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ROMY SOMMER
A division of HarperCollinsPublishers
www.harpercollins.co.uk
HarperImpulse an imprint of
HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
77–85 Fulham Palace Road
Hammersmith, London W6 8JB
www.harpercollins.co.uk
First published in Great Britain by HarperImpulse 2014
Copyright © Romy Sommer 2014
Cover images © Shutterstock.com
Romy Sommer asserts the moral right
to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is
available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction.
The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are
the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to
actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is
entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International
and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
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and read the text of this e-book on screen.
No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted,
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stored in or introduced into any information storage and
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whether electronic or mechanical, now known or
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written permission of HarperCollins.
Ebook Edition © September 2014
ISBN: 9780007594634
Version 2014-09-25
Digital eFirst: Automatically produced by Atomik ePublisher from Easypress.
To Barbara and Sarah, Terry and Sue, for friendships that have spanned decades, continents and countless film productions.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Epilogue – Tortuga
Also by Romy Sommer …
Romy Sommer
About HarperImpulse
About the Publisher
Chapter 1
One woman tearing your clothes off was fun. Five at once? Not so much.
“Please, ladies…” Christian was only half laughing now.
Rip. There went an Armani sleeve. He shrugged away from the grasp, but there were still other hands pulling at him, tugging at him.
He’d known adoring fans before, but they seldom pawed him. And this had gone way beyond pawing.
“I’ll sign autographs, but you really don’t need to take souvenirs.” He had to raise his voice over their squeals. This was definitely not fun. In fact, it was getting downright scary. The crowd surrounding him pressed in tighter. There seemed to be more of them now too.
Another rip. This time his shirt. The excited squeals increased in volume.
“He’s mine!” shouted one over-eager fan.
“Mine!” the others echoed.
“Well, actually, ladies…” He belonged to no one. But in the grip of mob mentality, they neither heard nor cared.
He had to get out of here.
With another rip, this time the rear seam of his evening jacket, he pulled away from the knot of admirers. One young woman tumbled to her knees with the impetus. Fighting every instinct to be a gentleman, he didn’t pause. He ran.
The sound of their pursuit spurred him on. He ran blindly. Now he knew how it felt to be the fox in a fox hunt.
A block or two further and the number of feet behind him seemed to diminish, but he still didn’t look back. He only hoped no one had been trampled in the ruckus. Though if one or two of the fanatics broke a heel in the process, justice would be served.
He reached an intersection and looked both ways. This foreign city had turned into a maze and he had absolutely no idea where he was. Back where he’d been accosted, the streets teemed with life. He paused. He stood now in a deserted residential street, a terrace of imposing townhouses lined with trees stark against the night sky.
And no way out.
Cul-de-sac either side and a dead-end straight ahead.
Damn.
He looked back over his shoulder. There were only three women left in the race, but they were gaining.
A car pulled out of a driveway within the cul-de-sac to his left, picking up speed as it approached his street corner. An open-topped sports car with only one occupant. Blonde was all he had time to register. Drawing on a lifetime’s worth of instinct, he took a running leap and landed face-first in the rear seat, just as the roof began to unfold and close over them.
The driver screamed, more ear-splitting even than the fans who, thwarted of their quarry, howled as the car sped past.
Christian sprawled on the back seat until the adrenalin rush waned enough that he became aware of aches and pains. He was winded too. He struggled upright.
The convertible roof clicked into place, sealing them in. Mercifully, the scream stopped as the driver drew in a fresh breath. He braced himself against another, but it didn’t come.
While the white knuckles grasping the steering wheel still revealed her terror, the driver seemed to have composed herself remarkably well. Her chin lifted and her shoulders straightened.
“What are you going to do with me?” she asked in local dialect, her voice icy, betrayed by the barest tremor. She turned her head to look at him in the rear-view mirror and he glimpsed an intriguing profile, beautifully arched eyebrows, long eyelashes, full lips, and a pert nose.
“Keep driving,” he urged, glancing out the back window at the group of young women receding into the distance. He looked down at his clothing. Great. The jacket sleeve fluttered loose and his shirt had been torn and gaped open across his chest, enough to reveal dark skin through the crisp white broadcloth.
The shirt had been hand-crafted in Milan.
He swore again.
The only thing he could rectify was the skew bow-tie. He removed it and stuck it in his pocket, then climbed into the passenger seat beside her. She gasped, as if about to scream again.
“It’s okay,” he said. “I’m not a…” he struggled for the word in her language “… hijacker.”
