Celebrate the legend that is bestselling author

PENNY JORDAN

Phenomenally successful author of more than two hundred books with sales of over a hundred million copies!

Penny Jordan’s novels are loved by millions of readers all around the word in many different languages. Mills & Boon are proud to have published one hundred and eighty-seven novels and novellas written by Penny Jordan, who was a reader favourite right from her very first novel through to her last.

This beautiful digital collection offers a chance to recapture the pleasure of all of Penny Jordan’s fabulous, glamorous and romantic novels for Mills & Boon.

About the Author

PENNY JORDAN is one of Mills & Boon’s most popular authors. Sadly, Penny died from cancer on 31st December 2011, aged sixty-five. She leaves an outstanding legacy, having sold over a hundred million books around the world. She wrote a total of one hundred and eighty-seven novels for Mills & Boon, including the phenomenally successful A Perfect Family, To Love, Honour & Betray, The Perfect Sinner and Power Play, which hit the Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller lists. Loved for her distinctive voice, her success was in part because she continually broke boundaries and evolved her writing to keep up with readers’ changing tastes. Publishers Weekly said about Jordan ‘Women everywhere will find pieces of themselves in Jordan’s characters’ and this perhaps explains her enduring appeal.

Although Penny was born in Preston, Lancashire and spent her childhood there, she moved to Cheshire as a teenager and continued to live there for the rest of her life. Following the death of her husband, she moved to the small traditional Cheshire market town on which she based her much-loved Crighton books.

Penny was a member and supporter of the Romantic Novelists’ Association and the Romance Writers of America—two organisations dedicated to providing support for both published and yet-to-be-published authors. Her significant contribution to women’s fiction was recognised in 2011, when the Romantic Novelists’ Association presented Penny with a Lifetime Achievement Award.

Master of Pleasure
Penny Jordan

www.millsandboon.co.uk

CHAPTER ONE

SASHA turned her head to look at her nine-year-old twin sons. They were playing on the beach like a pair of seal pups, wriggling and wrestling together, and jumping in and out of the waves that were washing gently onto the secluded Sardinian shoreline.

‘Be careful, you two,’ she warned, adding to the older twin, ‘Sam, not so rough.’

‘We’re playing bandits.’ He defended his boisterous tackling of his twin. Bandits had become their favourite game this summer, since Guiseppe, the brother of Maria who worked in the kitchen of the small boutique hotel that was part of the hotel chain owned by Sasha’s late husband, had told them stories about the history of the island and its legendary bandits.

The boys had their father’s night-dark hair, thick and silky, and olive-tinted skin. Only their eye colour was hers, she reflected ruefully, giving away their dual nationality—sea-coloured eyes that could change from blue to green depending on the light.

‘Told you I’d get free.’ Nico laughed as he wriggled dexterously out of Sam’s grip.

‘Careful. Mind those rocks and that pool,’ Sasha protested, as Sam brought Nico down onto the sand in a flying tackle that had them both laughing and rolling over together.

‘Sam, look—a starfish,’ Nico called out, and within a heartbeat they were both crouching side by side, staring into a small rock pool.

‘Mum, come and look,’ Nico called out. Obligingly she picked her way across to them, crouching down in between them, one arm around Sam, the other round Nico.

‘Come on. And I’m the Bandit King, remember.’ Sam urged Nico to get up, already bored with the rock pool and its inhabitant.

Boys, Sasha thought ruefully. But her heart was filled with love and pride as she watched them dart away to play on a safer area of smooth sand. She turned to look back towards the hotel on its rocky outcrop, while still keeping her maternal antennae firmly on alert. This hotel was, in her opinion, the most beautiful of all the hotels her late husband had owned. As a wedding gift to her he had allowed her a free hand with its renovation and refurbishment. The money she had expended had been repaid over and over again by the praise of their returning guests for her innovative ideas and her determination to keep the hotel small and exclusive.

