“Why is it you’re so determined to suspect my motives?” Alex asked.

“You’re a man,” Beth told him acidly, “and my experience of men is that…” She looked away from him. Something about the tight white line around Alex’s mouth was hurting her. Without knowing how it had happened she had strayed onto some very treacherous and uncertain ground indeed.

“So, I’m to be condemned without a hearing, is that it? Who was he, Beth?” he asked her grimly. “A friend? A lover?”

“Actually he was neither,” she told him. Frantically she got up, but she had taken only a few steps before he caught up with her and swung her around to face him.

Beneath her fingertips Beth could feel the fabric of his shirt, soft and warm, but the body that lay beneath it felt deliciously firm…hard, masculine, an unfamiliar and even forbidden territory that her fingers were suddenly dangerously eager to explore.

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Penny Jordan is one of Mills & Boon’s most popular authors. Sadly, Penny died from cancer on 31st December 2011, aged sixty-five. She leaves an outstanding legacy, having sold over a hundred million books around the world. She wrote a total of one hundred and eighty-seven novels for Mills & Boon, including the phenomenally successful A Perfect Family, To Love, Honour & Betray, The Perfect Sinner and Power Play, which hit the Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller lists. Loved for her distinctive voice, her success was in part because she continually broke boundaries and evolved her writing to keep up with readers’ changing tastes. Publishers Weekly said about Jordan ‘Women everywhere will find pieces of themselves in Jordan’s characters’ and this perhaps explains her enduring appeal.

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A Treacherous Seduction
Penny Jordan

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In memory of Dagmar Digrinová

whose enthusiasm and love

for her country inspired

this book.

CHAPTER ONE

BETH gave an involuntary gasp of horrified disbelief as she stared white-faced at the contents of the crate she had just opened.

‘Oh, no! No!’ she protested in despair as she picked up the wine glass she had just removed from its packaging, one of a suite of matching stemware she had ordered on her buying trip to Prague.

Beth closed her eyes; her face had gone deathly pale and she felt rather sick.

She had invested so much in this Czech order, and not just in terms of money.

Her fingers trembling, she opened another box, biting her bottom lip hard as the decorative water jug she had in her hand confirmed all her growing anxiety.

Three hours later, with the storeroom at the back of the small shop she ran in partnership with her best friend Kelly Frobisher strewn with packages and stemware, all Beth’s worst fears were realised.

These…these abominations against good taste and style were most certainly not the deliciously pretty reproduction antique items she had ordered with such excitement and pleasure all those months ago in the Czech Republic. No way. This order, the order she had received but most certainly never placed, might equate in terms of numbers and suites to what she had bought, but in every other way it was horrendous, horrible, a parody of the beautiful, elegant, covetable top-quality stemware she had seen and paid for.

No, there was no way she would ever have ordered anything like this, and no way could she ever sell it either. Her customers were very discriminating, and Beth’s stomach churned as she recalled how enthusiastically and confidently she had titillated their interest by describing her order to them and promising them that it would turn their Christmas dinner tables into wonderful facsimiles of a bygone age, an age of Venetian baroque, Byzantine beauty.

Sickly she stared at the glass she was holding, a glass she remembered as being a richly gorgeous Christmassy cranberry-red with a depth of colour one could almost eat.

Was it really for this that she had put the small shop, her reputation and her personal finances into jeopardy? Was it for this that she had telephoned her bank manager from Prague to persuade him to extend her credit facilities? No, of course it wasn’t. The glassware she had been shown had been nothing like this. Nothing at all!

Feverishly she examined another piece, and then another, hoping against hope that what she had already seen had simply been a slight mistake. But there was no mistake. Everything she unpacked possessed the same hallmarks of poor workmanship, inferior glass and crude colouring. The blue she remembered as being the same deep, wonderful colour as a Renaissance painter’s Madonna’s robes, as having the same depth when held up to the light as the most beautiful of antique stained-glass windows, the green she recalled as possessing the depth and fire of a high-quality emerald, and the gold which had had gilding as subtle as anything to come out of an expert gilder’s workshop were, in reality, like comparing the colours in a child’s paintbox to those used by a true artist.

There had to have been a mistake. Beth stood up. She would have to ring the suppliers and advise them of their error.

Her brain went into frantic overdrive as she tried to grapple with the enormity of the problem now confronting her. After being delayed well beyond its original delivery date, the order had just barely arrived in time for their Christmas market.

In fact, she had planned this very afternoon to clear the shelves of their current stock and restock them with the Czech stemware.

What on earth was she going to do?

Normally this would have been a problem she would immediately have shared with her partner, Kelly, but these were not normal circumstances. For one thing, she had been in Prague on her own when she had taken the initiative to order the stemware. For a second, Kelly was quite rightly far more preoccupied with her new husband and the life they were establishing together than she was with the shop at the moment, and they had mutually agreed that for the time being Kelly would take a back seat in the business they had started up together in the small town of Rye-on-Averton, where the girls had originally been encouraged to come by Beth’s godmother, Anna Trewayne.

And for a third…

Beth closed her eyes. She knew that if she were to tell her godmother, Anna, or Kelly, her best friend, or even Dee Lawson, her landlady, of the financial and professional mess she was now in all three of them would immediately rush to her aid, full of understanding and sympathy for her plight. But Beth was sharply conscious of the fact that, out of the four of them, she was the only one who always seemed to get things wrong, who always seemed to make bad judgements, who always seemed to end up being duped…cheated…hurt. Who always seemed to be a loser…a victim…

Beth shuddered with a mixture of anger and anguish. What was the matter with her? Why was she constantly involving herself with people who ultimately let her down? She might, as other people were constantly reminding her, be placid, and perhaps a little too on the accommodating side, but that didn’t mean that she didn’t have any pride, that she didn’t need to be treated with respect.

None of the other three would have got themselves in this situation, she was sure. Dee, for instance, would most certainly not have done. No, she couldn’t imagine anyone ever managing to dupe or cheat Dee, with her confident, businesslike manner, nor Kelly, with her vibrant, positive personality, nor even Anna, with her quiet gentleness.

