Outrageous Fortune

by Lulu Taylor

  Coco headed out to join Xander at the pool.

  The party started off tamely enough, with hip-looking young people arriving – most from the world of games designing and technology, some from the acting and movie world – all with tans, white smiles and plenty of smooth self-confidence. The girls wore shorts and cut-off tops, the boys slouchy tee-shirts and baggy jeans. Beers were cracked open, cigarettes lit and the barbecue started smoking away, producing masses of steaks and burgers, which were laid out next to huge bowls of juicy-looking salads.

  Coco stuck close to Xander, who seemed to have no problem talking to complete strangers, and tried to keep track of all the different people she was introduced to. From the corner of her eye, she was always aware of Will, his tall figure easy to spot as he moved among the guests. When he talked too long to another girl she wanted to rush over to interrupt them, but as she reached tipping point he would move on and she would breathe out with relief.

  Get a grip! she told herself fiercely. She’d never reacted to a guy like this before, but she couldn’t fight it.

  As the night went on the barbecue was eaten, more drinks consumed. The beers began to kick in and people relaxed. Soon they were swimming in the pool, playing mildly flirtatious games as boys tossed shrieking girls into the warm water, or amusing themselves in the games room. Someone had put music on and a few were bopping away on the terrace.

  The alcohol flooding her veins had loosened Coco up, and also made her feel sexy as hell. A guy at the pool tried to flirt with her, and she enjoyed the frisson. He was nice-looking too, but she could only think about Will. As her blood heated, she grew keener to find him. She began to wander about, making a slow circuit of the pool, wandering casually into the games room then into the house, looking for him without drawing attention to the fact. She found him at last, lying on the sofa of the sitting room, his phone clamped to his ear. He looked cross as he spoke. ‘To be honest, Megan, I don’t know. Please don’t keep hassling me. You know how it is and I’m pretty tired of this conversation … Yeah. OK. Talk to you tomorrow then.’

  He put his phone down as Coco came up, holding a mojito cocktail that someone had mixed for her outside. The rum was mingling nicely with the beer and giving her courage.

  ‘Hi,’ she said. ‘Everything OK?’

  ‘Yeah.’ He sighed and smiled ruefully. ‘It’s all good.’

  ‘Girl trouble?’

  ‘Well … sort of.’ He stood up, so tall, and radiating that incredible attraction that almost pulled her towards him like iron filings to a magnet. ‘Shall we go back to the party?’ he asked softly.

  Coco nodded and went to go ahead of him but tripped on her wedges and almost fell. As she stumbled, she felt a strong arm encircle her waist and hold her up as she righted herself, and she instinctively held on to it.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said breathlessly, as she looked back over her shoulder and found herself gazing directly into Will’s green-copper eyes. Her back was almost touching his chest and his lips were close enough that if she had moved forward, just a little, she could have kissed him.

  ‘You’re welcome,’ he said in a low voice.

  They stood like that for an instant longer than necessary, then Coco let go of his arm and he released her.

  ‘Dangerous things, shoes,’ he said teasingly. ‘They can lead you into all sorts of trouble.’

  Then they went back to the terrace, Coco hiding her trembling hands as best she could.

  57

  DAISY LOOKED OUT of the plane window at the miles and miles of taiga beneath her: the icy forest land that covered vast expanses of Siberia. She had heard of tundra, where the earth was permanently frozen hard and barren, but never before of this almost limitless, frosted, tree-covered landscape.

  The helicopter blades whirred above them and the shadow of the aircraft floated over the pine peaks below. They had flown up from Moscow in a private airplane to the city of Komsomolsk-on-Amur, a large, bleak, industrial-looking city on the far eastern coast of Russia, in the federal Krai of Khabarovsk. The city’s name, Darley told her, meant ‘Communist-Youth-Party on the Amur’, and from the looks of its grim, grey architecture, most of the place had been constructed to celebrate Stalinist ideals. But they hadn’t stayed there for long. A helicopter had been waiting to take them further north, away from the river basin and the industrialised city towards the frozen wastes beyond.

