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The woman who had been willing to give up her movie career rather than allow her family to be subjected to the constant and repeated invasion of privacy that came with being a celebrity?
Mark paused under the shade of the awning outside the dining-room window and looked out over the gardens and swimming pool as a light breeze brought some relief from the unrelenting late-June heat.
He needed to find some new way of working through the mass of information that any celebrity, wife and mother accumulated in a lifetime and make some sense of it all.
And one thing was clear. He had to do it fast.
The publisher had wanted the manuscript on his desk in time for a major celebration of Crystal Leighton at a London film festival scheduled for the week before Easter. The deadline had been pushed back to April, and now he would be lucky to have anything before the end of August.
And every time the date slipped another unofficial biography appeared. Packed with the usual lies, speculation and innuendo about her private life and, of course, the horrific way it had been brought to an early end.
He had to do something—anything—to protect the reputation of his mother. He’d failed to protect her privacy when it mattered most, and he refused to fail her again. If anyone was going to create a biography it would be someone who cared about keeping her reputation and memory alive and revered.
No going back. No compromises. He would keep his promise and he was happy to do it—for her and for his family. And just maybe there was a slim chance that he would come to terms with his own crushing guilt at how much he had failed her. Maybe.
Mark turned back towards the house and frowned as he saw movement on the other side of the French doors separating the house from the patio.
Strange. His housekeeper was away and he wasn’t expecting visitors. Any visitors. He had made sure of that. His office had strict instructions not to reveal the location of the villa or give out his private contact details to anyone.
Mark blinked several times and found his glasses on the side table.
A woman he had never seen before was strolling around inside his living room, picking things up and putting them down again as if she owned the place.
His things! Things he had not intended anyone else to see. Documents that were personal and very private.
He inhaled slowly and forced himself to stay calm. Anger and resentment boiled up from deep inside his body. He had to fight the urge to rush inside and throw this woman out onto the lane, sending her back whence she came.
The last thing he wanted was yet another journalist or so-called filmmaker looking for some dirt amongst his parents’ personal letters.
This was the very reason he’d come to Paxos in the first place. To escape constant pressure from the world of journalists and the media. And now it seemed that the world had decided to invade his privacy. Without even having the decency to ring the doorbell and ask to be admitted.
This was unacceptable.
Mark rolled back his shoulders, his head thumping, his hands clenched and his attention totally focused on the back of the head of this woman who thought she had the right to inspect the contents of his living room.
The patio door was half-open, and Mark padded across the stone patio in his bare feet quietly, so that she wouldn’t hear him against the jazz piano music tinkling out from his favourite CD which he had left playing on Repeat.
He unfurled one fist so that his hand rested lightly on the doorframe. But as he moved the glass backwards his body froze, his hand flat against the doorjamb.
There was something vaguely familiar about this chestnut-haired woman who was so oblivious to his presence, her head tilted slightly to one side as she browsed the family collection of popular novels and business books that had accumulated here over the years.
She reminded him of someone he had met before, but her name and the circumstamces of that meeting drew an annoying blank. Perhaps it was due to the very odd combination of clothing she was wearing. Nobody on this island deliberately chose to wear floral grey and pink patterned leggings beneath a fuchsia dress and an expensive jacket. And she had to be wearing four or five long, trailing scarves in contrasting patterns and colours, which in this heat was not only madness but clearly designed to impress rather than be functional.
She must have been quite entertaining for the other passengers on the ferry or the hydrofoil to the island from Corfu that morning.
One thing was certain.
This girl was not a tourist. She was a city girl, wearing city clothes. And that meant she was here for one reason—and that reason was him. Probably some journalist who had asked him for an interview at some function or other and was under pressure from her editor to deliver. She might have come a long way to track him down, but that was her problem. Whoever she was, it was time to find out what she wanted and send her back to the city.
Then she picked up a silver-framed photograph, and his blood ran cold.
