by Julia James
But then, he’d ignored her almost entirely ever since she’d fled from his office, taking on her shoulders the burden of guilt for a crime she had not committed.
Accepting the blame for having stolen a priceless bracelet.
Accepting the ‘choice’ Leo Makarios had held out to her.
But she hadn’t had any other option. She’d told herself that over and over again, like a litany running in her head. She could not let Jenny be sent to prison and have her baby taken from her, brought up in some faraway desert country, where wives were locked up in harems, kow-towing to every male in sight…
So I’m going to have to go through with what Leo Makarios wants. There’s nothing else I can do.
Yet the enormity of it crushed her. Appalled her.
She couldn’t think about it; she just couldn’t. It was the only way she could keep going. By not thinking about what she had done, what she was going to do…
She willed herself not to think. Because if she thought about it, if for a moment, a single moment, she let her brain accept what she had agreed to, she would, she would…
The grille sliced shut in her brain again. Stopping her thinking. Stopping her doing anything—anything at all except what she had to do.
And it had started straight away—last night, when she’d walked out of Leo Makarios’s office, with the word thief branded on her, to see the person she had taken the branding for.
She’d made herself go back to Jenny’s room and tell her that she’d simply slipped the bracelet under the hall table, positioning it such that it was in shadow, obscured by one of the heavy wooden struts supporting the table’s weight.
‘They’ll just think they missed it, that’s all,’ she’d told Jenny.
Her friend had gone white with relief.
‘I must have been insane,’ she’d whispered, burying her head in her hands and starting to cry.
Mopping up Jenny had taken all Anna’s energies. So had getting through the evening ahead.
A gala ball, followed by fireworks, opened by a breathtaking descent down the grand staircase of all four models en grande tenue, glittering, for the last time, with the full panoply of the Levantsky jewels, to the music of Strauss and the audience’s applause.
It had taken all Anna’s professionalism to get through the evening. Only one thing had been spared her—waltzing with Leo Makarios.
Or, indeed, being anywhere near him. If the previous evening he’d kept her glued to his side, last evening he’d done the opposite. He hadn’t danced with any of the models, sticking to high-ranking female guests like the Austrian minister’s wife.
Anna had been sickly grateful. And even more grateful to the kindly German spa-loving industrialist who’d made a bee-line for her. She’d hung on to him all evening.
When the ball had finally ended, deep in the early hours of the morning, and the models had been let off duty at last, Anna had hurried back to her room.
And locked her door.
If Leo Makarios wanted to come in he’d have to break through it with a sledgehammer.
But he had other plans for her, she’d learnt that morning, after a nerve-racking, sleepless night.
She’d been packing when the knock on her door had sounded. It had been Justin, pompously informing her of a new assignment.
‘Mr Makarios has very generously extended your booking,’ he’d told her. ‘It’s all arranged with your agency. You’ll be leaving in an hour. Please do not be late.’
Leaving for where? Anna had wondered.
Now, four hours later, she knew.
She was flying to the Caribbean, with Leo Makarios at her side.
To have as much sex with him as he warranted would atone for stealing the Levantsky rubies from him.
She felt sick all the way through every cell in her body.
Anna hung on to the strap above the door in the car as it bumped over the potholed island roads. She was dog-tired. In the front passenger seat Leo Makarios was talking to the driver, and she was dully grateful that he was continuing to ignore her.
Anna turned her head away, staring out into the black sub-tropical night. She’d been to the Caribbean before, on fashion shoots, but never to this particular island. At least it had been easy to convince Jenny that that was all this was—an unexpected extra shoot that Leo Makarios wanted done in a sub-tropical setting. Rich men, both she and Jenny knew, were capricious, and they expected others to jump when they said so.
As for Jenny herself, Anna had phoned mutual friends of theirs—a photographer and his wife—who would meet Jenny at Heathrow. The couple owned a holiday cottage in the Highlands, and had promised to keep Jenny there until Anna got back to the UK.
