British Bachelors: Gorgeous and Impossible. Jessica Hart
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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