Shackled by Diamonds
At the villa, he pulled up at the front entrance.
‘Go in,’ he instructed.
She got down from the car, but had hardly closed the door when it took off again, pounding back down the drive towards the gate in a swirl of gravel. Slowly she started to move towards the front door.
‘Miss Delane?’
The voice that spoke came from one side, and she turned. A man was walking up to her. He had a steady gait that was somehow menacing. A stab of unease went through Anna in her heightened state of excess emotion.
‘Who wants to know?’ she countered. She looked to the villa. There was no one around—not even a gardener in the gardens. The man approaching her was a stranger.
A car started moving from where it had been parked, in shadow, at the place where the drive swept away round to the garages at the side of the villa. It was black, with tinted windows.
‘You will come with me,’ the man approaching her said.
Anna backed away. Fear was running in her. What the hell was going on? Why were there no house staff around? She made to turn and run inside, to find someone—anyone.
Her arm was seized. A vice lock.
Automatically she lashed out, striking down at the man’s open side. But even as the side of her hand impacted he moved, coming round the back of her and striking her with a blow that all but knocked her out. Before she could recover she was being pushed, head-first, inside the car, thrust face down on the floor, so she could scarcely breathe, hardly think, hardly believe what was happening to her. There were voices—harsh, urgent—the car jerked forward, its engine revving. She tried to surface, fight through the terror buckling through her, but she was thrust back down again, a foot painful on her neck. Darkness rolled over her.
Leo stood, staring out to sea. He was on a rocky headland, where a rough track led to the ruins of an eighteenth-century British fort.
He could still feel anger coursing through him.
Of course it was anger. What else could it be? It was the only thing he was feeling. Burning, biting anger.
Anger at Anna Delane.
Criminal. Thief. Hypocrite.
Who had dared, dared to smear her crime on him. Dared to accuse him—him—of being a criminal—a blackmailer. Dared to look down her hypocritical nose and accuse him of being sordid.
Just because he’d wanted her so much, needed her right away—
She wanted it as much as I did. Thee mou, can I not tell exactly when she is aroused, and how much, and—?
His mobile phone went off. Impatiently he yanked it from his hip pocket and answered it.
‘Yes?’ he bit out.
He stilled totally as the caller started speaking.
The knife-blade glinted in the light. The man holding it looked at it, and then at Anna.
‘You know, Miss Delane, you would be well advised not to withhold the information I wish to have.’
He rotated the blade, so again it caught the light streaming through the windows.
‘You are very beautiful,’ he said in his accented English. ‘It would be a great pity to ruin that beauty. Now, consider your answer carefully. I ask you once again—where is your friend, Jennifer Carson?’
‘I don’t know.’
Anna’s voice was a thread. She had read in a thriller one time that fear was something you had to experience to believe. And now she believed.
The boat she was on rocked slightly over a wave as it continued to head out to sea, and the man holding her arms behind her back shifted his weight to rebalance. The movement caused renewed pressure on her joints, her shoulders. She felt faint again with the pain, her head muzzy, her brain fogged.
And the fear.
It was in every cell of her body. Like a cancer. In every cell.
The man interrogating her had eyes without expression in them.
‘I—I told you,’ she said again, her voice almost inaudible. ‘She went back to London when I left Austria with Leo Makarios. I don’t know where she is now. I don’t know anything.’
The man twisted the knife in the sunlight again and it flashed. Anna stared at it with a sick terror.
‘I am sure, Miss Delane,’ said the man with no expression in his eyes, ‘that that is an answer you should reconsider.’
He walked up to her, lifting the knife to her cheek and laying the blade flat. She could feel it pressing against her skin.
‘All I have to do,’ he told her, ‘is twist the blade inwards.’
The sickness churned in her stomach. Her eyes were distended, incapable of focus. Her brain was incapable of thought.
Only of terror.
The man holding her said something to the man with the knife. The latter gave a coarse laugh and pulled the blade from her face. He said something to the first man, and they both laughed. Then the first man looked at Anna again.