She glanced at him, long enough this time to be able to recognise him. Her eyes, Arctic blue, rounded with awareness, recognising him, struggling to place how she knew him. It would only be a matter of time. He relaxed.
But she didn’t. The white knuckles tightened their grip on the wheel and her gaze whipped back to the road. “I know your face… you were on television…” She choked. “Oh my God! You’re…” A single tear slid down her cheek.
He was used to women screaming, fainting, or losing the ability to speak when they recognised him, but that panicked tear was the most perplexing. Was she one of those crazies who believed actors really were the characters they played? Not that he’d played many villains. He was usually typecast as the charming rogue. The role fit him like a glove.
But she didn’t look crazy. She looked… terrified.
What was with this place? Fans who mauled him, women afraid of him…
His mother had told him a great deal about Westerwald. Sometimes, instead of bedtime stories, she’d reminisced about the place and its people. Bitter-sweet as her departure had been, she’d loved her time here and the people she’d met.
Right now he couldn’t figure out why. These Westerwaldians were mad.
The street grew busier around the car, a restaurant and a late-night corner-shop now amidst the residential buildings. He was worse than lost. He had no idea where the hell he was and had lost all sense of direction. Why had he said he’d walk to the damn party?
Because he’d wanted to see the city where he’d been conceived. Without an entourage.
Now he’d seen more than enough. Maybe he’d even agree to that local PA the producers kept trying to foist on him.
The woman was still driving way too fast.
“Slow down,” he instructed.
She nodded, a stiff movement, her gaze riveted ahead.
“What do you want from me?” She sounded calmer, but the ice was still there.
He opened his mouth to answer that he wanted nothing now he was safe, then the thought occurred that a lift to the party would be nice. He smiled with all the charm he could muster in his current sorry state.
The smile didn’t last long.
He slammed into the dashboard as the driver jammed on the brakes.
“Help!” she called. Without even cutting the engine, she leapt from the car. It stalled.
A man on the sidewalk turned at her voice. A uniformed police officer.
“I’m being abducted! This man jumped into my car… ”
The policeman stepped up to the car, leaning in to look at Christian. “You’re Christian Taylor!” He took in Christian’s dishevelled attire and frowned. “You weren’t really trying to abduct this young woman, were you?”
He sounded sceptical. At last – a rational-sounding local. And one who spoke English. Christian breathed a sigh of relief and winced, winded again.
“Of course not.” His voice sounded amazingly stable considering he felt as if he’d been punched in the gut. Twice. “I was attacked by a group of fans and this young lady unwittingly provided the getaway car.”
Saying it out loud made it seem even more bizarre than it was, but the policeman nodded, as if rabid fan attacks were an everyday occurrence in Westerwald.
Perhaps they were.
The policeman opened the passenger door and Christian stepped out gingerly, holding his bruised ribs.
“Oh, you’re hurt!” The young woman hadn’t gone far, though her stance screamed fight or flight.
The policeman’s eyes widened as he took in Christian’s state. “Do you need a hospital?”
Christian shook his head. “I’m fine.” Battered, shaken, but fine. He turned to his rescuer with another of his trademark smiles. “I’m sorry I frightened you.”
He hadn’t noticed before, but she was a real stunner. Classically beautiful, with high cheekbones and blonde hair, almost white beneath the street lights, swept back into one of those elegant twist things. She was dressed in a short, dark swing coat, buttoned up to conceal whatever lay beneath.
Like a model, she was thinner and less curvy than he preferred, but her stockinged legs, revealed now she was out the car, were the clincher. Perfectly shaped legs that went on forever. Legs he could see bare and wrapped around him in his very near future.
He grinned. Maybe he was going to like Westerwald after all.
Her classy attire was in stark contrast with his own, however. He glanced down at his torn suit. There was no way he could arrive at the party like this. It was a charity banquet and there was sure to be a press presence, and he really wasn’t in the mood for lengthy explanations.
Not when there was a much more pleasant diversion available than speeches and shaking hands.
“A lift back to my hotel for a change of clothes would be much appreciated.” And once he got her back to his hotel room…
“I’ll take you,” the woman offered, in lightly accented English. Where she’d looked pale moments before, now she looked flushed. “It’s the least I could do for not giving you a chance to explain.”
The policeman beamed. “All’s well that ends well, then.” His eyes twinkled as he turned to the young woman and addressed her in dialect. “This is your lucky day. Do you have any idea how many women would like to be in your shoes right now?”
Christian flinched. He’d just found out the hard way how popular he was in this little country.
