Singapore Fling with the Millionaire

by Michelle Douglas

  His confusion brought her to her senses.

  James Harrington was living his dream, the one they had shared in grabbed moments of privacy, in the precious, never to be forgotten, stolen half-term week that her parents had thought she was spending with an aristocratic school friend. He’d rented a cottage on the coast. They’d swum in the cold sea, eaten luscious food in the middle of the night, made love in front of the fire, totally consumed by their passion.

  Blissful, precious days when they hadn’t had to hide, but had lived their dream, planning the life they would have together one day in Paris. A fantasy world where, for a few short days, nothing could touch them.

  And then the stick had turned blue.

  James had done his best to convince her that he could take care of her and their baby, that they would be together no matter what. She’d wanted to believe him, but that fantasy had died with morning sickness. That was something you couldn’t keep secret in the hothouse atmosphere of school. Someone had heard her and ratted her out to matron.

  ‘Chloe?’ James kept her hand in his as she took a step back, attempting to reclaim a little dignity.

  ‘No...’

  Rage, despair, long hours working three jobs had taken their toll and she was no longer that Chloe. His Chloe.

  She couldn’t bear for him to see her like this and she wrenched her hand away, throwing it up to keep him back as she stepped back towards the door.

  ‘No!’ she repeated more forcefully as he took a step towards her.

  The fierceness of her rejection stopped him, giving her time to wrench open the door.

  ‘Chloe, wait!’

  The uncertainty was gone, now. All doubt.

  Ten years older, without the dewy freshness, the gloss, of the girl he’d known, pretending not to know him, to only speak French—he might have hesitated, been left with that disturbed feeling you had when you saw a stranger who looked like someone you once knew.

  That might have given her enough time to escape.

  But he’d always been Jay to everyone.

  James, soft and sweet, was the name she’d used when they were on their own. A stranger would not have clung to him, lips parted, inviting a kiss. No maid would abandon her trolley and run, and she knew that he would come after her, demanding answers that she did not have.

  He’d grown up in a hotel, knew his way around behind the scenes; there would be no hiding place and she didn’t wait to explain, to change. She just grabbed her coat, bag, boots and made her escape down the narrow lane at the rear of the hotel, the thin soles of her flats slithering on the icy cobbles.

  Once in the street, she was quickly swallowed up by the Christmas-shopping crowds laden with glossy carrier bags from the designer stores on the Rue Saint-Honoré, but she didn’t slow.

  She kept running until she was below ground in the safety of the Metro where she boarded the first train to arrive, pushing into the crush, heart pounding, shivering more with shock than cold, gasping for breath, as the train sped through the dark.

  It was early evening and the train had the steamy heat of transport packed with people wanting only to get home to their families, food and warmth after a hard day.

  Chloe didn’t see them, hear the coughs, the grumbles.

  She was lost in the memory of the last time she’d woken in James’s arms. His repeated promise that they would be together, that he would be there for her, always. The brief stolen kiss when he’d received a text telling him that he’d been picked to join the cricket team for a grudge match with a rival school on the other side of the county.

  It had never occurred to either of them to be suspicious.

  There had been no hint of anything other than an ordinary school day until she’d been called to the head’s office.

  The head wasn’t there. Her parents were alone and so, she’d realised, was she. Matron had pretended to believe her diet story, but it was clear that she had not been fooled.

  While she had been listening to Miss Kent drone on about Hardy, someone had packed her belongings and within ten minutes of being delivered into the hands of her mother and father she had been driven away from school.

  She had been cut off from the moment she’d left the classroom; there had been no way for her to leave a note, a message.

  James had known where she lived but even if he’d come after her, he wouldn’t have found her. They hadn’t taken the road towards their Hampshire estate, or the motorway into London.

  Frightened, she had asked her mother where they were going. Her only response had been to hand her a tissue and turn away.

  * * *

  James Harrington, stunned, scarcely able to believe his eyes, his ears, remained rooted to the spot.

  He had barely noticed the woman turning down his bed. He was still coming to terms with the sudden turn of events in London. The reappearance of his older brother after seventeen years of silence, the announcement that Hugo was the new owner of the Harrington Park Hotel.

  Once he’d recovered from the shock, heard his story, he’d been thrilled that his estranged older brother, Hugo, wanted both him and Sally to be involved in wiping out the bad years when their stepfather Nick Wolfe had been in control. Excited that he wanted them both to help him restore the hotel to the icon it had once been. But his return had dredged up brutal memories. That ghastly Christmas morning when he and Sally had woken up to discover that Hugo was gone, and no one would tell them where he was or when he’d be home.

  Their mother had done her best to fill the gap left by his absence, to be there for them. She had even signed the hotel over to Nick, no doubt convinced by him that it would give her more time to spend with her remaining children. The man was an ace manipulator.

  The car crash in which she’d died had shattered them both, and Nick Wolfe had been quick to rid himself of the burden of a couple of stepchildren.

