Caroline Anderson - The Tycoon's Instant Family

“It’s a beautiful night, and I want to go up into the tower with you and look at the moonlight on the sea, and just be alone with you.”

Georgie’s heart bumped against her ribs. She didn’t reply, just slipped her hand over Nick’s and squeezed gently.

It was enough. She unlocked the house, and he took her by the hand and led her up the carpeted stairs to the room at the top. And there in the moonlight they sat on the windowsill, staring out over the smooth, lazy swell of the sea, their fingers entwined.

Her fingers tightened on his. “I love you,” her mouth said, and her heart joined in the desperate protests from her feeble mind. Oh, damn, why had she said that?

He pulled her into his arms and hugged her. “I couldn’t have got through tonight without you. Thank you for being there for me.”

“You’re welcome,” she said, and wondered how long it would be before she came to regret those three little words that she’d never meant to say.

has the mind of a butterfly. She’s been a nurse, a secretary, a teacher, has run her own soft-furnishing business and now she’s settled on writing. She says, “I was looking for that elusive something. I finally realized it was variety, and now I have it in abundance. Every book brings new horizons and new friends, and between books I have learned to be a juggler. My teacher husband, John, and I have two beautiful and talented daughters, Sarah and Hannah, umpteen pets and several acres of Suffolk that nature tries to reclaim every time we turn our backs!”

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PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

‘GIVE me one good reason why I should help you.’

The man sitting in front of him gave a tiny, helpless shrug. He was a proud man at the end of his rope, and it gave Nick no pleasure to push him, but he needed to get to the bottom of this request, and pussy-footing around wouldn’t cut the mustard.

‘Mr Broomfield?’

Another little shrug. ‘I can’t—I can’t give you a reason. I don’t even know why I’m here—’

‘So why did you come to me?’

‘Gerry told me to. Gerry Burrows—you helped him out last year.’

‘I remember. We bought his company.’

‘Oh, you did more than that. You saved his life. He was suicidal and his wife was on the point of leaving him, and you turned his life around.’

And this man looked in need of the same kind of rescue package. Nick shifted in his chair and wondered how many more desperate friends Gerry Burrows had. One at a time, he told himself wearily. Surely there couldn’t be that many?

‘Gerry Burrows had a business worth buying. As yet I know nothing about you or your business, or even what you want from me, so why don’t you start there and tell me what exactly you have in mind?’

Andrew Broomfield’s laugh was bitter and self-deprecating. ‘I haven’t even thought that far—’

‘Then perhaps you should. If I’m going to help you, Mr Broomfield, I need a reason.’

‘There is no good reason. Only a lunatic would consider it.’ His laugh cracked in the middle. ‘We buy and sell bankrupt stock, of all things. It was doing really well, but then we overstretched ourselves, bought several shops so we could open retail outlets, and things went from bad to worse, really. They’re all mortgaged to the hilt, and our only real asset is draining so much cash it’s brought us to the brink. It was meant to save us, but it’s taking us under. We can’t go on—and if I can’t find someone to intervene, then I guess the receivers will.’

‘It might be the best thing.’

‘No.’ He closed his eyes, his head shaking slowly from side to side. ‘For me, yes, it’s what I deserve, but my wife’s pregnant, and we’ve just been told the baby’s got something wrong with him and he’ll need a whole series of operations, starting as soon as he’s born. She has no idea the business is in trouble, and I can’t do that to her—make her homeless just before the baby’s born, with all we’ve got to face there, but I just can’t see any way out of it—’

Oh, hell. He’d just hit on the one thing calculated to get to Nick, but curiously it didn’t look calculated. It looked as if it came from the heart.

‘Homeless?’ he prompted.

Broomfield nodded miserably. ‘I put the house up as security, like an idiot. It’s nothing special—just an ordinary little three-bedroomed detached house like millions of others and a drop in the ocean compared to our other debts, but it’s home, and I can’t take that away from her—’

Nick sat back, twiddling a pen in his fingertips and watching the man struggle with his emotions. God, he was getting soft in his old age. He knew he was only going through the motions here, knew he’d help Broomfield even though he didn’t know him from Adam and shouldn’t care a jot about his pregnant wife or the sick baby or the mess he’d got them in.

He stuck to the facts. ‘Tell me about this asset.’

The man shrugged again. ‘It’s just a building site—a tatty, near-derelict old school with a disused chapel and other bits and pieces, and a handful of temporary classrooms scattered about the site. I bought it a few years ago and sat on it, and last year we got planning permission for conversion and a small development on the playing fields. We should have sold it then, but—well, I thought we’d make more if we developed it ourselves, but I underestimated the cost of the work. Drastically.’

‘So you’ve started doing it.’

‘Yes, but we’ve just run out of money. We put the builder on a penalty clause to move things along faster, but we can’t afford to pay him and so everything’s come to a grinding halt. I’ve bought us a little time, managed to stop him walking out, but only because we owe them so much they won’t walk until they get their money.’

‘How much are we talking about?’ Nick asked.

‘I’m not sure—thousands. Hundreds of thousands, probably.’

Nick nodded, wondering how he could have got into so much debt and not know the figure. Presumably that was how. ‘And the other debts, on your business?’

He shrugged again. ‘The same—more, perhaps. The business is in real trouble, but if you knew what you were doing you might get something out of it, and if you could sell the shops they might almost clear the mortgage debt, but it would take time and that’s one thing we haven’t got. It’s only really the site that’s of significant value, and that’s only potential. Frankly at the moment it’s worth less than it was when we started.’

Nick’s entrepreneurial antennae twitched. Potential was one of his favourite words, and another one was honesty. Nobody could accuse Broomfield of trying to cover anything up. He was being distressingly honest at his own expense, but for Nick, at least, it worked. To a point.