CHAPTER ONE
CARLY glanced discreetly at the small mixed party she was minding in her role as partner in one of the country’s most prestigious and exclusive event-organising businesses, and wondered how long it would be before she could leave. The event was a fortieth birthday party for a banker and he’d chosen to have it at the London Nightclub CoralPink. It would not have been the venue she would have chosen but in a business where ultimately the customer was always right that was not her decision to make.
Already, though, she could see that their client’s wife was beginning to look less than pleased at the amount of attention her husband was giving the upmarket eye candy on view. There were already half a dozen empty bottles of Cristal champagne on their table, and another of the men was chatting up a girl who had been walking past, inviting her to join them. Male libidos and wifely tempers were both beginning to rise ominously in the club’s hormone-drenched heat, Carly realised dispiritedly.
She had balked at this assignment all along, knowing it wasn’t her cup of tea. She preferred the kind of event she had supervised over the weekend—a jolly surprise eightieth birthday party held for a sharp-witted grandmother by her large family. It had taken some delicate finessing of finances on Carly’s part to ensure that everything they had wanted was achievable within their modest budget, and she had been justifiably proud of the end result.
Mike Lucas’s wife was going to explode in a minute if he didn’t stop flirting with the young girl he had grabbed. Carly swiftly got up and made her way towards him, intent on defusing the situation before it got out of hand.
Ricardo didn’t know why the hell he had allowed himself to be persuaded to come here. His appetite for the proposed business deal that had brought him here had already soured. The whole set-up was everything he loathed, and could best be summed up as rich, immoral men being pursued by greedy, amoral women, he decided cynically.
His attention was caught by the occupants of a table several feet away. A group of forty-something men, paunchy and sweating from a combination of the club’s heat and the effect of the skimpily dressed young women thronging the room. Their wives and partners might be younger than they, but they were nowhere near as young as the girls the men were watching—apart from one. She was younger than the rest but still a woman and not a girl, and as Ricardo watched her she got up from her seat and walked round to the other side the table, where one of the men had started to paw a giggling leggy brunette for whom he had just ordered a bottle of champagne.
‘Mike.’ Carly smiled as she leaned towards him, strategically placing herself between him and the unknown girl.
‘Hello, sexy. Want some champagne?’
Mike Lucas made a grab for her, pulling her down onto his knee and putting his hand on her breast.
Immediately Carly froze, warning anger zig-zagging through the glance she gave him, but Mike was too drunk to notice. Still grinning, he pulled the other girl towards him as well. Unlike Carly, she made it plain that she was enjoying the attention.
‘Look what I’ve got,’ Mike called out to his friends, one hand on Carly’s breast and the other on the other girl’s. He jiggled them inexpertly and boasted drunkenly, ‘Hey, what about this for a threesome, guys?’
Ricardo’s hooded gaze monitored the small unsavoury scene. The sight of women selling their bodies was nothing new to him. He had grown up in the slums of Naples, and these women—these spoiled, pampered, lazy society women, with their designer clothes and their Cartier jewellery—were, as far as he was concerned, far more to be despised than the prostitutes of the Naples alleys.
He pushed back his chair and stood up, throwing a pile of banknotes down onto the table. The man who had invited him to the club was talking to someone at the bar, but Ricardo did not bother to go over and take any formal leave of him before quitting the club.
As a billionaire he had no need to observe the niceties that governed the behaviour of other, less wealthy men.
Ricardo studied the newspapers the most senior of his quartet of male PAs had left on his desk for him. He read them as he drank the second of his ritual two cups of thick, strong black coffee. Some tastes could be acquired, but others could never totally be destroyed or denied. He frowned, a look that was a formidable blend of anger and pride forking like lightning in the almost basalt darkness of his eyes.
He was not a prettily handsome man, but he was a man who commanded and indeed demanded the visual attention of others—especially women, who were aware immediately of the aura of raw, challenging male sexuality he exuded.
He reached for the first newspaper, flicking dismissively and contemptuously through its pages until he found what he wanted. A smile, in reality no more than cynically bared white teeth against the warmth of the skin tone that proclaimed his Italian heritage, curled his mouth without reaching his eyes as he glanced swiftly down the newspaper’s much trumpeted, newly revised ‘Rich List’.
