Shackled by Diamonds

Leo’s face was as if carved from marble.

‘Be very careful,’ he told her, his eyes like chips of rock, ‘what you say to me.’

Her face contorted.

‘Don’t threaten me. I don’t have to be treated like this by you or anyone else—however stinking rich they are!’

‘Don’t tell me—’ the contemptuous note was back in his voice ‘—it’s in your contract.’

‘Well, it’s just as bloody well it is, isn’t it?’ she spat back at him. ‘Because with you around I need it!’

The eyes were like granite again.

‘Enough. You have made your point of view very clear. But next time you want to play the outraged virtue card, Ms Delane, I suggest you do it before you entertain a man in your bedroom at midnight.’

He threw a last stony, contemptuously angry look at her, and walked out.

The door shut behind him with a violent reverberating thud.

Leo strode down the corridor in a cold rage such as he had seldom experienced.

Christos, where the hell had that come from?

From temptress to virago in ten seconds flat!

Deliberate?

His eyes narrowed. If there’d been the slightest indication that the whole thing was a put-on he’d—

He felt his hands clench as he walked rapidly away, and he had to force himself to release them.

No, she wasn’t worth it. Whether or not she was putting it on—one of those women who enjoyed blowing hot then cold just to twist men up—he didn’t care. Let her enjoy her 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.