But with Carlo’s death had come the shock of discovering that the other hotels in the group had not matched the financial success of this one. Unknown to her, Carlo had borrowed heavily to keep the business going, and he had used his hotels as collateral to secure his loans. Bad business decisions had been made, perhaps because of Carlo’s failing health. He had been a kind man, a generous and caring man, but not the kind of man who had taken her into his confidence when it came to his business and financial affairs. To him she had always been someone to be protected and cherished, rather than an equal.

They had met in the Caribbean, with its laid-back lifestyle and sunny blue skies, where Carlo had been investigating the possibility of buying a new hotel to add to those he already owned. Now, in addition to having to cope with the pain of losing him, she had had to come to terms with the fact that she had gone overnight from being the pampered wife of a rich man to a virtually destitute widow. Less than a week after Carlo’s death his accountant had had to tell her that Carlo owed frighteningly large sums of money, running into millions, to an unnamed private investor he had turned to for help. As security for this debt he had put up the deeds to the hotels. And, although she had begged her business advisers to find a way for her to be able to keep this one hotel, they had told her that the private investor had informed them that under no circumstances was he prepared to agree to her request.

She looked back at her sons. They would miss Sardinia, and the wonderful summers they had all enjoyed here, but they would miss Carlo even more. Although he had been an elderly father, unable to join in the games of two energetic young boys, he had adored them and they him. Now Carlo was gone, his last words to her a demand that she promise him she would always recognise the importance of the twins’Sardinian heritage.

‘Remember,’ he had told her wearily, ‘whatever I have done I have done with love—for you and for them.’

She owed Carlo so much; he had given her so much. He had taken the damaged needy girl she had been and through his love and support had healed that damage. The gifts he had given her were beyond price: selfrespect, emotional self-sufficiency; the ability to give and receive love in a way that was healthy and free of the taint of destructive neediness. He had been so much more to her than merely her husband.

Determination burned steadfastly in her eyes, turning them as dark as the heart of an emerald. She had been poor before—and survived. But then she had not had two dependent sons to worry about. Only this morning she had received a discreet e-mail from the boys’ school, reminding her that fees for the new term were now due. The last thing she wanted to do was cause more upheaval in their young lives by taking them away from the school they loved.

She looked down at her diamond rings. Expensive jewellery had never been something she’d craved. It had been Carlo who had insisted on buying it for her. She had already made up her mind that her jewellery must be sold. At least they had a roof over their heads for the space of the boys’ summer holidays. It had hurt her pride to ask Carlo’s lawyers to plead for them to be allowed to stay on here until their new school term began in September, and she had been grateful when they had told her that she’d been granted that wish. Her own childhood had been so lacking in love and security that from the very heartbeat of time when she had known she was pregnant she had made a mental vow that her child would never have to suffer as she had suffered. Which was why…

She turned her head to watch her sons. Yes, Carlo had healed so much within her, yet there had been one thing he couldn’t heal. One stubborn, emotional wound for which she still had not found closure.

The worry of the last few months had stolen what little spare flesh she had had from her body, leaving her, in her own eyes, too thin. Her watch was loose on her wrist as she pushed the heavy weight of her sun-streaked tawny hair back off her face and kept it there with one slender hand.

She had been eighteen when she’d married Carlo, and nineteen when the boys had been born, an uneducated but street-smart girl who had been only too glad to accept Carlo’s proposal of marriage despite the fact that he was so much older than her. Marriage to him had provided her with so much that she had never had, and not just in terms of financial security. Carlo had brought stability into her life, and she had flourished in the safe environment he had provided for her.

She had been determined to do everything she could to repay Carlo’s kindness to her, and the look on his face the first time he had seen the twins, lying beside her in their cots in the exclusive private hospital in which she had given birth, had told her that she had given him a gift that was beyond price.

‘Watch, Mum.’ Obediently she obeyed Sam’s demand that she watch as he and Nico turned cartwheels. One day soon they would be telling her not to watch them so closely. As yet they hadn’t realised just how carefully she did watch over them. Sometimes, with two such energetic and intelligent boys, it was hard not to be over-protective—the kind of mother who saw danger where they saw only adventure. Her own thoughts silenced the ever ready ‘be careful’, hovering on her lips. ‘Very good,’ she praised them instead.