When that would be, Anna did not want to think.
Or about anything that was going to happen. As she had done every waking hour since that hideous exchange in Leo Makarios’s office, Anna shut off her mind.
She kept it shut even when the car arrived at its destination, driving through metalwork gates set in a high retaining wall and along a smooth gravelled drive to draw up in front of a large, low villa. As she got out, the chill of the air-conditioned interior evaporated into the hot sub-tropical night. For a moment she simply stood there, taking in the sounds and smells of the Caribbean, the croaking of the tree frogs and the heady fragrance of exotic blooms.
Then she was following Leo Makarios indoors, back into air-conditioned cool and a huge, cathedral-ceilinged reception room. The light dazzled her. She took in an impression of great height, cool marble floors, lazily circling overhead fans, wooden shutters and upholstered cane furniture.
Leo Makarios seemed to have completely disappeared.
Instead, a middle-aged woman was coming towards her.
‘This way, please,’ she said, with a dignified gesture to follow her.
Anna fell in behind, her eyes automatically registering the unselfconsciously graceful walk of the woman—a walk that managed to be both indolent and purposeful. By contrast, she felt she was dragging her own body along, clumsy and exhausted.
Sleep—that was all she wanted. All she craved in the world right now.
The room she was shown to was vast. Up a short, shallow flight of stairs, off a broad gallery-style landing. Inside the room another high, wooden cathedral ceiling soared. A huge mahogany four-poster bed, swathed in what looked like ornamental muslin but was, Anna assumed, mosquito netting, dominated the room. Again, although the room was chilled by air-conditioning, a ceiling fan rotated lazily.
‘May I get you some refreshment?’ the woman was saying. Even as she spoke a porter entered, carrying Anna’s suitcase.
She shook her head.
‘Thank you—I’m just going to sleep.’
The woman nodded, said something to the porter in local patois, quite incomprehensible to Anna, and then they both left. Anna looked around her blearily. Her eyes automatically went to the vast four-poster bed.
Easily big enough for two.
Not tonight, Mr Makarios, she thought sourly—you’ll have to wait.
Five minutes later, clothes stripped, en suite bathroom perfunctorily utilised, she was fast asleep.
Leo stood out on his balcony. A half-moon glittered over the palm-fringed bay that curved in front of the villa. The location was superb, the scene in front of him idyllic, tranquil and untouched. He’d bought this place five years ago, yet how often had he been here? Not often enough.
Life seemed to be rushing by him at ever faster speeds.
Leo’s mouth twisted. So little done, so much to do—some politician had said that, and he could identify with the sentiment.
Another line drifted through his head.
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.
He frowned. No politician, the poet who had said that. And no businessman either. Getting and spending was what his whole life was about. It always had been.
But then, he’d always known that his destiny was to do that. To continue wit
h the work his grandfather had begun, rebuilding the Makarios fortunes after they had been lost in the debacle of the Greek expulsion from Asia Minor in the l920s.
He could hear his grandfather’s harsh voice even now, in his head, from when he’d been a boy.
‘We had nothing! Nothing! They took it all. Those Turkii. But we will get everything again—everything!’
Rebuilding the Makarios fortune had occupied his grandfather’s life, and his father’s, and now his too. The Makarios Corporation spread itself wide—property, shipping, finance, investment, and even—Leo thought of his latest contribution to the family’s coffers—the ultimate in luxury goods: priceless historic jewellery, and the revival of a name that had been synonymous with Tsarist extravagance.
He gazed out over the moonlit sea, feeling the warmth of the Caribbean night, hearing the soughing of the wind in the palms, the call of the cicadas, and, drowning them out, the yet more incessant calls of the tree frogs.
A thought came to him out of the soft wind, the sweet-fragranced air.
Who needed diamonds and emeralds on a night like this? Or sapphires and rubies? What use were they here, on the silvered beach by the warm sea’s edge?
