Chapter 16
Cameron stood in his office and looked across to Hyde Park in the distance. It was a spectacular view full of cars and buses and the swarm of humanity that made up modern-day London. It was nothing he could have begun to imagine in his youth, much less ever supposed he might be a part of so easily.
Then again, how could he possibly have dreamed that at thirty-five he would be running a company worth billions of pounds, dressing in suits, and flying in a private jet instead of just fighting to keep himself alive with his bare hands alone?
His father never would have in his most fantastical moments of wishing for glory and honor for the clan Cameron imagined such a thing.
Yet there he stood, with the weight of all that on his shoulders, watching the traffic in front of him from the comfort of a luxuriously appointed office that had been decorated specifically to put souls at ease so they would hand him vast sums of their money to invest as he saw fit.
He was very fortunate, he knew it, and he was very grateful for it.
It gave him something useful to do, though it kept him away from Scotland more often than he liked. That hadn’t bothered him before.
It bothered him now.
He wasn’t sure he wanted to think about why.
So, instead, he contemplated where he was and how he’d come to be there.
Alistair Cameron had built Cameron Ltd. thirty years ago, then left it to Cameron six years ago upon his death, trusting that Cameron wouldn’t run it into the ground.
He supposed Alistair would have been pleased with the fact that he’d doubled the numbers in his personal Swiss bank accounts and expanded by an equal amount the number of pies Cameron Ltd.
had its fingers dipping into. For himself, he was merely grateful for the trust of an old man who had given him a chance at a new life.
It was certainly more than he could have hoped for eight years ago when he’d woken in hospital without a clue where he was or how he’d gotten there.
He dragged his hands through his hair and turned away abruptly from those thoughts.
He’d given far too much thought to his past recently and it had left him indulging in maudlin sentimentalizing.
It wasn’t something he did often, but he hadn’t been able to stop the impulse.
Then again, it was a bit difficult to ignore the past when it had so much to do with his current straits.
Fortunately, or perhaps not, it wasn’t his past that troubled him at present—it was Alistair’s. And thanks to a friendship made by Alistair during that past, Cameron found himself at the center of the bitter inner workings of a family that wasn’t his.
He pushed himself to his feet, walked around his desk, and began to pace from one end of his office to the other.
Though he would have liked to have laid the blame on Alistair for his troubles, he couldn’t.
Though Rodney Ainsworth and Alistair Cameron had been friends from their youth and carried on that friendship over years of business associations, it was Cameron who had kept up the relationship after Alistair had died.
He’d done it partly because it seemed fitting and partly because he genuinely liked Rodney.
It was through his visits with Rodney at Ainsworth Hall that he’d come to know Rodney’s children, Nathan and Penelope.
Well, perhaps know was too generous a word for it, especially where Penelope was concerned.
He’d only seen her on those rare occasions when she had deigned to grace her father’s hall with her presence between jaunts to this trendy locale and that exclusive resort.
She’d behaved herself enough to lead him to believe she was as well mannered and gracious as she was lovely.
He’d seen quite a bit more of Nathan and recognized him for what he was: completely reprehensible and without a shred of honor to call his own.
Nathan was aggressively disagreeable and never pretended to be anything else.
Cameron had, on one level, respected that.
At least with Nathan, he’d known what to expect.
Penelope’s true character had come as a complete, and very unpleasant, surprise.
He paused in front of the window again. None of it would have made any difference except for a pair of things he’d felt duty bound to see to because Rodney had asked it of him.
The first had been promising Rodney on his deathbed that he would do as the man wished and take care of Penelope.
The second had come after Rodney had drawn his last and Cameron had gone to look for Nathan and Penelope only to find them rummaging through their father’s desk for his will.
The absolute silence that had filled that room when Nathan had read that he, Cameron, was to be the executor of the will instead of Nathan himself had been almost frightening.
Nathan had stood there in a towering rage until he’d gotten himself under control, then nodded shortly and left, leaving the will lying on the floor behind him. Penelope had only smiled, complimented her late father on his good sense, then gone off ostensibly to grieve.
Cameron had then poured himself a very tall whisky from Rodney’s decanter, looked at it longingly for a bit then poured it down the sink before he rendered himself quite unfit to fight off the attack he’d been quite certain Nathan would mount the moment he could.
He hadn’t realized it was Penelope he needed to have guarded against until he was sitting at a jeweler’s first thing the next morning, paying a ridiculous sum for an enormously gaudy diamond ring to put on her finger.
He’d gone along with the idea at the time because he’d supposed Fate—and Rodney—had been taking a hand in his life and forcing him to wed.
He’d needed a wife who could move in his social circles with ease and he’d long since given up on finding someone to love.
He had hoped that in time he might become fond of Penelope.
It had taken approximately two hours after the ring was on Penelope’s finger for him to realize how impossible that would be. She’d shrieked at his chauffeur for some imagined slight and Cameron had wondered if it would be impolite to change his mind.
Before he’d decided how best to go about that—and by that point he’d been perfectly willing to write off that excessive bit of business on her finger—he’d found himself spending a night lying on the floor of his hotel loo, resting between bouts of heaving.
When he’d finally managed to get himself to his feet and look in the mirror, he’d been appalled to find his face the same color that Rodney’s had been for that last week of what had been a very rapid and unexplained decline.
Poison?
He’d wondered. He’d wondered about it quite a bit, actually.
First that unpleasant night, then finding himself mugged on a handful of occasions during his predawn runs through the city, then having his offices broken into and his hotel room ransacked.
All that had taken place in just the first month after Rodney’s death.
Cameron Antiquities hadn’t escaped assault either.
It had begun with the theft of a piece of lace Cameron had tracked down for a regular client.
The lace had turned up somewhere else and it had cost him a bloody great deal to buy again and put in the right hands—far more than he’d made on the original bargain.
Added to that was an obscure little trust that had begun to quietly buy up shares of his investment firm.
At first he’d suspected Nathan was behind it all, but Nathan hadn’t been at that dinner party where Penelope had pressed wine on him all evening—that evening that had ended with him becoming so ill.
He hadn’t been eager to suspect her of treachery, but he’d been the first to admit he didn’t know her past superficials and what he had come to know did not recommend her.
And she had been, he realized upon further reflection, just as angry about the terms of her father’s will as her brother had been.
She’d just been quieter about it. He could readily imagine her having hired someone to assault him, and he could easily envision her wanting to put her greedy hands on the profits from his business.
Then again, he had no problem suspecting Nathan of all that as well.
All of which left him where he was, still engaged to a woman he didn’t love, still keeping her brother in his sights, still wondering which one of them was plotting against him in secret.
For all he knew, they were in league together.
It certainly wouldn’t have been the first time he’d found himself outnumbered and hemmed in on all sides.
He wasn’t one to call for aid prematurely, but he wasn’t home where he knew the landscape for leagues around his hall.
He was in London trying to protect more than just his own sweet neck.
He sighed deeply and pulled his mobile out of his pocket to dial his attorney.
Time to find out how the reinforcements were doing.
He was put through immediately, which never ceased to amaze him.
“Ah, more billable hours,” came the voice on the other end.
“My pleasure,” Cameron said sourly. “How lovely to think I can help you continue to make payments on that little hovel you have around the corner.”
“One does what one must, you know, to keep the old ball and chain happy.”
Cameron suppressed a snort. Geoffrey Segrave had just spent fifteen million pounds on a stunning row house not far from Hyde Park to please his wife, one of the most lovely, decent women Cameron had ever met, a woman who had protested vociferously that she would have been much happier with something simpler.
Suddenly, the impression came to him that Sunshine Phillips would have said the same thing.