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Julia James lives in England with her family. Mills & Boon were the first ‘grown up’ books she read as a teenager, alongside Georgette Heyer and Daphne du Maurier, and she’s been reading them ever since. Julia adores the English and Celtic countryside, in all its seasons, and is fascinated by all things historical, from castles to cottages. She also has a special love for the Mediterranean—‘The most perfect landscape after England’!—and she considers both ideal settings for romance stories. In between writing she enjoys walking, gardening, needlework, baking extremely gooey cakes and trying to stay fit!

CHAPTER ONE

LEO MAKARIOS paused in the shadows at the top of the flight of wide stairs leading down to the vast hall of Schloss Edelstein, one hand curved around the newel post of the massive carved wood banister, his powerful physique relaxing as he surveyed the arc-lit scene below with a sense of satisfaction.

Justin had chosen well. The four girls really were exquisite.

He stood a moment, looking them over.

The blonde caught his eye first, but despite her remarkable beauty she was too thin for his tastes, her pose too tense. He had no patience with neurotic women. The brunette beside her wasn’t too thin, but for all her glorious swathe of chestnut hair her expression was vacant. Leo’s gaze moved on. Unintelligent women irritated him.

The redhead’s pre-Raphaelite looks were stunning indeed, but they had, Leo knew, already caught the attention of his cousin Markos, under whose protection the girl was living. His gaze moved on again to the final girl.

And stopped.

His eyes narrowed, taking in the picture she made.

The hair was sable. As black as night.

The skin was white. As pale as ivory.

And the eyes were green.

As green as the emeralds she was wearing.

Wearing with an air of such total boredom that a sudden shaft of anger went through him. What business had any female to look bored when wearing a Levantsky necklace? Did she not realise what a miracle of the jeweller’s art the necklace was? And the earrings and the bracelets and the rings she was adorned with?

Evidently not. Even as he watched her lips pressed together and she gave a conspicuously heavy sigh, placing one hand on her hip and very obviously shifting her weight from one leg to the other beneath her long skirts.

Leo stilled, the anger draining out of him. As she’d given that heavy sigh her breasts had lifted. Already lush from the tightly corseted black gown she was wearing, the movement had made their soft dove-white mounds swell delectably.

Through Leo’s lean, powerful frame a familiar and pleasurable sensation started.

So the sable-haired, green-eyed beauty was bored, was she?

Well, he would be happy to remedy that.

Personally.

He started to walk down the stairs.

Anna felt her mood worsening. What was the hold-up now? Tonio Embrutti had gone into a huddle with his assistants, and she could hear the static hiss of vituperative Italian. She gave another sigh, feeling the low-cut décolletage digging in. She hated wearing it—it was far too revealing, and it invited the usual sleazy male attention she tried to avoid.

Her lips pressed together again. Mentally she forced herself to go through one of her karate katas. It both calmed her and reassured her, knowing she could fight off any physical harassment—even if she couldn’t stop men leering over her.

She shifted her weight again minutely in the heavy dress. Modelling wasn’t as easy as people thought it was, and she could tell that the two amateurs here—Kate and Vanessa—were finding it hard and tiring. Anna’s eyes travelled to them. The brunette, Kate, looked vacant without her lenses in—but at least, thought Anna, it meant she couldn’t see the lecherous looks aimed at her. The redhead, Vanessa, had other protection—word had gone round that her boyfriend was the cousin of the guy who’d set up this shindig and owned this medieval mansion. Though why, Anna mused, a Greek should own a castle in the Austrian Alps was beyond her. Maybe he just wanted to be close to the private Swiss bank he kept his loot in.

He certainly had a whole load of cash, that was for sure. Schloss Edelstein was vast, perched halfway up a mountain and surrounded by forests and snowfields.

Anna’s bored expression lightened suddenly with remembered pleasure. The view from her bedroom was breathtaking: sunlight sparkling on the pristine snow, down to the frozen lake below, ringed by mountains. Very different from the view of the gasworks she’d had when she was growing up.

