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CHAPTER ONE
DESPITE THE HEAT and the humidity there was a crowd of maybe fifty or sixty photographers waiting.
But not for him.
Trip Winslow tilted his face towards the tinted window of the limousine.
Nobody knew that he was coming. Incredibly, and despite the plethora of communication platforms available in the modern world, he had managed to stay incognito. All thanks to a phone call to Lazlo, the manager of the Diamond Club. It was Lazlo who had arranged the hot bath, wet shave, private jet, car and driver and security detail swiftly, quietly and with the same unshakeable calm that he did everything. It was what made him invaluable to the ten richest people in the world who made up the small, elite membership of the club.
But Trip’s disappearance was still the story of the hour, the year, maybe even the decade. After all, how many times did one of the wealthiest people on the planet just vanish into thin air?
So he’d anticipated that the paparazzi and news teams would be here in New York. His blue gaze moved assessingly over the huddle of mostly men prowling the steps up to the iconic gleaming glass and steel Winslow Building.
And yet it still felt like an ambush.
A ripple of panic skimmed over his skin, and for a moment he was back in the jungle, his heart pounding as he watched different men inch towards where he was pressed against a tree, their eyes narrowed, guns high against their chests like in the video games he had played incessantly as a teenager.
Only these gunmen were real. So were their bullets.
‘Do you want me to go round the back, Mr Winslow? Or I can call Security. Get an extra team out to block off the road.’
For a fraction of a second, he didn’t respond to the driver’s question, not least because even now, ten months after his father’s death, he was still struggling to remember that he was ‘that’ Mr Winslow. For him, the title would always belong to his father, Henry Winslow II. Of course, Trip’s older brother, Charlie, wouldn’t have given it a second thought.
His shoulders stiffened. In many ways, he’d felt as though he hardly knew his brother. And now he never would because Charlie was dead. Killed three years ago in a plane crash along with their mother.
Which left Trip.
The spare. The runner-up who had won by default.
Not that he hadn’t proven himself worthy of being CEO. But Charlie had always been destined to take over the business. Partly because he was twelve years older, but also because their father had raised him from birth to be his heir so that he looked and acted the part. Most important of all, Charlie was the type to defer to their father.
Unlike Trip.
He had been at odds with Henry Winslow II as far back as he could remember. Which probably explained why he had ended up being called Trip. That way, at least, his father could distance himself from the stubborn son who shared his name but rarely his opinions.
He glanced up, his gaze moving past the driver’s inquiring eyes to meet his own in the rear-view mirror. They were the exact same blue as his father’s. The only thing they had in common.
Like Charlie, his father was academically consistent, focused, disciplined, whereas he had oscillated between boredom and brilliance.
He had got into Harvard, like his father and Charlie, but had dropped out to set up a business that had failed in its first year. He’d learned from his mistakes though and his second venture was widely touted as a unicorn by the business media, reaching a billion-dollar valuation in its first year.
He had kept his stake and would probably have set up another business if his success hadn’t caught the eye of his father. To his astonishment, Henry had reached out to him, invited him to take over the Far East division in Hong Kong.
His father hadn’t gambled, had been notoriously risk averse, so Trip had known that he was being tested and that knowledge had given him a sense of purpose. He had effortlessly arrowed in on the failing areas of the business and each of those sectors had then outperformed themselves under his leadership.
His father had grudgingly admitted that he had done well, and, shortly before Charlie’s death, Trip had been allowed to go to London to head up the European division. There, his strokes of creative genius had attracted the attention of the business press and given Winslow Inc its most profitable year on record. But it had never been enough as far as his father was concerned.
Because mistakes, failures, missteps had been unacceptable to Henry Winslow II. A decorated naval officer who had taken over his father’s modest construction firm and turned it into the multinational conglomerate it was today. A private, committed family man whose one act of impulsiveness had led to a forty-two-year-long marriage that had ended only by his wife’s tragic death.
Trip gritted his teeth. Except it turned out his father hadn’t been that committed after all.
His spine tensed as he replayed the moment when he’d found the letters among his father’s things. Letters from a woman named Kerry. Letters filled with unfiltered declarations of need and passion.
I am blind without you...being with you will restore my sight, my love...
The shock had sent Trip spinning off course to Ecuador, to the churning white waters of the Rio Upano, and from there into the rainforest and imprisonment at the hands of a passing drugs cartel.
He stared through the window, his gaze snagging on a couple weaving between the stationary cars. The tall grey-haired man was holding the hand of the woman beside him. His wife? Before Ecuador he would have made this assumption unthinkingly. Now, though, he could see only other possibilities.
