Nina Milne – Marooned With The Millionaire (страница 2)

‘What can I do for you?’

As always he felt a profound relief when he saw his little sister, and a sense of gratitude that her life had worked out—that she seemed to have adjusted after her shaky start. Now twenty-two, she was content and successful and in her final year of studying law at university.

Speaking of which... His smile vanished. ‘Shouldn’t you be at lectures?’

‘Relax. I’m free of lectures this morning. My tutor’s ill, so I thought I’d drop in.’

He should have known Elvira wouldn’t skip a lecture; for all his big-brother crackdown he knew that his sister took her studies seriously, and truly appreciated the opportunities life had granted her.

No, not life. Those opportunities had come courtesy of death—the death of their criminal, alcoholic, violent parents in a fire. The same fire that a twelve-year-old Marcus had rescued his younger sister from, the identical inferno he had failed to rescue his parents from. Jonny and Alicia Brockley had perished.

Marcus and Elvira had been adopted, and their lives had dramatically altered course. For the better. The knowledge was a permanent biting ache of guilt.

Marcus shook his head—now was not the moment for a trip down the ravaged and torturous twists of memory lane.

‘Anything in particular on your mind?’ he asked as he gestured for Elvira to sit, and waited as she curled up in the comfy chair he’d sequestered from one of the many rooms of the Lycander Palace. His office was a mishmash taken from the mounds of furniture stockpiled by previous royal incumbents.

‘April Fotherington turned up at uni today...for “a chat”.’

Marcus drummed his fingers on the desk in an irritated tattoo. April Fotherington was a writer for a popular upmarket celebrity magazine, and she was in the process of writing a feel-good article on the Lycander wedding. With an emphasis on feel-good. That had been the deal Marcus had made with the magazine’s editor-in-chief. In person. Emphatically.

So a question begged. ‘Why would April need to have a chat with you? You don’t know Frederick or Sunita.’

‘She wasn’t asking about them. She was asking about Axel. About the night of his death and his relationship with Frederick.’

Damn it to hell.

Axel. He had been Marcus’s best friend, Frederick’s older brother, tragically killed in a car crash two years before. ‘Do you think she knows anything?’

Elvira shrugged. ‘I don’t think she knows anything. But I think she suspects something is a bit off—which is a problem. April Fotherington is good at what she does and she may well pursue this angle.’

‘Did you give anything away?’

Elvira narrowed her eyes. ‘Of course I didn’t. Give me some credit, Marcus.’

‘Sorry—and I’m sorry you were put in this position.’

Frustrated anger welled inside him—the type that in his early years would have had him punching a wall. Now he had learnt to convert it into cold, hard determination.

‘I’ll deal with it. April won’t bother you again.’

‘Whoa—hold on.’ Elvira frowned. ‘Don’t go overboard—all she did was ask a few questions, and I may be completely wrong to think she suspects anything. She was perfectly nice about it as well.’

‘I get that. But I—’

‘You hate that your little sister is involved in this. But it’s not your fault. Or hers.’

Yet somehow it felt that way to him.

‘Thank you, Elvi.’ Marcus rose to his feet.

Elvira’s brow creased into deeper grooves. ‘Where are you going?’

He grabbed his leather jacket from the back of the chair and shrugged into it.

‘I’m going to give you a lift to wherever you want to go, and then I am going to do my job and close April Fotherington down.’

* * *

April glanced down at her notebook, then up and around at her hotel room. Situated on the outskirts of Lycander’s town centre, it was pleasant enough, though not extravagant—well within her editor’s budgetary requirements. The room’s impersonal anonymity suited her, being reminiscent of her own small London flat.

Chewing the end of her pencil, she stared down at the words she had written.

Fact One: Two years ago Axel, heir to the throne of Lycander, died in a fatal car crash after attending an official state function.

Fact Two: At said function Axel claimed that his younger brother Frederick had originally been asked to attend, and Axel had demanded to take his place.

Fact Three: Prince Frederick, then known as the Playboy Prince, instead attended a celebrity-packed party aboard a yacht.

