CHAPTER ONE

      LESLEY FOX SLOWLY DREW to a stop in front of the most imposing house she had ever seen.

      The journey out of London had taken barely any time at all. It was Monday, it was the middle of August and she had been heading against the traffic. In all it had taken her under an hour to leave her flat in crowded Ladbroke Grove and arrive at a place that looked as though it should be plastered on the cover of a House Beautiful magazine.

      The wrought-iron gates announced its splendour, as had the tree-lined avenue and acres of manicured lawns through which she had driven.

      The guy was beyond wealthy. Of course, she had known that. The first thing she had done when she had been asked to do this job had been to look him up online.

      Alessio Baldini—Italian, but resident in the UK for a long time. The list of his various companies was vast and she had skipped over all of that. What he did for a living was none of her business. She had just wanted to make sure that the man existed and was who Stan said he was.

      Commissions via friends of friends were not always to be recommended, least of all in her niche sideline business. A girl couldn’t be too careful, as her father liked to say.

      She stepped out of her little Mini, which was dwarfed in the vast courtyard, and took a few minutes to look around her.

      The brilliance of a perfect summer’s day made the sprawling green lawns, the dense copse to one side lush with lavender and the clambering roses against the stone of the mansion facing her seem almost too breathtakingly beautiful to be entirely real.

      This country estate was in a league of its own.

      There had been a bit of information on the Internet about where the man lived, but no pictures, and she had been ill-prepared for this concrete display of wealth.

      A gentle breeze ruffled her short brown hair and for once she felt a little awkward in her routine garb of lightweight combat trousers, espadrilles and one of her less faded tee-shirts advertising the rock band she had gone to see five years ago.

      This didn’t seem the sort of place where dressing down would be tolerated.

      For the first time, she wished she had paid a little more attention to the details of the guy she was going to see.

      There had been long articles about him but few pictures and she had skimmed over those, barely noting which one he was amidst the groups of boring men in business suits who’d all seemed to wear the identical smug smiles of people who had made far too much money for their own good.

      She grabbed her laptop from the passenger seat and slammed the door shut.

      If it weren’t for Stan, she wouldn’t be here now. She didn’t need the money. She could afford the mortgage on her one-bedroom flat, had little interest in buying pointless girly clothes for a figure she didn’t possess to attract men in whom she had scant interest—or who, she amended with scrupulous honesty to herself, had scant interest in her—and she wasn’t into expensive, long-haul holidays.

      With that in mind, she had more than enough to be going on with. Her full-time job as a website designer paid well and, as far as she was concerned, she lacked for nothing.

      But Stan was her dad’s long-time friend from Ireland. They had grown up together. He had taken her under his wing when she had moved down to London after university and she owed him.

      With any luck, she would be in and out of the man’s place in no time at all.

      She breathed in deeply and stared at the mansion in front of her.

      It seemed a never-ending edifice of elegant cream stone, a dream of a house, with ivy climbing in all the right places and windows that looked as though they dated back to the turn of the century.

      This was just the sort of ostentatious wealth that should have held little appeal, but in fact she was reluctantly charmed by its beauty.