  It had hit Sally especially hard and her reaction when Hugo had turned up out of the blue had been a release of all that anger, all the pain that had been bottled up inside her.

  He’d understood her inability to accept that Hugo had been forced to stay away, to empathise with what he’d been through, but it had been emotionally draining, his nights disturbed by the return of exhausting dream searches down endless corridors for those lost.

  His parents.

  Hugo.

  Chloe and the baby they had made.

  She had vanished off the face of the earth ten years ago and when he’d seen her reflection in the window beside him, he had thought for a moment that he was imagining it. That she was a phantom dredged up by those dreams.

  Then their eyes had met.

  He’d caught her as she’d swayed, felt her breath on his cheek, his lips. Could still feel the warmth of her hand where he’d grasped her fingers. Still, in his mind, feel the warmth of lips that had, for just a moment, been his to take.

  Instead, scarcely able to believe his eyes, he had hesitated, unsure, and she had run.

  Did she believe that he had rejected her?

  ‘Never!’

  Jerking himself out of shocked immobility, he wrenched open the door but wasted seconds had given Chloe time to disappear.

  She wouldn’t have waited for the lift and he raced to the staff stairs, which led straight down to a part of the hotel that guests never saw. He was down two flights before reality brought him crashing to a halt.

  If he burst into Housekeeping, chasing a woman who’d run from him, he knew exactly what they’d think. Bad enough, but he’d won a major television show, was the youngest chef ever to win a Michelin star for L’Étranger, the restaurant he’d founded on the back of his television fame.

  His face had been on the cover of enough lifestyle and food magazines to make him recognisable, especially here in Paris where food was a religion.

  He didn’t
care what they said about him, but speculation would be all over social media by morning.

  Until he knew why Chloe was working here, in Housekeeping, he needed to exercise discretion because something was wrong. Badly wrong.

  The Forbes Scotts were old money. The kind of people who lived behind a security cordon on their estate when they were in the country. In a penthouse apartment accessible only from a private lift in the city. Who spent their vacations on the private islands owned by their friends.

  Powerful, rich as Croesus, they could, as he’d discovered when he’d tried to contact Chloe, throw up a wall of silence as impenetrable as their security systems.

  He hadn’t seen or heard from her since she’d been whisked away while he’d been on the other side of the county, bored out of his mind, sitting out the game as twelfth man on the sidelines of the pitch.

  After all the publicity about the Michelin star he had, for a while, lived in hope that Chloe might walk into L’Étranger one day; take in the clubby atmosphere of the ground floor, order a cocktail, ask to meet the chef. Or maybe arrive for the fine dining on the floor above with friends, a partner...

  At least send him a card offering her congratulations.

  Something. Anything.

  Pie in the sky.

  She might have smiled to see his success, perhaps remembered a doomed, youthful passion, but she would have moved on, married someone approved by her parents.

  She would definitely not want to have her life complicated by him turning up and demanding answers.

  Clearly, whatever had happened in the years since she’d disappeared from school, it couldn’t have been that.

  Did she marry someone her parents disapproved of? That wouldn’t be difficult. She’d warned him how it would be. Money spoke to money and anyone short of a multimillionaire would have been viewed as a fortune hunter.

  Did she have a family now?

  He leaned back against the wall, swept up in the memory of the anger, the pain of the young man he’d been. He’d had no illusions about the likely outcome of a youthful pregnancy caused by the urgency of their need for one another. His ineptitude.

  He pounded a fist into the wall.

  Did she think that he’d blame her? She’d warned him what her parents were like, how controlling they were, but with the arrogance of youth he’d dismissed her fears. He’d had the money his father had left him. A pittance compared to her family’s wealth, but enough to live the life they had talked about.

  He’d promised he would take care of her and their baby. Promised that they would be a family.

  He swore as his phone pinged a warning that it was time to leave for his meeting with the chef he hoped to recruit for Harrington’s. He turned to walk back up the stairs and paused as something glinted on the steps above him.

  He reached out and picked up a piece of crushed silver. It was, or had been, an art deco silver hairpin. He knew that because he’d bought it for Chloe’s seventeenth birthday, and it seemed likely that he’d stood on it on his rush down the stairs.

  He did not want to leave but Chloe was, for the moment, beyond his reach and time was short if Hugo was to have the hotel open for Christmas Eve.

  Louis Joubert was an old friend, but even so it was going to be a hard sell and he had the dramatic temperament to match his flair. He had squeezed in this meeting before starting service and keeping him waiting would not be a good start.

  James slipped the piece of silver into his pocket to deal with later.

  It was a crazy busy time of year for everyone and he should be in London, in his own kitchen, but he wasn’t leaving Paris until he’d talked to Chloe.

  Copyright © 2020 by Harlequin Books S.A.

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  ISBN-13: 9781488065323

  Singapore Fling with the Millionaire

  Copyright © 2020 by Michelle Douglas

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

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