What use are they at all?
Into his head jarred a voice—‘They’re just carbon crystals…lots of other common crystals are just as beautiful.’ Anna Delane’s lofty sneer at the Levantsky jewels.
His face hardened.
Hypocrite! She hadn’t helped herself to the ruby bracelet because it was beautiful, but because it was worth a fortune.
It had been a mistake thinking about her. He’d spent the last twenty-four hours assiduously putting her out of his mind. Even when she’d spent the flight sitting right next to him he’d refused to think about her, let alone look at her, or speak to her, or in any way acknowledge her existence. Now, fatally, she was there—vividly in his mind.
Desire shot through him, hard and insistent. His hands clenched over the wooden balustrade.
No! Now was not the time nor the hour. Sleep was the priority now—and it would be for her, too. When he took her it would not be like this, on the edge of exhaustion, but in the rich, ripe fullness of all his powers.
He would need all night to enjoy her to the full.
And every night.
Starting tomorrow.
How long would it take him to tire of her?
The hard smile twisted at his mouth.
A lot, lot sooner than it would take her to tire of him.
He would see to that.
Anna walked along the edge of the beach. It was one of those crystalline white sand, palm-fringed crescents that were put into travel brochures to make everyone instantly want to go there. But this beach she had to herself. Completely to herself. It belonged to the beautiful sprawling villa spilling along the shore, and the villa belonged to Leo Makarios.
She could see why he’d bought it.
It was, quite simply, idyllic. Like the beach, a travel agent’s dream of what a Caribbean villa should look like. The green tiled roof, the white walls, the wraparound veranda, the palm trees fringing the shore, the crystal beach, the pink and purple bougainvillaea and hibiscus splashing colour, the turquoise glitter of a freshwater pool.
Quite, quite idyllic.
Anna stopped to look out to sea. The sun was lowering, a thin band of cloud just above the surface of the sea starting to pool in the lengthening rays of the sun, like rich dye running into spun silk. Bars of gold were sliding across the azure water. Across the sun’s face a large, ungainly pelican flapped lazily. High in the sky a frigate bird soared.
Anna glanced at her watch. Though only just evening, the sub-tropical latitudes meant the sun was going down apace. The night would sweep in from the east like a velvet concealing cloak.
And the night would bring, she knew, Leo Makarios.
There had been no sign of him all day. She’d slept long and when she’d surfaced it had been late morning. She’d eaten breakfast on her balcony, and as she’d gazed out over the beautiful grounds leading down to the sea she’d felt the biting, mocking irony of her situation. Here she was in a Caribbean idyll—and tonight she was going to have sex with a man. Deliberate, cold-blooded sex, with a man she did not want to have sex with—a man who thought her a thief, a man she had already thrown out of her bedroom once but who now she could not throw out.
Deliberate, cold-blooded sex.
She made herself say the words again in her head. And again.
Because that was what it was going to be.
Something flared briefly in the depths of her eyes, but she crushed it instantly.
A sudden panic speared through her. She couldn’t go through with this. She just couldn’t!
I’ve got to tell him the truth! Tell him it wasn’t me who stole his precious bracelet, that it was Jenny, and that she only did it because she’s pregnant and terrified, and has got herself involved with a man so dangerous he makes Leo-Money-Bags-Makarios look like a pussycat…
Cold pooled in her stomach. However much she desperately wanted to, she knew she could not tell Leo Makarios the truth. The risks were far too great. As a woman, she might automatically side with Jenny, but who knew what a rich, powerful man like Leo Makarios would think? His attitude to women was dire—she had personal proof of that already—so why should he think Jenny deserved any favours, any mercy? After what she’d heard him say about Vanessa, and guarding his precious cousin from her, he’d probably think Jenny had got herself pregnant on purpose—picking a rich man to get at his money—and that a man so entrapped was entitled to take a woman’s baby from her—especially a woman who’d shown herself so morally lax that she’d stooped to theft… He wouldn’t understand.