He didn’t have to look very far to find his own name. Indeed he could count on the fingers of one hand the names that came above his.
Ricardo Salvatore, billionaire. Estimated fortune…Ricardo gave a short, grim laugh as he looked at a figure that fell well sho
rt of his actual wealth.
Beneath his name there were also a couple of lines describing him truthfully as single and thirty-two years old, and untruthfully as having founded his fortune on an inheritance from his uncle. A further line offered the information that, in recognition of his charitable donations to a variety of good causes, it was rumoured that Ricardo Salvatore was to be given a knighthood.
Now Ricardo did smile.
A knighthood! Not a bad achievement for someone who had been orphaned by the deaths of his young Italian mother and British father in a rail accident, and who, because of that, had ended up growing up virtually alone in the worst of Naples’ slums. It had been a tough and sometimes brutal way to grow up, but occasionally Ricardo felt that he had more respect and admiration for the companions of his youth than he did for the people he now mixed with.
Family ties and close friendships were not things that had ever formed a part of the fabric of his life, but he did not feel their absence. In fact, he actively liked his solitariness, and his corresponding freedom from other people’s demands. He had learned young how to survive—by listening and observing—and how to make his own rules for the way he lived his life. He drew his strength from what existed within him rather than what other people thought of him. He had been just eighteen, fiercely competitive and ambitious, when he had gambled for and won the money that had enabled him to buy his first container ship.
He dropped the newspaper onto his desk, picked up the file adjacent to it marked ‘Potential Acquisitions’ and started to speed-read through its contents. Ricardo was always on the look out for promising new acquisitions to add to his portfolio, and Prêt a Party would fit into it very neatly.
The first time he had heard of the organisation had been when a business acquaintance had mentioned it in passing, commenting that he was a family friend of its young owner. In fact, knowing Marcus Canning as he did, he was rather surprised that a man as financially astute as Marcus hadn’t seen the potential of the business for himself.
He gave a small shrug. Marcus’s reasons for not acting on the potential of Prêt a Party were of relatively little interest to him. By nature Ricardo was a hunter, and, like all hunters, he enjoyed the adrenalin-boosting thrill of the chase almost as much as he enjoyed the ultimate and inevitable kill at the end of it.
Prêt a Party might only represent a small ‘kill,’ but Ricardo’s preparations for the chase would still be carefully planned.
The normal avenue of obtaining detailed industry reports was not one he favoured; for one thing it tended to alert every other hunter to his interest, and for another he preferred his own methods and his own instincts.
The first thing he wanted to do was find out a good deal more about how the business worked—how efficient it was, how profitable it was, and how vulnerable to a takeover that would be profitable to him. The best person to tell him that was, of course, the owner, Lucy Blayne, but she was hardly likely to equip a potential and predatory buyer with such information. Which was why he had decided to pose as a potential client. The kind of fussy client who wanted to know every single in and out of how things worked and how his commission would be handled before he gave it. The kind of client who insisted on seeing Prêt a Party’s organisa-tional capabilities at first hand.
Of course in order to have these ‘eccentricities’ catered for, he in turn would have to dangle a very large and very juicy carrot in front of Lucy Blayne.
And that was exactly what he was going to do.
‘Carly! Thank God you’re back! It’s absolute chaos here!’
Walking into Prêt a Party’s smart but chaotic office in Sloane Street, one of the most upmarket areas of London, Carly acknowledged ruefully that things must indeed be chaotic for her once schoolfriend and now employer—kind-hearted and sweet-natured Lucy Blayne—to be in too much of a rush to ask Carly how things had gone last night.
One pretty but terrified-looking young girl who was new was rushing around trying to cope with the nonstop ringing of the telephone, whilst a couple more, who weren’t new, were earnestly reassuring clients that, yes, everything was in hand for their big event.
‘We’re just sooo amazingly busy—that launch party we did for you-know-who, the It Girl of the moment’s new jewellery range, got a mensh in Vogue. Nick’s bringing us in so much new business,’ Lucy enthused.
Carly said nothing. She had done her best not to let Lucy see how much she disliked Nick, and of course there was no way she could tell her friend why. Lucy was deeply in love with her new husband, and Carly knew how much it would hurt her to learn that Nick had actually come on to Carly herself within days of Lucy introducing him into the business.
