Temptation Island

Praise for

Victoria Fox and her debut book,Hollywood Sinners

‘This summer’s hottest novel. Hollywood Sinners … is giving Jackie Collins a run for her money.’ That’s Life!

‘Sure to be a huge hit and perfect for the beach’

Sun

‘We should’ve seen the twists in this sinful bonkbuster coming, but two of the surprises were so shocking that we ended up startling the other commuters on the bus!’

Now

‘The heady mix of corruption, glamour, lust and power is guaranteed to keep you up late into the night.Get your scandal fix here!’

Closer

‘This debut novel is full of sex, glamour and divas!’ 4 stars

Star

‘Scandalous. Glamorous. Sexy. Victoria Fox’s sassy, sparkling debut puts the bonk back into bonkbuster!’

Lovereading.co.uk

‘A juicy tale of glamour, corruption and ambition.

A cracking read’

Jo Rees, author of Platinum

‘A glorious, sexy story of high-octane Hollywood intrigue—I loved it.’

Lulu Taylor, author of Heiresses and Beautiful Creatures

‘Just what the devil ordered—salacious secrets, illicit sex and wicked deception’ J J Salem, author of The Strip and Tan Lines

‘For a trip to ultimate escapism, take the Jackie Collins freeway, turn left at Sexy Street, right at Scandal Boulevard.Your destination is Victoria Fox’s Hollywood.’

dailyrecord.co.uk

Temptation

Island

Victoria Fox

For Mark

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thank you to my editors Kim Young and Jenny Hutton, whose wisdom, guidance and commitment has meant the world to this book. To the whole team at HQ, especially Mandy Ferguson, Tim Cooper, Nick Bates, Oliver Rhodes, Claudia Symons, Elise Windmill, Jason Mackenzie, Clare Somerville, and Donna Esiri and Debbie Clements for the beautiful covers. To Madeleine Buston for being a phenomenal agent, and to Clare Wallace, Mary Darby and Rosanna Bellingham for their stellar work. I’m also grateful to Tory Lyne-Pirkis at Midas PR who is the best publicist I could wish for.

Special thanks to Victoria Stonex and the Consultancy for her ideas at the beginning and her insight at the end. Also to Kieran Lynch for an afternoon of plotting in a Lake District pub; to Jo and Jeff Croot for bringing tea in the morning and wine at night; to Seth Dawes for talking to me about New York; to Ross and Angie Freese for their friendship (and to Louis for when he’s older); to Kate Furnivall for her advice and encouragement; to Emily Plosker, Joe Martin, Matt Everitt and Ben Sanders. To Chloe, Sarah, Laura, Jimmy, Tay, Finny and everyone from school who remembers the LBM. To Mum and Dad. And to Mark Oakley for his patience, his imagination, and for believing that anything is possible.

Prologue I

Present Day

Island of Cacatra, Indian Ocean

Had it not been such a clear night, the moon so bright and the air so still, her body might not have been visible where it moved uncertainly, facedown, at the surface of the water. As it was, the pale skin of her shoulder glowed sickeningly in the silver light, one strap of her gown fallen and bound to her like seaweed, its jewels glinting bright as the stars that pierced the sky above.

In the distance, the low thump of music and faraway cries of merriment. The megayacht twinkled on the horizon, its outline lit gold against the black ocean, a winking diamond guillotining the depths. The grand vessel was scene to the birthday party of the year: a lavish, abundant celebration for which no expense had been spared. On board, a host of VIPs, from Hollywood stars to Olympic idols, from dazzling supermodels to the government’s elite, from singers, actresses and dancers—beautiful people the globe over—to the cream of the entrepreneurial world, partied as midnight came and went. All were oblivious to the quiet outside, around, below: unaware that, beneath their feet, a secret was drowned, soundless and stifled in the endless deep.

She had not been dead long, half an hour at most. The tide was strong, had rocked her body towards the shore, gently so as not to wake her, the water kissing her cold skin. Her arms were spread wide, her hair tangled like the ropes of a shipwreck, once bound to great beauty but now cut loose on the strange unknown. Her dress had been torn in the struggle, a red slit bleeding uselessly where the dagger had entered.

