I’d been on the patio nursing a scotch for twenty minutes. Luther was due to arrive and I knew he would be pissed with me because giving the contract to Darcy was like taking a pointy stick and giving fate a hefty ass-reaming.

Darcy had lived in Sydney these past two years. So had more than four-and-a-half-million other people. Luther would point out the long shot that the two people who seemed hell-bent on destroying my business also lived in Sydney. He would deduce that Darcy was a new arrow launched my way.

There was that pointy stick again.

I didn’t need Luther to bring any of that to my attention. The previous night I’d woken just after 2.00 a.m. That’s a shitty time to lie in bed, alone with my irrational thoughts, which meant I’d arrived at Darcy’s house yesterday with a dose of paranoia fully primed

I felt Luther’s approach behind me because his energy was like that of a pack alpha about to dish out a paw-smack to a recalcitrant adolescent. I fucking loved him like this, containing his fury, letting small amounts out to sting you, before closing off his pressure valve, holding it all in because if he released all that pressure he might deflate. Lose his game. Not going to happen but it was a habit and the thing he used to drive himself.

It’s what made us the perfect pairing on the rugby field at college, though neither of us had the balls or the inclination to carry on with the game once we’d graduated. We were tired of being hammered by the extraordinarily large and physically mature Polynesian guys. Luther would get riled by the opposition insulting him about his light stature, I’d back them up by saying he’d stepped up a grade for this game because we were a player short, and that would give him enough motivation to make elegant, angry try-scoring set-ups. What he lacked in bulk he made up for with sheer speed and cunning.

He carried an envelope which he threw square into my lap with customary precision. “Annabelle was on your stepfather’s payroll in Sydney. The evidence is in there—”

“You’ve told me this already, Luther.”

“Read it.”

“Fuck off.”

“Your selective naïvety makes you such an easy target, Oli. A beautiful stranger arrives in town—from Sydney no less—and ends up living a few houses along the road from you. Not only that, but by some incredible coincidence she has the exact qualifications we need to fill a contract vacancy because the person who’d initially taken the contract suddenly decides she doesn’t want to do it. And you’re all, step this way, sweetheart, the job’s yours.”

I tossed the peanut I was toying with at him but he snatched it from the air before it made contact with his head and in a reflex move, flicked it skywards and captured it in his mouth.

“Listen up, Oli. You’re a good businessman and you’re almost as good at building magnificent boats as your father. But one thing your father had that you don’t is the good sense to pay attention when his lawyer tells him he needs a bit of protection. Your father never questioned Dad when he suggested putting Tradewind into a trust before he married. That is the reason you had one of the most respected boatyards in the world to inherit. To me, Darcy looks and walks like a duck. I’m only suggesting you let me find out whether she quacks.”

“Believe me, she’s no duck.” I grinned at him. “You’re more paranoid than I am.”

“I’m the one who has to mop up the mess when this thing goes tits-up. Not to mention the damage to my liver from the nights I’ll have to spend consoling you with a bottle of scotch. Which brings me to my next question; is that whisky poisonous?”

I pushed a glass and the bottle in his direction and Luther added a couple of generous fingers of Laphroaig.

“If she’s clean, you have my blessing.”

Luther and I have been friends since kindergarten. He’s also one of the partners in the Lodge, and acts as my lawyer, the same way his father acted as my father’s lawyer. We enjoy tradition. There’s not much he doesn’t know about me, my business dealings, finances or the way I like to fuck. When he’s pissed with me, he doesn’t hold back so I braced myself for an expletive-filled tirade that would finish with diminishing insults until one of us offered to get the next drink.

“Do you think the Alberinis are still after the boatyard?” I asked.

My mother was a selfish bitch who followed the money. When she left Dad for Ant Alberini, his main business rival with a boatyard based out of Australia, it broke Dad’s heart. But Dad wasn’t as naïve as my mother and her new boyfriend hoped. Once my parents divorced Mother received half of sweet-fuck-all which meant Alberini was no closer to the superyacht contracts he had bid for, and lost.