No, she was the vulnerable one, the fool, the idiot, who had ‘cheat me’ written all over her.

It had to be her own fault. Look at the way she had fallen for Julian Cox’s lies; look how gullible she had been, believing that he loved her when all the time what he had really been interested in had been the money he had believed she would inherit.

She had been stricken with shame when Julian had left her, claiming that he had never told her that he wanted to marry her, accusing her of running after him, pursuing him, of imagining that he had ever felt something for her.

Beth’s face started to burn. Not because she still loved him—she most certainly didn’t, and she doubted deep in her heart that she ever had; she had simply allowed him to persuade her that she had, because she had been flattered by the assiduous attentions he had paid her, and by his constant declarations of love, his insistence that they were soul mates. Well, she had certainly learned her lesson there. Never, ever again would she trust a man who treated her like that, who claimed to have fallen crazily and instantly in love with her as Julian had done, and she had stuck to that private vow even when…

Beth could feel her heart starting to thud heavily as she fought to suppress certain dangerous memories.

At least she hadn’t made the same mistake twice. No, she agreed mentally with herself, she’d just gone on to make fresh ones.

A failed romance and the public humiliation of other people knowing about it, painful though it had been, had at least only damaged her own life. What had happened now had the potential to humiliate not just her but Kelly as well.

They had built up a very good reputation in the town since opening their crystal and china shop. Because they were a small outlet they concentrated on matching their customers’ needs and, where they could, innovatively anticipating them.

Kelly had already told her enthusiastically that they had several very good customers, with celebrations of one sort or another coming up, to whom she had mentioned the fact that the purchase of some very special and individual stemware might be an excellent idea.

One customer in particular had been talking excitedly to Beth only the previous week about purchasing three dozen of the crimson Czech champagne flutes.

‘It’s our silver wedding this year—two days before Christmas—the whole family will be coming to us and it would be wonderful to have the glasses for then. I’m having a large family dinner party and we could use them for the champagne cocktails I’m planning to do, and for the toasts…’

‘Oh, yes, they would be perfect,’ Beth had enthused, already in her mind’s eye seeing them on her customer’s antique dining table, the delicacy of the fragile glass and the richness of the colour emphasised by the candlelight.

There was no way Candida Lewis-Benton would want to order what she, Beth, had just unpacked. No way at all.

Valiantly Beth fought the temptation to burst into tears. She was a woman, not a girl, and, as she had thought she had proved when she was in Prague, she could be determined and self-reliant and, yes, proud too. She could earn her own self-respect, and never mind what certain other people thought of her—certain other not-to-be-thought-of, or thought about, arrogant, overbearing men who thought they knew her better than she knew herself. Who wanted to take over her life and her, who thought they could lie to her and get her to acquiesce to whatever they wanted for her by claiming that they loved her. And she had known, of course, just what it was he had wanted. Well, she had at least shown him just how easily she had seen through his duplicitous behaviour.

‘Beth, I know it’s probably too soon to tell you this, but I…I’ve fallen in love with you,’ he had told her that afternoon in the pouring rain on the Charles Bridge.

‘No, that’s not possible,’ she had replied hardily.

‘If that wasn’t love, then just exactly what was it?’ he had demanded on another occasion, and he had touched his fingertips to her lips, still swollen and soft from the passion they had just exchanged.

She had answered boldly, ‘It was just lust—just sex, that’s all…’ And she had gone on to prove it to him.

‘Don’t be tempted into falling for the promises these street traders make to you,’ he had warned her more than once. ‘They’re simply pawns being used by organised crime to dupe tourists.’

She knew quite well what he’d been after. What he’d been after was exactly what Julian had been after—her money. Only Alex Andrews had wanted her body thrown in as well.

At least sexually Julian had done the decent thing, so to speak.

‘I don’t want us to be lovers…not yet…not until you’re wearing my ring,’ Julian had whispered passionately to her the night he had declared his love—a love he had not felt for her at all, as it later transpired.

It seemed almost laughable now that she had ever agonised so much over his perfidy. Perhaps the acute sense of self-loathing she had experienced over his betrayal and accusations had had more to do with the humiliation he had made her suffer rather than a genuinely broken heart.

Certainly, whenever she thought about him now, which was rarely, it was without any emotion whatsoever other than a distant sense of amazement that she could ever have considered him attractive. She had gone to Prague determined to prove to herself that she was not the emotional fool Julian had painted her as being, vowing that never again would she let herself be conned into believing that when a man told her he loved her he meant it.

She had come back from Prague feeling extremely proud of herself, and equally proud of the new, hardheaded, hard-hearted Beth she had turned herself into. If men wanted to lie to her and betray her, then she would learn to play them at their own game. She was an adult woman, with all that that encompassed. Mistrusting men as emotional partners didn’t mean that she had to deny herself the pleasure of finding them sexually desirable. The days were gone when a woman had to deny the sexual side of her nature. The days had gone, too, when a woman had to convince herself that she loved a man and that, even more important, he loved and respected her before she could give herself to him physically.

She had been living in the Dark Ages, Beth had told herself—living her life by an outdated set of rules and an even more outdated set of moral beliefs. An outdated and far too idealistic set of moral beliefs. Well, all that was over now. Now she had finally joined the real world, the world of harsh realities. Now she was a fully paid-up member of modern society, and if men, or rather a certain man, did not like the things she did or the things she said, then tough. The right to enjoy sex for sex’s sake was no longer a purely male province, and if Alex Andrews didn’t like that fact then it was just too bad.

Had he really thought she was going to fall for those lies he had told her? All those ridiculous claims he had made about falling in love with her the moment he first saw her?

Prague had been surprisingly full of people like him. British-and American-born in the main, students, most of them, or so they’d claimed, taking a year out to ‘do’ areas previously off limits to them. Some had family connections in the Czech Republic, some not, but all of them had possessed a common ingredient; all of them, to some extent, had been living off their wits, using their skills as linguists, charming a living out of gullible tourists. In Beth’s newly cynical opinion they’d been only one step removed from the high-pressure-sales types hawking time-share apartments, who had made certain holiday areas of the continent notorious until their governments had taken steps to control their activities.

