Chapter 2
CHAPTER TWO
“Well?” Fergus prompted seconds later in a hard voice when Thea Morgan still hadn’t answered his question.
He’d been totally surprised when, given the opportunity to have a closer look at the woman following him, and after she’d told him her name was Thea, he had instantly recognized her as the daughter of Jessica Morgan. A woman he had dated briefly ten years ago but had regretted doing so for far longer than that after she had tried to trick him into marrying her.
It wasn’t just this young woman’s name that had revealed her identity to him. It was her eyes too. He had never seen eyes like them, before or since that brief meeting with Thea ten years ago.
Admittedly, their meeting had occurred in far from ideal circumstances. Fergus had driven Jessica to the hospital after an urgent telephone call from her daughter interrupted their dinner together. It was the first Fergus had heard of her even having a daughter.
Nor, when they reached the hospital, had Thea been the infant he had been expecting, but a girl in her early teens.
Thea had been in obvious pain, lying on a gurney waiting to go into the operating theater once her mother had signed the consent form for her to have her appendix removed. But even shadowed with pain, the girl’s gold-colored eyes had been arresting.
Her eyes were still that pure and natural gold Fergus had found so mesmerizing that evening ten years ago.
Well…pure was possibly stretching things a little, considering whose daughter Thea was and that she was now aged twenty-four.
But Fergus knew he had never seen eyes this color before or since he had looked into Thea Morgan’s all those years ago.
He realized he still found her eyes beautiful.
But he now found her arse bitable as well?
His lips thinned at the realization that, yes, he now found Thea’s arse eminently bitable. “I’m rapidly running out of what little patience I have left, so I advise you to start talking,” he warned.
She sighed. “A lot has happened since we last met. Too much to be condensed into a couple of sentences.”
He studied her for several moments before nodding in the direction of an empty bench situated ten feet away. “Let’s sit over there, and you can explain exactly what those things are.” He had no intention of inviting her back to his office, and his next appointment wasn’t scheduled for another hour.
He had to force himself not to look at her arse as he followed her across the pavement.
Thea, obviously totally unaware of his inward struggle, waited until they were seated next to each other on the bench before continuing. “My mother remarried five years ago.”
He nodded. “I saw the pictures of the wedding in the newspapers.” His mouth twisted at the memory. “As soon as I knew the name of her bridegroom, the phrase ‘go big or go home’ came to mind,” he derided.
She nodded. “Because my mother married the Russian billionaire Andrei Yegorov.”
“The Russian oligarch Andrei Yegorov,” he corrected dryly. “A man who, like several of his fellow countrymen, stripped Russia of its wealth thirty years ago before moving to live in the decadent West. He was also thirty years older than your mother when she married him.” He stated the facts as he knew them. “Yegorov conveniently died three years later, no doubt leaving Jessica the majority of his ill-gotten gains. Which, in turn, I presume have now passed on to you?”
She swallowed. “All that is true except the part about the money. Andrei and my mother had a prenuptial agreement in which she would inherit a fixed sum of money if he died, and not the majority of his fortune that you’ve just assumed she did,” she explained when he raised a questioning brow. “The bulk of Andrei’s fortune went to his son, Lev Yegorov.”
“Who is just as much of a crook as his father was before him,” Fergus dismissed with disgust.
She nodded. “Since my mother died, Lev has made it clear he wants that money returned to him.”
Fergus narrowed his eyes. “You said his father and Jessica had a prenuptial agreement.”
Thea nodded. “Which Lev threatened to legally challenge within days of my mother’s death on the basis his father was suffering from the beginnings of dementia when he signed the agreement and that his condition had noticeably worsened by the time he died.”
“Had it?”
She shrugged. “With a man like Andrei, it was hard to tell.”
His eyes narrowed. “How much money are we talking about?”
“Fifty million pounds.”
His brows rose. “And that wasn’t the majority of Yegorov’s fortune?”
“About one percent of it,” she acknowledged heavily. “I actually offered to give Lev the money back, but he’s now decided he wants more from me than that.”
Fergus’s eyes narrowed on the increased pallor of her cheeks. “Such as?”
She released a heavy sigh. “He says the money can be returned to him as some sort of dowry when the two of us marry.”
Fergus glanced at her ringless left hand. A hand, he noted with self-derisive admiration, that was as slender and graceful as the rest of her. “I don’t see an engagement ring?”
“Because I have no intention of becoming Lev’s fourth wife!” She gave him an exasperated glare. “ He’s the one saying I’m going to be his wife. I wouldn’t willingly marry him if he was the last man on earth.”
“Isn’t that denial a little overkill?” Fergus mocked. “After all, you’ve just said the man is a billionaire.”
She snorted. “Have you met Lev?”
