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Again, her eyes were quick and assessing Not calculating That was it That as different about her There wasn’t anything selfish in her gaze, nothing judge up herat the obscene amount of money she was yet to touch, and she pulled doo cut crystal glasses housed in a hidden shelf above the counter The way she resolutely ignored the uilt stirred within him
She placed the two glasses on the wooden bar top, waiting for his reaction, to see if he would object to her joining him It was his turn to assess She’d barely said tords to him She looked to be in her early twenties The white shirt she wore as a uniforer than her The worn na sewn onto the shirt pocket said ‘Mary Moore’ She didn’t look much like a Mary But he skimmed over these s behind her eyes So that called to him
He nodded, allowing her to proceed Instead of reaching for one of the bottles behind her, she bent beneath the bar and pulled out one that was ood stuff saved for special occasions Well, he supposed this was a special occasion
She poured the alass towards him and picked up the other
‘Sláinte,’ she had said
‘Yamas,’ he’d replied
And they both drank deeply
The plane banked to the right as it prepared to coht before, or the one froue, he could still taste her As the plane descended towards the runway, ih his mind The first taste of her lips, the feel of her heart beating beneath the palh as he moved it apart from the other The feel of her wrapped around him and her thrilled cry as he sank deeply into her The ecstasy he found as they cliether, swathed in each other The memory of the scream he’d silenced with an impassioned kiss was drowned out by the roar of the backward thrust of the sine as they came in to land at JFK
Even the air stewardess seemed reluctant to open the cabin door Her smile was sad as he disembarked, as if she too kneas about to happen But she couldn’t Only he, and perhaps two others in the whole world, did—the lead investigator, and whoever it ho had really perpetrated the crime
At the bottom of the small metal steps stood about twentytheents Gun belts with handcuffs and batons carefully held in place sat heavily around each man’s waist
He stepped doards the tarent, Dimitri Kyriakou, international billionaire, held out his hands before him—as he’d seen done inbefore this flight, long before last night—and as the steel handcuffs were clasped around his wrists he forced his head to reh
CHAPTER ONE
Present day
Dear Dimitri,
Today you found me
DIMITRI GUIDED THE car down roads he’d travelled only once before Headlights pierced the night, picking out slanting sheets of rain and wet shrubs lining the road His es of his now very much ex-assistant’s horrified face as words like ‘Sorry’, ‘I didn’t know’ and ‘It was for the bestfor the Kyriakou Bank’ stuttered from the man’s lips
Fury pounded through Dimitri’s veins How had this happened? How?
In the nineteen odforsaken American prison, he’d sweated blood and tears to try and find the culprit responsible for setting hi frauds of the last decade Not only that, but also to bring his—his father’s—falory
And finally, one o, after the arrest of his half-brother, Manos, he’d thought all his troubles had ended He’d thought he could put everything behind hiht he’d be finally able to breathe
Until he’d received notification of unusual activity on a small personal account he’d not looked at in years He’d set up the alerts the overnors and had hoped that he’d never receive one
But two days ago he had
And he’d been horrified to discover that, unbeknownst to hied payhter It had happened before, false accusations seeking to capitalise on his sudden unwelcome and erroneous notoriety after his arrest, demands for impossible amounts of money from scam artists But this time
Was it some perverse twist of fate that this discovery had coincided with the second leg of the Hanley Cup? That he should be drawn back to Dublin not only for the Winners’ Circle, but also because his assistant had transferred the ridiculous suer who had—