True, Alex Andrews had alluded to the very different lifestyle he claimed to lead in Britain. According to his own description of himself he was a university lecturer in Modern History at a prestigious university college who was taking a sabbatical to spend some time with the Czech side of his family, but Beth hadn’t believed him. Why should she have? Julian Cox had claimed to have a highly profitable and respectable financial empire—he had turned out to be little more than a fraudster who had somehow managed to keep himself one step in front of actually breaking the law. It had been plain to Beth from the first moment she had met him that Alex Andrews was very much the same type.

Too good-looking, too self-confident…too sure that she’d been going to fall into his arms just because he claimed he was desperate to have her there. She wasn’t that much of a fool. She might have fallen for that kind of line once, but she certainly hadn’t been about to fall for it a second time.

Oh, yes, she had escaped making a fool of herself over Alex Andrews, but she hadn’t been able to prevent herself from…

Numbly Beth studied the stemware she had unpacked. There was a sick, shaky feeling in her stomach, a sensation of mingled panic and dread. It had to be a mistake…It had to be.

She simply couldn’t face telling Dee, Anna and Kelly that she had made a spectacularly bad error of judgement—again.

And she certainly couldn’t face telling her bank manager. She had really gone out on a limb with the loan she had persuaded him to give her—and she it.

Anxiously she got to her feet. The first thing she needed to do was to ring the factory.

She was just about to dial the number on her invoice when the telephone rang. Picking up the receiver, she heard her partner Kelly’s voice.

‘Beth, you’re going to hate me for this…’ Kelly paused. ‘Brough is having to go to Singapore on business and he wants me to go with him. It could mean us being away for over a month—he says that since we would be almost halfway there anyway we might as well also fly on to Australia and spend a couple of weeks with my cousin and her family.

‘I know what you must be thinking. We’re coming up for our busiest time and I’ve only been working a couple of days a week lately anyway. If you’d rather I didn’t go I’ll understand…After all, the business…’

Beth thought quickly. It was true that she would find it hard to manage for what sounded as though it was going to be close on five or six weeks without her partner, but if Kelly was away then at least it meant that Beth wouldn’t have to tell her about the stemware. Cravenly Beth admitted to herself that, given the opportunity to do so, she would much rather sort out everything discreetly and privately without involving anyone else—even if that meant getting someone in part-time to help with the shop whilst Kelly was away.

‘Beth? Are you still there?’ she heard Kelly asking her anxiously.

‘Yes. Yes, I’m here,’ Beth confirmed.

Taking a deep breath, she told her friend and partner as cheerfully as she could, ‘Of course you must go, Kelly. It would be silly to miss out on that kind of opportunity.’

‘Mmm…and I would miss Brough dreadfully. But I do feel guilty about leaving you, Beth, especially at this time of the year. I know how busy you’re going to be, what with the new stemware…Oh…did it arrive? Is it as wonderful as you remembered? Perhaps I could come down…?’

‘No. No…there’s no need for that,’ Beth assured her quickly.

‘Well, if you really don’t mind,’ Kelly said gratefully. ‘Brough did say that we could drive over to Farrow today. I’ve been given the address of someone who works there who makes the most wonderful traditional hand-crafted furniture. He’s got one of those purpose-built workshops in the Old Hall Stables there. It’s been turned into a small craft village. But if you need me at the shop…’

‘No. I’m fine,’ Beth assured her.

‘When are you putting the new stemware stuff out?’ Kelly asked enthusiastically. ‘I’m dying to see it…’

Beth tensed.

‘Er…I haven’t decided yet…’

‘Oh. I thought you said you were going to do it as soon as it arrived,’ Kelly protested, plainly confused.

‘Yes. I was. But…but I want to get a few more ideas yet; we’ve still got nearly a fortnight before the town’s Christmas lights and decorations are in place, and I thought it would be a good idea to time the window to fit in with that…’

‘Oh, yes, that’s a wonderful idea,’ Kelly enthused. ‘We could even have a small wine and nibbles do for our customers…perhaps have the food and the drinks the same colour as the glass…’

‘Er…yes. Yes…that would be wonderful,’ Beth agreed, hoping that her voice didn’t sound as lacking in enthusiasm to her friend as it did to herself.

‘Oh, but I’ve just realised; we’ll be leaving at the end of the week so I shall miss it,’ Kelly complained. ‘Still, we’ll definitely be back for Christmas; that’s something I have insisted on to Brough, and fortunately he agrees with me that our first Christmas should be spent here at home…together…Which reminds me. Please save me a set of those wonderful glasses, Beth.’

‘Er, yes, I shall,’ Beth confirmed.

With luck, she would be able to get the mistake in her order reversed and the correct stemware sent out to her whilst Kelly was away. Whilst Kelly was away, yes, but would she get it in time for the all-important Christmas market? When selecting the pieces for her order she had deliberately focused on the colours she deemed to be the most saleable for the Christmas season; deep red, rich blue, fir-tree green, all in the lavishly baroque style and decorated with gold leaf. Beautiful though the pieces were, she doubted that they would have the same sales appeal in the spring and summer months.

One hour and five unanswered telephone calls after she had finished speaking with Kelly, Beth sat back on her heels and stared helplessly around her chaotic storeroom.

The horror and the anger she had initially felt at having received the wrong order were giving way even more to frantic unease and suspicion.

The factory she had visited had been a large one, and the sales director she had spoken with suave and business-suited. The cabinets which had lined the walls of his plush office had been filled with the almost mouth-wateringly beautiful stemware from which he had invited Beth to take her choice for her order.

His secretary’s office, which she had glimpsed through an open door as he had escorted her from the reception foyer and into his own office, had been crammed with the most up-to-the-minute modern technology, and it was just not feasible that such an organisation would not, during office hours, have its telephone system fully manned and its faxes working.

But every time Beth had punched the numbers into her own telephone she had been met with a blank silence, an emptiness humming along the wire. Even if the factory had been closed for the Czech Republic version of a Bank Holiday, the telephone would still have rung.

