Tender Assault. Anne Mather

needed cutting—had needed cutting since before his last trip to England. No wonder the Cessna’s pilot had given him such a studied look when he’d turned up at the airport. In a worn Oxford shirt and jeans, and scuffed trainers, he was hardly the usual kind of guest welcomed at Kittrick’s Hotel.

      His palm scraped over his unshaven chin, and he grimaced. He supposed he should have waited, grabbed a night’s sleep and a make-over, before presenting himself to his stepmother and his stepsister. He could have done it. His father was dead, for God’s sake! The knowledge still pained him, but he ignored it. There was no earthly need for him to catch the next flight to the Bahamas, as if some almighty ruling was waiting on his arrival. He had all the time in the world to claim an inheritance he still couldn’t believe was his. But when he had got back from Canada and found the cable waiting, giving himself time to think had not been on his agenda.

      He gazed out of the window, wondering why it was that even after all these years he still felt such a knee-jerk reaction whenever he thought of home. It wasn’t as if it had been his home for the past eight years. His father had kicked him out, for God’s sake! He shouldn’t forget that. And India had believed every word her mother had said. So why should he feel any emotion about going back? He wasn’t even sure he wanted to do it, not deep down inside him.

      But—and it was a big but—the present circumstances demanded that he at least should show his face. After all, it wasn’t every day he had a multi-million-dollar holiday resort dropped in his lap. Forget the fact that there were probably lawyers and accountants, public relations consultants and managers to handle all the day-to-day problems of the hotel and island complex. This had been his father’s creation. And, until he was twenty-one, he had shared it with him …

      He grimaced. The tragedy was that he had never even known his father was ill. And he had been out of the country—and out of reach—when the news of the old man’s death had been reported. In spite of everything, he would have liked to attend the funeral. And he would had done it, too, with or without Adele’s and India’s consent.

      Of course, they probably wouldn’t believe him. Or Adele might, but she’d make damn sure India didn’t. Right now, she was doubtless poisoning his stepsister’s mind with her version of why he was coming to the island. He hadn’t bothered to come before, she’d say. But now, when there was money involved—an immense amount of money, if the publicity was to be believed—he was coming to collect, like the vulture he was.

      A bitter smile tugged at the comers of his mouth. Well, in that respect, he could disabuse them—if he chose. He might have left the island without a penny, but he wasn’t coming back that way. He had his own money now, his own thriving organisation, which he continued to control simply because he wanted to do so. He was no longer the cocky teenager he had been when his father had married for the second time. He was a man who knew the meaning of survival.

      And that was what he had learned to do, in those first three years after he had left the island. He had joined the army, and any lingering traces of the boy he had once been had been sweated out of him in the jungles and rivers of Central America. But it had been a good training; it had instilled in him a respect of self-discipline that had given him the will, and the energy, to work for what he wanted.

      When he left the army, he had had only the germ of an idea of what he wanted to do with the rest of his life. So he had gone to work at a summer camp, and in the variety of activities offered to the children he had seen the way to realise his ambitions.

      He had decided to create a camp for adults, women as well as men, where, added to the usual fitness regime, he would offer the kind of experience previously only found within a military framework. Oh, he’d known it had to be provided within a comfortable ambience. The iron fist in the velvet glove. He had needed spa baths and saunas, expert masseurs to ease away the rigours of the day, and all the usual luxuries of hydrotherapy. His dream had been to create a kind of club where every physical need could be catered for. Somewhere where wives could learn tennis, and indulge in the most sinful forms of face and body massage, while their husbands climbed rocks, or white-water rafted, or battered their soft bodies into submission in some other macho pursuit.

      Of course, he had known there would be women who wanted to go rock-climbing and men who wanted to play racket sports and be pampered, but he’d been prepared for all of that. The lodges he’d envisaged his guests staying in would be so comfortable that they’d be totally asexual. It would be a total resort, and sufficiently expensive so that only truly committed health freaks would come.

      He had used the pay he had accumulated during his three years in the army to open his first camp. Most of his fellow rookies had spent their pay on beer and women, not necessarily in that order, but, apart from an initial phase of drunkenness, he had studiously saved his money. Besides, he had never had to pay for a woman in his life. Something about his heavy-lidded eyes and sun-burned features attracted females like a magnet. But it wasn’t something he was proud of. Experience had taught him it was safer to stay away from the opposite sex.

      Nevertheless, it had been a gamble, using every penny he had, plus a sizeable chunk of the bank’s money, to buy a run-down fruit farm in Florida. And it had taken months of work to get the place anything like ready for his guests. But, because he had initially concentrated on the less usual activities offered by his establishment, he had attracted the media’s attention, and in no time at all he was inundated by men desperate to escape from the confines of offices and boardrooms.

      It was around this time that he had run into Greg Sanders again. Sanders had been his old drill sergeant, and in his early days at Fort Cleary he had hated the seemingly ruthless black officer. Sanders had picked on him relentlessly, and he had spent more time on the parade ground and worn out more boots than any of his fellow recruits.

      Yet, in time, a genuine respect had grown between the two men, and, if in those early days they had never become friends, they had at least come to understand one another. And he knew that without Sanders’s training he might never have survived those months in the jungle. He had been soft; he could admit it now. Being Aaron Kittrick’s son had not prepared him for any other kind of life.

      Consequently, when he learned that Sanders had retired from the army and was looking for work, he had been more than willing to offer the man a job. If anyone could lick his visitors into shape, Sanders could, and it was good to have someone working with him who was more than just an employee.

      Sullivan’s Spas took off. He had used his mother’s maiden name, instead of his father’s, so that no one could accuse him of trading on his father’s reputation. Besides, it also gave him the anonymity he craved, and enabled him to move freely, without fear of recognition.

      No one, least of all himself, could have imagined the spas’ success. From that small beginning, they had mushroomed all across the United States. And, because most health clubs were in urban areas, and he had concentrated on creating his resorts in less civilised surroundings, there was the added novelty of communing with nature, of seeing birds and animals in their natural habitat.

      Besides, he knew that his spas were in some of the most beautiful country in the world: Southern California; Colorado; South Dakota; New Mexico; not to mention the pioneer resort in Florida, and other establishments all along the eastern seaboard. He had been lucky, in that land in the places he wanted to expand was not expensive. In consequence, he could afford to build low and consider the environment.

      Over the years, Greg Sanders had trained a score of instructors, who now worked under him. He no longer worked in the field himself, although they both spent periodic sabbaticals at each and every spa, making sure they were running smoothly, and that their guests were happy. On Greg’s fiftieth birthday, he had actually given him a quarter share of the business, making him the chief shareholder, aside from himself.

      And it was because of his company that he had been out of the country—and out of reach—when his father died. He had been in a mountainous district of British Columbia, researching the possibilities of opening a new resort in that most remote part of Canada. The only way in had been by float-plane and canoe, and it had teased his interest speculating the incongruity of creating an oasis of luxury in such primitive surroundings.