Temptation Island
Praise for
Victoria Fox
and her debut book,Hollywood Sinners
‘This summer’s hottest novel.
Hollywood Sinners …
is giving Jackie Collins a run for her money.’
That’s Life!
‘Sure to be a huge hit and perfect for the beach’
Sun
‘We should’ve seen the twists in this sinful bonkbuster coming, but two of the surprises were so shocking that we ended up startling the other commuters on the bus!’
Now
‘The heady mix of corruption, glamour, lust and power is guaranteed to keep you up late into the night.Get your scandal fix here!’
Closer
‘This debut novel is full of sex, glamour and divas!’ 4 stars
Star
‘Scandalous. Glamorous. Sexy. Victoria Fox’s sassy, sparkling debut puts the bonk back into bonkbuster!’
Lovereading.co.uk
‘A juicy tale of glamour, corruption and ambition.
A cracking read’
Jo Rees, author of
Platinum
‘A glorious, sexy story of high-octane Hollywood intrigue—I loved it.’
Lulu Taylor, author of
Heiresses
and
Beautiful Creatures
‘Just what the devil ordered—salacious secrets, illicit sex and wicked deception’ J J Salem, author of
The Strip
and
Tan Lines
‘For a trip to ultimate escapism, take the Jackie Collins freeway, turn left at Sexy Street, right at Scandal Boulevard.Your destination is Victoria Fox’s Hollywood.’
dailyrecord.co.uk
Indulge yourself with Victoria Fox’s
other books …
Hollywood Sinners
Short Tales of Temptation
Tinseltown
Rivals
Pride
Ambition
Temptation
Island
Victoria Fox
For Mark
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thank you to my editors Kim Young and Jenny Hutton, whose wisdom, guidance and commitment has meant the world to this book. To the whole team at MIRA, especially Mandy Ferguson, Tim Cooper, Nick Bates, Oliver Rhodes, Claudia Symons, Elise Windmill, Jason Mackenzie, Clare Somerville, and Donna Esiri and Debbie Clements for the beautiful covers. To Madeleine Buston for being a phenomenal agent, and to Clare Wallace, Mary Darby and Rosanna Bellingham for their stellar work. I’m also grateful to Tory Lyne-Pirkis at Midas PR who is the best publicist I could wish for.
Special thanks to Victoria Stonex and the Consultancy for her ideas at the beginning and her insight at the end. Also to Kieran Lynch for an afternoon of plotting in a Lake District pub; to Jo and Jeff Croot for bringing tea in the morning and wine at night; to Seth Dawes for talking to me about New York; to Ross and Angie Freese for their friendship (and to Louis for when he’s older); to Kate Furnivall for her advice and encouragement; to Emily Plosker, Joe Martin, Matt Everitt and Ben Sanders. To Chloe, Sarah, Laura, Jimmy, Tay, Finny and everyone from school who remembers the LBM. To Mum and Dad. And to Mark Oakley for his patience, his imagination, and for believing that anything is possible.
Prologue
I
Present Day
Island of Cacatra, Indian Ocean
Had it not been such a clear night, the moon so bright and the air so still, her body might not have been visible where it moved uncertainly, facedown, at the surface of the water. As it was, the pale skin of her shoulder glowed sickeningly in the silver light, one strap of her gown fallen and bound to her like seaweed, its jewels glinting bright as the stars that pierced the sky above.
In the distance, the low thump of music and faraway cries of merriment. The megayacht twinkled on the horizon, its outline lit gold against the black ocean, a winking diamond guillotining the depths. The grand vessel was scene to the birthday party of the year: a lavish, abundant celebration for which no expense had been spared. On board, a host of VIPs, from Hollywood stars to Olympic
idols, from dazzling supermodels to the government’s elite, from singers, actresses and dancers—beautiful people the globe over—to the cream of the entrepreneurial world, partied as midnight came and went. All were oblivious to the quiet outside, around, below: unaware that, beneath their feet, a secret was drowned, soundless and stifled in the endless deep.
She had not been dead long, half an hour at most. The tide was strong, had rocked her body towards the shore, gently so as not to wake her, the water kissing her cold skin. Her arms were spread wide, her hair tangled like the ropes of a shipwreck, once bound to great beauty but now cut loose on the strange unknown. Her dress had been torn in the struggle, a red slit bleeding uselessly where the dagger had entered.
If she had been asleep, the coarse shingle would have woken her now. A scratch to the belly before, with a final, sad push, the water deposited her. Quiet as silk, it noiselessly retreated.
A little way down the beach, a small boy was hunting for sea turtles. His father had told him they came in to lay their eggs at night, leathery things whose shells shone white in troughs of sand. He wasn’t supposed to be here—Miss Jensen, the housekeeper, would murder him—but it was boring waiting inside the mansion. He squinted at the yacht, hundreds of miles away, it seemed, and wished he could be there instead of here. They told him that one day it would all be his: his great inheritance. Crouching at the water’s edge, the palm of one hand cradling his chin and the other blindly raking the beach, it was hard to believe. His knees were damp from where he’d been on them, combing
the smooth, still-warm sand for that final, important discovery.
His fingers curled round it instinctively at first, like a baby’s around its mother’s thumb. It felt like net, the ones he caught crabs in, but it clung to him too unhappily for that, as if by holding on it could force him, maybe, to look.