The most horrible suspicion, the most awful possibility, was beginning to edge its way into Beth’s thoughts.

‘Don’t be taken in by what you’ve been shown,’ Alex Andrews had warned her. ‘Some gypsies are thought to be used as pawns in organised crime. Their aim is to sell non-existent goods to gullible foreign tourists in order to bring into the organisation foreign currency.’

‘I don’t believe you. You’re just trying to frighten me,’ Beth had told him furiously. ‘To frighten me and to make sure that I give my order to your cousins,’ she had added sharply. ‘That’s what all this is really about, isn’t it? Telling me you’ve fallen in love with me…claiming to care about me…I would be gullible if I had fallen for your lies, Alex…’

Beth didn’t want to remember Alex’s reaction to her accusations. She didn’t want to remember anything about Alex Andrews at all. She wasn’t going to allow herself to remember anything about him.

No? Then how come she had dreamed about him virtually every night since her return from the Czech Republic? a small inner voice taunted her.

She had dreamed about him simply out of the relief of knowing she had stood by her own promises to herself and not fallen for his lies, his claims to love her, Beth told her unwanted internal critic crossly.

She looked at her watch. It was almost four o’clock. No point in trying the Czech suppliers again today. Instead she would repack her incorrect order.

Dee, their landlady for the shop and the comfortable accommodation that went with it, who had now become a good friend, had invited her over for supper this evening.

Dispiritedly she started to repack the stemware, shuddering a little as she did so. The crystal was more suitable for jam jars than stemware, Beth decided with a grimace of distaste.

‘Haven’t I heard,’ Dee had queried gently a few weeks ago, ‘that some of the processes through which their china and glassware are made are a little crude when compared to ours…?’

‘At the lower end of the market perhaps they are,’ Beth had defended. ‘But this factory I found originally actually made things for the Royal House of Russia. The sales director showed me the most exquisite pieces of a dinner service they’d had made for one of the Romanian Princes. It reminded me very much of a Sèvres service, and the translucency of the china was quite breathtaking. The Czech people are very proud of their tradition of making high-quality crystal,’ Beth had added.

She had Alex Andrews to thank for that little piece of information. It had been something he had thrown furiously at her when she had accused him of trying to persuade her to buy his cousins’ goods, and the cause of yet another quarrel between them.

Beth had never met anyone who infuriated her as much as he had done. He had brought out in her a streak of anger and passion she had never previously known she possessed.

Anger and passion. Two very dangerous emotions.

Quickly Beth got back to repacking the open crates. Remember, she told herself sternly, you aren’t going to think about him. Or about what…what happened…

To her chagrin, Beth could feel her face starting to heat and then burn.

‘God, but you’re wonderful. So sweet and gentle on the outside and so hot and wild in private, so very hot and wild…’

Furious with herself, Beth jumped up.

‘You weren’t going to think about him,’ she told herself fiercely. ‘You aren’t going to think about him.’

CHAPTER TWO

‘MORE coffee, Beth…?’

‘Mmm…’

‘You seem rather preoccupied. Is anything wrong?’ Dee asked Beth in concern as she put down the coffee pot she had been holding.

They had finished eating and were now sitting in Dee’s sitting room, where several furnishing and decorating catalogues were spread open around them. Dee was planning to redecorate the room, and had been asking Beth for her opinion of the choices she had made.

‘No. No…I like the cream brocade very much,’ Beth told Dee quickly. ‘And if you opt for the cream carpet as well, that will allow you to bring in some richer, stronger colours in the form of cushions and throws…’

‘Yes, that was what I was thinking. I’ve seen a wonderful fabric that I’ve really fallen for, and I’ve managed to track down the manufacturer, but it’s a very small company. They’ve told me that they can only accept my order if I pay for it up front, and of course I’m reluctant to do that, just in case they can’t or don’t deliver.

‘I’ve asked my bank to run a financial check on them and let me have the results. It will be a pity if the report isn’t favourable. The fabric is wonderful, and I’ve really set my heart on it. But of course one has to be cautious in these matters, as no doubt you know.

‘You must have really been keeping your fingers crossed in Prague whilst you waited for your bank to verify that the Czech company was financially sound enough for you to do business with.’

‘Er…yes. Yes, I was…’

Beth took a quick gulp of her coffee.

What would Dee say if Beth were to admit to her that she had done no such thing, that she had quite simply been so excited at the thought of selling the wonderful stemware she had seen that every principle of financial caution she had ever learnt had flown right out of her head?

‘Kelly rang me today. She was telling me that she and Brough are hoping to make an extended trip to Singapore and Australia…’

‘Mmm…they are,’ Beth agreed.

She ought to have asked her bank to make proper enquiries over the Czech factory. She knew that, of course. Not just to ensure that they were financially sound, but also to find out how good they were at meeting their order dates. She could even remember her bank manager advising that she do so when she had telephoned him to ask him for extra credit facilities. And no doubt if he hadn’t been on the point of departing for his annual leave on the very afternoon she had rung he would have made sure that she had done so.

But he had and she hadn’t and the small, nagging little seed of doubt planted earlier by her inability to make telephone or fax contact with the factory was now throwing out shoots and roots of increasingly strong suspicion and dread with frightening speed.

‘How will you manage whilst Kelly’s away? You’ll have to get someone in part-time to help you…’

‘Yes. Yes, I shall,’ Beth agreed distractedly, wondering half hysterically what on earth Dee would say if she admitted to her that, if her worst fears were confirmed and her incorrect order had not been a mistake but a deliberate and cynical ploy to take advantage of her there was no way she would need any extra sales staff because, quite simply, there would be virtually nothing in the shop to sell.

Another fear sprang into Beth’s thoughts. If she had nothing to sell then how was she going to pay her rent on the shop and the living accommodation above it?

She had absolutely nothing to fall back on, not now that she had over-extended herself so dangerously to purchase the Czech glass.

Her parents would always help her out, she knew that, and so, too, she suspected, would Anna, her godmother. But how could she go to any of them and admit how foolish she had been?

