The Billionaire's Bride of Innocence

A sudden idea occurred to him.

‘Remember how great our wedding night was?’ he said, and she nodded, her eyes glistening a little. ‘Why don’t we try to re-create that?’

‘But…but…how?’

‘If you remember, we hadn’t seen each other for a few weeks before our wedding day. That time apart made our getting together again extra-special. I know it’ll only be a few days this time, but we could do something similar. You could sleep down here till we go. And have your meals down here. If you promise to eat, that is. What do you think?’

‘I think it’s a very romantic idea,’ she said, but with reservation, he thought.

‘I can be romantic, you know,’ he said teasingly.

‘Can you?’

‘Not often, I admit. But I can try.’

‘Won’t Roberta think it a bit strange if I don’t come up to the house for meals?’

‘I’ll explain what we’re doing.’

She blinked, then nodded. James smiled. That was another thing he really liked about Megan. She didn’t argue with him.

‘Great. Look, I’d better hotfoot it into the office and see to that booking post-haste. Don’t forget to eat some of this food. I’ll pick something up at work. Bye, darling.’ He squeezed her shoulder as he gave her a peck on the cheek. ‘See you tonight.’

‘No, you won’t.’

‘You’re right. I won’t. Damn. Still, it’s not that long till Saturday.’ Just a bloody eternity!

‘What happens if you can’t get a booking?’

‘I’ll get a booking,’ he said with a scowl. ‘Even if I have to buy the whole damned island!’

Chapter Five

WHICH he would, Megan accepted ruefully as she watched him hurry out of the pool house. James Logan was not a man to fail in anything he did. He was a man amongst men. A winner.

Megan knew more about her husband than he might realise she did. When he’d left her home alone during the six weeks between their engagement and wedding, she’d spent many hours checking him out on the internet, feeding her insatiable curiosity about the powerful man she’d fallen madly in love with and was about to marry. She’d read every item of news which related to him; every single article written about his background, his professional and his private lives.

There was one heck of a lot.

Although she already knew that James’s father was transport magnate Wayne Logan, Megan hadn’t known that Logan senior was a self-made billionaire who’d begun life as a lowly truck driver, becoming a multimillionaire by the time he was thirty. Of course, his marriage to the daughter of his wealthy boss had given him a leg up on the ladder of success, a strategy Megan was familiar with. Megan suspected her own mother had married for money, not for love. She was sometimes ashamed of the way her extremely materialistic mother did nothing but spend her poor father’s money.

At least Wayne Logan had pulled his weight, proving himself an astute businessman by building up his ailing father-in-law’s trucking company into the biggest in Australia. After his father-in-law passed away, Logan had gone on to bigger and better things, expanding his transport empire overseas, buying container ships and a couple of airlines, as well as more trucks.

Logan’s marriage had produced two sons. Jonathon, the elder by five years, had been killed in a car accident a few weeks after his twenty-third birthday. The Porsche he was driving—he’d run off the road and hit a telegraph pole—had been a birthday present from his doting father.

James didn’t figure largely in any articles about the Logan family until he was twenty-five, at which point he’d burst into the media spotlight—not because he’d followed into the family business as his older brother had, but as the highly successful manager of several singers and actors whose previous manager had been arrested for embezzlement three years earlier. Facing financial ruin, they’d all clubbed together at that time and turned to James for help. James had set up shop as a civil litigation lawyer after leaving university, raking up business by dropping pamphlets through letter boxes.

It came out later than none of them had known James had only been twenty-two at the time. James had always looked older than he was.

But help them he had. Not by suing the man who’d fleeced them—an impossible course of action after the gamblingaddicted fool had committed suicide—but by talking them into taking him on as their manager. James had always had the gift of the gab, it seemed, and a passion for the entertainment business.

It was history now that under the original contract they’d signed with him James had taken no commission for the first year, provided they did what he said, no questions asked. With little to lose—all of them were in danger of fast becoming ‘has-beens’ and ‘never-wases’—they’d all agreed to his terms.

Within three years, every one of James Logan’s clients was a success story and James was raking it in. His new company, Images, quickly became the most famous management agency in Australia, and he was dubbed ‘The Makeover Man’.

That was his basic modus operandi. James made people over; gave them what he called the right image, transforming the bland and the boring into the bold and the beautiful, giving each singer and actor not just a new look but also sometimes a new name, and always a new confidence. This, combined with lots of exposure on television—in everything from telethons to reality shows to guest spots on the proliferation of breakfast programmes—made his clients some of the most well-known faces in Australia and subsequently some of the most sought-after performers.