Fact Four: In the here and now I have interviewed a political activist called Brian Sewell, who claims that, ‘Axel should never have been there. Frederick bailed out at the last moment to attend some jet-setting party and Axel stepped up—just like he always did. Frederick didn’t give a sh—Pardon me. He didn’t give a damn about Lycander; he only cared about himself and his hedonistic lifestyle. He should have died in that car crash, not Axel. Axel didn’t want to attend that function—he had other plans.’

April’s gaze lingered on the words died and car crash and black despair threatened, jabbing at every nerve-end, twisting her brain with jagged flashes of memory.

Her baby son’s face, his milky smell, the down of his hair as a newborn, the first gummy smile, the first toddling step... And then nothing. There would be no more firsts. No more anything.

Because Edward had died in a car crash.

Her fault—the knowledge throbbed and pulsed her brain.

Fact One: I was planning on leaving my husband, Edward’s father—Dean Stanworth.

Fact Two: Dean discovered my plans and arrived home in a drunken violent fury, snatched Edward and drove off.

Fact Three: He crashed, and both he and Edward perished.

Breathe, focus. She used all the tricks of the grief trade, so carefully learned, and tried to numb the pain. One last exhale and she was able to regard her notebook again, read the facts about Axel with structured dispassion. Able to block away the grief that clamoured behind the barricades.

The question now was: what next? Speak with Prince Frederick about it? No. Too soon. She needed further verification—after all, there was every chance her source was unreliable... Brian Sewell was a known anti-monarchist. Yet the intuition born of three years of dedication to her job—countless interviews—told her this was the truth.

Damn it.

She liked Frederick, she liked Sunita, and her commission was to write a happy piece—a feel-good fairy tale article that indicated belief in a happy-ever-after. April might not have achieved a happy-ever-after of her own, once the glitter had blown away her own personal fairy tale had decayed into a dark story of misery-ever-after. But that didn’t mean she begrudged happiness to others. However—and there always seemed to be a ‘however’—she believed in the truth.

If she had faced up to the truth earlier, tragedy might have been averted.

Relief swathed her as the phone rang, distracting her from another visit to the past. It was imperative she kept herself on track. Picking up the receiver, she identified herself.

‘Good morning, Ms Fotherington.’ The hotel receptionist’s professional bell-like tone was clear. ‘Marcus Alrikson is here for your meeting.’

Marcus Alrikson? Meeting?

April’s mind slalomed, raced, whirred as she considered the words. For a start she did not have a meeting scheduled with Lycander’s millionaire Chief Advisor, because he had made it crystal-clear that he didn’t see any need for one.

April hadn’t taken it personally—Marcus Alrikson hadn’t given a single press interview in the past two years. He was a man who wielded massive influence and acted behind the scenes. Of course she knew about him. A self-made millionaire by the age of twenty-five, thanks to his start-up company, Alrikson Security, and from a privileged background. He’d attended a prestigious school where he’d met Prince Axel of Lycander, and after Axel’s death he’d been appointed Chief Advisor to Prince Frederick.

She’d seen him before too, of course, but only from a distance or in a photo, or in the very briefest of video clips as he strode through packs of reporters. Enough for her to garner the sense of a man who radiated an aura of tightly self-contained power, and to register the fact that he had the looks and build to wow the public, if he so wished.

Yet that desire was quite clearly not on the man’s wish list—his expression always neutral with a veer towards grim.

So what was he doing here?

Clearly her meeting with his sister Elvira had rattled his cage.

Excellent.

‘I’ll be right down.’

Grabbing her oversized bag, she spared one glance at her reflection as she headed to the door. Good thing she always dressed ‘business casual’, and her wardrobe choices were simple. Today she’d opted for slim-leg trousers, a tucked-in shirt and a blazer. Sensible flat shoes. There was no need to do anything to her dark auburn hair; her chosen style was short, sleek and easy to maintain.

So she was ready to face whatever Marcus might throw at her—and she had no doubt there would be something. Marcus Alrikson was anti-press, and if he was here that meant his feathers had been seriously ruffled.