No, she had got herself into this mess, and somehow she would get herself out of it.

And her first step in doing that was to locate her supplier and insist that the factory take back her incorrect order and supply her with the goods she had actually ordered.

‘Beth, are you sure you’re all right…?’

Guiltily she realised that Dee had been speaking to her and that she hadn’t registered a single word that the older woman had been saying.

‘Er…yes…I’m fine…’

‘Well, if it would be any help I could always come and relieve you at the shop for the odd half-day.’

‘You!’ Beth stared at Dee in astonishment, surprised to see that Dee was actually flushing.

‘You needn’t sound quite so surprised,’ Dee told Beth slightly defensively. ‘I did actually work in a shop while I was at university.’

Had she hurt Dee’s feelings? Beth tried not to show her surprise. Dee always seemed so armoured and self-contained, but there was quite definitely a decidedly hurt look in her eyes.

‘If I sounded surprised it was just because I know how busy you already are,’ Beth assured her truthfully.

Dee’s late father had had an extensive business empire which Dee had taken over following his death, managing not only the large amounts of money her father had built up through shrewd investment but also administering the various charity accounts he had set up to help those in need in the town.

Dee’s father had been the old-fashioned kind of philanthropist, very much in the Victorian vein, wanting to benefit his neighbours and fellow townspeople.

He had been a traditionalist in many other ways as well, from what Beth had heard about him—a regular churchgoer throughout his life and a loving father who had brought Dee up on his own after his wife’s premature death.

Dee was passionately devoted to preserving her father’s memory, and whenever anyone praised her for the good work she did via the charities she helped to fund she was always quick to point out that she was simply acting as her father’s representative.

When Beth and Kelly had first moved to the town they had wondered curiously why Dee had never married. She had to be about thirty, and surprisingly for such a businesslike and shrewd woman she had a very strong maternal streak. She was also very attractive.

‘Perhaps she just hasn’t found the right man,’ Beth had suggested to Kelly. That had been in the days when she herself had believed that she had very much found the right man, in the shape of Julian Cox, and had therefore been disposed to feel extremely sorry for anyone who was not so similarly blessed.

‘Mmm…or maybe no man can compare in her eyes to her father,’ Kelly had guessed, more shrewdly.

Whatever the truth, one thing was certain: Dee was simply not the kind of person whose private life one could pry into uninvited. And yet tonight she seemed unfamiliarly vulnerable; she even looked softer, and somehow younger as well, Beth noticed. Perhaps because she had left her hair down out of its normal stylish coil.

Certainly it would be impossible to overlook her, even in a crowd. She had the kind of looks, the kind of manner that immediately commanded other people’s attention—unlike her, Beth decided with wry self-disdain.

Her soft mousy-blonde hair would never attract a second look, not even when the sun had left it, as it had done last summer, with these lighter delicate streaks in it.

As a teenager she had passionately longed to grow taller. At five feet four she was undeniably short…‘Petite’, Julian had once infamously called her. Petite and as prettily delicate as a fragile porcelain doll. And she had thought he was complimenting her. Yuck. She was short. But she was very slender, and she did have a softness about her, an air which had once unforgettably and almost unforgivably led Kelly to say that she could almost have modelled for the book Little Women’s Beth.

On impulse, before going to Prague, she had had her long hair shaped and cut. The chopped, blunt-edged bob suited her, even if sometimes she did find it irritating, and had to tuck the stray ends behind her ears to stop them from falling over her face when she was working.

‘You are beautiful,’ Alex Andrews had told her extravagantly when he had held her in his arms. ‘The most beautiful woman in the whole world.’

She had known that he was lying, of course, and why, and she hadn’t been deceived—no, not for one minute—despite the sharp, twisting knife-like pain she had felt as she had listened to him in the full knowledge of his duplicity.

Why would he possibly think she was beautiful? After all, he was a man who any woman could see was quite extraordinarily handsome in a way that was far more classical Greek god than modern-day film star. Tall, with a body that possessed a steely whipcord-fit muscular strength, he’d seemed to radiate a fierce and very high-charged air of sensual magnetism that had almost been like some kind of personal force field. Impossible to ignore it—or him. Beth had felt at times as though he was draining the willpower out of her, as though he was somehow subtly overpowering her with the intensity of his sexual aura.

He also had the most remarkably hypnotic silver-grey eyes. She could see them now, feel their heat burning her. She could…

‘Beth…?’

‘I’m sorry Dee,’ she apologised guiltily.

‘It’s all right,’ Dee assured her, with her unexpectedly wide and warm smile. ‘Kelly told me that you’d collected your stemware from the airport and that you were unpacking it. I must say that I’m looking forward to seeing it. I’ve got some spare time tomorrow. Perhaps if I called round…?’

Beth could feel herself starting to panic.

‘Er…I don’t want anyone to see it until the town’s Christmas lights go on officially,’ she told Dee quickly. ‘I haven’t got it on the shelves yet, and—’

‘You want to surprise everyone by making a wonderful display with it,’ Dee guessed, her smile broadening.

‘Well, whatever you decide to do with it, to display it, I know it’s going to look wonderful. You really do have a very creative and artistic eye,’ she complimented Beth truthfully, adding ruefully, ‘And I most certainly do not. Which is why I needed your advice on the refurbishment of my sitting room.’

‘Your eye is actually very good,’ Beth assured her. ‘It’s just when it comes to those extra details that you need a bit of help. That crimson damask trimmed with the dull gold fringing would make a wonderful throw…’

‘It’ll be very rich,’ Dee commented doubtfully.

‘Yes, it will,’ Beth agreed. ‘Perfect for winter, and then for spring and summer you could switch to something softer. Your sitting room French windows open out onto the garden, and a throw which picks up the colours in that bed you’ve got within view of the window would be a perfect way to bring the garden and the sitting room into harmony with one another.’

Beth glanced at her watch and stood up. It was time for her to leave.

‘Don’t forget,’ Dee urged her, ‘if you do need some help in the shop, let me know. I realise that Anna sometimes stands in, when either you or Kelly aren’t available, but…’

She stopped as Beth was already shaking her head.