His biggest success story back then had been Jessica Mason, a country-and-western performer in her late twenties, who’d once won a ‘Golden Guitar’ in her late teens, but had languished in mediocrity ever since. She’d also gained about twenty kilos in that time. James didn’t change her name, though he shortened her first name to Jessie and left off the last. He personally supervised her diet and exercise programme till she was back to her optimum weight of fifty-two kilos, allowing her very good figure to emerge once more. Her long mass of rather ratty blonde hair was dyed jet-black and her wardrobe was changed from fringed suede vests and cowboy boots to long, flowing skirts, low-cut tops and jewelencrusted sandals.

Her first album—titled ‘Barefoot Gypsy’—had one of the sexiest covers ever produced, with Jessie standing next to a camp fire in a flamenco-style pose, with her skirt lifted high to expose a lot of hip and thigh, her head thrown back so that her wild black curls flowed down her back and her obviously braless breasts thrust up high against the gauzy white blouse she was almost wearing.

The album had gone gold within days; platinum within weeks. Years later it was still selling. Of course, this wasn’t entirely due to the provocative cover, though it played a big part. The songs on the CD backed up the promise of the packaging, being moody and sexy, with great lyrics and throbbing rhythms.

‘You still have to deliver,’ James was quoted as saying when he was accused of selling sex. ‘My singers can sing, and my actors can act. The trouble with the entertainment industry is that the truly talented don’t always get the opportunity to show what they can do. I give my people that opportunity by promoting them in a way which gets them noticed.’

It was inevitable that James would eventually extend his business interests into the advertising industry.

‘Products aren’t much different from people,’ he was also quoted as saying in another article after he’d started up Images Advertising. ‘They require an image to be successful, as do companies. Come to me and I’ll guarantee to increase your sales in six months, or I’ll give you your money back.’

This extremely bold statement had seen stressed sales and marketing managers flocking to James to perform his magic. And perform it he had, with the help of the highly creative, lateral-thinking staff he’d hired.

By the age of thirty James had become a multimillionaire and something of a playboy. The internet threw up hundreds of photographs of him doing what playboys did during their leisure hours: there were snapshots of him at the races, at movie premieres, at swish charity dos and golfing tournaments; on yachts, driving sports cars and relaxing in five-star resorts.

Most of the photographs showed James with a different dolly-bird on his arm. It came as a surprise to the Press when, at the age of thirty-two, he married Jackie Foster, the Australian supermodel. He’d been tabbed to stay a swinging bachelor for a few more years.

Megan had only felt minor jealousy over James’s earlier girlfriends. They were way in the past, after all. But she’d taken one look at the photographs of James’s first wedding day and realised she had a long way to go before her bridal snaps would even compare. Jackie Foster had made a simply stunning bride.

Megan still wasn’t jealous. James had done a good job of convincing Megan she was what he wanted, not Jackie Foster. Suddenly, however, she’d not been happy with the way she looked. The least she could do was make the best of herself. So she’d turned to a fashion guru for help—not her overly critical mother!—and been very pleased with the result. She’d swanned down that aisle on her own wedding day believing she was truly beautiful, and also believing that she had her husband-to-be’s true love.

‘What a fool I was,’ she muttered as she picked up a piece of toast and gave it a savage bite.

What hadn’t she believed back then?

Thinking about her husband’s lies and deceptions stirred up a hornets’ nest of anger inside Megan. Some directed at James, but most directed at herself. She should have confronted him with the truth at the hospital, when the hurt had been fresh in her mind, and in her heart. She should not have left it.

It was too late now. She was trapped, not just by her unrequited love for the man, but also by her renewed desire for him. She wanted to go on that second honeymoon with him quite desperately. Wanted him to make love to her for days on end. No use pretending differently. No use thinking she was going to do or say anything which would stop that from happening.

Standing up, Megan walked over to the easel and lifted the dust cloth from the painting. What she saw there still had the power to shock her…but also to excite her.

The phone ringing startled Megan. Impossible for James to be in his office yet. He’d only left ten minutes earlier. Of course, he could be ringing her from his car phone, but she didn’t think so. He didn’t do that too often.

Megan winced at the thought it might be her mother, wanting to know the ins and outs of Hugh’s wedding. She’d rung last night as Megan had been undressing for bed. Megan had put her off at the time, saying she had a headache.