It was the only precious picture he had from the last Christmas they had celebrated together as a family. His mother’s happy face smiled out from the photograph, complete with the snowman earrings and reindeer headset she was wearing in honour of Cassie’s little boy. A snapshot of life at Belmont Manor as it used to be and never could be again.
And now it was in the hands of a stranger.
Max gave a short, low cough, both hands on his hips.
‘Looking for anything in particular?’ he asked.
The girl swung round, a look of absolute horror on her face. As she did so the photograph she was holding dropped from her fingers, and she only just caught it in time as it slid down the sofa towards the hard tiled floor.
As she looked at him through her oversized dark sunglasses, catching her breath unsteadily, a fluttering fragment of memory flashed through his mind and then wafted out again before he could grasp hold of it. Which annoyed him even more.
‘I don’t know who you are, or what you’re doing here, but I’ll give you one chance to explain before asking you to leave the same way you came in. Am I making myself clear?’
CHAPTER TWO
LEXI thought her heart was going to explode.
It couldn’t be. It just could not be him.
Exhaustion. That was the only explanation. Three weeks on the road, following a film director through a series of red-carpet events across Asia, had finally taken their toll.
She simply had to be hallucinating. But as he looked at her through narrowed eyes behind rimless designer spectacles Lexi’s stomach began to turn over and over as the true horror of the situation hit home.
She was standing in front of Mark Belmont—son of Baron Charles Belmont and his stunningly beautiful wife, the late movie actress Crystal Leighton.
The same Mark Belmont who had punched her father in that hospital on the day his mother had died. And accused her of being his accomplice in the process. Completely unfairly.
When she was a little girl she’d had a recurring nightmare about being a pilgrim sent to fight the lions in some gladiatorial arena in Rome.
This was worse.
Her legs were shaking like jelly, and if her hand held on to her bag any tighter the strap would snap.
‘What—what are you doing here?’ she asked, begging and pleading with him in her mind to tell her that he was a temporary guest of the celebrity she had been paid to work with and that he would soon be leaving. Very soon. Because the other alternative was too horrible to imagine.
She’d thought that she had escaped her shameful connection to this man and his family.
Fate apparently had other ideas.
Fate in the form of Mark Belmont, who was looking at her with such disdain and contempt that she had to fight back the temptation to defend herself.
With a single shake of the head, he dismissed her question.
‘I have every right to be here. Unlike yourself. So let’s start again and I’ll ask you the same question. Who are you and what are you doing in my house?’
His house? A deep well of understanding hit her hard and the bottom dropped out of Lexi’s stomach.
If this was his house—was it possible that Mark Belmont was her celebrity?
It would make sense. Crystal Leighton’s name had never left the gossip columns since her tragic death, and Lexi had heard a rumour that the Belmont family were writing a biography that would be front-page news. But surely that was Baron Belmont, not his business-guru son?
Lexi sighed out loud. She was jumping to conclusions—her imagination was running ahead of itself. This was a big house, with room for plenty of guests. It could easily be one of his colleagues or aristocratic friends who needed her help.
And then the impact of what he was asking got through to her muddled brain.
Mark had not recognised her. He had no clue that she was the girl he had met in the hospital corridor only a few months earlier.
They had only met for a few fleeting moments, and she had certainly changed since then. They both had. And her sunglasses were a genius idea.
She inhaled a couple of breaths, but the air was too warm and thick to clear her head very much. It was as though his tall, powerful body had absorbed all the oxygen from the room.
A flicker of annoyance flashed across his full, sensuous mouth before he said, ‘I don’t take kindly to uninvited guests, so I suggest you answer my question before I ask you to leave.’
Uninvited guests? Oh, God, the situation was worse than she’d realised. He didn’t seem to be expecting a visitor—any visitor. He had no idea that his publisher had sent a ghost writer out to the island! No wonder he thought that she was some pathetic burglar or a photojournalist.
Okay, so he had treated her unfairly in the worst of circumstances, but she was here to do a job. She glanced down, desperate to escape his laser-beam focus, and her eyes found the image of a happy family smiling back at her from behind the glass in the picture she had almost dropped.