No—Anna’s face closed—there was no way she could take that risk. And that meant—her expression twisted—she just couldn’t tell Leo Makarios why she had taken the blame for stealing his rubies.
He had to go on thinking that she was the thief. It was the only way she could protect Jenny.
Which meant—the fear pooled in her stomach again, but with a different cause this time—that she was, indeed, going to have to go through with what Leo Makarios intended.
Have sex with him.
She stared unseeingly out over the water. In Austria it had seemed unreal; she’d been in shock, Anna realised, using all her mental energy to tamp down the panic that had been trying to erupt. Here, after being on her own all day, the reality of what she was going to have to do was hitting.
Hitting hard.
For a moment she felt revulsion stiffen through her.
A phrase welled up in her thoughts.
Self-respect. An alien concept to so many people, she knew, moving in the world she did. Men who treated women’s bodies as commodities—women who treated them the same way. She could name half a dozen other models she knew who would have thought themselves in paradise to have been offered the choice that Leo Makarios had offered. Queued round the block for it.
I’m not one of them!
Even as she mentally shouted her denial, another voice spoke in her head. With killing, merciless force.
But you will be…
Leo Makarios will reduce you to exactly that. Strip you of every last vestige of your self-respect even as he strips the clothes from your body…
Pincers bit inside her stomach, sharp and painful.
She went on staring out over the darkening sea, her mind even darker.
Facing up to what she was going to do.
What she was going to lose.
Yet, for all that was true, she could not sacrifice her friend’s future, her baby, just to protect her own self-respect.
I have to do this.
And after all, she thought, with savage mockery at her own prurience, supposing it was Jenny or jail? What would you do then? Would you still stand by her if it meant losing years of your life?
Instead of just a few days…a few nights…
So why ma
ke such a fuss about what Leo Makarios is offering?
Even as Anna let the thought into her mind she tried to suppress it.
Leo Makarios was dangerous. She’d thought him so the very first time she’d set eyes on him, and every encounter with him had proved it to her. Especially the one in her bedroom…
Memory flooded back like a drowning tide, and suddenly she was there, there again, as Leo Makarios held her, kissed her, caressed her—a sensual onslaught that had simply overwhelmed her, made it impossible for her to resist…
Until, with a strength she’d hardly been able to summon, she had flung him from her…
She shut her eyes in anguish, blocking out memory.
Self-respect? The words stabbed at her. Mocking her. Taunting her.
She wasn’t just going to sacrifice her self-respect by having deliberate, cold-blooded sex with Leo Makarios. She was going to lose it for a much, much worse reason…
She turned away abruptly. Grimly, she headed back up the beach in the brief sub-tropical dusk.
Her face had hardened.
She couldn’t get out of it now. That wasn’t in her power. Not if she wanted to keep Jenny safe, herself out of jail.
But she could, she must ensure that it was nothing but deliberate, cold-blooded sex.
Nothing more.
Dear God, let me have the strength I need—please, please!
‘More champagne?’
‘No, thank you.’
‘Smoked salmon?’
‘No, thank you.’
‘Caviar?’
‘No, thank you.’
‘As you wish.’ There was an amused, baiting quality to Leo’s voice. He sat back in his rattan chair on the terrace. From the veranda the gardens were landscaped so that the curve of the beach opened up, framed by palm trees. A light, cooling breeze came off the sea. Moonlight bathed the surface of the water.
It was a beautiful scene—and the woman sitting opposite him complemented it perfectly. His eyes slid over her as she sat there, ramrod-straight, staring determinedly out to sea.
She was wearing a jade-green loose silk-trousered affair, with long sleeves and a high collar. As she’d stalked across the terrace, her hair caught back in a stark, high knot, not a scrap of make-up on her, he’d read the signals coming from her as if she’d been broadcasting in neon.