CHAPTER ONE

      DOMINIC DASHWOOD drove through the ornate golden and navy gates of St Fiacre’s Hill estate with just a little more speed than was necessary. Though not with as much speed as he would have liked, he decided, with a grim smile which nonetheless transformed his devastating features into the kind of face that most women only ever fantasised about.

      Tensing one long, muscular thigh, he depressed the accelerator pedal, and his dark green Aston Martin shot forward like a bullet.

      What he would have liked was to be on some wide, empty highway, where he could put his foot down and succumb to the heady lure of mechanical power. Machines and speed were two of Dominic’s great passions. In the past women had accused him of being cold and unfeeling.

      ‘You love that damned car more than you love me!’ some sultry beauty had once poutingly accused him.

      And Dominic had been unable to deny the truth which lay behind her accusation. He had taken her to bed one last time—because she had begged him to and, in truth, because he had wanted to—and had then walked away, wondering what it was that made him immune to the pain of emotion.

      You know damn well what it is! mocked an inner voice, and Dominic’s long fingers tightened convulsively around the soft leather of the steering wheel, as if they were biting deliciously into a woman’s tender flesh. But not just any woman. He felt the potent flicker of desire as he slowed to take the bend near the clubhouse.

      His sensual mouth twisted as a woman in tennis whites emerged from the St Fiacre’s club-house. She stopped dead and stared at the car as it roared by, her eyes narrowing with speculation as they took in the hard, handsome profile of the driver.

      But Dominic deliberately avoided eye contact with her. The woman’s body language made it patently clear that she was available, and Dominic avoided such openly available women like the plague.

      His unconscious sexual appeal had become the bane of his life. In his youth he had used it, squandered it even. For many years now he had desired the challenge of a woman who would not melt with early submission into his arms.

      Unfortunately, the woman he was scheduled to meet in just under an hour was not going to provide the challenge he needed, though once again he felt the reluctant heat coursing around his veins which just the thought of her could provoke.

      For Romy Salisbury was everything he despised in a woman.

      She was a siren who used her sexuality indiscriminately. Who had ruined at least one man’s life and had haunted his own for longer than he cared to admit.

      A muscle worked in his lightly tanned cheek as he drove past another sports car, unwilling excitement shivering its way up his spine as he anticipated what he intended to happen.

      Dominic smiled—but it was a cold, cruel smile as his mind lingered on the pleasure of the retribution he was going to exact in the next few days.

      He had waited five years for his moment and now it had come at last.

      It was high time that he settled the score with the delicious Miss Romy Salisbury.

      Romy missed the turning for St Fiacre’s Hill and said something rather rude underneath her breath. The entrance was so well camouflaged she was surprised that even the residents could find it!

      But then, didn’t they always say that you got what you paid for? And what St Fiacre’s residents were paying for—apart from ultra-luxurious houses in the jewel-like setting of nine hundred prime Surrey acres—was privacy, pure and sweet.

      Privacy from nosy tourists with their instant cameras always to hand, who were curious to know how the super-rich really lived. And privacy from good, old-fashioned fortune-hunters—people