Shackled by Diamonds

The heavy-lidded eyes turned to her.

How, she found herself thinking, could eyes that were so impassive make her feel every muscle in her body tighten? As though she were an impala—caught out on a deserted African plain, with the sun going down.

When the big cats came out to hunt.

But she wasn’t an impala, and this Leo Makarios was no leopard. He was just a rich man who was having a fun time getting his latest rich-man’s toy some media attention. Starting with publicity photos, courtesy of four models specially hired for the purpose.

But not hired to strip.

‘Your photographer,’ she said sweetly, ‘wants us to breach the contract.’ Her voice changed. Hardened. ‘No nude work. It’s in the contract,’ she informed him. ‘I made sure it was. Check it out.’

She went on standing protectively beside Jenny. The other two girls—the amateurs—had, she noticed, instinctively closed in on each other as well. Both were looking uneasy.

Leo Makarios was still looking at her.

She was looking back.

Something was happening to her.

Something deep down. In her guts.

Something she didn’t like.

Slime. Was that it? Was that what it was about the way Leo Makarios was looking at her that she didn’t like?

No, she thought slowly. Definitely not slime. That she could handle. She’d had to learn how, and now she could.

But this was worse. What Leo Makarios was doing to her hit somewhere completely different.

She could feel it happening. Feel the slow, heavy slug of her heart rate. Feel the blood start to pulse.

As if for the very first time in her life.

Oh, no, she thought, with the kind of slow-motion thinking that came with great shock. Not this.

Not him.

But it was.

Leo let his eyes rest on her.

She wasn’t looking bored now.

Two quite different emotions were animating her face, though she was, he could see, trying not to let the second one through.

The first emotion was anger. The girl was angry. Very angry.

It was an old anger too, one that was familiar to her.

But the second emotion was coming as a shock to her.

He felt a surge of satisfaction go through him.

She might be hiding it, but he’d seen it—seen the tell-tale minute flaring of her pupils as her eyes had impacted with his.

The satisfaction came again, but he put it to one side. He’d attend to it later—when the time was appropriate. Right now he had other matters to deal with.

He flicked his eyes to the blonde. Yes, definitely the neurotic type, he thought. Tense and jittery, and the type to give any man a headache. She was fantastically beautiful, of course, but he didn’t envy the man who had the handling of her.

‘Let me understand,’ he said to her. ‘You do not want this shot? The one Signor Embrutti desires?’

The girl was almost trembling she was so tense. She shook her head.

Tonio Embrutti burst into a fusillade of staccato Italian. Leo halted him with a peremptory hand.

‘No breast shots. Not for her. Not for any of them. Their clothes stay on—all of them,’ he spelt out, for good measure.

His eyes moved over the four girls, resting momentarily on the redhead. A smile almost flickered on his mouth. He could just imagine his cousin Markos’s reaction to seeing his mistress’s naked charms paraded in the publicity shots accompanying the launch of the rediscovered Levantsky collection—long-hidden in a secret Tsarist cache in the depths of Siberia and recently returned to the commercial world courtesy of a shrewd acquisition by Makarios Corp.

Markos would have beaten him to a pulp for allowing it!

If he could land a punch, that was, thought Leo, with dark humour.

Not that he would give him cause to—or any man who had an interest in the girls here.

His eyes flicked back to the sable-haired model. Was she taken? Just because she’d responded to him it didn’t mean that another man didn’t have his marker on her. She wouldn’t be the first female to think she’d do better trading up to a Makarios.

Those that thought that way, however, he promptly lost interest in.

Such women made poor mistresses. Their minds were on his money—not on him.

And when he had a woman in bed with him he wanted her mind totally and utterly on him.

As the sable-haired model’s would be when he bedded her. He would see to it.

He strolled to the side of the vast hall, nodding briefly to the senior security personnel hired to guard the Levantsky collection, leaned back against the edge of a heavy oak table, crossed one ankle over the other, folded his arms, and watched, wanting to see more of the girl he had selected for himself.

The shoot went on.

It was the turn of the sable-haired model next. Both to be shot and picked on.

Tonio Embrutti was clearly taking out his spleen on her. Nothing she did was right. He snapped and snarled and sneered at whatever she did, however she posed.