‘Look, we can do handstands too,’ Sam boasted.

They were agile, as well as tall for their age, and strongly built.

‘You have made good strong sons for me, Sasha,’ Carlo had often praised her. She smiled, remembering those words. Their marriage had bought her time and space in which to grow from the girl she had once been into the woman she was now. The sun glinted on the thin gold band of her wedding ring as she turned again to look at the hotel on the rocks above them.

She had travelled all over the world with her late husband, visiting his chain of small exclusive hotels, but this one here in Sardinia had always drawn her back. Originally a private home, owned by Carlo’s cousin, Carlo had inherited the property on the cousin’s death, and had vowed never to part with it.

Gabriel stood in the shadow cast by the rocks and looked down onto the beach. His mouth twisted with angry contempt and something else.

How did she feel now? he wondered, knowing that fate had reneged on the bargain she had struck with it, and that the security she had bought with her body was not, after all, going to be for life. How had she felt when she had learned that her widowhood was not going to be one of wealth and comfort?

Had she cursed the man she married, or herself? And what of her sons? Something dark and dangerous ripped his guts with razor-sharp claws. Just watching them had brought to the surface memories of his own childhood here on Sardinia. How could he ever forget the cruel, harsh upbringing he had endured? When he had been the age of these two boys he had been made to work for every crust he was thrown. Kicks and curses had taught him how to move swiftly and sure-footedly out of their range. But then he had been an unwanted child, a child disposed of by his rich maternal relatives, abandoned by his father, to be brought up by foster carers. As a boy he had, Gabriel acknowledged bitterly, spent more nights sleeping outside with the farm animals than he had inside with the foster family, who had learned their contempt of him from his mother’s relatives.

Gabriel believed that such an upbringing either made or broke the human spirit, and when it made it, as it had his, it hardened it to pure steel. He had never and would never let anyone deflect him from his chosen path, or come between him and his single-minded determination to stand above those who had chosen to look down on him.

His maternal grandfather had been the head of one of the richest and most powerful of Sardinia’s leading families. The Calbrini past was tightly interwoven with that of Sardinia. It was a family riven in blood feuds, treachery and revenge, and steeped in pride.

His mother had been his grandfather’s only child. She had been eighteen when she’d run away from the marriage he had arranged for her, to marry instead a poor but handsome young farmer she had believed herself in love with.

Strong-willed and spoiled, it had taken her less than a year to realise that she had made a mistake, and that she loathed her husband almost as much as she did the poverty that had come with her marriage. But by then she had given birth to Gabriel. She had appealed to her father, begging him to forgive her and let her come home. He had agreed, but on condition that she divorced her husband and left the child with his father.

According to the stories Gabriel had been told as a child, his mother hadn’t thought twice. Her father had paid over a goodly sum of money to Gabriel’s father on the understanding that this was a once and for all payment and that it absolved the Calbrini family from any responsibility towards the child of the now defunct marriage.

With more money that he had ever had in the whole of his life in his pocket, Gabriel’s father had left his three-month-old son and set off for Rome, promising the cousin he had left Gabriel with that he would send money for his son’s upkeep. But once in Rome he’d met the woman who was to become his second wife. She had seen no reason why she should be burdened with a child who was not hers, nor why her husband’s money should be wasted on it.

Gabriel’s foster parents had appealed to his grandfather. They were poor and could not afford to feed a hungry child. Giorgio Calbrini had refused to help. The child was nothing to him. His daughter had also remarried—this time to the man of his choice—and he was hoping that within a very short space of time she would give him a grandson with the lineage his pride demanded.

Only she hadn’t, and when Gabriel was ten years old his mother and her second husband had both been killed when the helicopter they were in crashed. Giorgio Calbrini had then had no alternative but to make the best of the only heir he had—Gabriel.

