Once in Paris

“I’ll take care of it myself,” he said, and he didn’t smile. His eyes narrowed on her young face. “You can hang out over here until he leaves. I understand that he’s facing the threat of a military coup by a poor neighboring country with no oil. They want his.”

“So does my stepfather,” she informed him. “He’s all but bankrupted himself putting money into developing the oil fields over there, and he’s attracted other investors to help him. If the military coup succeeds, he’ll be standing on the street corner selling pencils out of a cup.”

“Or diving for conch,” he added mockingly.

“That isn’t likely. He can’t swim.”

“He’s made a bad bargain there,” Pierce murmured thoughtfully. “A real deal with the devil.” His dark eyes narrowed as they slid over her. “What are you supposed to be, collateral?”

She flushed. “Over my dead body.”

He didn’t reply to that. He was thinking, and his thoughts weren’t pleasant. “How did you end up with Brauer for a stepfather?” he asked after a minute.

“My mother is beautiful,” she said simply. “I’m just a poor carbon copy of her. She was selling jewelry in an exclusive shop and he was buying a present for a friend. She said it was love at first sight.” She shrugged. “I don’t know. Anyway, my father had just died a few months earlier and she was lonely. But not lonely enough to become a rich man’s mistress,” she added with a faint smile. “It was marriage or nothing, so he married her.” She toyed with her glass. “They have a new son and he’s the whole world for Mother.”

“Is Brauer good to her?”

“No,” she said flatly. “She’s afraid of him. I don’t know that he’s actually hit her, but she’s very nervous around him. Now that she has the baby to think about, she never argues with him like she used to when they were first married.”

“Does she talk to you about him?”

She shook her head. “Kurt makes sure that I never have much time alone with her.” She met his eyes. “I didn’t like him from the beginning, but she thought I was resentful because it was so soon after Dad’s death.”

“Brauer is nobody’s idea of a white knight,” he murmured curtly.

She studied him. “You know something about him, don’t you.”

“I know that he’s devious and underhanded and that he’ll do absolutely anything to make money, and he does,” he said flatly. “We’ve been rivals for some time now. I cost him a lot of money a few years ago, and he’s never forgotten. If he has an enemies list, I’m at the very top of it.”

“Can I ask how you cost him money?” she wondered aloud.

He was reluctant to tell her, but in the end, he decided that she needed to know the truth about her stepfather. “He was trying to make a deal with a terrorist group to attack an oil platform and cause an environmental disaster.”

“Why?” she asked, aghast.

“I’ve never been quite sure,” he told her. “Kurt plays a close hand, and his business dealings are kept under the table. All I know is that an enemy of Kurt’s was making some threats. Kurt reasoned that by making the man look criminally careless about damaging the global ecology, he could give him enough bad publicity to bring him down. And it might have succeeded.”

“You stopped it?”

“Tate Winthrop did,” he said with a faint smile. “My security chief has contacts everywhere, and we soured the deal. Brauer never knew how it was done, but I know he suspects that I was behind it.”

“Are you in competition with him?”

He chuckled as he finished his drink. “Not really. I’m in the oil business, of course, but I deal primarily in the construction of oil platforms. Kurt has an interest in an oil shipping firm. Still, he’s got a few scores to settle with me, and I’ve heard some veiled threats that I don’t like about my newest site. I can’t afford an environmental disaster. I’ve spent too much money building this platform with adequate safeguards to prevent any wholesale leaks. So I’ve sent Winthrop and some of his men out to my new platform to stand guard while it goes into operation. Just in case.”

“Where is it?”

“In the Caspian Sea,” he said. “It’s brimming over with oil, but most drillers won’t put a lot of money into extracting it because of the dicey situation in the Middle East. It would have to be piped through hostile territory or tanked around. But we’re working on a deal, and with any luck, we may strike a bargain that’s mutually beneficial.”

“It sounds very complicated.”

