The Secret Sinclair Read Online Free PDF

tried to get in touch, but I … I couldn’t …’
    Raoul stiffened. Having money had been a tremendous learning curve. It had a magnetism all of its own. People he had once known and heartily wished to forget had made contact, having glimpsed some picture of him in the financial pages of a newspaper. It would have been amusing had it not been so pathetic.
    He tried to decipher what Sarah was saying now. Had she been one of those people as well? Had she turned to the financial news and spotted him, thought that she might get in touch as she was down on her luck?
    ‘What do you mean,
you couldn’t
?’ His voice was several shades cooler.
    ‘I had no idea how to locate you.’ Her heart was beating so hard that she felt positively sick. ‘I mean, you disappeared without a trace. I tried checking with the girl who kept all the registration forms for when we were out there, and she gave me an address, but you’d left …’
    ‘When did all this frantic checking take place?’
    ‘When I got back to England. I know you dumped me, Raoul, but … but I had to talk to you …’
    So despite all her bravado when they had parted company she had still tried to track him down. It was a measure of her lack of sophistication that she had done that, and an even greater measure of it that she would now openly confess to doing so.
    ‘I came to London and rented a room in a house out east. You would never have found me.’
    ‘I even went on the internet, but you weren’t to be found. And of course I remembered you saying that you would never join any social networking sites …’
    ‘Quite a search. What was that in aid of? A general chat?’
    ‘Not exactly.’
    Sarah was thinking now that if she had carried on searching just a little bit longer—another year or so—then she would have found him listed somewhere on the computer, because he would have made his fortune by then. But she had quickly given up. She had never imagined that he would have risen so far, so fast, and yet when she thought about it there had always been that stubborn,closed, ruthless streak to him. And he had been fearless. Fearless when it came to the physical stuff and fearless when it came to plans for his future.
    ‘I wish I had managed to get through to you. You never kept in touch with your last foster home, did you? I tried to trace you through them, but you had already dropped off their radar.’
    Raoul stilled, because he had forgotten just how much she knew about him—including his miserable childhood and adolescence.
    ‘So you didn’t get in touch,’ he said, with a chill in his voice. ‘We could carry on discussing all the various ways you tried and failed to find me, or we could just move on.
Why
did you want to get in touch?’
    ‘You mean that I should have had more pride than to try?’
    ‘A lot of women would have,’ Raoul commented drily. She turned her head and the overhead light caught her hair, turning it into streaks of gold and pale toffee. ‘But I suppose you were very young. Just nineteen.’
    ‘And too stupid to do the sensible thing?’
    ‘Just … very young.’ He dragged his eyes away from the dancing highlights of her hair and frowned, sensing an edginess to her voice although her face was very calm and composed.
    ‘You can’t blame me if I couldn’t find you …’
    Raoul was confused. What was she talking about?
    ‘It’s getting late, Sarah. I’ve worked through the night, hammering out this deal with lawyers. I haven’t got the time or the energy to try and decipher what you’re saying. Why would I
blame
you for not being able to find me?’
    ‘I’ll get to the point. I didn’t
want
to get in touch with you, Raoul. What kind of a complete loser do you imagineI am? Do you think that I would have come crawling to you for a second chance?’
    ‘You might have if you’d been through the mill with some other guy!’
    ‘There
was
no other guy! And why on earth would I come running to
you
when you had