His getaway driver didn’t look as if she felt particularly lucky either, but she nodded and climbed back into the car. Christian followed suit, this time buckling himself in. His ribs couldn’t take any more abuse.
She took a shaky breath, as if pulling herself together, and re-started the engine.
“I’m Christian Taylor,” he said as she put the car in gear and pulled off.
“I gathered.” That touch of ice was still there. So knowing who he was hadn’t melted any of her stiff attitude. “I assume I should know who you are?”
“I’m an actor. And you are?” He smiled, warming up for a charm assault, but she didn’t even glance his way. If anything, she seemed to freeze up even more.
“Teresa.”
Sheesh. Glaciers were warmer.
“Thank you for coming to my rescue, Teresa.”
“Were you really attacked by fans, or were you just pulling some stunt?”
“You didn’t see them – the girls on the sidewalk?”
Her brow furrowed and she pursed her lips, troubled. “Which hotel are you staying at?”
“The Grand. It’s on… ”
“I know where it is.”
He’d never worked such a hard crowd. But there wasn’t a woman he couldn’t seduce when he set his mind to it. He upped the smoulder. “I thought you recognised me. Who did you think I was?”
“I don’t watch much television, but the story’s been all over the news lately… Two prisoners escaped from their transit van on the way to court. I thought you were one of them.”
Another punch to the gut – an emotional one this time. “You thought I was an escaped con? Why – because I’m black?”
“Of course not.” She turned her head to look at him, as if seeing him properly for the first time.
He was a little mollified she hadn’t judged him by the colour of his skin. Even in his adopted homeland, which had made him far more welcome than his own people ever had, that still happened all too frequently.
But this woman, looking down her regal nose at him, had still judged him and found him wanting. Something started to sizzle inside him, something old, dark and unhealed.
They paused at a traffic light. “I knew I’d seen your face somewhere before,” she said.
“Which of my movies have you seen?”
“I don’t know, but I suppose I must have seen one once.”
One once? His face had been on the cover of more magazines than he could count, he was a household name on at least five continents, and she’d seen one once?
“I told you, I don’t watch much television.”
Nor was he some two-bit TV actor. His movies were Hollywood tent poles and their marketing alone cost millions of dollars. Time magazine called him the world’s most bankable star, and Vogue had voted him the world’s sexiest. And this woman didn’t know who he was?
“Besides, when you’ve seen one of those action movies, you’ve seen them all. It’s not real acting,” she said.
The punches just kept on coming. He frowned. “So if you don’t watch movies or television, what do you do for fun?”
“I read. Or I go to the opera and the ballet.”
He rolled his eyes. Bor-ing. “People don’t do those things for fun. They do those things to impress other people.”
“Maybe in Hollywood. But here in Westerwald we’re not cultural philistines. We have brains and we use them.”
Ouch. Two hits in one perfectly enunciated sentence. She spoke better English than the Queen.
The swift sensation that accompanied her words was one he hadn’t felt in years. His hackles rose. “You wanna bet? Clearly there are a few philistines here who watch my movies. I’ve never been attacked by fans in California before.”
“They were probably Americans.”
“So now you not only have a problem with movie-goers and Hollywood, but with Americans too?”
She lifted her chin. “When were you last even inside a theatre? The kind with a proscenium arch, not a screen?”
“Do the Academy Awards count?”
Her lips pursed. No sense of humour, then.
Her gaze fixed firmly back on the road as she indicated and turned into a wider street that looked vaguely familiar to him. “You Americans place so much emphasis on entertainment and beauty. On your own immediate gratification. Nothing lasts, movies are quickly forgotten. Who will even remember your movies five or ten years from now? Audiences will have moved on to the Next Big Thing and what difference will you have made in the world?”
Forget the fact that he’d been wondering the same thing these past few months. His blood boiled, the temper he usually kept in check flaring like a Californian wildfire.
What did she know about him? He’d given nearly a third of his income to Los Pajaros over the years. Not that the people there deserved it. The happiest time in his life was after he left the islands and moved to California.
“So what difference are you making in the world?” he bit out.
He eyed her tailored coat and the diamonds on her wristwatch that twinkled as she moved. It was easy to talk about making a difference in the world when you didn’t have to fight for your place in it.
“I do volunteer work for several local charities.”
And that confirmed it. Only the idle rich had time to spare to volunteer for charities. She’d probably never had a real job in her life, had never had to make it on her own or prove her worth to anyone.
She continued, her gaze still on the road ahead: “If only half the money spent on frivolous things, like movies and actors’ lavish lifestyles, were used to help the less fortunate this world would be a much better place.”
