had sounded. It had been Justin, pompously informing her of a new assignment.
‘Mr Makarios has very generously extended your booking,’ he’d told her. ‘It’s all arranged with your agency. You’ll be leaving in an hour. Please do not be late.’
Leaving for where? Anna had wondered.
Now, four hours later, she knew.
She was flying to the Caribbean, with Leo Makarios at her side.
To have as much sex with him as he warranted would atone for stealing the Levantsky rubies from him.
She felt sick all the way through every cell in her body.
Anna hung on to the strap above the door in the car as it bumped over the potholed island roads. She was dog-tired. In the front passenger seat Leo Makarios was talking to the driver, and she was dully grateful that he was continuing to ignore her.
Anna turned her head away, staring out into the black subtropical night. She’d been to the Caribbean before, on fashion shoots, but never to this particular island. At least it had been easy to convince Jenny that that was all this was—an unexpected extra shoot that Leo Makarios wanted done in a subtropical setting. Rich men, both she and Jenny knew, were capricious, and they expected others to jump when they said so.
As for Jenny herself, Anna had phoned mutual friends of theirs—a photographer and his wife—who would meet Jenny at Heathrow. The couple owned a holiday cottage in the Highlands, and had promised to keep Jenny there until Anna got back to the UK.
When that would be, Anna did not want to think.
Or about anything that was going to happen. As she had done every waking hour since that hideous exchange in Leo Makarios’s office, Anna shut off her mind.
She kept it shut even when the car arrived at its destination, driving through metalwork gates set in a high retaining wall and along a smooth gravelled drive to draw up in front of a large, low villa. As she got out, the chill of the air-conditioned interior evaporated into the hot sub-tropical night. For a moment she simply stood there, taking in the sounds and smells of the Caribbean, the croaking of the tree frogs and the heady fragrance of exotic blooms.
Then she was following Leo Makarios indoors, back into air-conditioned cool and a huge, cathedral-ceilinged reception room. The light dazzled her. She took in an impression of great height, cool marble floors, lazily circling overhead fans, wooden shutters and upholstered cane furniture.
Leo Makarios seemed to have completely disappeared.
Instead, a middle-aged woman was coming towards her.
‘This way, please,’ she said, with a dignified gesture to follow her.
Anna fell in behind, her eyes automatically registering the unselfconsciously graceful walk of the woman—a walk that managed to be both indolent and purposeful. By contrast, she felt she was dragging her own body along, clumsy and exhausted.
Sleep—that was all she wanted. All she craved in the world right now.
The room she was shown to was vast. Up a short, shallow flight of stairs, off a broad gallery-style landing. Inside the room another high, wooden cathedral ceiling soared. A huge mahogany four-poster bed, swathed in what looked like ornamental muslin but was, Anna assumed, mosquito netting, dominated the room. Again, although the room was chilled by airconditioning, a ceiling fan rotated lazily.
‘May I get you some refreshment?’ the woman was saying. Even as she spoke a porter entered, carrying Anna’s suitcase.
She shook her head.
‘Thank you—I’m just going to sleep.’
The woman nodded, said something to the porter in local patois, quite incomprehensible to Anna, and then they both left. Anna looked around her blearily. Her eyes automatically went to the vast four-poster bed.
Easily big enough for two.
Not tonight, Mr Makarios, she thought sourly—you’ll have to wait.
Five minutes later, clothes stripped, en suite bathroom perfunctorily utilised, she was fast asleep.
Leo stood out on his balcony. A half-moon glittered over the palm-fringed bay that curved in front of the villa. The location was superb, the scene in front of him idyllic, tranquil and untouched. He’d bought this place five years ago, yet how often had he been here? Not often enough.
Life seemed to be rushing by him at ever faster speeds.
Leo’s mouth twisted. So little done, so much to do—some politician had said that, and he could identify with the sentiment.
Another line drifted through his head.
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.
He frowned. No politician, the poet who had said that. And no businessman either. Getting and spending was what his whole life was about. It always had been.
But then, he’d always known that his destiny was to do that. To continue with the work his grandfather had begun, rebuilding the Makarios fortunes after they had been lost in the debacle of the Greek expulsion from Asia Minor in the 1920s.
He could hear his grandfather’s harsh voice even now, in his head, from when he’d been a boy.
‘We had nothing! Nothing! They took it all. Those Turkii. But we will get everything again—everything!’
Rebuilding the Makarios fortune had occupied his grandfather’s life, and his father’s, and now his too. The Makarios Corporation spread itself wide—property, shipping, finance, investment, and even—Leo thought of his latest contribution to the family’s coffers—the ultimate in luxury goods: priceless historic jewellery, and the revival of a name that had been synonymous with Tsarist extravagance.
He gazed out over the moonlit sea, feeling the warmth of the Caribbean night, hearing the soughing of the wind in the palms, the call of the cicadas, and, drowning them out, the yet more incessant calls of the tree frogs.
A thought came to him out of the soft wind, the sweetfragranced air.
Who needed diamonds and emeralds on a night like this? Or sapphires and rubies? What use were they here, on the silvered beach by the warm sea’s edge?
What use are they at all?
Into his head jarred a voice—’They’re just carbon crystals…lots of other common crystals are just as beautiful.’ Anna Delane’s lofty sneer at the Levantsky jewels.
His face hardened.
Hypocrite! She hadn’t helped herself to the ruby bracelet because it was beautiful, but because it was worth a fortune.
It had been a mistake thinking about her. He’d spent the last twenty-four hours assiduously putting her out of his mind. Even when she’d spent the flight sitting right next to him he’d refused to think about her, let alone look at her, or speak to her, or in any way acknowledge her existence. Now, fatally, she was there—vividly in his mind.
Desire