But then Anna had been lucky, she knew—spectacularly lucky.

Spotted in a shopping mall when she was eighteen by a scout for a modelling agency, she’d been incredibly suspicious at first. But the offer had proved genuine. Not that it hadn’t taken non-stop hard work to succeed at modelling. Now, even though she was not in the supermodel bracket, and at twenty-six was already facing up to her limited remaining shelf-life, she made a living that was light-years away from what she’d been born to.

She’d learned a lot along the way. Not just how the other half lived—which had opened her eyes big-time—but about how to survive in one of the toughest careers around. And do it without letting the slime get to you.

Because slime, she had swiftly discovered, was a big, big feature of a fashion model’s world. Some of the girls, she knew, did every drug they could, and slept with every man who could help their career. And a lot of the men in the fashion world weren’t any better either.

Not that everyone was like that, she acknowledged. Some people in the fashion world were fine—there were designers she respected, photographers she trusted, models who were friends. Like Jenny, the blonde of the quartet, her best friend, draped now in white, with a diamond tiara and bracelets up to her elbows.

Anna’s eyes narrowed.

Jenny didn’t look well. She’d always been thin—what model wasn’t?—but now she was on the point of looking emaciated. It wasn’t drugs—Jenny didn’t do drugs, or Anna would not have been friends with her. She hoped it wasn’t just undereating—especially not if some jerk of a photographer had been telling her to shift some non-existent weight. Illness? A shudder went through Anna. Life was uncertain enough, and you could die in your twenties all right. Hadn’t her own mother not made it past twenty-five, leaving her fatherless baby daughter to be brought up by her widowed grandmother?

Whatever it was that was pulling Jenny down, Anna would try and catch some time with her, when today’s shoot had finished. If it ever did. At least the huddle around Tonio Embrutti seemed to be ending. He was turning his attention back to the models. His little eyes flashed in his fleshy face, which a cultivated designer stubble did not enhance.

‘You!’ He pointed dramatically at Jenny. ‘Off!’

Anna saw Jenny stare.

‘Off?’ she echoed dumbly.

The photographer waved his hands irritably.

‘The dress. Off. Down to the hips. Peel it off. Then I need the hands crossed over in your cleavage. I want to shoot the bracelets. Hurry up!’ He clicked impatiently at a hovering stylist and held out a hand for his camera from his assistant.

Jenny stood frozen.

‘I can’t.’

The photographer stared at her.

‘Are you deaf? Remove your dress. Now!’

The stylist he’d pointed at was obediently undoing the fastenings down the back of Jenny’s dress.

‘I’m not taking the dress off!’

Jenny’s voice sounded high-pitched with tension.

Anna saw Tonio Embrutti’s face darken. She stepped forward to intervene.

‘No strips,’ she announced. ‘It’s in the contract.’

The photographer’s face whipped round to hers.

‘Shut up!’ He turned back to Jenny.

Anna walked up to her, putting a hand out to stop the stylist. Jenny was looking as tense as a board.

Another voice spoke. A new voice.

‘Do we have a problem?’

The voice was deep, and accented. It was also—and Anna could hear it like a low, subliminal tremor in her body—a warning.

A man had stepped out of the shadows consuming the rest of the vast hall beyond the brilliantly illuminated space they were being photographed in.

Anna felt the breath catch in her throat. The man who had stepped into the circle of light was like a leopard. Sleek, powerful, graceful—and dangerous.

Dangerous? She wondered why the word had come into her mind, but it had. And even as it formed it was replaced by another one.

Devastating.

The breath stayed caught in her throat as she stared, taking in everything about the man who had just appeared.

Tall. Very tall. Taller than her.

Dark hair, olive skin—and a face that could have stepped out of a Byzantine mosaic. Impassive, remote, assessing.

And incredibly sexy.

It was the eyes, she thought, as she slowly exhaled her breath. The eyes that did it. Almond-shaped, heavy-lidded, sensual.

