It was terrible. She was ashamed of herself! ‘Sex-starved, that’s what you are,’ she muttered, and gave her pillow an angry thump before settling down to experience the self-same dream all over again!
Consequently she was not in a very good frame of mind when her phone began ringing at what felt like the break of dawn that morning.
Grumbling incoherently to herself, she tried to ignore it at first, stuffing her head beneath her pillow and pretending the noise was not there. But it didn’t stop, and after a while she sighed, sat up, rubbed at her gritty eyes then reached out with a lazy hand to lift the receiver.
‘Annie!’ Lissa’s excited voice hit her eardrums like the clash from a hundred cymbals. ‘Get our neat botty out of that bed! Cliché’s got its launch. And we have one hell of a panic on!’
A panic. She would call it more than a panic, Annie decided grumpily as she dragged herself to the transit lounge at Barbados’s Grantley Adams airport over twelve hours later.
‘But I’m due in Paris on Tuesday!’ she’d exclaimed in protest when Lissa had finished giving her the hurried details of Todd’s great coup.
‘All changed, darling,’ her agent had said. ‘Everything cancelled for the next two weeks in favour of this.’
‘This’ being Todd’s brainwave—which had apparently hit him after he had been talking to her on the phone last night.
Or—to be more precise—someone else had hit him with it.
The great and glorious Adamas, no less.
And, even despite not wanting to be, Annie was impressed.
Adamas jewellery was the most expensive anyone could buy. The man who worked under that trade name was a legend because he designed and produced every single breathtakingly exquisite piece himself, using only the finest stones and setting them in precious metal. All the world’s richest women clamoured to possess them.
He was a genius in his field. His last collection had taken five years to put together, and had sold out in five minutes. That must have been—Annie frowned, trying to remember—four years ago at least.
And late last night, it seemed, Todd had found himself talking to none other than Adamas himself! He hadn’t known, of course, whom he was sharing a nightcap with. Hardly anyone alive on this earth knew who the real Adamas actually was, because the man was some kind of eccentric recluse!
But, according to Lissa, during this chat over a drink Todd’s journalistic mind must have been alerted by something Ad
amas had said, and he’d begun to suspect just whom he was drinking with. So he had gone for it—asked the man outright—and, lo and behold, found out that he was right!
One thing had led to another, and a few drinks later Todd had discovered that the guy had just completed his latest collection. And that had been when his brain-storm had hit. A blind shot, he’d called it. He’d suggested what a coup it would be if Cliché launched with Annie Lacey wearing the latest Adamas collection. And to his surprise the great man had agreed!
And that, neatly put, was why Annie had just spent the last twelve hours travelling.
Adamas had agreed, but only on his own strict terms—one being that the whole thing had to take place immediately or not at all, another that he chose the location and—something insisted on because of the priceless value of the subject matter in hand—that the whole thing must be carried out in the utmost secrecy!
Which was also why she was now stuck in transit, waiting to find out what the rest of her travel arrangements were. Lissa had only been privy to Annie’s travel plan this far. The rest was to be revealed.
But that would not be before she’d had a chance to change out of the faded jeans and baggy old sweatshirt that had been part of her disguise along with a sixties floppy velvet hat into which she’d had her hair stuffed for the last twelve hours to comply with his demand for secrecy, she decided grimly.
She was hot, she was tired, and she felt grubby. And, grabbing her flight bag, she made her way to the ladies’ room, deciding that any further travelling could wait until she felt more comfortable.
Half an hour later, and dressed more appropriately for the Caribbean in a soft white Indian cotton skirt and matching blouse, with her hair scooped into a high topknot, she was being ushered out into the burning sun and across the tarmac towards a twin engined, eight-seater aeroplane which was to take her to Union Island, the gateway to the Grenadines, or so she’d been informed by the attendant who’d come to collect her.
An hour after that she found herself standing in the shimmering heat of her third airport of the day, where a beautiful young woman with perfect brown skin and a gentle smile was trying to usher her towards a waiting helicopter!
‘But where am I supposed to be going to?’ she demanded irritably, growing tired of all this cloak-and-dagger stuff.
‘To one of our beautiful smaller islands, privately leased from our government by your host,’ the young woman informed her smoothly, and strode off in the wake of Annie’s luggage, which was being carried by an airport lackey.
‘Host,’ she muttered tetchily. Did anyone know the actual name of the great Adamas? Or did his desire for privacy mean that even his name was a carefully guarded secret?
Her luggage had been stowed by the time she reached the helicopter, its lethal blades already rotating impatiently. She was instructed to duck her head a little as she ran beneath them, then was helped to clamber in beside the pilot.
With a smile and a gesture of farewell the young woman closed the door, and the sudden change from deafening noise to near silence was a shock. Annie straightened in her seat, smoothed down the soft folds of her skirt, blinked a couple of times in an effort to clear her bewildered head, then turned to look at the pilot.
And almost fainted in surprise.