  ‘It’s enormous,’ breathed Daisy. The white landscape, with its ice-pruned, stunted trees, stretched away as far as she could see.

  Darley’s voice came through her headset. ‘Siberia is so big that even if it were an independent country, it would still be the largest country in the world. Makes you realise how vast Russia is.’

  Daisy gave him a sideways glance. He was in the seat next to hers, wearing an insulated black jacket that puffed up comically around his seat belt. ‘Are you going to be full of facts throughout this entire trip? You’re like a walking guidebook.’

  ‘I thought you might be interested,’ he said with a shrug. ‘I researched this area for a while.’

  Daisy turned back to continue marvelling at the view below. Yes, this was certainly an interesting little situation, to say the least …

  Darley Ross was a man of influence. When he’d agreed to appoint Daisy as his executive assistant, things moved quickly. He had cleared it with John Montgomery, who’d been sad to lose her but unable to do much about it. It was agreed that she would continue to administer the new chain of hotels from the Dangerfield HQ, though she would no longer be involved with the upgrading of the other Craven holdings, and the situation would be reviewed in six months.

  Within a fortnight, Daisy had found herself a flat to rent and had moved from Bristol to London. Driving into the city, the removal truck somewhere behind her on the M4, was an extraordinary moment. After her years of planning, she was actually returning to the place where it had all begun. She could hardly believe it had worked out the way she’d planned. And, to her incredulity, she actually had the means to bring the whole Dangerfield empire down. With a few words, she could expose the fraud that was sustaining the hotel division. Then the banks would call in loans and the whole delicately poised structure would collapse.

  She imagined Daddy’s face, the pleasure she would feel in the revenge, in the moment of his realising that the girl he’d cast aside, even had ‘killed’, had become his nemesis, destroying the thing he loved most in life – the precious company that his own father had built up.

  But then, she loved it too.

  Who knows what the hell I’m going to do? But the moment of reckoning is almost here.

  On the day she arrived at Dangerfield HQ, she was given her office ID and an induction into the systems of the great building that included a short film with a honey-voiced narration explaining how the Dangerfield Group had been created, grown and prospered, and what a privilege it was to be part of the global team.

  ‘With hotel, leisure and property interests all over the world,’ enthused the voice, ‘Dangerfield is the most exciting place possible to realise your career goals. This company needs your talents and can richly reward your efforts.’

  Daisy had thought herself so entirely into Daphne’s mindset that when Daddy suddenly flashed up on the screen, part of her almost wondered who the hell that fat man with the dyed hair was. He smiled into the camera and said, ‘I’m delighted that you’re joining our team. We value every member. Remember, you’re part of the Dangerfield family.’

  Daisy wanted to laugh. So she was a Dangerfield again, was she? Hmm. She had a feeling it wasn’t going to be quite that simple.

  At first she’d been so frightened of meeting Daddy that she’d come in to work very early and left long after she thought he would have gone, but she realised within a day or two that her chances of meeting him were in fact extremely slim. He went directly to the penthouse offices in the executive lift and saw only the most important directors who reported to him in his office. Even
so, the knowledge that he was sitting a few floors above her, oblivious of her presence, made her feel strange and nervous. She stayed in her office, burrowing deeper and deeper into the Dangerfield company, a tiny and unobserved mole slowly and surely working her way towards the heart of it. Soon she became certain of one thing.

  All Daddy’s employees hated and feared him with a passion.

  At the end of the first week Darley took her out to a small wine bar in a back street, far from the usual hangouts of Dangerfield employees.

  There, huddled over a small table with a candle burning in a Chianti bottle, he explained what his investment in Russia actually was.

  ‘I met a businessman called Sergei Anatolski, and we had a very interesting talk. He has hotel interests in Russia, and was keen to get Dangerfield to invest in his new venture of high-spec luxury hotels in Moscow, St Petersburg and Kiev. I thought it sounded like an excellent idea. We don’t have any Russian interests, after all, and it was a good prospect. We had an excellent dinner.’ Darley seemed lost in memory for a moment.

  ‘So you decided to invest?’ prodded Daisy. ‘That doesn’t seem such a terrible secret. Why didn’t you take this to the board?’

