everyone instantly want to go there. But this beach she had to herself. Completely to herself. It belonged to the beautiful sprawling villa spilling along the shore, and the villa belonged to Leo Makarios.
She could see why he’d bought it.
It was, quite simply, idyllic. Like the beach, a travel agent’s dream of what a Caribbean villa should look like. The green tiled roof, the white walls, the wraparound veranda, the palm trees fringing the shore, the crystal beach, the pink and purple bougainvillaea and hibiscus splashing colour, the turquoise glitter of a freshwater pool.
Quite, quite idyllic.
Anna stopped to look out to sea. The sun was lowering, a thin band of cloud just above the surface of the sea starting to pool in the lengthening rays of the sun, like rich dye running into spun silk. Bars of gold were sliding across the azure water. Across the sun’s face a large, ungainly pelican flapped lazily. High in the sky a frigate bird soared.
Anna glanced at her watch. Though only just evening, the sub-tropical latitudes meant the sun was going down apace. The night would sweep in from the east like a velvet concealing cloak.
And the night would bring, she knew, Leo Makarios.
There had been no sign of him all day. She’d slept long and when she’d surfaced it had been late morning. She’d eaten breakfast on her balcony, and as she’d gazed out over the beautiful grounds leading down to the sea she’d felt the biting, mocking irony of her situation. Here she was in a Caribbean idyll—and tonight she was going to have sex with a man. Deliberate, cold-blooded sex, with a man she did not want to have sex with—a man who thought her a thief, a man she had already thrown out of her bedroom once but who now she could not throw out.
Deliberate, cold-blooded sex.
She made herself say the words again in her head. And again.
Because that was what it was going to be.
Something flared briefly in the depths of her eyes, but she crushed it instantly.
A sudden panic speared through her. She couldn’t go through with this. She just couldn’t!
I’ve got to tell him the truth! Tell him it wasn’t me who stole his precious bracelet, that it was Jenny, and that she only did it because she’s pregnant and terrified, and has got herself involved with a man so dangerous he makes Leo-Money-Bags-Makarios look like a pussycat…
Cold pooled in her stomach. However much she desperately wanted to, she knew she could not tell Leo Makarios the truth. The risks were far too great. As a woman, she might automatically side with Jenny, but who knew what a rich, powerful man like Leo Makarios would think? His attitude to women was dire—she had personal proof of that already—so why should he think Jenny deserved any favours, any mercy? After what she’d heard him say about Vanessa, and guarding his precious cousin from her, he’d probably think Jenny had got herself pregnant on purpose—picking a rich man to get at his money—and that a man so entrapped was entitled to take a woman’s baby from her—especially a woman who’d shown herself so morally lax that she’d stooped to theft…He wouldn’t understand.
No—Anna’s face closed—there was no way she could take that risk. And that meant—her expression twisted—she just couldn’t tell Leo Makarios why she had taken the blame for stealing his rubies.
He had to go on thinking that she was the thief. It was the only way she could protect Jenny.
Which meant—the fear pooled in her stomach again, but with a different cause this time—that she was, indeed, going to have to go through with what Leo Makarios intended.
Have sex with him.
She stared unseeingly out over the water. In Austria it had seemed unreal; she’d been in shock, Anna realised, using all her mental energy to tamp down the panic that had been trying to erupt. Here, after being on her own all day, the reality of what she was going to have to do was hitting.
Hitting hard.
For a moment she felt revulsion stiffen through her.
A phrase welled up in her thoughts.
Self-respect. An alien concept to so many people, she knew, moving in the world she did. Men who treated women’s bodies as commodities—women who treated them the same way. She could name half a dozen other models she knew who would have thought themselves in paradise to have been offered the choice that Leo Makarios had offered. Queued round the block for it.
I’m not one of them!
Even as she mentally shouted her denial, another voice spoke in her head. With killing, merciless force.
But you will be…
Leo Makarios will reduce you to exactly that. Strip you of every last vestige of your self-respect even as he strips the clothes from your body…
Pincers bit inside her stomach, sharp and painful.
She went on staring out over the darkening sea, her mind even darker.
Facing up to what she was going to do.
What she was going to lose.
Yet, for all that was true, she could not sacrifice her friend’s future, her baby, just to protect her own self-respect.
I have to do this.
And after all, she thought, with savage mockery at her own prurience, supposing it was Jenny or jail? What would you do then? Would you still stand by her if it meant losing years of your life?
Instead of just a few days…a few nights…
So why make such a fuss about what Leo Makarios is offering?
Even as Anna let the thought into her mind she tried to suppress it.
Leo Makarios was dangerous. She’d thought him so the very first time she’d set eyes on him, and every encounter with him had proved it to her. Especially the one in her bedroom…
Memory flooded back like a drowning tide, and suddenly she was there, there again, as Leo Makarios held her, kissed her, caressed her—a sensual onslaught that had simply overwhelmed her, made it impossible for her to resist…
Until, with a strength she’d hardly been able to summon, she had flung him from her…
She shut her eyes in anguish, blocking out memory.
Self-respect? The words stabbed at her. Mocking her. Taunting her.
She wasn’t just going to sacrifice her self-respect by having deliberate, cold-blooded sex with Leo Makarios. She was going to lose it for a much, much worse reason…
She turned away abruptly. Grimly, she headed back up the beach in the brief sub-tropical dusk.
Her face had hardened.
She couldn’t get out of it now. That wasn’t in her power. Not if she wanted to keep Jenny safe, herself out of jail.
But she could,