‘There’s no way that Ward will allow Anna to spend several hours on her feet right now. Anna says that you’d think no woman had ever had a baby before. Apparently it doesn’t matter how often she tells him that being pregnant is a perfectly natural state, that she’s happy and there’s absolutely nothing for him to worry about; he still treats her as though she’s too fragile to draw breath.’

Dee laughed ruefully.

‘He’s certainly very protective of her. He was most disapproving the other day when he found out she and I’d been to the garden centre and that I’d let her carry a box of plants. But then I suspect he still hasn’t completely forgiven me for sending him away when he came to look for Anna before they were married.’

‘You were only trying to protect her,’ Beth protested. She liked Ward, and was pleased that her godmother had found happiness with him after being widowed for so long, but she could well understand how two such strong characters as Dee and Ward would clash occasionally.

Only a very, very fine line separated a strong, determined man from being a bossy, domineering one, as she had good cause to know. Ward, fortunately, knew which side of the line to be on; Alex Andrews did not.

Alex Andrews.

He would certainly have enjoyed her present predicament, and he would have enjoyed even more saying ‘I told you so’ to her.

Alex Andrews!

Beth parked her small car outside the shop and let herself into the separate rear door which led upstairs to the living accommodation she had originally shared with Kelly.

Alex Andrews!

She was still thinking about him as she made herself a cup of tea and headed for her bedroom.

Alex Andrews—or, more correctly, Alex Charles Andrews.

‘I was named for this bridge,’ he had told her quietly the day they had stood together on Prague’s fabled Charles Bridge. ‘A reminder, my grandfather always used to say, of the fact that I was half Czech.’

‘Is that why you’re here?’ Beth had asked him, curious despite her determination to remain aloof from him—aloof from him and suspicious of him.

‘Yes,’ he acknowledged simply. ‘My parents came here in the early days after the Velvet Revolution in 1993.’ His eyes had grown sombre. ‘Unfortunately my grandfather died too soon to see the city he had always loved freed.

‘He left Prague in 1946 with my grandmother and my mother, who was a child of two at the time. She can barely remember anything at all about living here, but my grandfather…’ He stopped and shook his head, and Beth felt her own throat close up as she saw the glitter of tears in his eyes.

‘He longed to come back here so much. It was his home, after all, and no matter how well he had settled in England, how glad he was to be able to bring up his daughter, my mother, in freedom, Prague always remained the home of his heart.

‘I remember once when I was at Cambridge he came to see me and I took him punting on the Cam. “It’s beautiful,” he told me. “But it isn’t anywhere near as beautiful as the river which flows through Prague. Not until you have stood on the Charles Bridge and seen it for yourself will you understand what I mean…”’

‘And did you?’ Beth asked him softly. ‘Did you understand what he meant?’

‘Yes,’ Alex told her quietly. ‘Until I came here I had thought of myself as wholly British. I knew of my Czech heritage of course, but only in the form of the stories my grandfather had told me.

‘They had no substance, no reality for me other than as stories. The tales he told me of the castle his family had once owned and the land that went with it, the beautiful treasures and the fine furniture…’ Alex gave a small shrug. ‘I felt no sense of personal loss. How could I? And neither did I feel any personal sense of missing a part of myself. But once I came here—then…then…yes…I knew that there was a piece of me missing. Then I knew that subconsciously I had been searching for that missing piece of myself.’

‘Will you stay here?’ Beth asked him, drawn into the emotional intensity of what he was telling her in spite of herself.

‘No,’ Alex told her. ‘I can’t—not now.’

It was then that the heavens well and truly opened, causing him to grab her by the arm and run with her to the shelter of a small, dangerously private alcove tucked into a span of the bridge. And then that he had declared his love for her.

Immediately Beth panicked—it was too much, too soon, too impossible to believe. He must have some ulterior motive for saying such a thing to her. How could he be in love with her? Why should he be?

‘No! No, that’s not possible. I don’t want to hear this, Alex,’ she told him shortly, pulling away from him and out of the shelter of the alcove, leaving him to follow her.

Beth had first come across Alex at her hotel. The staff there, when she had asked for the services of an interpreter, had prevaricated and then informed Beth that, due to the fact that the city was currently hosting several large business conventions, all the reputable agencies were fully booked for days ahead. Beth’s heart had sunk. There was no way she could do what she had come to the Czech Republic to do without the services of an interpreter, and she had said as much to the young man behind the hotel’s reception desk.

‘I am so very sorry,’ the man apologised, spreading his hands helplessly. ‘But there are no interpreters.’

No interpreters. Beth was perilously close to tears; her emotions, still raw in the aftermath of discovering how badly Julian Cox had deceived her, were inclined to fluctuate from the easy weepiness of someone still in shock to a numb blankness which, if anything, was even more frightening. Today was a weepy day, and as Beth fought to blink away her unwanted emotions through the watery haze of her tears she saw the man who had been standing several feet away from her at the counter turn towards her.

‘I couldn’t help overhearing what you were just saying,’ he told Beth as she turned to walk away from the desk. ‘And, although I know it’s rather unorthodox, I was wondering if I could possibly be of any help to you…’

His English was so fluent that Beth knew immediately that it had to be his first language.

‘You’re English, aren’t you?’ she challenged him dubiously.

‘By birth,’ he agreed immediately, giving her a smile which could have disarmed a nuclear warhead.

Beth, though, as she firmly reminded herself, was made of sterner stuff. There was no way she was going to let any man, never mind one who possessed enough charisma to make him worthy of having a ‘danger’ sign posted across his forehead, wheedle his way into her life.

‘I speak English myself,’ Beth told him pleasantly and, of course, unnecessarily.

‘Indeed, and with just a hint of a very pretty Cornish accent, if I may say so,’ he astounded Beth by commenting with a grin. ‘However,’ he added, before she could fire back, ‘it seems that you do not speak Czech, whereas I do…’

‘Really?’ Beth gave him a coolly dismissive smile and began to walk away from him. She had been warned about the dangers of employing one of the self-proclaimed guides and interpreters who offered their services on Prague’s streets, approaching tourists and offering to help them.

