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CHAPTER ONE
‘GOODMORNING,MSCAVENDISH.Did you have a good holiday?’
Without breaking her stride, Dove Cavendish turned towards the young paralegal who had interrupted her thoughts and her progress across the foyer of Cavendish and Cox and forced her lips into the shape of a small, careless smile.
‘I did, yes. Thank you, Mollie.’
‘You picked a good week to take off. There was another tube strike on Wednesday and loads of us didn’t get into work until halfway through the morning.’ Mollie hesitated. ‘Oh, and we’ve got a new client. Did you hear? I mean, about Mr—?’
Before she could say his name, Dove cut her off with a swift, emphatic nod. ‘I did, yes,’ she repeated. It was all her numb mind could come up with.
A shiver ran down her spine and her cheeks felt hot, but she knew her expression would not betray her. Growing up as the Band-Aid baby of her parents’ failing marriage, she had learned early on to keep her thoughts to herself and concentrate on defusing conflict. It was one of the reasons she was so good at her job as a corporate lawyer. Even today, when her carefully rebuilt world had been knocked off its orbit, nobody would ever guess what she was really thinking. What she had been thinking since her boss, Alistair Cox, had called her at home last night.
She had just returned from a long overdue and much-needed week away, and had been in the middle of emptying her bag. It hadn’t been a long conversation, and truthfully she’d barely heard most of what Alistair had been saying, but after he’d hung up she hadn’t had the strength to finish unpacking. This morning her suitcase was still on the floor in her bedroom, gaping open as if, like her, it was still in shock at his bombshell revelation.
Gabriel Silva had hired Cavendish and Cox to handle his latest acquisition. M&A.
She stopped in front of the lift.
Gabriel Silva.
The name pulsed inside her head in time with her heartbeat as she watched the numbers light up.
At thirty years old, he was a legend in the corporate world—an apex predator in an ocean filled with hunters...killers. Ruthless, relentless, never tiring, he pursued his prey remorselessly and in doing so had built one of the most successful businesses in the world from scratch.
But it wasn’t his business reputation that was making a silent scream of panic rise up inside her. Six years ago, Gabriel Silva had broken off their relationship and broken her heart. Actually, he had shattered it into a thousand pieces. And he hadn’t simply broken up with her. Her father, Oscar, had offered him money to disappear from her life and Gabriel had accepted his offer, pocketing the cash and walking away without so much as a word of explanation or apology.
And now he was back.
Her throat tightened. People said that time was a great healer: they were wrong. Hearing Alistair say his name last night had been like a serrated blade slicing through her skin. The pain of his rejection was as raw and as agonising just as if it had happened yesterday.
‘It’s pretty exciting, isn’t it?’ Mollie looked over at her, her brown eyes wide with undisguised awe. ‘I Googled him this morning and he’s like the real deal.’
No, he isn’t, Dove thought, her heart lurching forward as the lift doors opened. There was nothing real about Gabriel Silva.
Everything—every word, every smile, every touch—had been fake. All of it carefully staged to look like the real thing so that she would take the bait. And she had. Despite knowing that ‘love’ was a hoax, a bow to prettify something essentially pragmatic and transactional, she had allowed herself to be reeled in.
And, like every other gullible woman who had fallen for a pair of blue eyes and a brain-melting smile, she had paid the price. Or rather her father had. And that hurt the most. Not just that Gabriel had never loved her, but that her love for him had been transformed into currency in some horrible, distorted alchemy.
There was only one positive in the whole sorry mess. Knowing how everyone would react to her dating a man whose father was an electrician, she and Gabriel had kept their relationship secret. No one other than her father had known the truth, and Oscar had died a month after Gabriel left—not of a broken heart but a diseased one. So her humiliation had been hers alone.
As much as she’d wanted to confide in her mother, she hadn’t. Not when she’d known how devastated Olivia would be.
She knew the story of her parents’ marriage back to front and inside out. Officially, it had been the love story of their generation. Beautiful, wealthy American heiress Olivia Morgan and handsome, upper-class Englishman Oscar Cavendish.
But just weeks after exchanging their vows the marriage had been floundering. The bills for Oscar’s expensive tastes—including her mother’s engagement ring and the honeymoon—had started rolling in. Only Oscar had had no money to pay them. His inheritance was gone, and he’d had no intention of doing anything as menial as working.
It had been the start of a very long and disappointing marriage, and ever since Dove could remember her mother had warned her daughters—particularly her youngest—against making the same mistake. Or maybe it just felt that way because she was the last one at home and there was nobody around to dilute Olivia’s fears.
Either way, given her mother’s feelings about men without money but with ulterior motives, she had never been able to bear to tell her the truth.
Diverting her thoughts away from that particularly unedifying dead end, Dove leaned back against the wall of the lift as it started to move upwards jerkily. Like everything else in the firm’s Grade II listed headquarters in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, it needed upgrading, but clients didn’t come to Cavendish and Cox for glossy interiors. They came because they wanted a lawyer they could trust implicitly—they came for Alistair Cox.
Her pulse darted. Or that was what they usually came for anyway. But was the same true of Gabriel Silva?
Feeling Mollie’s gaze on her face, she blanked her mind to all the possible and equally unnerving answers to Mollie’s observation. ‘Yes, he is the real deal,’ she agreed. ‘But I shouldn’t get too excited, Mollie. It will be Mr Silva’s people we’ll be dealing with. Not the man himself.’
Of that she was certain. He would review the data as it was presented to him, and obviously it would be his signature on the dotted line, but he wouldn’t be a part of the exhaustive day-to-day process of negotiation and due diligence.