Very dark.

He spoke again. Everyone seemed to have gone totally silent around him. He was the kind of man who’d have that effect on people, Anna found herself thinking.

‘I repeat—do we have a problem?’

He doesn’t like problems—he gets rid of them. They get in his way…

The words seemed to form in her mind of their own accord.

‘And you are…?’ Tonio Embrutti enquired aggressively.

Stupidly.

The man turned his impassive heavy-lidded eyes on him. For a moment he said nothing.

‘Leo Makarios,’ he said.

He didn’t say it loudly, thought Anna. He didn’t say it portentously. And he certainly didn’t say it self-importantly.

Yet there was something about the way the man who owned Schloss Edelstein, whose company owned every jewel that she and the other three models were draped with, and who owned a whole heap more besides spoke. Something about the way he said his name that almost—almost—made her feel sorry for Tonio Embrutti.

Almost, but not quite. Because Tonio Embrutti was, without doubt, one of the biggest jerks she’d ever had the displeasure to be photographed by.

‘Yes,’ she announced clearly, before the photographer could get a word out. ‘We do have a problem.’

The heavy-lidded eyes turned to her.

How, she found herself thinking, could eyes that were so impassive make her feel every muscle in her body tighten? As though she were an impala—caught out on a deserted African plain, with the sun going down.

When the big cats came out to hunt.

But she wasn’t an impala, and this Leo Makarios was no leopard. He was just a rich man who was having a fun time getting his latest rich-man’s toy some media attention. Starting with publicity photos, courtesy of four models specially hired for the purpose.

But not hired to strip.

‘Your photographer,’ she said sweetly, ‘wants us to breach the contract.’ Her voice changed. Hardened. ‘No nude work. It’s in the contract,’ she informed him. ‘I made sure it was. Check it out.’

She went on standing protectively beside Jenny. The other two girls—the amateurs—had, she noticed, instinctively closed in on each other as well. Both were looking uneasy.

Leo Makarios was still looking at her.

She was looking back.

Something was happening to her.

Something deep down. In her guts.

Something she didn’t like.

Slime. Was that it? Was that what it was about the way Leo Makarios was looking at her that she didn’t like?

No, she thought slowly. Definitely not slime. That she could handle. She’d had to learn how, and now she could.

But this was worse. What Leo Makarios was doing to her hit somewhere completely different.

She could feel it happening. Feel the slow, heavy slug of her heart rate. Feel the blood start to pulse.

As if for the very first time in her life.

Oh, no, she thought, with the kind of slow-motion thinking that came with great shock. Not this.

Not him.

But it was.

Leo let his eyes rest on her.

She wasn’t looking bored now.

Two quite different emotions were animating her face, though she was, he could see, trying not to let the second one through.

The first emotion was anger. The girl was angry. Very angry.

It was an old anger too, one that was familiar to her.

But the second emotion was coming as a shock to her.

He felt a surge of satisfaction go through him.

She might be hiding it, but he’d seen it—seen the tell-tale minute flaring of her pupils as her eyes had impacted with his.

The satisfaction came again, but he put it to one side. He’d attend to it later—when the time was appropriate. Right now he had other matters to deal with.

He flicked his eyes to the blonde. Yes, definitely the neurotic type, he thought. Tense and jittery, and the type to give any man a headache. She was fantastically beautiful, of course, but he didn’t envy the man who had the handling of her.

‘Let me understand,’ he said to her. ‘You do not want this shot? The one Signor Embrutti desires?’

The girl was almost trembling she was so tense. She shook her head.

Tonio Embrutti burst into a fusillade of staccato Italian. Leo halted him with a peremptory hand.

‘No breast shots. Not for her. Not for any of them. Their clothes stay on—all of them,’ he spelt out, for good measure.