‘Mmm…I learned it from my grandfather. He came originally from Prague.’

Beth tensed as he fell into step beside her.

‘Ah, I see what it is. You don’t trust me. Very wise,’ he approved, with astounding aplomb. ‘A beautiful young woman like you, on her own in a strange city, should always be suspicious of men who approach her.’

Beth glowered at him. Just how gullible did he think she was?

‘I am not…’ Beautiful, she had been about to say, but, recognising her danger, she quickly changed it. ‘I am not interested.’

‘No? But you told the receptionist that you were desperately in need of an interpreter,’ he reminded her softly. ‘The hotel manager will, I am sure, vouch for me…’

Beth paused.

He was right about one thing: she was desperately in need of an interpreter. She had come to Prague partially to recover from the damage inflicted on her emotions by Julian Cox and, more importantly in her eyes at least, in order to buy some good-quality Czech stemware for her shop.

Via Dee she had obtained from their local Board of Trade some addresses and contacts, but she had been told that the best way to find what she was looking for was to make her own enquiries once she was in Prague, and there was no way she was going to be able to do that without some help. It wasn’t just an interpreter she needed, she acknowledged; she needed a guide as well. Someone who could drive her to the various factories she needed to visit as well as translating for her once she was there.

‘Why should you offer to help me?’ she asked suspiciously.

‘Perhaps I simply don’t have any choice,’ he responded with an enigmatic smile.

The smile Beth dismissed. As for his comment—perhaps he hoped to make her feel sorry for him by insinuating that he was short of money.

Whilst she was still wondering just what she ought to do a very elegant dark-haired woman in her early fifties came hurrying down the corridor towards them.

‘Ah, Alex, there you are!’ she exclaimed, addressing Beth’s companion. ‘If you’re ready to leave, the car’s here…’

She gave Beth a coolly assessing look which made Beth feel acutely conscious of her own casual clothes and the older woman’s immaculate elegance. She had the chicness of a Parisian, from the tips of her immaculately manicured fingernails to the top of her shiningly groomed chignon. Pearls, large enough to have been fake but which Beth felt pretty sure were anything but, were clipped to her ears, and the gold necklace she was wearing looked equally expensive.

Whoever she was, the woman was obviously very wealthy. If this man was acting as an interpreter for her he must be trustworthy, Beth acknowledged, because one look at the older woman’s face made it abundantly clear that she was not the sort of person to be duped by anyone—no matter how handsome their face or how sexy their body.

‘You don’t have to make up your mind right now,’ the man was telling Beth calmly. ‘Here is my name and a number where you can reach me.’ Reaching into his jacket, he removed a pen and a piece of paper on which he quickly wrote something before handing it to Beth. ‘I shall be here in the hotel tomorrow morning. You can let me know your decision then.’

She wasn’t going to accept his offer, of course, Beth assured herself once he and his companion had gone. Even if he had been an accredited interpreter provided by a reputable agency she would still have had her doubts.

Because he’s too sexy…too…too disturbingly male, and you’re too vulnerable, an inner voice taunted her. I thought you were supposed to be immune to men like him now. You said that Julian Cox had cured you of ever falling in love again.

No. That will never happen, she answered her sharp-tongued inner critic swiftly. There’s no way I could ever be in danger of falling for a man like him, a man who’s far too good-looking for his own good. Heavens, he must have women swarming all over him. Why on earth should he be interested in someone like me?

Perhaps for the same reason that Julian Cox was interested in you, her inner critic taunted. To him you probably seem to be an easy meal ticket. A woman on her own, vulnerable. Remember what you were told before you left home.

Beth was determined not to accept Alex’s offer, but in the morning, when she presented herself at the hotel’s reception desk again, insisting that she desperately needed an accredited interpreter, the man behind the counter shook his head regretfully, repeating what Beth had been told the previous day.

‘I am sorry, but we simply cannot. There are conventions,’ he told Beth.

It crossed Beth’s mind that she might have to abandon her plans to make this a business trip and simply do some sightseeing instead. But that would mean going home, having to admit to another failure…She had come to Prague to look for crystal, and she was not going to go home until she had found some.

Even if that meant accepting the services of a man like Alex Andrews?

Even if it meant accepting that—yes! Beth told herself sternly.

She had eaten her breakfast alone in her room; the hotel was busy, and, despite all the stern admonishments she had made to herself, she still didn’t feel confident enough to eat in the dining room—alone. Now she ordered herself a coffee and removed the guidebook she had bought on her arrival in Prague from her handbag. For all she knew Alex Andrews might not even turn up. Well, if he didn’t there were plenty of other foreign students looking for work, she reminded herself stoically.

She went and sat down in a corner of the hotel lobby, not exactly hiding herself away out of sight, but certainly not making herself very obvious either, she recognised with a small stab of irritated despair. Why was she so lacking in confidence, so insecure, so…so vulnerable? It was not as though she had any reason to be. She was part of a very loving and closely knit family; she had parents who had always supported and protected her. Perhaps that was what it was. Perhaps they had protected her a little too much, she decided ruefully. Certainly Kelly, her friend, seemed to think so.

‘The waiter couldn’t remember what you’d ordered, so I’ve brought you a cappuccino…’

Beth nearly jumped out of her skin as she heard Alex’s husky, sensual voice.

How had he found her here in this quiet corner? And, more importantly, how had he known she’d ordered coffee in the first place? And then, as he placed the tray he was carrying down on the table in front of her, Beth guessed what he had done. There were two cups of coffee on it and a croissant. No doubt all of them charged to her room!

‘I actually ordered my coffee black,’ she told him curtly, and not quite truthfully.

‘Oh.’ He gave her an oblique, smiling look. ‘That’s odd; I could have sworn you were a cappuccino girl. In fact I can almost see you with just a hint of a creamy chocolatey moustache.’