“I try to avoid being in the same vicinity as Russian gangsters.” Which, Fergus immediately realized, wasn’t completely true.
Because he and the rest of his family were now friends with Nikolai Volkov, the man who was second to the pakhan of the London bratva.
Nikolai had been instrumental in reuniting Fergus’s cousin Rufus with his daughter, whom they had all thought had been killed in a car accident with her mother when she was a baby. For years, Rufus and the rest of the Wynter family had all believed Emily to be forever lost to them.
The truth of that situation was far more convoluted than that, but the only thing that really mattered was that Rufus had his fully grown-up daughter returned to him. Nikolai Volkov and his wife, Daisy, were now godparents to Rufus’s granddaughter, Lily.
As a consequence, the rest of the Wynter family were now also acquainted with Daisy and Nikolai.
The cold and lethal Russian was known and feared as the Wolf in his home country and by the rest of the world. His lack of mercy when dealing with his enemies said he more than lived up to that name.
But if Nikolai decided he liked you and became your friend, and he seemed to have decided he liked and wanted to be a friend of the Wynter family, then he became your ally for life.
Thea glared impatiently at his dismissive answer. “Lev is almost sixty and for years has overindulged in vodka and donuts.” She grimaced when Fergus smiled. “Yes, I’m aware it’s a strange combination, but apparently, he’s always liked Russian vodka, and he discovered his liking for donuts after moving to the States when he left Russia with his father thirty years ago. Andrei moved to England fifteen years ago. Lev didn’t move here until after his father died.”
“When you were twenty-two?”
“That would be correct.”
“And he was already in his midfifties?”
“Yes.”
“And now the two of you are going to be married?”
She gave an obviously impatient shake of her head. “Will you please at least give me the courtesy of listening to what I’m telling you?”
“But you said?—”
“What I said was I wouldn’t willingly marry him.”
Fergus stilled. “Yegorov is forcing you to marry him?”
She shrugged. “He hasn’t gone that far yet, but I’m sure he’ll get around to it eventually. He isn’t known for accepting the word no, any more than his father was.” She gave a shudder. “The first time Lev asked me to marry him was at my mother’s funeral four months ago. I refused.”
“Before or after you offered to give him the fifty million pounds back?”
“Both! Knowing where it came from, I’m never going to touch a penny of it anyway, so he might as well have it.”
Fergus inwardly acknowledged that attitude was the total opposite of Thea’s money-grasping mother.
Jessica had been determined to marry a man she knew had money. The fact that she had eventually married Andrei Yegorov showed she had no scruples about how and where he had acquired that wealth.
Fergus knew that Jessica’s first husband, Thea’s father, had worked on an oil rig in the North Sea. But he had been killed in a freak accident six years before Fergus and Jessica met. He knew that she had survived after her husband died by living on the generous insurance payment she had received from the company he had worked for. But by the time Fergus met her, that money must have been dwindling, and she was on the hunt for a rich husband.
Unfortunately for her, Fergus hadn’t been looking for a wife, let alone a fourteen-year-old stepdaughter.
Thea frowned. “Lev has asked me to marry him several more times since then, and he’s always calling round to my apartment uninvited. He seems utterly convinced that I’ll eventually accept his marriage proposal,” she recalled with a disgusted wrinkling of her nose.
Fergus shrugged. “Maybe you’ll change your?—”
“Don’t even say it,” she warned vehemently. “I wouldn’t marry Lev if we were the last two people on the planet.”
Fergus snorted. “I can’t see too many women turning down his wealth. Despite his liking for vodka and donuts.”
“Well, this one did and will continue to do so.” Frustrated tears glistened in her eyes. “I am not my mother, Fergus.”
He was slowly beginning to accept that. Slowly. Because Jessica Morgan really had done a number on him all those years ago. “Lev Yegorov can’t force you to marry him. Nor am I clear on what you think I can do to help you with this situation.”
She drew in a deep breath. “I’m not here because of Lev. At least, I don’t think I am.” Her frown was pained.
“Explain.”
“Someone has been following me for the past couple of weeks. Stalking me,” she revealed.
“Perhaps Lev just employed a bodyguard to protect his future wife?”
“How many times do I have to tell you I have no intention of marrying him?” she snapped in annoyance.
“Well, he obviously hasn’t accepted your refusal as final if he keeps asking. A bodyguard he hired would have to follow you to be able to protect you. Besides, you’ve been following me the last two days,” he reminded. “And you’ve already said you don’t consider yourself to be a stalker.”
She sighed. “I’ve explained why I did that.”
“Because you weren’t sure I would even agree to see you, let alone hear you out.” She was probably right to have made that assumption, Fergus inwardly conceded. The name Morgan did not conjure up good memories for him. Far from it.
“My stalker isn’t a bodyguard hired by Lev,” she insisted.
