His Hidden Son
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Maya Blake
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13
PROLOGUE
SOMEONE WAS HACKING his bank.
Again.
If Ekow Quayson hadn’t been so infuriated at the ease with which the hacker had infiltrated his formidable internet firewall, he would’ve been impressed. But his sense of humour had left the building after the third breach.
‘How the hell is this still happening?’ he barked into the phone. ‘Correct me if I’m wrong, but don’t I pay you astronomical sums to ensure this sort of thing doesn’t happen?’
He didn’t need to be in the same room to know that his cyber security team were shaking in their boots. He hadn’t yet taken the final step of firing them after weeks...no, months...of the cat-and-mouse game this hacker was playing with him only because they were the best—supposedly—on the market.
‘Sir, they’re using a very sophisticated system. One we haven’t seen before. But we’re attempting to—’
‘Stop attempting and get it done! You’re cyber security experts. It’s your job to make sure no system, sophisticated or otherwise, messes with my bank. You’re failing. Fix it. Now.’
‘Yes, sir. Our counterparts in South Africa are working on the issue right now. That’s where we pinpointed the last few attacks. We should... It’ll be taken care of within the next few hours.’
Ekow froze in his chair. ‘Did you say South Africa?’ he asked, choosing to ignore the false confidence his security chief had layered on his response. They were all skating on thin ice, and he wouldn’t hesitate to fire them if the breach wasn’t sorted this time.
‘Yes, sir. We’re moments away from tracking the hacker down.’
Ekow barely heard the response as his fingers curled into a fist on his desk and a curious roiling started inside him.
South Africa.
He knew he was giving too much power to a geographical location, but the slow, unrelenting knots tightening in his gut mocked that knowledge.
South Africa... Specifically Cape Town...
The place he’d met her.
By his very strict record, he should’ve forgotten her by now. Moved on to the next available woman as he did every few months. It was the way he preferred things. It ensured mutual enjoyment without inviting notions of permanence. Since he’d turned thirty, two years ago, it was as if he had switched on an unknown beacon to the opposite sex, urging them not to take seriously his ‘just fun, nothing heavy’ edict when it came to relationships.
Every single one had eventually discovered he’d meant it, of course. Because he’d sworn off entanglements of any sort except the very transient kind. And if those brief liaisons with the opposite sex had only got briefer and less enjoyable in the last few years it was no one’s business but his own.
When life had taught you that emotional connections led to disappointment and devastation, you learned the very real lesson that keeping your emotions out of things was the best way forward.
He’d learned that truth up close.
First by observing his father’s patently biased relationship with Ekow’s eldest brother, Fiifi. And then by watching that same brother with the woman he’d lived for and eventually died with.
Fiifi’s relationship with Esi had been a melodramatic tragedy to challenge the most epic historical love saga—starting with her being forbidden fruit because their families were sworn enemies, then swerving into the volatile nature of their relationship. He’d never seen two people so right and yet so wrong for each other, their highs and lows a dizzying spectacle he’d watched from a safe and highly sceptical distance.
Of course it had been heartbreaking but almost karmic to witness it end dramatically in a car crash on Fiifi’s twenty-fifth birthday, with a lovers’ row after a night of ferocious celebration. A shocking tragedy that had rocked both families.
And then there was Ekow’s relationship with his father. Or, more accurately, the distinct lack of one.
He’d known all that sixteen months ago, during his business trip to South Africa. Yet none of those warnings had made a blind bit of difference while he’d been with her.
Because she left you.
Was he so shallow to let a rejection affect him for this long? Aggravate him this intensely? Or was it something else? Something about her?
Evangeline.
Was it because she’d never told him her full name, perhaps? That he wasn’t even sure if the first name she had given him was correct? Even while he’d been cynically confident he wouldn’t be ensnared by her air of mystique—deliberate, he suspected—he’d ended up yearning to know every single thing about her...
Impatient with his train of thought, he gritted his teeth and surged to his feet. He hadn’t thought about her in weeks. And he had more pressing matters to deal with than a woman he was sure would’ve turned out to be just as ordinary as the rest of them.
‘I want a report in the next four hours of who is toying with my security. Fail me and you will be terminated,’ he grated into the phone.
Control reinstated, Ekow ended the call and resumed his work day, dismissing the mystery woman from his mind with the same ruthless efficiency with which he ran his family bank.
The report arrived in two hours.
Another hour later and he had the right people in place to track down his hacker.
But some problems required the personal touch, and so Ekow found himself reaching for the phone one final time, and summoning his pilot to ready his jet—destination Cape Town.
He’d deal with this problem once and for all in the only way he knew how—with Quayson power and might.
And if he was heading to the same city as Evangeline, the woman who’d given herself to him in ways that still stopped his breath and then disappeared without a trace, what did it matter?