Great, a Greenpeace Evangelist. The vision of those long legs wrapped intimately around him flickered out and died.
“Are you always this judgie about people you’ve just met?” He crossed his arms over his chest and leaned back against the window. “You think you know me, but I’ll have you know I was on my way tonight to a charity banquet to raise funds for a new children’s hospital in Los Pajaros.”
Teresa flicked him a contemptuous glance. “A society event packed with pretentious people all showing off their designer wear and eating gourmet food? That’s not helping others. That’s helping yourself.”
She was right, of course. Tonight was all about him, not about the charity. His appearance as guest speaker tonight had been arranged by his publicist. And even free publicity hadn’t been his real incentive. He’d only agreed to attend when he’d heard his latest co-star was going to be there too.
But he wasn’t going to admit that this prissy bitch was right.
He forced a crooked smile. “And what’s wrong with that?”
The look she cast him could have out-frozen the Antarctic. “Do you even care about anyone other than yourself?”
Not any more.
Teresa pulled the car to a stop. Glancing out the window, he recognised the forecourt of his hotel.
Then she turned her clear, frigid gaze on him, and every repressed childhood memory, every insult and every torture he’d endured rose up. He kept his fury in check and resisted the urge to fist his hands. He thought he’d left the past behind, but clearly it still lingered beneath the surface, waiting for a moment just like this. He wanted to lash out, to take revenge on this superior ice queen, who suddenly represented every person who’d ever slighted the outcast mixed-race child from Los Pajaros.
But he was an actor. He could control his emotions. And he would die before letting her see how she’d got to him.
He opened the door and the chill night air rushed in. “I’m a narcissist and proud of it. But before you judge another person, Miss High and Mighty, you should take a walk in their shoes.”
A slight smile tugged at the edge of her full lips. “Are you upset because I haven’t fallen at your feet?”
He stepped out the car. “Thank you for the ride, Princess.” He slammed the door shut and the trailing tail of his evening jacket caught in it, but he didn’t care. He heard the fabric rip as he stalked away, head high, shoulders back, barely seeing the doorman as he pushed past into the plush lobby.
Tessa sat for a long moment, her hands on the steering wheel, which vibrated with the engine’s purr. Now he was gone and the adrenalin rush faded, reaction set in.
Her hands began to shake.
She’d been unpardonably rude.
It wasn’t like her.
Blood thundered in her ears and she laid her forehead down on the steering wheel. She could blame it on the shock of having a strange man jump into her car, invading her personal space, but it was so much more than that.
She was angry with herself.
If Daddy found out about her lapse tonight, she’d never hear the end of it. She’d been raised better than that. Remember your manners, keep your temper, and don’t be rude. She’d broken all three tonight.
Not to mention that he’d warned her that danger could come when you least expected it and that she needed to be vigilant. But she’d been so wrapped up in her own thoughts, in herself, she hadn’t even seen Christian until he’d leapt into her car. Nor had she noticed the women chasing after him. She’d been as self-absorbed as she’d accused him of being.
If her father heard of this incident, he’d have a security detail on her in a heartbeat, and she hated having eyes and ears trained on her. How could she go about planning the biggest day of her life with a bodyguard stalking her every move? She felt claustrophobic enough in her life as it was.
She could only pray that by then the escaped convicts would be back behind bars and they could stop living in fear. And that this dreadful feeling of being caged would go away.
She lifted her head and put the car in gear.
Still, neither fear nor anger was an excuse. She’d behaved insufferably tonight. Christian was right – she’d been judgmental and condescending. Just because he represented everything she distrusted and despised didn’t mean she had to say it out loud.
She’d lied too. She’d pretended not to know who he was. But even she, enclosed in her ivory tower, had heard of Christian Taylor, the man who’d made his fame playing the ultimate superhero.
She sucked in a deep breath and pulled away from the hotel forecourt.
The last thing she felt like right now was a charity banquet. Especially one where she’d just insulted the guest of honour. She turned the car in the opposite direction to the banquet hall and headed home. She’d have a bath and curl up in bed with a book. And if her father wanted to know if she’d done as he asked and met Christian Taylor, at least she could answer honestly that she had.
And she’d send up a prayer that it was over and done with and she never need see him again.
Chapter 2
“You may go straight in. Your father’s expecting you.”
His executive assistant waved her in, and with only the barest pause in her stride to acknowledge the older woman, Tessa headed towards the closed office door. Her heels beat out a firm rhythm on the parquet floor. She hesitated at the door; her hand suspended a centimetre from the solid wood door.