Temptation Island. Victoria Fox

Each guest had received their invite months previously, but it was hardly as if they could forget the only social event worth bothering about this year. All that time his people had been fielding calls from neglected stars—singers and models and actresses, politicians, art dealers, writers; names and faces who’d thought they were good acquaintances but clearly hadn’t made the cut. He’d had to slash a few loose. You didn’t get to where Reuben was without making a few sacrifices.

      Initially he had purchased Cacatra as a business enterprise: an exclusive island getaway for the rich and famous, a destination for relaxation and rehabilitation, shelter from the glare of the spotlight. But these days he was living here more and more. The island’s lush vegetation, its azure water and golden sands, offered a man exiting middle age the kind of respite he needed. Cacatra was a safe place, a beautiful place. There weren’t enough of those left in the world.

      Set back from the beach, up a series of winding stone steps, was the van der Meyde mansion. A white colossus overlooking the ocean, circled by glittering fountains and emerald palms, it had been built to a template of exacting standards and now, as voted for several years ago in a major US lifestyle publication, boasted the title of Most Desirable Residence in the World. It wasn’t sufficient. Reuben had plans to improve the place further, beginning with extending the already gargantuan swimming pool to a multi-tiered affair that fed directly into the ocean. It was his entrepreneurial spirit, exactly how he had made his fortune: he would think of the most outrageous idea he could and then test himself—dare himself—to go ahead and do it.

      Not today. He had a party to get on with first.

      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