a pawn in his game plan.

      That day something within her withered and died.

      She refused Duardo’s calls, acceded to her father’s demands that Duardo be forbidden entry to the family home.

      Then Duardo issued an ultimatum of his own.

      Choose. Your husband or your family.

      She didn’t utter so much as a word beneath Benjamin’s torrent of anger. Instead, she slid off her wedding band and handed it to the man whose name she’d taken as her own. And watched him turn and walk away.

      Then she witnessed, in the ensuing months, Duardo Alvarez’s acquisition of the Enright-Smythe business empire, with Duardo now firmly labeled a predator with one goal in mind.

      Absent was the desire to party, and Kayla’s friends gradually gave up issuing invitations as she refused each and every one of them. The association with frivolity and flirtatious fun seemed firmly embedded in pain. The kind of pain she never wanted to suffer again in her lifetime.

      The only social occasions she attended were those instigated by her father: dull, boring business dinners where she was forced to watch Benjamin’s decline among his peers.

      Within a year, the firm of Enright-Smythe held a list of unfulfilled contracts, union problems, and was the subject of a takeover bid by none other than Duardo Alvarez.

      By then everything