It could have been a movie set, with a perfect cast of actors brought in for the day. Gorgeous film-star mother, handsome and tall aristocratic father, and two pretty children—with the cutest toddler on the planet waving at the camera. All grouped in front of a tall Christmas tree decorated in red and gold and a real fire burning bright in a huge marble fireplace.
What did Mark Belmont know about broken families and wrecked dreams?
Guilt about the pain her father had caused the Belmont family pinched her skin hard enough to make her flinch. But she ignored it. What her father had done had never been her fault, and she wasn’t going to allow the past to ruin her work. She needed this job, and she’d be a fool to let her father snatch away the chance to make her dream come true.
Lexi opened her mouth as if to speak, closed it again, and then pinched her thumb and forefinger tightly against the bridge of her nose.
‘Oh, no.’ She shook her head slowly from side to side, eyes closed. ‘The agency would not do this to me.’
‘The agency?’ Mark asked, his head tilted slightly to one side. ‘Have you got the right villa? Island? Country?’
She chuckled, and when she spoke her voice was calmer, steadier.
‘Let me guess. Something tells me that you may not have spoken, emailed or in some other way communicated with your publisher in the past forty-eight hours. Am I right?’
For the first time since she had arrived a concerned look flashed across his tanned and handsome face, but was instantly replaced by a confident glare.
‘What do you mean? My publisher?’
Lexi dived into her huge bag, pulled out a flat black tablet computer, and swiped across the screen with her forefinger—being careful not to damage her new fingernails, which still carried the silver and purple glitter that had been the hit of the last show party in Hong Kong.
‘Brightmore Press. Sound familiar?’
‘Maybe,’ he drawled. ‘And why should that matter to me?’
Lexi’s poor overworked brain spun at top speed.
He was alone in the villa. This was the correct address. And Mark was familiar with Brightmore Press. Lexi put those three factoids together and came up with the inevitable conclusion.
Mark Belmont was the mystery celebrity she had been assigned to work with.
And the bubble of excitement and enthusiastic energy that had been steadily inflating on the long journey from Hong Kong popped like an overstretched balloon.
Of all the rotten luck.
She needed the job so badly. Running a home in central London wasn’t cheap, and this bonus would have made a big difference to how quickly she could start the renovations. All her plans for the future relied on having her own home office where she could write her children’s books full-time. Walking away from this job would set her back months.
She stared at him wide-eyed for a few seconds, before sighing out loud.
‘Oh, dear. I hate it when this happens. But it does explain why you didn’t meet me at the harbour.’
Mark shifted his legs shoulder-width apart and crossed his arms. ‘Meet you? No, I don’t think so. Now, let me make myself quite clear. You have two minutes to explain before I escort you from my private home. And please don’t think I won’t. I’ve spent more time than I care to think about giving press conferences. My office has a catalogue of past interviews and press statements, covering every possible topic of conversation. I suggest that you try there—because I have absolutely no intention of giving you an interview, especially when you seem intent on damaging my property. Am I getting through to you?’
‘Your property? Oh, I’m so sorry,’ she murmured, scrabbling to pick up the picture and brushing off any dust from the silver frame. ‘I did knock, but there was no answer, and the door was open. This is a lovely family photo and I couldn’t resist peeking at it, so …’ She gave a quick shrug of the shoulders and lifted her chin slightly. ‘You should be more careful about security.’
‘Really?’ He nodded, his voice calculating and cool enough to add a chill to the air. ‘Thank you so much for the advice, but you aren’t in the city any more. We don’t lock our doors around here. Of course if I’d known I was to have visitors I might have taken additional precautions. Which brings us to my earlier question. Who are you, and why are you here? I’m sure the two charming police officers who take care of this island would be delighted to meet you in a more formal setting. And, as you have probably realised, Gaios is only about three miles from here. And they are the proud owners of both a police car and a motorcycle. So I would suggest that you come up with a very convincing excuse very quickly.’
Police? Was he serious?