The same contracts Tradewind had bid for and won.

Unbeknown to any of us, Dad had tied Tradewind up in a trust that took it out of the marital property portfolio in a legal sense. Luther’s father had successfully convinced my father that when it came to marriage, loyalty seldom figured in the equation.

I had no time for my greedy mother, or any other woman with designs to access my assets. Ironically, I’m a generous person, but I prefer to choose where my money gets distributed.

“A cocktail of Aussie pride and Latin machismo means Alberini will never give up. Accept it.”

“Fine.” I tipped some more scotch into my mouth and let it heat and tease my tongue, all the while wondering what Darcy was up to.

“Stop thinking about her,” Luther snapped.

That was a lucky guess. “I’m not.”

“Bullshit. Come to Auckland with me on Friday. We’ll hook up with a couple of women and go to a club.”

“I don’t do that anymore.”

“You need to.”

“I need to eat. Come inside, Angus dropped in a couple of lobsters.” Angus ran the boats at the Lodge. He spent most of his time underwater, and everyone joked he’d developed gills. His hunting abilities were legendary and he could rustle up lobster with a mere whisper.

After dinner we were back on the patio. I’d lit the outside fire because although it was spring, the sun had gone down taking the temperature with it. Over dinner dismantling lobster I steered Luther off the subject of Darcy, but she sat there as a topic ready to be revived at any moment.

“Did you check her CV?” Luther asked.

“Let me guess, Darcy’s CV, right?”

He threw me a look that worked better with soon-to-be ex-wives than old mates. I’d planned to give her details to my HR person at the boatyard to check her references and qualifications. “Sure, she’s fine. Probably overqualified.”

“Give me her details. I’ll run a background check on her.”

He was a terrier when he needed to be. “That’s probably overdoing it,” I suggested

“There are four of us partners in this, Oli.” He stabbed a finger at his chest. “This partner wants her checked out.”

I raised my hands in surrender. He had every right to demand a more thorough background check and I had no idea why I didn’t want that done. Perhaps because the thought that my stepfather might be coming after me again was fucking annoying. And if he was using a beautiful woman to do it, like he had with Annabelle, that simply added another level of stupidity to his war.

I pulled up Darcy’s CV on my tablet and passed the device to Luther. It felt like a betrayal even though I scarcely knew her. I certainly didn’t want to analyze the feeling driving that emotion.

Luther did whatever it was he did and minutes later placed the tablet on the table and reached for his wine. “So, Auckland, Friday?”

I shook my head. “I’m staying here this weekend. Going to show Darcy around the area, make sure she’s kept busy so that she doesn’t get bored and bolt.”

“You’re so full of shit, Sackville.”

I waited for him to say I was a Sackville of shit the way he usually did, but I could tell he was concerned. That should have troubled me more than it did.

“How long is it since you last came to Auckland with me?” he asked.

“I went up when you visited Rachel last month.”

“That’s right. I visited Rachel, and you did what, exactly?”

“I visited Rachel, too.”

“Precisely. You’re a long time out of the game. You’re denying who you are. Come to Auckland, it’ll do you good.”

“I have better arrangements.”

“You fancy the fuck out of her, don’t you?”

“If she’s my enemy, Luther, I plan to keep her very close. I’ll spend so much time in her company there won’t be a thing about her I don’t know. There’s chemistry between us, and the fact that I ‘fancy the fuck’ out of her, as you so eloquently put it, means this will be anything but a hardship.”

Luther drained his glass and spent a moment peering at the sediment that remained. “You should have decanted the wine, Oli.”

“You were in a hurry to fill your glass.”

He shrugged. “Let me put a goon onto the case and we’ll know all about Darcy in a week.”

“Don’t do that, Luther,” I warned.

He shot me a pitying look. “Oh, Christ, you’ve got it bad.”