  ‘Well …’ Darley looked a little sheepish. ‘It wasn’t his hotels I invested in.’

  ‘Oh?’ Daisy looked at him askance.

  ‘He’s a very persuasive man. Very. He told me about a fantastic new business opportunity. He’d recently inherited a small patch of ground in Siberia, no more than a mile square, and it turned out he was sitting on several million tonnes of high-grade iron ore. Most of the iron-ore mines in Russia are owned by Russian steel companies, who’ve been buying up all the mines they can over the last few years to integrate their business and control the mineral supply. It’s rare to find an independent one like this.’

  ‘Iron ore.’ Daisy frowned. ‘Not my area of expertise, I’m afraid.’

  Darley took a swig from his glass of Burgundy. ‘Iron ore is needed for the production of cars, mobile phones, computers … just about everything we need for modern life. The Chinese are desperate to get hold of as much as they can and they’re keen to sign an exclusive deal for the mine’s ore.’

  ‘OK,’ Daisy said. ‘Sounds like an excellent result for your Russian friend.’

  ‘And it looked like it might be the answer to our losses on the Scottish links,’ Darley added. ‘Anatolski told me that the mine would make a fortune but that he needed some extra cash to fund getting the stuff out of the ground. A quick turnaround, he said. A cash injection and I’d double or triple my money in no time at all.’

  Daisy began to see how it all fitted together. ‘So you borrowed some money without authorisation to invest …’

  ‘Yes,’ Darley said unhappily, ‘to plug the gap and make back the cost of the loan, and more.’

  Daisy shook her head. ‘Oh, dear. Honestly, Darley, borrowing money on behalf of the company without authorisation … you might as well pack your prison clothes right now. And such a huge amount. How did you hide the loan on the company balance sheet?’

  He waved his hand in an impatient gesture. ‘Oh, it can be done, believe me. Maybe not for ever, but in the short term, with a bit of clever accounting. Anatolski needed help fast because he’d used all his cash to buy his brother out just before the iron ore discovery was made and had no money to invest in getting the damn’ stuff out.’

  ‘Wouldn’t the Chinese invest if they’re so keen on iron ore?’

  ‘They would – but at a price. They demanded joint ownership, and Sergei didn’t want that. In fact, everyone who was prepared to buy in wanted co-ownership, and he wasn’t prepared to give it because of his previous experience working with his brother. I was the only man who had cash, and didn’t want in permanently. All I wanted was the repayment of my money and a doubling of my stake in the shortest possible time. So we shook on it.’

  Daisy stared at him. The candlelight flickered on Darley’s full cheeks. The red wine had left a dark stain around his lips. The extent of his scheme was becoming clear now. It was clever, she had to give him that. Over-borrowing and looking for a quick return to get him out of a hole. Or, if it didn’t work, incredibly stupid.

  ‘You’ve met old Dangerfield, haven’t you?’ Darley said suddenly.

  Daisy shook her head.

  ‘He’s a miserable bastard. He inherited everything he had, but acts like he’s some kind of business genius. He isn’t. This whole company is a tangled mess and if it makes money, it’s more by accident than by design, or through the fact that some brilliant people are working here. Dangerfield believes in tyranny. He gets results through fear. He’ll destroy a man’s life and career on the flimsiest of pretexts.’ Darley rolled the stem of his wine glass between his fingers so that the ruby liquid tipped and swirled in the bowl. ‘He pays well. He offers good benefits. The company sucks you in, offers you home loans, helps with school fees and lots of tasty little treats. But after that, you’re a possession, a thing, with no right to be heard and no thoughts of your own.’ He looked up at Daisy dully. ‘I’ll be pleased to get out. And you’re a brave woman if you want to stay in.’

  Daisy blinked. It was strange to hear her father spoken of like this. The man she’d grown up worshipping and adoring and thinking could do no wrong was detested by everyone who worked for him. And, of course, I know the truth of that too. ‘Can’t he be got rid of?’ she asked slowly. ‘Can’t someone depose him?’