She looked warily into those startling blue eyes. Oh, yes, he was serious.
Her chest lifted a good few inches and she stared straight at him in alarm. Then she sucked in a breath and her words came tumbling out faster than she would have thought possible.
‘Okay. Here goes. Sorry, but your peeps have not been keeping you up to date on a few rather crucial matters. Your Mr Brightmore called my talent agency, who called me with instructions to get myself to Paxos because one of their clients has a book to finish and they—’ she gestured towards his chest with her flat hand ‘—are apparently a month past the final deadline for the book, and the publishers are becoming a little desperate. They need this manuscript by the end of August.’
She exhaled dramatically, her shoulders slumped, and she slid the tablet back into her bag with a dramatic flourish before looking up at him, eyebrows high, with a broad grin.
‘Right. Now that’s out of the way I suppose I should introduce myself. Alexis Sloane. Otherwise known as Lexi. Ghost writer extraordinaire. And I’m here to meet a client who needs help with a book. I take it that would be you?’
‘Well, of course I didn’t tell you what the publisher had organised, darling brother, because I knew exactly what your reaction would be.’
Mark Belmont sat down hard on the end of the sun lounger, then immediately stood up again and started pacing up and down the patio, the sun-warmed stone hot under his bare feet. The temperature was a perfect match for his mood: incendiary. His emotions boiled in a turmoil of resistance, resolution and defiance touched with fury. Cassandra Belmont had a lot to answer for.
‘Cassie,’ he hissed, ‘I could strangle you. Seriously. How could you do this to me? You know that this biography is too personal, too close to home, to ask anyone to help. Why do you think I’ve come all the way to Paxos to work on the book on my own? The last thing I need is some random stranger asking questions and digging into places I don’t know I want to go myself. Communication is a wonderful thing, you know. Perhaps you’ve heard of it?’
‘Relax.’
His sister’s voice echoed down the phone, and he imagined her curled up on the sofa in Belmont Manor while her two small sons played havoc around her.
‘Lucas Brightmore recommended the most discreet agency in London. Their staff sign cast-iron confidentiality agreements and would never divulge anything you tell them. I think it could work.’
‘Cassie, you are a menace. I don’t care how discreet this … secretary is. If I wanted a personal assistant I would have brought one. I have excellent staff working for me. Remember? And I would never, ever invite them here to the villa. I need privacy and space to get the work done. You know me.’ His voice slowed and dropped lower in pitch. ‘I have to get my head into the detail on my own before I can go public with anything. And I need peace and quiet to do that.’
‘You’re right. But this is not a business project you are evaluating. This is our mother’s life story. It has to do her justice, and you’re the only person in the family with the faintest bit of creativity. I know I couldn’t do it in a million years. I don’t have nearly enough patience. Especially when it comes to the difficult bits.’
Cassie took a breath and her voice softened.
‘Look, Mark, this is hard for all of us. And it’s incredibly brave of you to take over the project. But that makes it even more important to get the job done as quickly as you can. Then we can all get on with our lives and Dad will be happy.’
‘Happy?’ Mark repeated with a dismissive cough. ‘You mean like he’s happy about my plans to renovate those derelict cottages on the estate into holiday lets? Or the restructuring plans for the business that he’s been blocking since Christmas?’
‘Probably not,’ Cassie answered. ‘But you know as well as I do that it isn’t about you or me. It has a lot more to do with the fact that he’s ill for the first time in his life and he’s just lost his wife in a surgical procedure she never even told him about. He doesn’t know how to deal with that any more than the rest of us.’
Mark ran his tongue over his parched lips. ‘How is he today?’
The delay before Cassie answered said more than the sadness inherent in her reply. ‘About the same. This round of chemotherapy has really knocked him back.’ Then her steely determination kicked back in, tinged with concern. ‘You don’t need to put yourself through this. Hand back the advance from the publisher and let some journo write Mum’s biography. Come home and run your business and get on with your life. The past can take care of itself.’