When he did, he knew it was bad. His fist was buried in a knot of wet stuff, too sticky, too like cobweb, too … human. Strands of it across his skin, darkened by its journey over the water, a thickness so much like hair, and the solid bump of skull beneath; the yielding scalp.
The boy’s scream ruptured the quiet. It came from somewhere in him that until then he hadn’t known existed, somewhere basic and raw. The island gasped with the force of it, trembling in the vastness of its ocean pillow, and seemed to open one eye in recognition, as if it knew all along it was about to be discovered.
II
One day earlier
Twenty-four hours to departure
Reuben van der Meyde disembarked his yacht with the air and importance of a king. And he
was
a king, damn it—at least in this part of the world, where it was easy to forget that land and civilisation existed beyond the clean blue line of the horizon. The end of the earth, the van der Meyde sightline: as far as Reuben was concerned, Cacatra was it.
Despite the lightweight linen shirt he’d had his housekeeper leave out, Reuben was sweating buckets. He could feel it down his back, pooling in a horseshoe under his arms and sticking in the doughy folds he was trying halfheartedly to shift. Christ! When did he start perspiring out of his
ears
? Removing his baseball cap with an irritable swipe, he patted his head with a handkerchief and dug about a bit in his ear-holes. At last, satisfied, he strode purposefully off down the beach, thoughtfully scratching the ginger fuzz on his chin.
Preparations were in order: he had checked the boat, talked to the organisers, sorted the charity raffle … what next? In twenty-four hours everybody who was anybody would join him to celebrate his sixtieth birthday, a party in honour of, arguably (though Reuben saw no point in arguing an indisputable fact), the richest and most powerful man on the planet. Each guest had received their invite months previously, but it was hardly as if they could forget the only social event worth bothering about this year. All that time his people had been fielding calls from neglected stars—singers and models and actresses, politicians, art dealers, writers; names and faces who’d thought they were good acquaintances but clearly hadn’t made the cut. He’d had to slash a few loose. You didn’t get to where Reuben was without making a few sacrifices.
Initially he had purchased Cacatra as a business enterprise: an exclusive island getaway for the rich and famous, a destination for relaxation and rehabilitation, shelter from the glare of the spotlight. But these days he was living here more and more. The island’s lush vegetation, its azure water and golden sands, offered a man exiting middle age the kind of respite he needed. Cacatra was a safe place, a beautiful place. There weren’t enough of those left in the world.
Set back from the beach, up a series of winding stone steps, was the van der Meyde mansion. A white colossus overlooking the ocean, circled by glittering fountains and emerald palms, it had been built to a template of exacting standards and now, as voted for several years ago in a major US lifestyle publication, boasted the title of Most Desirable Residence in the World. It wasn’t sufficient. Reuben had plans to improve the place further, beginning
with extending the already gargantuan swimming pool to a multi-tiered affair that fed directly into the ocean. It was his entrepreneurial spirit, exactly how he had made his fortune: he would think of the most outrageous idea he could and then test himself
—dare
himself—to go ahead and do it.
Not today. He had a party to get on with first.
Margaret Jensen, his housekeeper, was waiting at the main entrance. She was a small, birdlike Englishwoman in her forties with poker-straight mouse-brown hair that hung limply to her shoulders and quick, darting eyes. She moved swiftly, purposefully and with a touch of fuss, in the way efficient people sometimes do.
‘Is everything all right, Mr V?’ she enquired as he swept past, flip-flops slapping the polished floor. It was what he liked to be called. ‘The boat looks impressive.’
‘Fine.’ Reuben’s brutal Johannesburg accent pinched the word thin. He threw his cap on to a dark-wood chest, a grossly expensive African piece he’d had sourced at an auction in the spring. The slogan across the front of the cap read: DO IT BEFORE YOU CHANGE YOUR MIND.
Reuben opened the door to his office, wishing that Miss Jensen could keep to the point and not feel it necessary to stick her beak in. He supposed she imagined she had the right.
Ill at the thought, he closed the door and strode over to his desk. Of
course
the yacht was impressive: that was the whole bloody point. Everything Reuben van der Meyde did was in pursuit of admiration. He was a god, and he expected his people to treat him as such.
He flicked on his Mac, wondering if he’d heard back about the Asian possibility. There was one unread message
in his inbox, from a coded address he didn’t recognise, and he clicked on it lazily, easing himself back in his chair with a greasy squeak of leather. Behind him the panoramic ocean view stretched out.
I’m one of them.
Tomorrow the truth comes out.
Reuben watched the message for a moment. He leaned in. He frowned at it. Then he got up from his desk and pulled open the door.
‘Margaret.’
Instantly Miss Jensen appeared in the hall. ‘Yes, Mr V?’
‘Where is Jean-Baptiste?’
Margaret swallowed her nerve. JB was the man every woman wanted. It was wrong, because the things he did were terrible. She knew he was as cool and ruthless as her boss, and yet the Frenchman wore his secrets well. His were uncharted waters; she had always thought so. She would catch him, sometimes, deep in thought, and the way he was with the boy …
But Reuben only ever used the man’s full name when something was the matter.
‘I haven’t seen him,’ she said carefully. ‘Is there anything I can help you with?’
Reuben forgot his manners. ‘Do you really think an issue for which I require Jean-Baptiste could possibly be one you would be capable of handling?’