The Flaw in His Rio Revenge

Excerpt

CHAPTER ONE

At eleven p.m. on a Saturday night in September, in the gilded ballroom of a seven-star Athens hotel, the charity auction at the Stanhope Kallis Foundation gala was drawing to a close. A sumptuous six-course dinner accompanied by the finest wines had preceded it, and as a result, over the last hour, millions of euros had been thrown at luxury villas, questionable art and cases of claret by well-fed, well-oiled guests determined to outdo each other.

Santiago Ferreira, however, who was lounging in the seat for which he’d paid a five-figure sum, had eaten little, drunk less and was saving his money for the last lot on the list.

Stone-cold sober, biding his time and ignoring the puerile one-upmanship that was going on around him, he slowly turned his coffee this way and that. He watched as up on the stage Thalia Stanhope, the foundation’s CEO, hovered in the wings. Her dark hair was swept up into an elegant pile on the top of her head. The pearls dangling from her earlobes and circling her throat gleamed white against her olive skin. The full-length dress encasing her pneumatic body was cherry-red and tight.

She was more beautiful that he remembered, he thought, letting his gaze drift over her dispassionately. So cool and composed, despite the sultry sensuality. She—the daughter of an aristocratic British banking mogul and a Greek shipping socialite, who’d been brought up with immense privilege and educated at the world’s finest institutions—was the epitome of class, sophistication and inherited wealth.

He, on the other hand, was the now-orphan son of an impoverished single mother and a wealthy father who’d refused to acknowledge him—and whom he’d therefore never met—and had grown up in a shack in a drugs-and-guns-ridden favela on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro. He’d received very little in the way of formal education and hadn’t even learned to read and write until he was fourteen. He was brash not subtle, rough not elegant, and his wealth was newly acquired.

He was everything she wasn’t, as she’d once so brutally reminded him. But that hadn’t stopped them embarking on a blazing affair the evening they’d met on Naxos, at the wedding of a former colleague of his to Thalia’s twin brother, sixteen months ago. One look across the bar was all it had taken to detonate an explosion of heat between them and instinctively propel him towards her, even though his mother’s experiences of the rich and privileged had taught him that getting involved with someone like her would be madness.

‘Dance with me,’ he’d murmured, in the faintly accented yet flawless English he’d vowed to master the minute he’d realised it was the language of technology.

‘Yes,’ she’d replied breathlessly, her English polished to perfection by a Swiss finishing school that had been followed by Oxford.

He could recall nothing of the music they’d swayed to. Nothing of their surroundings. All he’d been aware of was the soft warmth of her body pressed up against his, the thundering of his pulse and the dizzying wildness of their kisses. Later, they’d tumbled into bed, setting fire to the sheets until dawn, and had subsequently met up whenever they were on the same continent at the same time, which, as the weeks had gone by, had occurred with increasing frequency.

Any misgivings had been dazzled into submission. That cool, cultured exterior of hers had concealed a volcano of passion the likes of which he’d never encountered before, all the more mind-blowing for its unexpectedness. And she’d seemed equally hooked on him. The minute the door to whichever hotel room they’d booked closed, she’d cast off her reserve, along with her clothes, and she’d launch herself at him, overwhelming him with a scorching blast of passion and need that without fail took out his knees and obliterated his brain. Their chemistry had been off the scale, their desire for each other insatiable. Their X-rated video calls had been so blisteringly hot it had always surprised him afterwards that their devices hadn’t incinerated.

And then, twelve weeks later, thirteen months ago, she’d ended it. She’d just told him one day that they needed to talk—which, as everyone knew, meant only one thing—and once they were done, she’d coolly picked up her things and left. Which had never happened to him before because he was the one to terminate a relationship. He was the one who called the shots. Always. He never checked his phone for missed calls and messages that didn’t come. He never dwelt. He moved on with no looking back and zero regrets.

That was why the abrupt end to their affair still irritated him so much, like a splinter lodged so deep it couldn’t be prised out. Why it still dogged his thoughts day and night. Why he was stuck, unable to move on. He had not been ready to let her go. He’d been caught off guard. Humiliated. Stunned by the icy hauteur he’d never encountered in her before. She’d robbed him of his control and his strength and riddled him with doubt and confusion for the first time in years.

This disruption to his personal life could not be allowed to continue, he’d realised after months of wallowing in bitterness and self-pity. It had gone on for far too long already and enough was enough. Where he came from, weakness and uncertainty could get you killed. Obsession with the opposite sex, he learned at an early age, led to powerlessness, misery and despair. An absence of control could easily lead to unwise decision-making and impulsivity.

And so he’d come here tonight. Not just to secure the advice he sought but also to right a wrong. Several wrongs in fact, because he was not some plaything of the rich, to be picked up and discarded on a whim like his mother. He was not Thalia’s inferior, despite what she’d intimated shortly before turning her back on him and walking out of that Paris hotel room. And no one rejected him these days.

Closure was what he wanted. Retribution. And to that end he intended to decimate her objections to him and rekindle their affair. To reel her in slowly and surely and to finish what they’d started. When the time was right, when the attraction had faded and he was ready, he’d let her go. And then, with the record set straight, the bewilderment and humiliation all hers, the power and invincibility once again all his, he’d finally be able to move on.

It was a simple but effective plan. He didn’t doubt it would work. He was exceptionally single-minded and could be very persuasive when he chose to be. He’d had to put things on hold in order to focus on the recent sale of his software business, but that had been finalised and signed off six weeks ago. Having been catapulted from millionaire to billionaire, he now had a bank balance to rival hers, and all the time in the world to pursue other objectives.

‘And lastly, to our final lot,’ intoned the auctioneer, as every muscle Santi possessed tightened and adrenalin surged through his system. ‘If you want to set up a foundation, expand your charity or organise a fundraiser and need a little help, this one’s for you. Our CEO, Thalia Stanhope, is offering one hundred hours of her valuable time to consult and advise on any aspect of your enterprise. With a decade of experience in the sector, what she doesn’t know isn’t worth knowing. She is the ultimate expert. The best in the business. Who’ll start me at fifty thousand?’

Silver paddles started flashing up and down almost instantly and within minutes the price for the lot had reached a quarter of a million.

Who’d have thought there’d be so much charitable feeling in the room? Santi reflected wryly, impervious to the growing buzz, his pulse beating steadily as the bidding continued apace, but pointlessly. Or was it the idea of spending one hundred hours in Thalia’s company that was so appealing? He could understand that, on a superficial level. It had been double that amount of time before she’d shown him her true colours. Six weeks into their affair, he’d still been in her thrall, completely taken in by her exquisite façade and fiery passion.

But the motives of others were irrelevant. No one was going to win her but him, and his rivals had had their fun. It was time to close this lot down and activate the plan.

‘Fifty million euros,’ he said in an uncompromising tone that cut through the proceedings and warned everyone else to back the hell off.

A stunned silence descended over room, then the auctioneer found his voice and a minute later, with the bang of the gavel and a rush of triumphant satisfaction that was unexpectedly intense, given the fact that the outcome of the lot had never been in any doubt, Thalia was his.