Beth stared at him in angry disbelief. He was taking far too many liberties, behaving far too personally. She gave him a ferociously frosty look and informed him arctically, ‘As a woman, I hardly find that a flattering allusion. Men have moustaches.’

‘Not the kind I mean,’ he returned promptly as he sat down beside her, a wicked smile dancing in his eyes as he leaned forward. His lips were so close to her ear that she could actually feel the warmth of his breath as he whispered provocatively, ‘The kind I meant is kissed off, not shaved…’

Beth’s eyes widened in outraged fury.

He was actually pretending to flirt with her, pretending to find her attractive.

She started to get up, too furious to even bother telling him that she was not going to need his services, when, out of the corner of her eye, she caught sight of the beautiful crystal lustres the salesgirl was placing on the display shelves of the hotel’s gift shop. Beth caught her breath. They were just so beautiful. The lustres moved gently, catching the light, their delicacy and beauty so immediately covetable that Beth ached to buy them.

A friend of her mother’s had some antique Venetian ones which she had inherited from her grandmother, and Beth had always loved them.

‘What is it?’ she heard Alex asking her curiously at her side.

‘The lustres…the wall-lights,’ Beth explained. ‘They’re so beautiful.’

‘Very beautiful and I’m afraid very expensive,’ Alex told her. ‘Were you thinking of buying them as a gift, or for yourself?’

‘For my shop,’ Beth told him absently, her attention concentrated on the lustres.

‘You own a shop? Where? What kind?’ His voice was less soft now, sharp with interest and something which Beth told herself was almost avaricious—too avaricious to be mere polite curiosity.

‘Yes. I do…in a small town you won’t have heard of. It’s called Rye-on-Averton. I…we sell good-quality china and pottery ornaments and glassware. That’s why I’ve come to Prague. I’m looking for new suppliers here, but the quality has to be right, and the price…’

‘Well, you won’t beat those pieces for quality,’ Alex told her positively.

Beth looked at him, but before she could say anything he was telling her, ‘Your coffee’s going cold. You had better drink it and I had better introduce myself to you properly. As you know, I’m Alex Andrews.’

He held out his hand. A little reluctantly Beth took it. She had no idea why she felt so reluctant to touch him, or to have any kind of physical contact with him. Any other woman would have been more than eager to do so, she was quite sure. So what did that make her? A frightened little rabbit…too scared to touch such a good-looking and sexy man because she was afraid of the effect he might have on her? Of course not.

Quickly she shook his hand, and just as quickly released it, uncomfortably aware of the way her pulse-rate had quickened and her face become flushed.

‘Beth Russell,’ she responded.

‘Yes, I know,’ Alex told her, confessing, ‘I asked them on Reception. What’s it short for?’

‘Bethany,’ Beth told him.

‘Bethany…I like that; it suits you. My grandmother was a Beth as well. Her actual name was Alžbta, which she anglicised when she and my grandfather fled to Britain. She died before I was born—of a broken heart, my grandfather used to say, mourning the country and the family she had to leave behind.

‘When my parents finally visited Prague, after the Revolution, my mother said that she found it incredibly moving to hear her family talking about her. She said it made her mother come alive for her. She died when my mother was eight…’

Beth made an involuntary sound of distress.

‘Yes,’ Alex agreed, confirming that he had heard and understood it. ‘I feel the same way too. My mother missed out on so much—the loving presence of her mother and the comfort of being part of the large, extended family which she would have known had she grown up here in Prague. But then, of course, as my grandfather used to say, the opposite and darker side of that was the fact that because of his political beliefs he would have been persecuted and maybe even killed.

‘The rest of the family certainly didn’t escape unscathed. My grandfather was a younger son. His eldest brother would, in the normal course of events, have inherited both lands and a title from his father, but the Regime took all that away from the family.

‘Now, of course, it has been restored. There are some families living in the Czech Republic today who have regained so many draughty castles that they’re at a loss to know what to do with them all.

‘Fortunately, in the case of my family, there is only the one. I shall take you to see it. It is very beautiful, but not so beautiful as you.’

Beth stared at him, completely lost for words. British he might claim to be, British his passport might declare him to be, but there was quite obviously a very strong Czech streak in him. Beth had done her homework before coming to Prague; she knew how the Czech people prided themselves on being artistic and sensitive, great poets and writers, idealists and romantics. Alex was certainly romantic. At least in the sense that he obviously enjoyed embroidering reality and the truth. There was no way she came anywhere near deserving to be described as beautiful, and it infuriated her that he should think her stupid enough to believe that she might be. Why was he doing it?

She was about to ask him when the lustres caught her eye again. Alex was right; they would be expensive on sale in a hotel like this one, but there must be other factories that made the same kind of thing—factories that did not charge expensive hotel prices to tourists. Without an interpreter, though, she would have no chance of finding them.

Beth turned to Alex Andrews.

‘I know exactly what the going rate for interpreters is,’ she warned him fiercely, ‘and you will have to be able to drive. And I intend to check that the hotel management is prepared to vouch for you…’

The smile he was giving her was doing crazy things to her heart, making it flip over and then flop heavily against her chest wall like a stranded salmon.

‘What are you doing?’ she protested, panicking as Alex reached for her hand.

‘Sealing our bargain with a kiss,’ he told her softly as he lifted her nerveless fingers to his lips. And then, before they got there, he stopped and told her thoughtfully, ‘Although perhaps on second thought…’

Beth went limp with relief. But it was a relief that came a little bit too soon, for, as she started to pull away, Alex leaned closer to her and swiftly captured her mouth with his own, kissing it firmly.

Beth was too shocked to move.

‘You…you kissed me,’ she gasped in a squeaky voice. ‘But…’

‘I’ve been wanting to do that from the first moment I saw you,’ Alex told her huskily.

Beth stared at him.

Common sense, not to mention a sense of self-preservation, screamed to her that there was no way she could employ him as her interpreter, not after what he had just done, but his mesmeric grey eyes were hypnotising her, making it impossible for her to say what she knew ought to be said.

‘We’ll need a hire car,’ he was telling her, just as though what he had done was the most natural thing in the world. ‘I’ll organise one.’

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