CHAPTER ONE

      ANNIS CAREW walked into her father’s house and stopped dead. This was not the small, family supper she had been expecting. This was a full scale dinner party with women in jewels, waiters in black tie and, inevitably, tonight’s candidate to help the millionaire’s plain daughter off the shelf.

      And what a candidate! Annis picked him out the moment the door closed behind her. He was talking to her father on the other side of the drawing room but they both glanced up to see who had arrived. At once, Annis forgot her father, her kind matchmaking stepmother Lynda, and everyone else in the room.

      The candidate was tall and good looking in a sardonic, hard edged sort of way. But it wasn’t his height or his Byronic profile that stopped her breath in her throat. It was what she privately called The Look—the look of a man who did not have to try.

      Annis knew The Look from grim experience. She had been meeting—and failing to make any impression on—men with The Look ever since the first smart cocktail party at which Lynda had tried to introduce her to what she called Nice People.

      Oh, no, not that one, thought Annis. Lynda, what are you trying to do to me?

      Her father had obviously been waiting for her. Lynda’s instructions, no doubt. Now, as he said something to the tall dark man, he looked relieved.

      Probably thought I’d realise what was going on and cut loose, thought Annis. As I should have done. How could I be so stupid?

      On the telephone this afternoon Lynda had been casual. Too casual, Annis now realised. ‘Come over for supper, darling. It’s so long since we’ve seen you,’ Lynda had said.

      And Annis, speeding through her flat on the way to her next meeting, had flung, ‘OK. What time?’ at the telephone speaker without pausing to think.

      So now here she was, high and dry, an ugly duckling in her sober business suit among the swans of London’s elite. Rain-draggled hair dripped down her back. Meanwhile The Look shouldered his way purposefully through the crowd to the rescue of the millionaire’s plain daughter who didn’t want rescuing.

      Say a big hello to the perfect Friday night, thought Annis. She felt a strong urge to scream. She repressed it. Just.

      Annis watched the tall figure bearing down on her. Like most of the men here this evening he was formally dressed. Unlike most of them he was wearing a high collared Nehru jacket in a muted brocade that glimmered richly in the candlelight. It skimmed his slim hips in a fashion that was as flattering as it was startling. Together with his strange, slanted eyes, it gave him an air of slightly exotic danger.

      No doubt at all, thought Annis, that the effect was deliberate—and carefully calculated. A peacock, she thought, among all these high priced swans. Who on earth was he?

      He reached her and took her hand.

      ‘Across a crowded room—I knew it would happen one day.’ He had a voice like black treacle, warm and deep and horribly sensuous. You could, thought Annis indignantly, probably drown in that voice. Slowly and pleasurably.

      She gave him a wintry smile and removed her hand.

      ‘Hi, doll,’ said her father, arriving.

      Since Annis had become a businesswoman in her own right her father treated her with a breezy camaraderie that imperfectly disguised his gratitude that she no longer admitted to emotions.

      ‘Hi, Dad,’ she said, cool as the glass of champagne a waiter was pressing into her hand.

      ‘This is Konstantin Vitale. He specially wants to meet you.’

      I’ll just bet he does, thought Annis dourly. She wondered briefly whether it was the opportunity for business offered by her father’s company or her own status as an heiress that had drawn Konstantin Vitale across the room to her side.

      Tony Carew answered the question for her. ‘He’s working on the headquarters project.’

      ‘Ah. Palazzo Carew,’ said Annis, understanding.

      Her father’s plans for the new centre he was going to build for his company were enthusiastically extravagant. They had impressed the media and had stunned his rivals. His family had been teasing him about them for months.

      ‘So, here’s your mystery woman, Vitale.’ He sounded pleased with himself ‘My daughter, Annis.’

      ‘Mystery woman?’ echoed Annis. She was growing warier by the