“It is. We’re very sensitive to environmental issues. I don’t want to cause an oil spill. And not because it’s bad publicity. I have no patience with people who are willing to sacrifice the planet on the altar of profit margins.”

She smiled at him. “No wonder I like you.”

He smiled back. She was bright and she seemed to sparkle. He liked her, too. It wouldn’t do to let that feeling get out of hand, of course. He had to try to think of her as a child.

“You aren’t eating the tea cakes,” he pointed out. “Don’t you like sweets?”

“Very much. But I’m not really hungry,” she confessed. “I’ve been worried about Mr. Sabon.”

“You can stop worrying. I’ll deal with Sabon.”

“He’s very rich,” she said worriedly. “He owns a whole island somewhere off the coast of his native country in the Middle East. It’s called Jameel.”

“I own two islands,” he countered with a chuckle. “One’s off the coast of South Carolina, and I own one here in the Bahamian chain.”

“Really?” She was impressed. “Are they inhabited?”

He shook his head. “Not inhabited or developed. I’m leaving them both as wildlife habitats.” He smiled at her delighted expression. “I’ll take you to them one day and show them to you.”

Her heart skipped and she sighed with open pleasure. “I’d like that a lot.”

He searched her face with quiet, thoughtful eyes. His expression became somber. “So would I.” He put his empty glass down on the table. “Tell me about your father. What did he do?”

“He was a loan officer in a bank,” she said. “He wasn’t handsome or terribly intelligent, but he was kindhearted and he loved me.” Her eyes grew sad with the memories of him. “Mother never had time for me, even when she was at home. She worked a six-day week at the jewelers, and she always seemed to feel that Dad didn’t give her the life-style she deserved. He was a failure in her eyes, and she never stopped telling him so.” She grimaced. “One day he went to work and we got a phone call just after lunch. They said he’d started toward an office to talk to one of the vice presidents and he just folded up. He died right there of a heart attack. Nothing they did brought him back.”

“I’m sorry. It must have been rough.”

“It was. Mother didn’t really even mourn. And just three months later, there was Kurt, and suddenly I didn’t have a family I belonged in anymore.”

A long silence fell between them. Then he said, “I never had a family at all. My parents died when I was in grammar school, in a plane crash. I went to live with my father’s father in America. He had a small oil transport fleet and a smaller construction company. My first job was helping to put up buildings. I learned it from the ground up, the hard way. Grandfather never pampered me, but he loved me. He was Greek, very old-world even after becoming a naturalized American citizen.” He chuckled at the memory of the gruff old man. “I adored him, rude manners and all.”

“But your last name doesn’t sound Greek,” she said.

“It was Pevros, before he changed it to Hutton, after a wealthy family he’d read about in the States,” he replied. “He wanted to be American all the way. I still have French citizenship, but I could qualify as an American citizen, having spent half my life in New England.”

“You said your grandfather had a small construction company,” she murmured. “But yours is enormous and international.”

His broad shoulders rose and fell. “I had a sort of sixth sense about mergers that paid off big. Once I got the hang of it, there was no stopping me. I sold the oil tankers and parlayed the proceeds into an enterprise that became the core company of an empire.” His eyes narrowed as he studied her. “Margo’s father had a chain of building supply companies in Europe,” he recalled. “The merger led to a marriage and ten of the happiest years of my life.” His face seemed to harden to stone. “I thought she was immortal.”

Impulsively, she laid her hand over his big one on the table. “I still miss my dad,” she said softly. “I can only imagine how it must be for you.”

His hand stiffened. Then it relaxed and turned, enveloping hers in its warm, strong grasp. “That empathy of yours saved me,” he said, searching her eyes quietly. “If you hadn’t taken me home to my hotel that night in Paris, I really don’t know where I would have ended up.”

“I do,” she murmured dryly. “You’d have ended up with that industrial-strength blonde, being rolled for your wallet!”

He chuckled. “I probably would have. I was too drunk to care what happened to me.” His eyes softened. “I’m glad you were there.”