‘Some journo? No, Cassie. The press destroyed Mum’s last chance of dignity, and I don’t even want to think about what they’d do with a true-life exposé based on lies, innuendo and stupid gossip.’ He shook his head and felt a shiver run down his spine despite the heat. ‘We know that her friends have already been approached by two writers for hire looking for dirt. Can you see the headlines? Read All About It: The True Sordid Past of the Real Crystal Leighton Belmont.’ He swallowed hard on a dry throat. ‘It would kill him. And I refuse to let her down like that again.’
‘Then finish the book our mother started. But do it fast. The agency said they were sending their best ghost writer, so be nice. I’m your sister, and I love you, but sometimes you can be a little intense. Oh. Have to go. Your nephews are awake and need feeding. Again. Take care.’
‘You, too,’ Mark replied, but she had already put the phone down.
He exhaled slowly and willed his heart rate to slow.
He had never been able to stay angry with Cassie. His sister had been the one constant in his father’s life ever since their mother had died. She had her own husband, a toddler and a new baby to take care of, but she adored the manor house where they had grown up and was happy to make a home there. Her husband was a doctor at the local hospital whom Cassie had met when she’d taken their father for a check-up. Mark knew that he could totally rely on her to take care of their father for a few weeks while he took time out of the office.
She had even taken over the role of peacemaker on the rare occasion when he went back to Belmont Manor.
But she shouldn’t have talked to the publisher without telling him about it.
Suddenly the decision to come to Paxos to finish the biography seemed ridiculous. He’d thought that being on his own would help, but instead he’d become more agitated and irritable by the day. He needed to do things. Make things happen. Take responsibility just like he’d always done. It infuriated him that he’d found it impossible to focus on the task he had set himself for more than a few minutes without having to get up and pace around, desperate for an opportunity to procrastinate.
Cassie was right. This biography was too close. Too personal.
His mother had always been a hopeless housekeeper, and organisation had never been one of her strong points. She’d liked the creative world, and enjoyed making sense of the jumble of random photographs, letters, newspaper clippings and memorabilia.
And he was just the same. An artist in many ways. His natural inclination was to push through the boundaries of possibility to see what lay beyond and shake things up. Little wonder that he was increasingly at loggerheads with his father’s almost obsessive need to keep things in order. Compliant. Unchanging. Private and quiet.
Or at least that had been the case until six months ago.
But now?
Now his father was on his second round of chemotherapy, his beloved mother had effectively died on a plastic surgeon’s operating table, and his on-off girlfriend had finally given up on him and met someone she actually seemed to love and who loved her in return.
Mark felt as though the foundations on which he had based his entire life had been ripped out from under him.
His fingers wrapped tightly around the back of the chair until the knuckles turned white with the pressure.
No. He could handle this trauma. Just as he had abandoned his own life so that he could take his brother’s place in the family.
There was no point in getting angry about the past.
He had given his word. And he would see it happen on his own, with the privacy and the space to work things through. The last thing he needed right now was a stranger entering his private space, and the sooner he persuaded her that the publisher was wrong and she could head off back to the city the better.
Think. He needed to think.
To stop herself shaking Lexi gripped her shoulder bag with one hand and pressed the other against the back of the leather sofa. She couldn’t risk ruining her carefully contrived show of being completely unfazed as she looked at Mark Belmont, pacing up and down the patio next to the swimming pool, her cell phone pressed to his ear.
Only this was not the business-guru version of The Honourable Mark Belmont that usually graced the covers of international business magazines around the world. Oh, no. She could have dealt with that stiff, formally dressed office clone quite easily. This version was an entirely different sort of man: much more of a challenge for any woman.
The business suit was gone. Mark was wearing a pair of loose white linen trousers and a short-sleeved pale blue striped polo shirt that perfectly matched the colour of his eyes. His toned muscular arms and bare feet were tanned as dark as the scowl he had greeted her with, and the top two buttons of his shirt were undone, revealing a bronzed, muscular chest.
