Anna smoothed total sunblock over her legs. Even though she spent as much time as she could in the shade, and put sunblock on religiously, she still seemed to be browning. She frowned. It was a damned nuisance. Her white skin was one of her selling points, and she guarded it assiduously. OK, so she could have stayed indoors every day, but she couldn’t bear to. It was bad enough just getting through the days, without being denied the run of the gardens and the beach. Or the pool.
Thank God for the pool. Swimming up and down occupied hours of her time, and a swimsuit was something she never travelled without. Although she had enough evening outfits—brought for her time at the Schloss—daywear suitable for the Caribbean climate was more of a problem. By dint of washing her exercise outfit daily, and wearing the jade-green silk trouser suit during the day, she was just managing to cope. She could also, during the day, wander round with just a towel wrapped round her like a sarong. That was because—and she thanked all the gods there were—Leo Makarios was never around in the daytime.
Maybe he sleeps in his earth-filled coffin in daytime? she thought acidly.
The reality, she knew, was more prosaic. He took himself off on the water. He seemed, thankfully, to have a whole range of ways of enjoying himself out at sea. Sometimes she saw him on a windsurf board, racing across the bay in a crosswind; sometimes—according to her cautious enquires of the house staff—he went to the Atlantic coast for stronger winds and wave-sailing and kite-surfing. Often he disappeared off in a variety of sailing craft. He seemed to have a whole collection in a boathouse further along the beach. She saw him skimming along in a one-handed dinghy, or on windier days taking a catamaran out, spinnaker billowing. He went off diving, too, some days, and she watched the staff lug oxygen tanks on board the inflatable dive boat, then him heading out to the reefs.
Whatever took him out to sea, she was just grateful.
It gave her precious respite time—without which, she knew, she would have cracked.
How many days had passed since she’d been brought here? She was losing count. It was coming up to two weeks, it must be. Or was it longer? She had tried not to count, tried not to think. The moon was changing, at its peak now, sailing serene and high far above the ocean, mocking her with its romantic beauty.
But then the whole place mocked her.
It could have been a paradise on earth. Instead it was her prison. Her place of torment.
A place where Leo Makarios tormented her to the utmost of his malign powers.
Night after night she burnt like a flame in his arms as he wrung from her the response he would not let her rest without.
The response she could not let herself rest without.
He had become a poison for her. A poison that had got into her bloodstream and which she was now utterly, completely dependent on.
And the poison was desire.
Abject, helpless desire.
It mortified her, humiliated her, lacerated her.
But it held her in its thrall.
And she knew she could not free herself from it now—she had succumbed to it abjectly, helplessly. Succumbed to Leo Makarios and what he could make her feel.
Every day when he came back to the villa her heart gave a leap. She tried to crush it, but it would not be crushed. She felt her breath quicken in her lungs, felt a rush of pleasure. Of anticipation.
Sometimes he took her to his bed immediately. Walking up to her, catching her hand, and taking her upstairs. She would feel her body quickening even as she went with him, feel the warm, delicious flood of arousal start in her body. She was as ardent as he; she could not help it. She wanted to feel his mouth on hers, his hands on her body, her hands on his, their bodies seeking, melding, fusing together in a rush of desire so intense it consumed her, time, after time, after time.
It had been a revelation—never had she understood how raw, how powerful, desire could be. Leo Makarios had taken her to a new place, one she had not known existed.
It was a place of passion, of ecstasy, of wanting and needing, of sating and slaking.
She knew no peace. Not during the day, when her restless body waited in forced patience for his return. Not when he was there either, and she went to him and let him take her in that white rush of desire as she took him into her. No peace then, only hunger, a driving, pulsing hunger that was a desperate, ravening need for what he and he alone could give her.
She knew only the brief, strange peace that came after, when their bodies were spent and they lay, exhausted, in each other’s arms.
As if they were lovers.
But they weren’t lovers. She knew that. Knew it deep in her being. There was nothing between them. Neither knowledge nor intimacy.
They were strangers. Day after day. Night after night.
Nothing but strangers.
A dull, crushing heaviness filled her as she sat, now, putting cream on her legs, before plunging into the warm waters of the pool. She looked around. There was a house full of staff tending the villa and its grounds—other human beings who lived and breathed and had hopes and ambitions and families and friends and loved ones—and yet she was all on her own.
You’re always on your own. You always have been.
The thought distilled in her mind. It was true. It had always been true. Her grandmother loved her dearly, had brought her up single-handed after her mother’s death, with her father long since disappeared into whatever wasteland involuntary fathers disappeared to. But her grandmother, for all her love, all her protection, was two generations away from her—happy with her little world in the street of terraced houses beside the gasworks, happy to spend the day watching soaps and chat shows, and scared to let Anna go out into the world. Let alone take up modelling.
Her grandmother hated it; she’d always known that. Warning her about the evils of the life she was heading for. But she could not have turned down her one big chance to get away from the gasworks and the beckoning biscuit factory. She’d always visited her grandmother as often as she could, and the years had passed, and she’d become too infirm in body and mind to go on living in her little terraced house. Now she passed her time in an expensive private nursing home, paid for by her granddaughter’s modelling fees, sometimes recognising her when she visited, sometimes not.
Who will I have when my grandmother dies? Who will I have then?
The question echoed in her head as she stared out over the azure sea beyond.
She had some friends—good friends like Jenny, with whom she’d bonded in the frenetic, superficial, all too often corrupt and corrupting world of fashion modelling, and a few others that she trusted. But, valuable as her friends were, they each had someone special in their lives. Even Jenny had the child she would bear, in secrecy and safety, in her new life that she would make for herself in Australia.
I could go with her.
The thought came from nowhere.
And even as it formed a terrible heaviness came in its wake.
When Leo Makarios is finished with me—what shall I do?
She had thought she would simply go back to her life. Had thought nothing else.
But now, with punishing clarity, she knew it was impossible, that her life was empty.
She could never go back.
Her life as a model seemed a million miles away from here. On another planet.
She could never go back to it.
And the terrible heaviness crushed at her. She would have to leave here. One day, coming closer day by day, when Leo was bored with her, when he’d decided she’d made reparation enough, when some business crisis cropped up, needing his attention in New York, or Geneva, or London, then he