Shackled by Diamonds

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 air-conditioning, 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 l920s.

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 sweet-fragranced 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 shot through him, hard and insistent. His hands clenched over the wooden balustrade.

No! Now was not the time nor the hour. Sleep was the priority now—and it would be for her, too. When he took her it would not be like this, on the edge of exhaustion, but in the rich, ripe fullness of all his powers.