  Darley shook his head. ‘He could resign. He could be voted off the board, but that would never happen. We might all be very lucky and he could die – that’s what we’re all hanging on for. Maybe his son Will might come in and take over. He’s a successful businessman in the States. He can’t be any worse than his father anyway.’

  Daisy realised that she was biting her lip hard. People actually wished her father dead. What a terrible indictment of a man.

  ‘My problem is that things haven’t worked out as I’d hoped.’ Darley looked unhappy. ‘The mine isn’t anywhere near ready to produce the ore. Anatolski gave me to understand that he was on the brink of extraction, but it’s not happening. In fact, I’m flying out there next week to see what the situation is for myself. He’s being very evasive, but has hinted he might need even more money. So I’m going to take a look.’

  Daisy sat back to process all of this. ‘In that case,’ she said at last, ‘I’d better come with you. I want to see this mine too. We’ll need to find out the truth of the situation before we can make any decisions.’

  ‘Come with me?’ Darley looked disbelieving.

  ‘Of course,’ she replied coolly. ‘I don’t see any alternative if I’m going to help you. You’d better sort it out first thing tomorrow.’

  Now, as the little helicopter took her inexorably north to the Siberian mine where Sergei Anatolski was waiting for them, Daisy wasn’t so sure about her decision to come. This seemed like a hare-brained scheme that would probably result in the sack for both of them. She’d be lucky to get her old job as a chambermaid at the Excalibur after public disgrace like that. She tried not to think about it. It was a crazy throw of the dice, but if it worked, then it could prove the perfect way to implement everything she had planned and worked for.

  58

  COCO WOKE MID-MORNING and wandered out. The party had gone on late into the night, but Will had disappeared early and, once he’d left, her appetite for enjoying herself had died completely so she’d turned in as well. The pool area was tidy again, all signs of the gathering cleared away. She went into the kitchen where Maria waved her back outside, promising to bring breakfast out to her and appearing a few minutes later with a tray laden with cereal, yoghurt, fruit, coffee, juice and a basket of warm croissants. Coco sat at one of the tables by the pool to eat, and when Maria came back with milk, butter and honey, she asked where Will was.

  ‘Gone to work today,’ she said. ‘He’s in town. Might be back late. I never know.’

  How on earth am
I going to find anything out? Coco wondered. I never see the guy. He’s either shut away here or else at work. She could see that this might take time. Would she and Xander be able to stay here for as long as it took, without arousing suspicion?

  She finished her breakfast and settled down by the pool until Xander emerged from his room, white-faced and rather ill-looking, just in time for lunch. He’d got mightily drunk with a pretty girl from the Valley and had fancied his chances, but she’d left at dawn with a few of the others.

  ‘You’re pretty footloose, aren’t you, Xander?’ Coco teased, pouring him a glass of chilled water, which he drank gratefully.

  He shrugged. ‘I guess so. It’s just the way I am. One day I’ll settle down, but I’m still young, you know. Still lots of partying to do before I get all sensible and dull.’

  ‘And you think anyone’s crazy enough to take you on?’ Coco gazed at him through the lenses of her sunglasses. They gave Xander an almost healthy glow but when she peered over the top she could see the truth of his greyish skin and dark stubble.

  ‘You’d be surprised,’ he said, leaning back. ‘Actually, there’s a friend of my sister’s. A really sweet girl. She’s had a crush on me for ever.’

  ‘Don’t tell me you’ve used her and tossed her aside, please?’

  ‘Well …’ Xander looked a little sheepish.

  ‘Xander! You didn’t.’

  ‘Just once. It was rather romantic, if you must know. The two of us, under the stars, making love in an orchard … It’s an experience I remember with great happiness.’ He took a great swig of water and then sighed. ‘I’m no good for her really, but if I ever shape up – well, I can think of worse things than ending up with Imogen.’

  ‘Oooh, lucky Imogen, whoever she is!’ replied Coco caustically. ‘With that attitude, she’s in for a treat.’

  Xander picked up a napkin, screwed it up and tossed it at her. ‘Shut up. It’s a figure of speech. What I mean is, if I get my act together, then maybe we’ll fall properly in love. That’s all, you bloody pedant.’