Temptation Island by Victoria Fox Page B

him. She wanted to touch him in a way she had never before encountered—raw, necessary, primal. The stranger was facing away, his profile still, his mouth set in a line of grim determination, as though he were trying to resist unseen temptation.
    And then, she didn’t know how it happened, they were kissing each other, their bodies apart one second and together the next. His lips, his tongue, that scar she had noticed that felt, beneath her mouth, like danger. The smell of leather and the smell of him: his neck, his skin, the softness of his mouth and eyelashes. His hands held her face, one thumb on her chin where it was cut, the fingers behind her jaw, beneath her earlobes. She had never been kissed like that. She could kiss him for ever. She could kiss him till her mouth bled.
    Not once did his hands move lower, though she ached for them to. She wanted him to touch her in all the places she had refused her boyfriend: all the emotions she was meant to feel with Rico but hadn’t, imagining something must be the matter with her. His fingers reached round and pressed the very top of her spine, his touch so deft, electricity, the heat of his body and the soft insistency of his mouth, and she felt the blood rush like fever, trembling, to between her legs. For the first time in her life, Lori experienced desire. Prolonged, exquisite, concentrated desire that entered her like a knife and twisted her heart, sliding its smooth blade down her stomach, opening her up to that place whose existence she had always denied.
    The car stopped. The man pulled away, his expression closed, but angry, like an argument happening behind a shut door.
    The only sound was their breathing, painfully intimate in the silence.
    Lori sensed the certainty of their parting and grasped for more, abandoning restraint because that was what he had done to her.
    ‘I have to find a way to thank you—’
    Sunlight flooded in, hurting her eyes. They were back outside Tres Hermanas . His driver stood on the sidewalk.
    The man took her hand. ‘You’ll be all right,’ he told her, in that soft, strange accent. ‘I’ll make sure of it. I always will.’
    Lori was helped on to the street, the light blinding: a new world. She was shaking.
    His arm reached to close the door.
    ‘Wait! Will I see you again? What’s your name? You have to tell me. I have to know.’
    The man lifted his mouth slightly, the corners, not much, like a cat that wakes from a deep sleep and raises his head once to look around before settling again. It wasn’t a smile. It didn’t come close to the eyes, whose look of benevolence had hardened like a frozen lake.
    ‘It does not matter who I am.’
    And with a last, lingering stare, as quick as he’d come, he was gone.

14
    Present Day
    Island of Cacatra, Indian Ocean
    Four hours to departure
    Reuben van der Meyde was a self-made industrial entrepreneur with tens of billions in the bank. He had come from nothing: orphaned as a baby, he had grown up with a lukewarm, uninterested foster family in the South African city of Johannesburg. At thirteen, after being expelled from school for bad behaviour, he had started his own trade on the streets, selling stolen cut-price jewellery to travelling businessmen. One such businessman, an unhappily married tycoon who had recently lost a son Reuben’s age, took him under his wing, trained him and served up a job in one of his fledgling telecommunications companies. With the Soweto sprawl in the seventies came massive investment in the suburbs—Reuben was in the thick of it and, as each year passed, his flair for business grew. Aged twenty, he launched VDM Communications. Soon he was rivallingthe man who had taught him everything and, as his business swelled, so did his fortune, his reputation, and his ambition. Today, VDM was the most lucrative company in the world.
    Reuben van der Meyde was not a man prepared to be taken down.
    He paced the terrace, pausing occasionally to put his hands on the