virtue. Theos, it was all she was going to enjoy tonight.
Anna Delane could enjoy her precious celibacy, and he…he could have a cold shower.
How the hell was I supposed to know she didn’t want it?
Indignation filled him—and a sense of unjustified ill usage.
Good God, he wasn’t some callow teenager, unable to tell whether a woman was responding to him. Anna Delane had responded all right—clear and loud.
So why the outrage?
Roughly, he pushed the question aside. What the hell did he care what the answer was?
His interest in Anna Delane was over.
Permanently.
CHAPTER FOUR
ANNA lay in bed. Her heart was still pumping, adrenaline surging through her. She couldn’t stop it. Her whole body was as tense as a board, every muscle rigid.
How had it come to this? How?
Disbelief kept flooding through her, cold and icy through her guts.
The cold emptied through her again, clutching at her with its icy fingers.
How, how had it happened?
The question went round and round, pounding ceaselessly, tormentingly.
How had she let Leo Makarios do that to her? Just walk up to her and start to touch her. And she’d done nothing—nothing! Pathetic. Pathetic.
A shudder went through her.
She had just let him stand there and kiss her, fondle her, as if she was some kind of…some kind of…
She felt anger excoriating her. Anger at Leo Makarios, who had just walked into her bedroom and decided to help himself to her. The anger wired through her nerves. Anger at Leo Makarios.
But a worse fury consumed her too.
Anger at herself.
How could she have succumbed to him like that? Letting him come into her room, kiss her, caress her, do what he wanted to her? How could he have just swept away all her defences, all her years of fighting men off?
And into her head stole a voice that chilled her to the bone.
Because you didn’t want to fight him off. You wanted him…you wanted him badly…Wanted to feel his mouth on yours, wanted his hands caressing you, wanted to feel him stroke you, arouse you…
She closed her eyes in anguish, her face contorting.
No, please—please. She mustn’t want Leo Makarios.
Not a man like that, a man who’s just proved himself to be everything you knew he was. Everything! The kind of man who wants instant cheap gratification and thinks you’re going to roll over and let him get it from you!
Revulsion shuddered through her.
Then slowly, agonisingly slowly, piece by piece, she started to pull herself together.
Yes, she had been a fool, an idiot, but the worst had not happened—that was what she must hang on to. It might have been so close to the edge of the precipice that she must never, ever think of it again, but at least she had summoned the last of her sanity and sent him packing.
She opened her eyes again, staring into the dark.
Imagine if it were now after you’d given yourself totally to him. If you were lying here now and he’d gone back to his gilded state apartment, sleek and sated, leaving you here with nothing left but the bones…
Cold iced through her again.
She had had such a narrow escape…
But she had escaped—that was what she must remember. She had clawed back to sanity just in time.
And she was safe now. Safe.
Slowly, very slowly, she felt her heart-rate come down.
Never, ever again would Leo Makarios push her that close to the precipice.
Never.
Her mouth thinned.
Never.
’Plunge your hands in. Now lift them out—lift, lift, lift! Yes. Hold them up! Up!’
Anna held her hands the way she was being told to. So did the other three models. They were standing around the vast oak table in the castle’s echoing hall again, but this time none of them was wearing any of the Levantsky jewels.
Their hands were all in a huge golden bowl into which had been poured rivers of diamonds, emeralds, rubies and sapphires. And now the four models were plunging into this golden cornucopia and lifting them out, their fingers dripping necklaces and earrings and bracelets.
‘Basta!’ Tonio Embrutti called, simultaneously summoning the stylist and her assistants. ‘Now I want the jewels just draped over their shoulders, in their hair, over their arms, their breasts. Not fastened, just draped.’
His pudgy face took on a sulky look. ‘Of course, their bodies should be naked, but—’
He contented himself with merely making an Italian gesture of exasperation with his hands, waving his camera around as he did so.
Anna stood patiently as the stylist’s assistants got to work.
Her mind was strangely numb. She’d got hardly any sleep last night, and the disapproving make-up artist had commented adversely on the effect thereof on her eyes and complexion. Anna didn’t care. She was, she knew, beyond caring. She had only one overriding impulse.
To get out of here. Out and home.
But she still had today and tonight to get through before she could run. At least today there was no sign of Leo Makarios. He’d gone off with his guests—some whisked off to ski slopes, some on horse-drawn sleigh rides, some on helicopter tours of the Austrian Alps, or back to Vienna and Munich for shopping trips.
Even so, today’s shoot seemed longer than yesterday’s, but finally it was done. Released at last, changed back into her normal clothes, Anna headed back up to her room. Vanessa had disappeared instantly—presumably Markos was in the wings somewhere—and Kate almost as quickly.
‘There’s an early concert in the town’s Musikverein,’ Kate had explained to the others eagerly. ‘Maestro Lukacs has given me a ticket!’ She’d said it as though he’d given her the keys to the kingdom, her eyes shining.
‘Have fun,’ Anna had said dryly. Preferably, she added silently, not in Antal Lukacs’s bed. Kate was far too impressionable.
She headed off after