If she had been asleep, the coarse shingle would have woken her now. A scratch to the belly before, with a final, sad push, the water deposited her. Quiet as silk, it noiselessly retreated.

A little way down the beach, a small boy was hunting for sea turtles. His father had told him they came in to lay their eggs at night, leathery things whose shells shone white in troughs of sand. He wasn’t supposed to be here—Miss Jensen, the housekeeper, would murder him—but it was boring waiting inside the mansion. He squinted at the yacht, hundreds of miles away, it seemed, and wished he could be there instead of here. They told him that one day it would all be his: his great inheritance. Crouching at the water’s edge, the palm of one hand cradling his chin and the other blindly raking the beach, it was hard to believe. His knees were damp from where he’d been on them, combing the smooth, still-warm sand for that final, important discovery.

His fingers curled round it instinctively at first, like a baby’s around its mother’s thumb. It felt like net, the ones he caught crabs in, but it clung to him too unhappily for that, as if by holding on it could force him, maybe, to look.

When he did, he knew it was bad. His fist was buried in a knot of wet stuff, too sticky, too like cobweb, too … human. Strands of it across his skin, darkened by its journey over the water, a thickness so much like hair, and the solid bump of skull beneath; the yielding scalp.

The boy’s scream ruptured the quiet. It came from somewhere in him that until then he hadn’t known existed, somewhere basic and raw. The island gasped with the force of it, trembling in the vastness of its ocean pillow, and seemed to open one eye in recognition, as if it knew all along it was about to be discovered.

II

One day earlier

Twenty-four hours to departure

Reuben van der Meyde disembarked his yacht with the air and importance of a king. And he was a king, damn it—at least in this part of the world, where it was easy to forget that land and civilisation existed beyond the clean blue line of the horizon. The end of the earth, the van der Meyde sightline: as far as Reuben was concerned, Cacatra was it.

Despite the lightweight linen shirt he’d had his housekeeper leave out, Reuben was sweating buckets. He could feel it down his back, pooling in a horseshoe under his arms and sticking in the doughy folds he was trying halfheartedly to shift. Christ! When did he start perspiring out of his ears? Removing his baseball cap with an irritable swipe, he patted his head with a handkerchief and dug about a bit in his ear-holes. At last, satisfied, he strode purposefully off down the beach, thoughtfully scratching the ginger fuzz on his chin.

Preparations were in order: he had checked the boat, talked to the organisers, sorted the charity raffle … what next? In twenty-four hours everybody who was anybody would join him to celebrate his sixtieth birthday, a party in honour of, arguably (though Reuben saw no point in arguing an indisputable fact), the richest and most powerful man on the planet. Each guest had received their invite months previously, but it was hardly as if they could forget the only social event worth bothering about this year. All that time his people had been fielding calls from neglected stars—singers and models and actresses, politicians, art dealers, writers; names and faces who’d thought they were good acquaintances but clearly hadn’t made the cut. He’d had to slash a few loose. You didn’t get to where Reuben was without making a few sacrifices.

Initially he had purchased Cacatra as a business enterprise: an exclusive island getaway for the rich and famous, a destination for relaxation and rehabilitation, shelter from the glare of the spotlight. But these days he was living here more and more. The island’s lush vegetation, its azure water and golden sands, offered a man exiting middle age the kind of respite he needed. Cacatra was a safe place, a beautiful place. There weren’t enough of those left in the world.

Set back from the beach, up a series of winding stone steps, was the van der Meyde mansion. A white colossus overlooking the ocean, circled by glittering fountains and emerald palms, it had been built to a template of exacting standards and now, as voted for several years ago in a major US lifestyle publication, boasted the title of Most Desirable Residence in the World. It wasn’t sufficient. Reuben had plans to improve the place further, beginning with extending the already gargantuan swimming pool to a multi-tiered affair that fed directly into the ocean. It was his entrepreneurial spirit, exactly how he had made his fortune: he would think of the most outrageous idea he could and then test himself—dare himself—to go ahead and do it.

Not today. He had a party to get on with first.

Margaret Jensen, his housekeeper, was waiting at the main entrance. She was a small, birdlike Englishwoman in her forties with poker-straight mouse-brown hair that hung limply to her shoulders and quick, darting eyes. She moved swiftly, purposefully and with a touch of fuss, in the way efficient people sometimes do.

