Destiny Unleashed Read Online Free

losing today. He’d clearly intended his little bombshell to ruin William’s concentration, not just on this hole, but for the rest of the round.
    William felt a little zing in his blood, something that hadn’t happened nearly often enough since Destiny had walked out on their relationship twenty years before.
    Back then, he’d stubbornly resisted following her to the States, deluding himself for the longest time that a love like theirs wasn’t something she could possibly forget or abandon forever.
    But she had. He’d totally misjudged her sense of family loyalty. The Destiny he’d known in France hadn’t had a maternal bone in her delectable body. She’d been carefree, impetuous and a bit of a Bohemian. But to his shock, she’d thrown over all traces of her carefree ways to settle down and mother her three orphaned nephews.
    After a time, when he’d heard barely a word from her, his pride had kicked in. She’d chosen children who were virtual strangers over him, the man she’d claimed to love. It had grated.
    It had taken him a long time to catch on to the fact that nothing on earth was worse than a man more devoted to pride than common sense. If she’d abandoned those boys, as he’d anticipated, she wouldn’t have been the kind of woman he wanted in his life. That was what he should have realized from the beginning. He was the fool who’d forced her to make an impossible choice, rather than going after her and being supportive when her entire world had been turned upside down. All these years, he could have had her love and the love of three stepsons, plus maybe some children of their own. Any children of Destiny’s would have been astonishingly bright and handsome. Destiny hadn’t cost the two of them a future. He had.
    William had found his own shortsightedness to be so incredibly annoying, so completely perplexing, that he had spent the last ten years mucking up every business deal Carlton Industries set out to make in Europe. It wasn’t something he’d done to get rich. Hell, he had more money than he could spend in ten lifetimes. It wasn’t even the satisfaction of winning that haddrawn him into the game. It was an idiotic, half-baked attempt to get Destiny’s attention.
    And now he had.
    He grinned as he set his ball back on the tee and slammed it straight down the fairway toward the green, gazing at its trajectory with satisfaction. About damn time she got the message. He’d wasted a lot of years waiting for life to get interesting again.
     
    Harcourt & Sons was one of those long-established London companies that dabbled in a wide variety of businesses, assembled over generations less with logic than with the various passions and needs of prior generations. William appreciated that aspect of the company’s history. It made his own acquisition tactics in recent years seem perfectly fitting. His ancestors had acquired whatever companies appealed to them, just as he was intent on acquiring those most likely to annoy Destiny.
    Harcourt owned a small chain of exclusive haberdashers, founded due to William’s grandfather’s girth and demand for excellent tailoring. The chain had begun on Saville Row, then spread through the countryside, thanks to his grandfather’s contacts in Parliament who wanted the shops that specialized in personalized service conveniently located in their home districts. It was also a small way to support their local woolen manufacturers.
    Another company was renowned throughout the country for its exotic selection of teas, acquired when William’s grandmother had had difficulty obtaining the blends she wanted. Those shops had later been expanded to serve an elegant afternoon tea, when hismother had wanted a place to take her friends after a day’s shopping.
    The whole conglomerate had begun quite unexpectedly with an antiquarian bookshop, opened after his great-grandfather’s bookshelves were filled to overflowing with leather-bound editions of the classics, as well