“Tell me why you think that?”
“If it had only been that feeling of being followed, I probably wouldn’t think it at all, but when I came home from work one day last week?—”
“You inherited fifty million pounds four months ago and you still work?”
Her eyes narrowed. “You’re a billionaire and you still work.”
“Touché.” Fergus didn’t bother asking how she knew how much money he had.
He already knew, from this conversation alone, that Thea Morgan wasn’t just beautiful, she was intelligent and resourceful too. Far more so than her mother had been. Although, he was intrigued by the fact that Thea was still working, despite having recently inherited a fortune. Surely most people her age would have gone traveling for a while, if nothing else?
“Anyway,” Thea continued. “The moment I entered my apartment that day, and despite the fact the door was still locked, I knew that someone had been inside. A glance into my bedroom confirmed that suspicion when it was obvious someone had been lying on my bed and not only hadn’t bothered to straighten it again but had taken my favorite pillow with them when they left.”
“You have a favorite pillow?” Fergus repeated incredulously.
He’d slept in some pretty shitty places during the years he spent in the military, when having any sort of pillow would have been a luxury. A pillow was a pillow as far as Fergus was concerned.
Tell that to your luxury bedding and bamboo pillows the French designer told you “you simply must have” when you redecorated the house in Paris two years ago!
“You’re missing the point,” Thea snapped in irritation.
“Which is?” Fergus knew exactly what the point was. He just enjoyed watching the flare of angry color in Thea’s cheeks. Partly because it was better than the pallor, but mainly because it enhanced the pure gold of her eyes.
“That someone broke into my apartment and then lay down on the same bed where I sleep every night!” She looked ill just from talking about it.
“Then took your favorite pillow when they left,” Fergus stated evenly.
Her eyes narrowed to golden slits. “Could you stop focusing on the pillow and concentrate on the fact that someone broke into my apartment? It’s creeping me the hell out. The money and Lev’s insistence that I marry him are making it difficult for me to know who I can trust. Which is why I decided I not only needed to talk to an expert about my personal security, but also someone who I know can’t be bought or coerced by Lev.”
“Me?”
“Yes.”
“Lucky, lucky me! I’m sorry.” He held up a placating hand when she looked ready to explode into anger again. “But there are lots of capable security companies in London you could have consulted with. My cousin Rufus’s son-in-law is a member of the family-owned Kingston Security. Rufus and Magnus are both now based at the London offices of Wynter Security, and I’m sure either of them would have been happy to talk to you.” Rufus and Magnus were both a lot mellower since they married.
Thea shook her head. “I don’t know or trust your brother, cousin, or his son-in-law.”
“You don’t know or trust me either.”
“I might not know you, but I trust you.”
He gave a derisive huff. “I can’t imagine why you would.”
“Because everything I found out about you says you’re a decent and honest man. I believe that to be true because, despite deep provocation for you to behave otherwise, you were never less than a gentleman toward my mother and her machinations.”
He snorted. “And that’s your criteria for classing me as being trustworthy and a decent and honest man?”
That color stained her cheeks again. “Yes.” She sighed. “The money… Inheriting that money from my mother, Andrei’s money, even though I have no intention of ever spending any of it, makes it difficult to know who I can trust and who just wants to use me because they think I’m wealthy.”
“Because you are.”
“Only on paper. I told you, as soon as I can convince Lev he’s wasting his time trying to force me into marrying him, he’s going to accept the money back so fast, I’ll probably get whiplash.”
Fergus narrowed his eyes. “Are you referring to anyone in particular when you say people want to be with you because of the money?”
She seemed to hesitate for a second or two before giving a shake of her head. “No, I just… It’s difficult to explain, but my life no longer feels like my own with all that money sitting in a bank account with my name on it. I feel…wrong-footed, self-conscious that everyone knows about it. It’s making me suspicious of everyone and what their motives might be for wanting to know me. Yes, I know the name for that is paranoia, and that it could also account for me thinking I have a stalker,” she added self-derisively when he gave her a pointed glance. “I put it down to that too at first, but the break-in at my apartment and the…theft,” she said carefully, “told me I’m not imagining things.”
Fergus still wasn’t sure what he thought about all this. “Was your mother and Yegorov’s marriage a happy one?”
“I don’t think so, no,” she answered cagily.
“Because Andrei Yegorov wasn’t a nice man.”
“No.”
“Was he nice to your mother?”
“I…don’t believe so.”
“You don’t think so and you don’t believe so…?”
She shrugged. “I didn’t see them enough after the marriage to be able to give an opinion.”
“Separately or together?”
“Either.”
“Didn’t Yegorov help to pay your way through university?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“He never offered, and I never asked.”
