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?’
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 sighed out loud. She was jumping to conclusions—her imagination was running ahead of itself. This was a big house, with room for plenty of guests. It could easily be one of his colleagues or aristocratic friends who needed her help.
And then the impact of what he was asking got through to her muddled brain.
Mark had not recognised her. He had no clue that she was the girl he had met in the hospital corridor only a few months earlier.
They had only met for a few fleeting moments, and she had certainly changed since then. They both had. And her sunglasses were a genius idea.
She inhaled a couple of breaths, but the air was too warm and thick to clear her head very much. It was as though his tall, powerful body had absorbed all the oxygen from the room.
A flicker of annoyance flashed across his full, sensuous mouth before he said, ‘I don’t take kindly to uninvited guests, so I suggest you answer my question before I ask you to leave.’
Uninvited guests? Oh, God, the situation was worse than she’d realised. He didn’t seem to be expecting a visitor—any visitor. He had no idea that his publisher had sent a ghost writer out to the island! No wonder he thought that she was some pathetic burglar or a photojournalist.
Okay, so he had treated her unfairly in the worst of circumstances, but she was here to do a job. She glanced down, desperate to escape his laser-beam focus, and her eyes found the image of a happy family smiling back at her from behind the glass in the picture she had almost dropped.
It could have been a movie set, with a perfect cast of actors brought in for the day. Gorgeous film-star mother, handsome and tall aristocratic father, and two pretty children—with the cutest toddler on the planet waving at the camera. All grouped in front of a tall Christmas tree decorated in red and gold and a real fire burning bright in a huge marble fireplace.
What did Mark Belmont know about broken families and wrecked dreams?
Guilt about the pain her father had caused the Belmont family pinched her skin hard enough to make her flinch. But she ignored it. What her father had done had never been her fault, and she wasn’t going to allow the past to ruin her work. She needed this job, and she’d be a fool to let her father snatch away the chance to make her dream come true.
Lexi opened her mouth as if to speak, closed it again, and then pinched her thumb and forefinger tightly against the bridge of her nose.
‘Oh, no.’ She shook her head slowly from side to side, eyes closed. ‘The agency would not do this to me.’
‘The agency?’ Mark asked, his head tilted slightly to one side. ‘Have you got the right villa? Island? Country?’
She chuckled, and when she spoke her voice was calmer, steadier.
‘Let me guess. Something tells me that you may not have spoken, emailed or in some other way communicated with your publisher in the past forty-eight hours. Am I right?’
For the first time since she had arrived a concerned look flashed across his tanned and handsome face, but was instantly