A Trap So Tender Read Free Page A

no
rush.” Maybe she could convince him to sell her the factory for a pittance. She
wasn’t sure why he’d bought it in the first place. “What’s your latest
project?”
    “I’m becoming interested in real estate. Sooner or later this
recession will end and people will want everything bigger and better and newer
than ever.”
    “And you plan to be poised to take advantage of that.”
    He sipped his wine. That mouth was wasted on a businessman. He
should have been a pouting rock star. “I try to be ready for anything.”
    Her father’s factory was centrally located in an old business
district that was ripe for redevelopment into a yuppie paradise. The building
was from the 1950s and looked like a giant shoebox. Until six weeks ago it had
employed eighteen people and provided her father with his only source of income.
But James had engaged in some skullduggery with the local government and managed
to buy it out from under her dad for a pittance in unpaid taxes. At least that
was how she understood it. All the workers had been laid off, and her dad was
now facing bankruptcy, so the clock was ticking.
    When she was younger, her dad had owned a chain of restaurants,
but that had apparently disappeared. They’d had so little contact with him after
she moved to the States with her mom that she was surprised to find him so close
to the edge, when family legend had pegged him as a high-rolling, self-made
tycoon.
    She’d always planned to show him just how like him she was when
she made her first million. Her anticipated triumph had been utterly destroyed
by his sudden ruin. Now it looked as if she’d come to Singapore to crow over the
father who abandoned her, when that was the very opposite of her intention.
    Her heart squeezed. She’d grown up without her dad and she
wasn’t going to lose him now. “I try to be ready for anything, too. And I had no
idea I was so ready to go to Scotland with a complete stranger.”
    He lifted his glass. “Here’s to the unexpected.”
    She smiled and clinked hers against it. If
you only knew.

Two
    “T hese berms mark the edge of the estate.”
James nodded to the window of the fast-moving Land Rover that had picked them up
at Aberdeen airport.
    Fiona peered out. Anticipation coursed through her body. Which
was ridiculous. She was here on the most underhanded mission, yet she felt
excited as if she genuinely hoped to find that damn cup and maybe even have a
torrid affair with James while she did it. Deep ditches on the side of the road
swooped up into high walls of grass and trees. They drove straight along this
avenue for almost twenty minutes. “How big is the estate?”
    “Big. But don’t worry. We’ll reach the business end soon.”
Eventually, the road swung around and took them through a tall stone gateway.
Hills soared around them, making her feel tiny in the dramatic landscape. “My
ancestors liked privacy.”
    “And you don’t?”
    “Not that much.” He smiled. “A wall between me and my neighbors
is quite enough. I don’t need a few miles.”
    “Then it’s lucky you’ll have me here to bother you.”
    “It is.”
    Her skin tingled at the affirmation that he was glad of her
company. She should feel guilty that she was here only to get her father’s
factory back. She didn’t, though. The reports she’d read of James’s business
practices had made her toes curl. He was all about the bottom line and clearly
didn’t care whom he steamrolled over on the road to more greenbacks. And he
hadn’t brought her here just to find some old cup. She wasn’t the worldliest
person, but she’d been around the block to know he had some ulterior motive
himself, even if it was just a highland fling.
    The road was dead straight, carved right through the undulating
landscape in what must have been an engineering feat to rival building the
pyramids. High hedges loomed ahead, and once they passed those her jaw dropped
as a menacing storybook castle rose in front of them.
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