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      THE POWERFUL AND THE PURE

       When Beauty tames the brooding Beast …

      From Mr Darcy to Heathcliff, the best romantic heroes have always been tall, dark and dangerously irresistible.

      This year, indulge yourself as Modern™ Romance brings you four formidable men—the ultimate heroes. Untameable … or so they think!

       The Powerful and the Pure

       When Beauty tames the brooding Beast.

      Coming soon in 2011—four timeless love stories from Modern^™ Romance!

      CHAPTER ONE

      LOUIS CHRISTOPHE JUMEAU slammed the door of the Range Rover and favoured it with a look of pure loathing. Really, he should have known better than to trust in a car-rental agency which proudly proclaimed that it was the only one around for fifty miles. Lack of healthy competition invariably equalled a third-rate service; he had been proved right. He should have arranged his own private transport. He could easily have used his helicopter and had one of his own top-of-the-range cars on standby to collect him from the airfield.

      But he had wanted to check out the transport links for himself. Over-indulged, wealthy patrons would expect efficient links to Crossfeld House, should they decide to get there by train, as he had. And onwards by car—as he, unfortunately, had chosen to do.

      He cursed fluently under his breath, flicked open his mobile and was rewarded with a robust ‘no signal’ sign.

      Around him, in the darkening winter light, the countryside was desolate and unwelcoming. There was also the threat of snow in the air. It seemed to be an ongoing threat for the inhabitants of Scotland and one he would have taken more seriously had he been in possession of a crystal ball and predicted that his rental car—none finer than this, sonny!—would have taken its last breath on a desolate road in the Highlands some forty minutes away from his destination.

      He rescued his coat from the back seat of the old Range Rover and decided there and then that the one and only carrental agency for fifty miles around would soon be facing stiff competition, or he would pull out of this particular investment fast enough to make the heads of its five desperate sellers spin.

      Crossfeld House—an addition to his already bulging portfolio of boutique hotels around the world and country-house hotels across the UK—would be pleasing but was hardly essential. Its unique selling point as far as he was concerned was its golf course. It had been enthusiastically lauded for its ‘challenging qualities’, which he cynically interpreted as ‘unkempt to the point of unplayable’.

      But he would see for himself. If he ever made it to the place on foot.

      He would also be in a position to conclusively sort that other little problem out.

      He slung on his coat against the bitter December winds and began walking in the direction of the manor house, his mind moving along from the problem he could not currently solve—namely his lack of car—to the problem ahead of him which he most definitely intended to solve. To be precise, his friend’s sudden infatuation with a girl who, from all descriptions, fitted neatly into the category of gold-digger. Even never having met her, Louis could recognise the type: too pretty, too poor and with a mother hell-bent on getting rid of her five offspring to the highest bidders.

      His mouth curled into a smile of grim satisfaction at the prospect of showing up on the doorstep of the Sharp family. Nicholas might be rich and successful but he was also naive and way too trusting for his own good. Mother Sharp might be able to shuffle her pretty little daughter up for inspection and Nicholas—whose visits to Crossfeld House on the pretext of checking out the edifice had become ever more frequent—might well have ended up as compliant bait at the end of the hook. But he, Louis, wasn’t born yesterday.

      And Nicholas was nothing if not a lifelong friend whose honour and bank balance Louis had every intention of protecting.

      Fully absorbed by his train of thought, he was only aware of the roar of a motorcycle when it was virtually on top of him. It pelted past him in a whirl of gravel, ripping apart the eerie silence of the countryside like a shriek within the hallowed walls of a cathedral and then spun around, decelerating so that the rider, dressed entirely in black with a matching shiny black helmet, could inspect him.

      More than anything else, Louis was enraged by what he considered wildly reckless driving.

      ‘Very clever,’ he said with biting sarcasm, bearing down on the rider and standing intimidatingly close. ‘Get your kicks that way, do you? Or do you think that this is your private racetrack and you can ride this thing however fast you want?’

      In the middle of reaching up to remove her helmet, Lizzy’s hands stilled and then dropped to her sides.

      Up close and personal, this guy was bigger, taller and looked a lot meaner than she had expected. Whilst she knew this part of the countryside like the back of her hand, along with everyone in it, she was still sharp enough to realise that she was in the company of a stranger and there was nothing within screaming distance to disturb the isolation of the landscape.

      She couldn’t make out the guy’s face but his voice was like a whiplash, raising the hackles on her back and making her want to meet his attack head-on.

      ‘I didn’t have to stop for you.’

      ‘Are you going to take that helmet off so that I can see who I’m dealing with?’

      Alone on a dark road, surrounded by acres of barren isolation and staring down a man who looked as though he could snap her in half if he put his mind to it: the helmet was staying on. Let him think that he was dealing with another man. One