CHAPTER ONE

      JAVIER VASQUEZ LOOKED around his office with unconcealed satisfaction.

      Back in London after seven years spent in New York and didn’t fate move in mysterious ways...?

      From his enviable vantage point behind the floor-to-ceiling panes of reinforced rock-solid glass, he gazed down to the busy city streets in miniature. Little taxis and little cars ferrying toy-sized people to whatever important or irrelevant destinations were calling them.

      And for him...?

      A slow, curling smile, utterly devoid of humour, curved his beautiful mouth.

      For him, the past had come calling and that, he knew, accounted for the soaring sense of satisfaction now filling him because, as far as offices went, this one, spectacular though it was, was no more or less spectacular than the offices he had left behind in Manhattan. There, too, he had looked down on busy streets, barely noticing the tide of people that daily flowed through those streets like a pulsing, breathing river.

      Increasingly, he had become cocooned in an ivory tower, the undisputed master of all he surveyed. He was thirty-three years old. You didn’t get to rule the concrete jungle by taking your eye off the ball. No; you kept focused, you eliminated obstacles and in that steady, onward and upward march, time passed by until now...

      He glanced at his watch.

      Twelve storeys down, in the vast, plush reception area, Oliver Griffin-Watt would already have been waiting for half an hour.

      Did Javier feel a twinge of guilt about that?

      Not a bit of it.

      He wanted to savour this moment because he felt as though it had been a long time coming.

      And yet, had he thought about events that had happened all those years ago? He’d left England for America and his life had become consumed in the business of making money, of putting to good use the education his parents had scrimped and saved to put him through, and in the process burying a fleeting past with a woman he needed to consign to the history books.

      The only child of devoted parents who had lived in a poor barrio in the outskirts of Madrid, Javier had spent his childhood with the driving motto drummed into him that to get out, he had to succeed and to succeed, he had to have an education. And he’d had to get out.

      His parents had worked hard, his father as a taxi driver, his mother as a cleaner, and the glass ceiling had always been low for them. They’d managed, but only just. No fancy holidays, no flat-screen tellies for the house, no chichi restaurants with fawning waiters. They’d made do with cheap and cheerful and every single penny had been put into savings for the time when they would send their precociously bright son to university in England. They had known all too well the temptations waiting for anyone stupid enough to go off the rails. They had friends whose sons had taken up with gangs, who had died from drug overdoses, who had lost the plot and ended up as dropouts kicked around on street corners.

      That was not going to be the fate of their son.

      If, as a teenager, Javier had ever resented the tight controls placed on him, he had said nothing.

      He had been able to see for himself, from a very young age, just what financial hardship entailed and how limiting it could be. He had seen how some of his wilder friends, who had made a career out of playing truant, had ended up in the gutter. By the time he had hit eighteen, he had made his plans and nothing was going to derail them: a year or two out, working to add to the money his parents had saved, then university, where he would succeed because he was bright—brighter than anyone he knew. Then a high-paying job. No starting at the ground level and making his way up slowly, but a job with a knockout financial package. Why not? He knew his assets and he had had no intention of selling himself short.

      He wasn’t just clever.

      Lots of people were clever. He was also sharp. Sharp in a streetwise sort of way. He possessed the astuteness of someone who knew how to make deals and how to spot where they could be made. He knew how to play rough and how to intimidate. Those were skills that were ingrained rather than learnt and, whilst they had no place in a civilised world, the world of big business wasn’t always civilised; it was handy having those priceless skills tucked up his sleeve.

      He’d been destined to make it big and, from the age of ten, he had had no doubt that he would get there.

      He’d worked hard, had honed his ferocious intelligence to the point where no one could outsmart him and had sailed through university, resisting the temptation to leave without his Master’s. A Master’s in engineering opened a lot more doors than an ordinary degree and he wanted to have the full range of open doors to choose from.

      And that was when he had met Sophie Griffin-Watt. The only unexpected flaw in his carefully conceived life plan.

      She had been an undergraduate, in her first excitable year, and he had been on the last leg of his Master’s, already considering his options, wondering which one to take, which one would work best for him when he left university in a little under four months’ time.

      He hadn’t meant to go out at all but his two housemates, usually as focused as he was, had wanted to celebrate a birthday and he’d agreed to hit the local pub with them.

      He’d seen her the second he’d walked in. Young, impossibly pretty, laughing, head flung back with a drink in one hand. She’d been wearing a pair of faded jeans, a tiny cropped vest and a denim jacket that was as faded as the jeans.

      And he’d stared.

      He never stared. From the age of thirteen, he’d never had to chase any girl. His looks were something he’d always taken for granted. Girls stared. They chased. They flung themselves in his path and waited for him to notice them.

      The guys he’d shared his flat with had ribbed him about the ease with which he could snap his fingers and have any girl he wanted but, in actual fact, getting girls was not Javier’s driving ambition. They had their part to play. He was a red-blooded male with an extremely healthy libido—and, as such, he was more than happy to take what was always on offer—but his focus, the thing that drove him, had always been his remorseless ambition.

      Girls had always been secondary conquests.

      Everything seemed to change on the night he had walked into that bar.

      Yes, he’d stared, and he’d kept on staring, and she hadn’t glanced once at him, even though the gaggle of girls she was with had been giggling pointing at him and whispering.

      For the first time in his life, he had become the pursuer. He had made the first move.

      She was much younger than the women he usually dated. He was a man on the move, a man looking ahead to bigger things—he’d had no use for young, vulnerable girls with romantic dreams and fantasies about settling down. He’d gone out with a couple of girls in his years at university but, generally speaking, he had dated and slept with slightly older women—women who weren’t going to become clingy and start asking for the sort of commitment he wasn’t about to give them. Women