‘Oh!’ The pretty young girl looked shocked and almost dropped the telephone receiver.
‘It’s the Duke of Ryle,’ she told Lucy theatrically, in a cut-glass upper-class English voice. ‘And he wants to speak to you.’
Lucy rolled her eyes. ‘Don’t disappear, there’s something important I need to discuss with you,’ she told Carly quickly, before saying cheerfully, ‘Uncle Charles—how lovely. How is Aunt Jane?’
Smiling reassuringly at the flustered and flushed-faced young girl, Carly edged her way past the overflowing desks in the outer office and into her small private office, exhaling in relief as she stepped into her own circle of peace.
A note on her desk caught her eye and she grinned as she read it.
BEWARE—Lucy is in major panic mode—Jules
The three of them—Lucy, Julia and Carly—herself, had been at school together, and Carly knew that Jules,
like her, had been extremely dubious at first when Lucy had told them she intended to set up an event organisation company.
But Lucy could be very persuasive when she wanted to be, and since—as Jules had pointed out—neither of them had any other job to go to, and Lucy, thanks to her large trust fund, could afford to both set up the business and pay them a respectable salary, they simply could not refuse.
Now, three years later and much to her own astonishment, Carly had been forced to admit that Lucy’s business was beginning to look as though it had the potential to become a really big success. Just so long as she continued to insist that they kept a firm grip both on reality and their costings.
‘Come back!’
‘Jules!’
‘So, how did last night go?’
Carly grimaced expressively. ‘Well, let’s just say that the tabloid journalist who snapped Mike Lucas with one hand down the front of the Honourable Seraphina Ordley’s Matthew Williamson frock and the other gripping my far less worthy, five-year-old second-hand Armani silk-clad breast will by now have realised his mistake. “Thou shalt not photograph the niece of one’s rag’s major shareholder in a pose more suited to a failed contestant from Big Brother”.’
‘Ordley?’ Jules mused. ‘So she’s a Harlowe, then.’ As she was an earl’s granddaughter, Julia knew Burke’s Peerage inside out. ‘It has been said that the Harlowes’ motto should be “As in name, so in action”. It’s a Charles II title,’ Jules explained. ‘He handed them out like sweets to his cast-off mistresses. You aren’t smiling,’ she accused Carly.
‘Neither would you be if you had been there last night.’
‘Oh. As bad as that, was it?’
When Carly made no verbal response, but instead simply looked at her, Jules grinned. ‘Okay, okay, I apologise. I should have been the one to go with them, I know, and I backed out and left you to do it for me…Did he really grab your boob, Carly? What did you do?’
‘I reminded myself that the evening was making us a profit of £6,000.’
‘Ah.’
‘And then I dropped a full bottle of Cristal on his balls.’
‘Oh!’
‘It wasn’t funny, Jules,’ she protested, when her friend started to laugh. ‘I love Lucy to bits and most of the time I’m grateful to her for including me in her plans—like when she decided to set up this business. But when it comes
to events like last night’s…’
‘It was one of Nick’s, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ Carly agreed tersely.
‘And the weekend—did you manage to get time to see…them?’
Carly frowned. The three of them were so close that there were no secrets between them, but even so the habit of loyalty was ingrained deeply within her.
Jules—or the Honourable Julia Fellowes, to give her her correct title—touched her gently on the arm, and Carly shook away her own reticence.
‘It was dreadful,’ she told her simply. ‘Even now I don’t think they’ve really taken it in. I felt so so sorry for them. They’ve lost so much—the estate and everything that went with it—and the prestige living there gave them was very important to them. And now this.’
‘Well, at least thanks to you they’ve got a roof over their heads.’
‘The Dower House.’ Carly pulled a face. ‘They hate living there.’
‘What? When I think of how you’ve beggared yourself to get a mortgage and buy it from the estate for them—oh, honestly, Carly.’
‘I might not be able to afford a designer lifestyle, but I’ve hardly beggared myself. Thanks to you I’m living rent-free in one of the poshest parts of London. I’ve got a job I love, all the travel I could possibly want…’
She had balked initially at Jules’s generous offer that the three of them should share her flat—the three of them being Jules, Carly, and Jules’s notorious ‘I’m having a bad day and I need to shop’ habit. Other people ate chocolate, or rowed with their mother; Jules bought shoes.