His eyes moved over the four girls, resting momentarily on the redhead. A smile almost flickered on his mouth. He could just imagine his cousin Markos’s reaction to seeing his mistress’s naked charms paraded in the publicity shots accompanying the launch of the rediscovered Levantsky collection—long-hidden in a secret Tsarist cache in the depths of Siberia and recently returned to the commercial world courtesy of a shrewd acquisition by Makarios Corp.

Markos would have beaten him to a pulp for allowing it!

If he could land a punch, that was, thought Leo, with dark humour.

Not that he would give him cause to—or any man who had an interest in the girls here.

His eyes flicked back to the sable-haired model. Was she taken? Just because she’d responded to him it didn’t mean that another man didn’t have his marker on her. She wouldn’t be the first female to think she’d do better trading up to a Makarios.

Those that thought that way, however, he promptly lost interest in.

Such women made poor mistresses. Their minds were on his money—not on him.

And when he had a woman in bed with him he wanted her mind totally and utterly on him.

As the sable-haired model’s would be when he bedded her. He would see to it.

He strolled to the side of the vast hall, nodding briefly to the senior security personnel hired to guard the Levantsky collection, leaned back against the edge of a heavy oak table, crossed one ankle over the other, folded his arms, and watched, wanting to see more of the girl he had selected for himself.

The shoot went on.

It was the turn of the sable-haired model next. Both to be shot and picked on.

Tonio Embrutti was clearly taking out his spleen on her. Nothing she did was right. He snapped and snarled and sneered at whatever she did, however she posed.

Leo felt an intense desire to stride across to the photographer and wring his scrawny neck. And he also felt a grudging admiration for the model.

She might be bored wearing a Levantsky parure, she might be the kind of troublemaker who quoted contractual conditions at the first sign of rough water, but when it came to putting up with what was being handed out to her she had the patience of a saint.

Which was curious, thought Leo, watching her assessingly, because she didn’t look saint-like at all.

Not that she looked sexy.

Nothing that crass.

No, her intense sexual allure came from something quite different.

It came from her being supremely indifferent to it.

It really was, he mused, very powerful.

Very erotic.

His eyes swept over her. The black hair like a cloak, the milk-white shoulders and generous curve of her corseted breasts, her tiny waist and her accentuated hips, her slender but moulded arms—and then her face, of course. Almost square, with a defined jaw, and yet the high cheekbones, the straight nose, the wide, unconsciously voluptuous mouth—and the emerald eyes…

Oh, yes, she really was very, very erotic.

He felt his body stir, and he relaxed back to enjoy the view.

And anticipate the night’s entertainment to come.

Courtesy of the sable-haired model.

Idly, he wondered what her name was…

Anna sank her exhausted body into the hot, fragrant water. It felt blissful. God, she was tired. The shoot had been punishing. Not just because of that jerk Embrutti—though keeping her cool with him had taken more effort than she enjoyed exerting—but simply because it had taken so long.

But in the end it had been a wrap. Every girl had been photographed wearing every different colour stone, with both matching and contrasting gowns. They would be wearing the jewels again tonight, at the grand reception Leo Makarios was holding to launch his revival of the Levantsky jewellery marque. Vanessa in emeralds, Kate in rubies, herself in diamonds and Jenny in sapphires.

Anna’s eyes were troubled suddenly. She’d had her little chat with Jenny, following her into her room when they’d all finally been dismissed. She’d plonked her down on the bed, sat down beside her, and got the truth from her.

And it had shocked her totally.

‘I’m pregnant!’ Jenny had blurted out.

Anna had just stared. She hadn’t needed to ask who by, or just why Jenny was so upset about it.

She’d warned her all along not to get involved with someone whose culture was so different from Western norms, that it could only end in trouble.

And it certainly had.

‘He told me!’ Jenny had rocked back and forth on the bed, clutching her abdomen where, scarcely visible, her baby was growing. ‘He told me that if ever I got pregnant I faced two choices. Marrying him and living as his wife to raise the child. Or marrying him, giving him the child, and being divorced. But I can’t. I can’t do either! I can’t!’

She’d started crying, and Anna had wrapped her up in her arms and let her cry.