His dark brown hair might have been expertly cut into tight curls, but he hadn’t shaved, and his square jaw was covered in a light stubble much more holiday laid-back than designer businessman. But, Lord, it suited him perfectly.
She knew several fashion stylists who would have swooned just at the sight of him.
This was a completely different type of beast from the man who’d defended his mother so valiantly in the hospital. This was Mark Belmont in his natural setting. His territory. His home.
Oh, my.
She could lie and pretend that her burning red neck was simply due to the heat of a Greek island in late June and the fact that she was overdressed, but she knew better.
Her curse had struck yet again.
She was always like this around Adonis-handsome men. They were like gorgeous baubles on display in a shop window. She could ogle them all day but never dared to touch. Because they were always so far out of reach that she knew she would never be able to afford one. And even if she could afford one it would never match the disorganised chaos of her life.
This particular bauble had dark eyebrows which were heavy and full of concern. He looked tense. Annoyed and anxious.
It had seemed only right to ring the publisher for him. Just to clarify things.
Only judging by the expression on his face the news that her assignment was not a practical joke after all had not gone down well.
Normally her clients were delighted that a fairy godmother had dropped into their world to help them out of a tricky situation.
Apparently Mark Belmont was not seeing his situation in quite the same way.
She had to persuade him to allow her to stay and help him with … with what? She still had no idea what type of book Mark Belmont was writing. Business management? A family history? Or … she swallowed … the obvious. A memoir of his mother.
Lexi looked up as Mark turned towards her from the door, lowering the phone, and searched his face for something—anything—that would help her make the decision.
And she found it. In his eyes of frosty blue.
The same eyes that had looked at her with such pain mixed with contempt on that terrible day in the hospital. When his heart had been breaking.
Decision made. If he could survive writing about his late mother then she would do her best to make the book the best it could be. Even without his help.
She could make this work. It would take a lot of effort, and she would have to be as stubborn as a stubborn thing in Stubbornland, but she could do it. She had stood her ground before, and she’d do it again.
Mark stood still for a moment, eyes closed, tapping the cell phone against the side of his head.
‘If you’re quite finished with my phone, Mr Belmont?’ A sweet, charming voice echoed out from behind his back. ‘It tends not to function very well after being used as a percussion instrument.’
Mark opened his eyes and stared at the offending cell phone as though he had never seen it before. He’d never used a purple phone in his life and he was extremely tempted to throw the offending article into the pool and leave it there. With its owner. The hack writer.
Fortunately for the phone, good manners kicked in and, holding it between his thumb and forefinger, he turned and extended his arm towards Lexi.
To her credit, she was not wearing a self-satisfied smirk but the same look of professional non-confrontational indifference he was used to seeing from city suits around the boardroom table where some of his riskier ideas were discussed.
Except for him this was not a job. It was very personal. And even the idea of sharing his deepest concerns and emotions about his parents made him bristle with resentment and refusal to comply.
He hadn’t built a venture-capital company from the ruins of his father’s business without taking risks, but they had been calculated risks, based on information he had personally checked and worked on until he’d known that the family’s money would not be wasted on the investment.
This girl—this woman—in this ridiculous outfit had arrived at his home without his approval.
His sister might have confidence in the talent agency, but he knew nothing about the plan, and if there was one thing guaranteed to annoy him it was things being planned behind the scenes without his knowledge.
Cassie was perfectly aware of that fact, but she’d done it anyway. Her intentions might be excellent, but the reality was a little difficult to stomach.
A light tapping broke Mark out of his reverie, and he flashed a glance at the girl just in time to see her keying furiously into the cell phone, her sparkly purple-painted fingernails flashing in the sunlight. Although how she could see through those huge sunglasses was a mystery to him.
In the living room she had been more stunned than stunning, but in the bright white light reflected back from the patio her skin appeared pale and almost translucent, as though she hadn’t seen sunlight for quite some time. The contrast between her English-rose complexion and the startlingly bright scarves wrapped around her neck was so great that it distracted him for a moment from the fact that she was talking.