‘Is everything all right, Mr V?’ she enquired as he swept past, flip-flops slapping the polished floor. It was what he liked to be called. ‘The boat looks impressive.’

‘Fine.’ Reuben’s brutal Johannesburg accent pinched the word thin. He threw his cap on to a dark-wood chest, a grossly expensive African piece he’d had sourced at an auction in the spring. The slogan across the front of the cap read: DO IT BEFORE YOU CHANGE YOUR MIND.

Reuben opened the door to his office, wishing that Miss Jensen could keep to the point and not feel it necessary to stick her beak in. He supposed she imagined she had the right.

Ill at the thought, he closed the door and strode over to his desk. Of course the yacht was impressive: that was the whole bloody point. Everything Reuben van der Meyde did was in pursuit of admiration. He was a god, and he expected his people to treat him as such.

He flicked on his Mac, wondering if he’d heard back about the Asian possibility. There was one unread message in his inbox, from a coded address he didn’t recognise, and he clicked on it lazily, easing himself back in his chair with a greasy squeak of leather. Behind him the panoramic ocean view stretched out.

I’m one of them.

Tomorrow the truth comes out.

Reuben watched the message for a moment. He leaned in. He frowned at it. Then he got up from his desk and pulled open the door.

‘Margaret.’

Instantly Miss Jensen appeared in the hall. ‘Yes, Mr V?’

‘Where is Jean-Baptiste?’

Margaret swallowed her nerve. JB was the man every woman wanted. It was wrong, because the things he did were terrible. She knew he was as cool and ruthless as her boss, and yet the Frenchman wore his secrets well. His were uncharted waters; she had always thought so. She would catch him, sometimes, deep in thought, and the way he was with the boy …

But Reuben only ever used the man’s full name when something was the matter.

‘I haven’t seen him,’ she said carefully. ‘Is there anything I can help you with?’

Reuben forgot his manners. ‘Do you really think an issue for which I require Jean-Baptiste could possibly be one you would be capable of handling?’

‘I’m sorry—’

Reuben slammed the door.

It was a hoax. But how had this person got into his private account? Only a small clique was permitted: Jean-Baptiste being one of them, and a handful of selected clients.

Pinching the material of his shirt between two fat fingers, Reuben fanned air on to his sweaty chest. Despite his self-assurances, his heart was throbbing against his rib cage.

Thump, thump, thump.

Fuck it. No one was more powerful than him. This party was going to go off without a hitch and then he’d trace whatever joker had dared stray into his personal business. For that was what it was: business. He was a businessman. The things he’d done … well, they were to make money. And make money they most certainly had. He wasn’t about to start unravelling a moral fibre he wasn’t even sure was there. Conscience was for pussies—not for him.

This time he buzzed for Margaret, couldn’t tolerate facing her scarcely concealed rapture at whatever drama had now been thrown his way.

‘Get me a girl,’ he instructed as soon as she came on the line. ‘And make it quick.’

There was only one thing he needed right now: a fucking blow job.

Book One

2008-9

1 Lori

Loriana Garcia Torres was reading a novel. It was a good one. The hero was about to enter, a brooding, misunderstood lover with vengeance in his heart.

Dark hair fell over her face and she pulled the wild curls back with one hand, gathering them at the base of her neck. The Tres Hermanas beauty salon, a dusty-walled, graffiti-plastered enterprise in LA’s Eastside was, as usual, empty.

Anita approached the counter. ‘Trash needs takin’ out,’ she sneered, her features contorted with their usual combination of spite and boredom. ‘Get to it.’

Lori tore herself away. At seventeen, with skin the colour of the desert at sunrise and wide, thick-lashed gold-black eyes, she was sexy, even though—perhaps because—she had never had sex. Hers was an irresistible age. On the cusp of womanhood, she still possessed a childlike innocence that rendered her very Spanish beauty incomparable. Her stepsisters, themselves a few years older and with none of Lori’s charm or kindness, hated her for it.

‘I’ve been here since six,’ she replied. ‘This is my first break.’

