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 beeline 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 subtropical 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 subtropical 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 airconditioning, 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