‘I can’t marry him!’ Jenny had sobbed. ‘I can’t live in some harem and never get out ever again. And as for giving up my baby…’

Her sobs had become even more anguished.

‘I take it,’ Anna had said, when they finally died away, ‘that he doesn’t know about the baby?’

‘No! And he mustn’t find out! Or he’ll come and get me and drag me back to his desert. Oh, God, Anna, he mustn’t find out. Don’t you see why I was so terrified when Tonio wanted me to strip down? In case it showed—the pregnancy. Supposing someone noticed—they would; you know they would—and it started circulating as a rumour. He’d pick up on it and he’d come storming down on me! Oh, God, I’ve got to get away. I’ve got to.’

Anna had frowned.

‘Get away?’

‘Yes. I’ve got to hide. Hide before anything starts really showing. And I mean hide for good, Anna. If he ever hears I’ve had a baby he’ll know it’s his. He’ll have tests done and all that. So I’ve got to get away.’

She’d turned a stricken face to her friend.

‘I’ve got to get really, really far away—and stay there. Totally resettle. Somewhere he’ll never think of looking.’ She bit her lip. ‘I was planning on Australia. One of the obscure bits, round the northwest. Where the pearls come from. I can’t remember what it’s called, but it’s the last place he’d look.’

Anna had looked sober.

‘Can you afford to move out there, Jenny?’

She knew Jenny earned good money, but it was patchy. Neither of them were in the very top league of supermodels, and agency fees and other expenses ate into what they were paid. Besides, Jenny’s ill-advised affair with the man she was now desperate to flee from had kept her out of circulation for too long—other, younger models were snapping up work she’d have now been grateful to get.

Jenny hadn’t answered. Just bitten her lip.

‘I can lend you—’ Anna began, but Jenny had shaken her head.

‘You need your money. I know how expensive that nursing home is for your gran. And I won’t have you selling your flat. At our age we’re both looking extinction in the face—you need your savings for when you quit modelling. So I’m not borrowing from you. I’ll manage. Somehow.’

Anna hadn’t bothered to press her offer. Somehow she would make sure Jenny had at least enough to start running, start hiding—even if it meant mortgaging her flat to raise some cash.

Now she lay back in the water, letting the heat drain her tiredness. Poor Jenny—pregnant by a man who valued her only as a body, and who would part her from her baby with the click of his imperious fingers. Neither of the generous ‘options’ he’d given her was acceptable. No, Jenny had to get away, all right. As soon as this shoot was over.

But there was more to get through yet. Already guests had started to arrive. Driven up in chauffeured cars or deposited via helicopter. The rich, the famous, the influential—all invited by Leo Makarios.

She stared at the steam gently rising from the huge clawfooted bathtub.

Leo Makarios.

She was going to have to think about him.

She didn’t want to.

Had been putting it off.

But now she had to think about him.

Cautiously she opened her mind to what had happened.

For the first time in four long, safe years she had seen a man who was dangerous to her.

And it was disturbing.

Because men weren’t dangerous to her. Not any more. Not since Rupert Vane had told her that he was off to marry Caroline Finch-Carleton—a girl, unlike Anna, from his own upper-crust background.

Even now, four years on, she could still feel the burn of humiliation. Of hurt.

Rupert had been the first man—the only man—who had got past her defences. He’d had the lazily confident good-mannered charm of a scion of the landed classes, and he’d simply breezed through each and every one of her rigidly erected guards. He had been funny, and fun, and fond of her in his own shallow way.

‘It’s been a hoot, Anna,’ he’d told her as he’d given her the news about his forthcoming marriage.

Since then she’d kept men—all men—at a safe distance. Thanking heaven, in a perverse way, that most of the ones she encountered held no attraction for her.

Into her mind, as the water lapped her breasts, an image stole. A picture of a man looking her over with dark heavylidded eyes.

Leo Makarios.

Deliberately she let herself think about him. I need to know, she thought. I need to know why he’s dangerous to me.