‘This is my first break,’ Anita mimicked as she chewed gum with an open mouth. It was obscene, the way she did it, because she was wearing so much lipgloss. The hand on her hip was crowned with curled fingernails, each one several inches in length, and heavy hoops pulled fatly at her earlobes. ‘Been busy readin’ that garbage?’ She snatched the book, regarding its pages with disdain. ‘There’s jobs gotta be done round here, quit makin’ excuses.’

‘I’m not. I haven’t stopped all day …’ Lori trailed off under the scorch of Anita’s glare.

‘And you won’t now.’ Anita smiled sweetly and turned up the Jay-Z track on the radio. ‘Or I’ll tell Mama and Tony about Rico. And you wouldn’t want that, would you?’ Rico was Lori’s boyfriend. The Garcias could never find out she was seeing him—they’d go crazy.

Lori’s gaze raked over Tres Hermanas: the cracked mirrors bolted to the walls; the sickly pink of the salon seats, damp and rubbery in the sticky summer heat, their mock leather peeling like sunburned skin; the stained porcelain bowls where she washed through all that tough hair; the acrid smell of ammonia. She hated it. Every second she was here she hated it.

Life hadn’t been easy since her mother had died, ten years ago now. Tony, her father, had swiftly remarried, acquiring a new family: Anita and Rosa, jealous of her beauty and dead-set on making her life a misery, and a stepmother, Angélica, whose mean stare and sideways looks gave Lori the impression she could well do without the nuisance of a ready-made daughter. Unable to abandon the hopes and dreams of her parents, Lori had left school and joined the business, working till her bones ached and her feet blistered. It wasn’t enough. Her sisters’ attitude had driven clients away and now the salon was spiralling rapidly into debt and disrepair.

Lori had no money and no prospects. The days were long and the pay virtually non-existent, and while Anita and Rosa wasted no time spending their share, on cheap clothes, cigarettes and men, Lori put hers straight back into the enterprise. She did it because she loved her father and she didn’t want him to suffer—not more than he already had.

It wasn’t a life. It was endurance.

Rosa emerged from the back, where she’d been smoking out in the yard. Rosa was the eldest and overweight. She sported a cap of slick dark hair, which she tweezed into little hook-like curls at the sides of her face.

‘Loriana thinks she’s done enough for one day,’ chirruped Anita. ‘Got better stuff to do.’

‘Oh, yeah?’ Rosa shot Lori a scornful look. ‘Like what?’

Defeated, Lori rose from the counter. It was easier than arguing. Once upon a time she’d have stood up for herself, given as good as she got, but the reality was she was outnumbered. The only person on her side was Tony—or, he had been. These days he seemed to have given up, the endless loans and threats from the bank and demands for payment finally wearing him down. He’d become weak, let Angélica take over with her punishing schedules and harsh government, at least where Lori was concerned. No, she was by herself. That was all there was to it.

The salon door opened and Rosa’s only appointment of the afternoon wandered in, a mean-faced black girl with a tired weave. She slumped into one of the salmon-coloured chairs and threw a glance Lori’s way. ‘I want hair like hers,’ she declared. It wasn’t the first time a client had requested curls like Lori’s, something that was impossible to pull off. Rosa glowered.

Anita released a satisfied puff as Lori began mopping the floor. ‘You’re lucky to have a job here, y’know,’ she mused, leaning over the counter and lazily examining her nails. She’d always been a bully, was born with it in her character, intrinsic as genetics.

‘My family started this place,’ Lori fired back. ‘So don’t tell me I’m lucky to be here.’

It was a petty observation, but nevertheless the truth. Lori’s parents had been proud, God-fearing, hard-working people: they’d been dirt poor but they’d been happy, arriving in America with barely two cents to their name and taking out a loan to build their own business. Purchasing one of a chain of beat-up shopfronts in a down-and-out part of LA, over the years they had watched it grow into something about which they could be proud.

Then her mother had died. Too quick, too sudden, too horrible. Through a shroud of grief, Tony had allowed himself to be comforted by the first person who claimed they wanted to listen. Angélica had pounced on a vulnerable man and an exploitable business. In the weeks that followed, Pelobello had become Tres Hermanas, and from there it had begun its descent. Lori tried desperately to keep its head above water but she worked thankless, endless hours. After a while, it got to a person. It made them feel useless and hopeless. It made them feel broken.

