Temptation Island

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?’

‘I’m sorry—’

Reuben slammed the door.

It was a hoax. But how had this person got into his private account? Only a small clique was permitted: Jean-Baptiste being one of them, and a handful of selected clients.

Pinching the material of his shirt between two fat fingers, Reuben fanned air on to his sweaty chest. Despite his self-assurances, his heart was throbbing against his rib cage.

Thump, thump, thump.

Fuck it. No one was more powerful than him. This party was going to go off without a hitch and then he’d trace whatever joker had dared stray into his personal business. For that was what it was: business. He was a businessman. The things he’d done … well, they were to make money. And make money they most certainly had. He wasn’t about to start unravelling a moral fibre he wasn’t even sure was there. Conscience was for pussies—not for him.

This time he buzzed for Margaret, couldn’t tolerate facing her scarcely concealed rapture at whatever drama had now been thrown his way.

‘Get me a girl,’ he instructed as soon as she came on the line. ‘And make it quick.’

There was only one thing he needed right now: a fucking blow job.

Book One

2008-9

1 Lori

Loriana Garcia Torres was reading a novel. It was a good one. The hero was about to enter, a brooding, misunderstood lover with vengeance in his heart.

Dark hair fell over her face and she pulled the wild curls back with one hand, gathering them at the base of her neck. The Tres Hermanas beauty salon, a dusty-walled, graffiti-plastered enterprise in LA’s Eastside was, as usual, empty.

Anita approached the counter. ‘Trash needs takin’ out,’ she sneered, her features contorted with their usual combination of spite and boredom. ‘Get to it.’

Lori tore herself away. At seventeen, with skin the colour of the desert at sunrise and wide, thick-lashed gold-black eyes, she was sexy, even though—perhaps because—she had never had sex. Hers was an irresistible age. On the cusp of womanhood, she still possessed a childlike innocence that rendered her very Spanish beauty incomparable. Her stepsisters, themselves a few years older and with none of Lori’s charm or kindness, hated her for it.

‘I’ve been here since six,’ she replied. ‘This is my first break.’

‘This is my first break,’ Anita mimicked as she chewed gum with an open mouth. It was obscene, the way she did it, because she was wearing so much lipgloss. The hand on her hip was crowned with curled fingernails, each one several inches in length, and heavy hoops pulled fatly at her earlobes. ‘Been busy readin’ that garbage?’ She snatched the book, regarding its pages with disdain. ‘There’s jobs gotta be done round here, quit makin’ excuses.’

‘I’m not. I haven’t stopped all day …’ Lori trailed off under the scorch of Anita’s glare.

‘And you won’t now.’ Anita smiled sweetly and turned up the Jay-Z track on the radio. ‘Or I’ll tell Mama and Tony about Rico. And you wouldn’t want that, would you?’ Rico was Lori’s boyfriend. The Garcias could never find out she was seeing him—they’d go crazy.

Lori’s gaze raked over Tres Hermanas: the cracked mirrors bolted to the walls; the sickly pink of the salon seats, damp and rubbery in the sticky summer heat, their mock leather peeling like sunburned skin; the stained porcelain bowls where she washed through all that tough hair; the acrid smell of ammonia. She hated it. Every second she was here she hated it.

Life hadn’t been easy since her mother had died, ten years ago now. Tony, her father, had swiftly remarried, acquiring a new family: Anita and Rosa, jealous of her beauty and dead-set on making her life a misery, and a stepmother, Angélica, whose mean stare and sideways looks gave Lori the impression she could well do without the nuisance of a ready-made daughter. Unable to abandon the hopes and dreams of her parents, Lori had left school and joined the business, working till her bones ached and her feet blistered. It wasn’t enough. Her sisters’ attitude had driven clients away and now the salon was spiralling rapidly into debt and disrepair.

Lori had no money and no prospects. The days were long and the pay virtually non-existent, and while Anita and Rosa wasted no time spending their share, on cheap clothes, cigarettes and men, Lori put hers straight back into the enterprise. She did it because she loved her father and she didn’t want him to suffer—not more than he already had.

It wasn’t a life. It was endurance.

Rosa emerged from the back, where she’d been smoking out in the yard. Rosa was the eldest and overweight. She sported a cap of slick dark hair, which she tweezed into little hook-like curls at the sides of her face.

‘Loriana thinks she’s done enough for one day,’ chirruped Anita. ‘Got better stuff to do.’

‘Oh, yeah?’ Rosa shot Lori a scornful look. ‘Like what?’

Defeated, Lori rose from the counter. It was easier than arguing. Once upon a time she’d have stood up for herself, given as good as she got, but the reality was she was outnumbered. The only person on her side was Tony—or, he had been. These days he seemed to have given up, the endless loans and threats from the bank and demands for payment finally wearing him down. He’d become weak, let Angélica take over with her punishing schedules and harsh government, at least where Lori was concerned. No, she was by herself. That was all there was to it.

The salon door opened and Rosa’s only appointment of the afternoon wandered in, a mean-faced black girl with a tired weave. She slumped into one of the salmon-coloured chairs and threw a glance Lori’s way. ‘I want hair like hers,’ she declared. It wasn’t the first time a client had requested curls like Lori’s, something that was impossible to pull off. Rosa glowered.

Anita released a satisfied puff as Lori began mopping the floor. ‘You’re lucky to have a job here, y’know,’ she mused, leaning over the counter and lazily examining her nails. She’d always been a bully, was born with it in her character, intrinsic as genetics.

‘My family started this place,’ Lori fired back. ‘So don’t tell me I’m lucky to be here.’

It was a petty observation, but nevertheless the truth. Lori’s parents had been proud, God-fearing, hard-working people: they’d been dirt poor but they’d been happy, arriving in America with barely two cents to their name and taking out a loan to build their own business. Purchasing one of a chain of beat-up shopfronts in a down-and-out part of LA, over the years they had watched it grow into something about which they could be proud.

Then her mother had died. Too quick, too sudden, too horrible. Through a shroud of grief, Tony had allowed himself to be comforted by the first person who claimed they wanted to listen. Angélica had pounced on a vulnerable man and an exploitable business. In the weeks that followed, Pelobello had become Tres Hermanas, and from there it had begun its descent. Lori tried desperately to keep its head above water but she worked thankless, endless hours. After a while, it got to a person. It made them feel useless and hopeless. It made them feel broken.

Lori refused to accept this was her future. A light glimmered inside her. Some days she thought it was her mother, still with her; others, the glowing, insistent ember that kept her alive. Change would come. She’d know when it did.