“Your mother?—”
“Never asked or offered either. I was an adult, Fergus,” she defended when she saw the disgust in his expression. “By that time, I was more than capable of looking after myself.”
“That isn’t the point?—”
“It’s the only one that matters,” Thea insisted.
Fergus had never thought Jessica was a particularly good mother, indicated by the fact that she had left Thea home alone that evening when Jessica had received the call to go to the hospital. Thea had only been fourteen at the time, too young, in Fergus’s opinion, to be left at home on her own all evening in the middle of London.
It didn’t sound as if Jessica’s maternal leanings had improved much after that, and from the little Thea had said, it seemed that when Jessica married Yegorov, she had mostly abandoned her maternal role altogether. Possibly because, as had been the case when she dated Fergus in the past, she hadn’t wanted Andrei’s friends to know she had a grown-up daughter.
“My mother and I didn’t see each other often after she married Andrei,” Thea said, confirming that theory. “I was already working my way through university, and I preferred to carry on paying my own way rather than asking for any financial help. I knew how Andrei came by his money, and I’m pretty sure there would have been a price to pay on my part if I’d asked for any financial help from him. My mother and I would meet for lunch on birthdays and before Christmas, but otherwise, our lives were too different. We simply had nothing in common other than what was left of our familial connection.” She grimaced. “I’ve seen more of Lev the past four months than I saw of his father in the three years he was married to my mother.”
“Because Lev wants to marry you.” Fergus couldn’t quite hide the distaste he felt thinking of this beautiful young woman married to that old lecher. The Yegorovs, senior and junior, were both known for their drinking and womanizing.
The thought of that lecherous old bastard touching Thea, let alone caressing and making love to the bottom Fergus now coveted, made him feel like hitting something. Preferably Yegorov.
“Lev always wants what he can’t easily have.” Again, Thea confirmed some of what Fergus had been thinking.
“And this time, he wants you.”
“Yes.”
“You would be marrying a billionaire,” he reminded.
She lifted her chin, eyes narrowed. “Exactly what are you implying?”
They both knew what he was implying!
“My name is Thea, not Jessica,” she snapped before he could answer her. “I would never use deception to try to blackmail someone into marrying me. Considering our history, I would certainly never try to do something so awful to you. Besides,” she added mockingly, “as you’ve already pointed out, I already have one billionaire who wants to marry me, so I would have no reason to use subterfuge on another one.”
Fergus scowled. “I would like to think that there are noticeable differences between myself and Lev Yegorov.” Such as their almost twenty-year difference in age. Their personalities. The fact that Fergus kept his body in trim condition and Lev looked as if he overindulged on the vodka and donuts Thea had said he did.
Fergus was aware that a part of him was judging the daughter by the mother’s actions. But knowing Jessica Morgan, however briefly, had been a mistake he and his wallet had almost paid dearly for. Was it any wonder he remained wary about her daughter’s intentions now in seeking him out?
Although that fifty million pounds Thea had inherited from her mother and her aversion to marrying the very wealthy Lev Yegorov were both pretty good indications that Thea really wasn’t a fortune hunter like her mother.
That she had continued to work, even after inheriting all that money, was also indicative of Thea’s true nature.
As was the fact she had offered to return that fifty million pounds to Lev without a marriage needing to take place. In fact, she had made it perfectly clear how much she would prefer that it didn’t.
“What kind of work do you do?” Fergus prompted curiously.
She blinked at this sudden change of subject. “I’m a teacher.”
“Of what?”
“History.”
“Impressive. I’m being serious,” he assured when Thea eyed him skeptically. “Teaching isn’t an easy profession nowadays. I’m not sure it ever was,” he dismissed wryly. “I’m guessing this is the Easter holiday if you’re still actively teaching but currently spending time in Paris?”
“Yes.”
“History was one of my favorite subjects at school,” he reminisced. “I have my degree in History and War Studies.” He’d mainly been interested in the battles and strategy used to either win or lose them.
“I know.”
Of course, she knew. He had no doubts that Thea would have made it her business to find out everything she possibly could about him before she flew to Paris to speak with him. He would have done the same in her position.
Despite his derisive reaction earlier, Fergus could admit, if only inwardly, that it was worrying that someone had broken into Thea’s apartment.
It also didn’t seem like the actions of someone Lev Yegorov would have sent to watch and guard her. Not when whoever had broken in had also made themselves comfortable on the bed Thea slept in. Fergus doubted that the lecherous and possessive-sounding Lev would have liked that at all.
Fergus wasn’t sure where the theft of the pillow fit into that scenario, but its disappearance was as concerning as the rest of what Thea had told him.
The real question was whether he was willing to commit to going back to London with Thea to look into this situation more thoroughly.
Whether he was willing to test his own self-control by spending more time with her, when he knew how much he wanted to kiss and bite her delectable arse!