Lori refused to accept this was her future. A light glimmered inside her. Some days she thought it was her mother, still with her; others, the glowing, insistent ember that kept her alive. Change would come. She’d know when it did.

‘I’m done,’ she said now, shoving the mop back in its corner. Anita’s horrified expression appeared in one of the salon mirrors.

‘Don’t you dare think about it!’ she crowed.

‘I’m not thinking about it.’ Lori grabbed her bag. She changed from the uncomfortable plastic heels made obligatory by Angélica into her favourite worn Converse. ‘I’m doing it.’

‘You can’t leave,’ Rosa bitched, jabbing a pair of styling scissors in Lori’s face. ‘You’ve got another hour and you’re workin’ every second of it!’

‘Or what?’ She scooped up a stack of battered paperbacks from under the counter.

‘You’d better not be meetin’ Rico!’ one of them screeched, but she couldn’t tell which. ‘You won’t get away with it!’

Lori pulled open the door, hearing the familiar, hated metallic buzz that announced her departure. She held the books tightly to her, remembering the worlds they kept inside: other worlds she dreamed of when she lay in bed staring into darkness, imagining what opportunity, what possibility, tasted like. Sweet, she decided, like honey.

Things would be different. It was only a matter of time.

I will get out of here, Lori Garcia vowed. One day. One day I’m going to be free.

2 Aurora

‘So, do you want to fuck?’

Mink Ray, sixty-something rock star fresh from a comeback tour with The Bad Brothers, put down his brush and gazed, stoned, at the canvas he’d been working on.

‘Looks like shit,’ he complained.

Aurora Nash ground out her half-smoked joint and sat up. She was naked. ‘I’m offended.’

‘I doubt it.’

‘Let’s see.’ She peeled herself off the couch, one of several sunken offerings in Mink’s Hollywood apartment. Aurora was tall, about five-nine, with short ice-blonde hair and glacial blue-grey eyes. Her tits were small and high on her chest, the nipples dark and stiff. She hooked an arm round Mink’s waist. He was wearing his customary leather jacket and it felt weird, quite horny, against her skin. ‘It’s not that bad,’ she pouted, secretly thinking it was dire. She couldn’t work out if it was meant to be abstract or if Mink was just a crap artist.

‘What’s that?’ She pointed at a jagged torpedo thing in the middle of the picture.

‘Your tit,’ he commented lazily, sparking up a cigarette and ambling to the bar, where he poured them both drinks.

‘You promised me it would be tasteful,’ Aurora teased, not minding at all. How tasteful was it ever going to be? She was posing nude for her friend’s dad, rock star legend and now, apparently, frustrated artist.

‘It is,’ Mink said, chucking back the dark liquid and immediately filling another. ‘You couldn’t tell what it was, could you?’

Aurora faced him, unabashed. She put a hand on her hip and felt Mink’s gaze rake over her young body. Her skin was smooth, flawless, smelled fine … and she knew it. ‘My turn.’ She arched an eyebrow at his leather-clad crotch. ‘Let me draw you.’

Mink snorted by way of reply. He fingered the blinds on the window, allowing a sliver of mid-afternoon light to stream in. It illuminated the crags on his face, features addled by years of alcohol and drug abuse and who knew what else. Aurora found it sexy. When he let go, the apartment returned to its den-like state. Aurora joined him at the bar and slipped on to a stool, crossing her long legs and in doing so folding away the light triangle of butter-coloured hair between them. She caught Mink watching.

‘Wanna get bombed?’ he asked, squinting as she took a slug of her drink.

‘What are you offering?’ She trailed her pinkie around the rim of the glass.

Mink knew he should suggest she wear a robe. He didn’t.

‘How old are you anyway?’ he growled.

‘Old enough to fuck.’

‘Yeah, right, missy.’

‘I’ll be nineteen next year.’ Aurora was guessing this was an acceptable number to him. Mink must’ve done all sorts in his day.

He narrowed his eyes. ‘More like eighteen.’

‘Whatever.’ Finishing the drink, she pushed her glass out for a refill. Mink obliged. As she padded back to the couch she could feel Mink’s gaze fixed on her ass.