He had to do something—anything—to protect the reputation of his mother. He’d failed to protect her privacy when it mattered most, and he refused to fail her again. If anyone was going to create a biography it would be someone who cared about keeping her reputation and memory alive and revered.
No going back. No compromises. He would keep his promise and he was happy to do it—for her and for his family. And just maybe there was a slim chance that he would come to terms with his own crushing guilt at how much he had failed her. Maybe.
Mark turned back towards the house and frowned as he saw movement on the other side of the French doors separating the house from the patio.
Strange. His housekeeper was away and he wasn’t expecting visitors. Any visitors. He had made sure of that. His office had strict instructions not to reveal the location of the villa or give out his private contact details to anyone.
Mark blinked several times and found his glasses on the side table.
A woman he had never seen before was strolling around inside his living room, picking things up and putting them down again as if she owned the place.
His things! Things he had not intended anyone else to see. Documents that were personal and very private.
He inhaled slowly and forced himself to stay calm. Anger and resentment boiled up from deep inside his body. He had to fight the urge to rush inside and throw this woman out onto the lane, sending her back whence she came.
The last thing he wanted was yet another journalist or so-called filmmaker looking for some dirt amongst his parents’ personal letters.
This was the very reason he’d come to Paxos in the first place. To escape constant pressure from the world of journalists and the media. And now it seemed that the world had decided to invade his privacy. Without even having the decency to ring the doorbell and ask to be admitted.
This was unacceptable.
Mark rolled back his shoulders, his head thumping, his hands clenched and his attention totally focused on the back of the head of this woman who thought she had the right to inspect the contents of his living room.
The patio door was half-open, and Mark padded across the stone patio in his bare feet quietly, so that she wouldn’t hear him against the jazz piano music tinkling out from his favourite CD which he had left playing on Repeat.
He unfurled one fist so that his hand rested lightly on the doorframe. But as he moved the glass backwards his body froze, his hand flat against the doorjamb.
There was something vaguely familiar about this chestnut-haired woman who was so oblivious to his presence, her head tilted slightly to one side as she browsed the family collection of popular novels and business books that had accumulated here over the years.
She reminded him of someone he had met before, but her name and the circumstamces of that meeting drew an annoying blank. Perhaps it was due to the very odd combination of clothing she was wearing. Nobody on this island deliberately chose to wear floral grey and pink patterned leggings beneath a fuchsia dress and an expensive jacket. And she had to be wearing four or five long, trailing scarves in contrasting patterns and colours, which in this heat was not only madness but clearly designed to impress rather than be functional.
She must have been quite entertaining for the other passengers on the ferry or the hydrofoil to the island from Corfu that morning.
One thing was certain.
This girl was not a tourist. She was a city girl, wearing city clothes. And that meant she was here for one reason—and that reason was him. Probably some journalist who had asked him for an interview at some function or other and was under pressure from her editor to deliver. She might have come a long way to track him down, but that was her problem. Whoever she was, it was time to find out what she wanted and send her back to the city.
Then she picked up a silver-framed photograph, and his blood ran cold.
It was the only precious picture he had from the last Christmas they had celebrated together as a family. His mother’s happy face smiled out from the photograph, complete with the snowman earrings and reindeer headset she was wearing in honour of Cassie’s little boy. A snapshot of life at Belmont Manor as it used to be and never could be again.
And now it was in the hands of a stranger.
Max gave a short, low cough, both hands on his hips.
‘Looking for anything in particular?’ he asked.
The girl swung round, a look of absolute horror on her face. As she did so the photograph she was holding dropped from her fingers, and she only just caught it in time as it slid down the sofa towards the hard tiled floor.
As she looked at him through her oversized dark sunglasses, catching her breath unsteadily, a fluttering fragment of memory flashed through his mind and then wafted out again before he could grasp hold of it. Which annoyed him even more.
‘I don’t know who you are, or what you’re doing here, but I’ll give you one chance to explain before asking you to leave the same way you came in. Am I making myself clear?’
CHAPTER TWO
LEXI thought her heart was going to explode.
It couldn’t be. It just could not be him.
Exhaustion. That was the only explanation. Three weeks on the road, following a film director through a series of red-carpet events across Asia, had finally taken their toll.
She simply had to be hallucinating. But as he looked at her through narrowed eyes behind rimless designer spectacles Lexi’s stomach began to turn over and over as the true horror of the situation hit home.
She was standing in front of Mark Belmont—son of Baron Charles Belmont and his stunningly beautiful wife, the late movie actress Crystal Leighton.
The same Mark Belmont who had punched her father in that hospital on the day his mother had died. And accused her of being his accomplice in the process. Completely unfairly.
When she was a little girl she’d had a recurring nightmare about being a pilgrim sent to fight the lions in some gladiatorial arena in Rome.
This was worse.
Her legs were shaking like jelly, and if her hand held on to her bag any tighter the strap would snap.
‘What—what are you doing here?’ she asked, begging and pleading with him in her mind to tell her that he was a temporary guest of the celebrity she had been paid to work with and that he would soon be leaving. Very soon. Because the other alternative was too horrible to imagine.
She’d thought that she had escaped her shameful connection to this man and his family.
Fate apparently had other ideas.
Fate in the form of Mark Belmont, who was looking at her with such disdain and contempt that she had to fight back the temptation to defend herself.
With a single shake of the head, he dismissed her question.
‘I have every right to be here. Unlike yourself. So let’s start again and I’ll ask you the same question. Who are you and what are you doing in my house?’
His house? A deep well of understanding hit her hard and the bottom dropped out of Lexi’s stomach.
If this was his house—was it possible that Mark Belmont was her celebrity?
It would make sense. Crystal Leighton’s name had never left the gossip columns since her tragic death, and Lexi had heard a rumour that the Belmont family were writing a biography that would be front-page news. But surely that was Baron Belmont, not his business-guru son?
Lexi