It had been an austere, loveless life for a young boy, Gabriel remembered, with a grandfather who’d had no love for him and had despised the blood he had inherited from his father. But at least under his grandfather’s roof he had been properly fed. His grandfather had sent him to the best schools—and had made sure that he was taught everything he would need to know when the time came to take over from him and become the head of the house of Calbrini. Not that his grandfather had had high hopes of him being able to do so, as he had made plain to Gabriel more than once. ‘I have to do this because I have no choice, because you are the only grandson I have,’ he had told Gabriel, ceaselessly and bitterly.

Gabriel, though, had been determined to prove him wrong. Not to win his grandfather’s love. Gabriel did not believe in love. No, he had wanted to prove that he was the better man, the stronger man. And that was exactly what he had done. At first his grandfather had refused to believe Gabriel’s tutors when they praised his grasp of financial politics and all the complexities that went with them. But by the time he was twenty Gabriel had quadrupled the small amount of capital his grandfather had given him on his eighteenth birthday.

Then, three weeks after Gabriel had celebrated his twenty-first birthday, his grandfather had died unexpectedly and Gabriel had inherited his vast wealth and position. Those who had predicted that he would never be able to step into his grandfather’s shoes had been forced to eat their words. Gabriel was a true Calbrini, and he possessed an even sharper instinct for making money than his grandfather. But there was more to his life than making money. There was also the need to make himself emotionally invulnerable.

And that was exactly what he was, Gabriel reflected now. No woman would ever be allowed to repeat his mother’s rejection of him and go unpunished.

Especially not this woman.

He could hear Sasha speaking to her sons, the sound of her voice, but not her words, carried to him by the breeze.

Sasha! By the time Gabriel was twenty-five he had become a billionaire. A billionaire who trusted no one and who kept the women he chose to warm his bed as exactly that—bedmates and nothing else. The rules he laid down for his relationships with them were simple and non-negotiable. No talk of love, or a future, or commitment; absolute fidelity to him while they were partners; absolute and total adherence to his safe sex and no babies policy. And, just to make sure that this latter rule wasn’t broken ‘accidentally on purpose’, Gabriel always took care of that side of things himself.

Over the years he had endured his share of angry, bitter scenes, with weeping women who had thought they could change those rules and then learned their mistake. Magically those tears had quickly dried once they were offered a generous goodbye gift. His mouth twisted cynically. Was it any wonder that he had become a man who trusted no one, and most of all a man who despised women? So far as Gabriel was concerned there wasn’t a woman in existence who could not be bought. His mother had shown him what women were, and all the other women he had come into contact with since had confirmed what she had taught him when she had abandoned him for money.

Not that he didn’t enjoy the company of women, or rather the pleasure of their bodies. He did. He had inherited his father’s good looks, and finding a willing female partner to satisfy his sexual needs had never been a problem.

‘Sam, don’t go too far. Stay here, where I can see you.’ Sasha’s words reached him this time, as she raised her voice so that her son could hear it. A caring mother? Sasha?

Like his bitterness, the past wouldn’t let go of him. It was here around him now, gripping him so tightly that he could feel its pain.

After his grandfather’s death he had had closed up his grandfather’s remote and uncomfortable house in Sardinia and bought himself a yacht. With financial interests in property, it had made sense for him to travel, looking for fresh acquisitions both material and sexual. And if a woman invited him to use her for his sexual pleasure then why should he not do so? Just so long as she understood that once his appetite was sated there would not be a place in his life for her.

By the time he was twenty-five he had also already made the decision that when the time came he would pay a woman to provide him with an heir—a child to which he would make sure he had exclusive rights.

Gabriel watched Sasha with cold-eyed contempt. Six weeks ago, just after his thirty-fifth birthday, he had stood beside the hospital bed of his dying second cousin—the Calbrini family was extensive, and had many different branches—listening to Carlo pleading for his help for the two sons Carlo loved more than anything else in the world.

The same warm breeze that was playing sensually with Sasha’s long hair was flattening the thick darkness of his own to reveal the harsh purity of a bone structure that bore the open stamp of Sardinia’s human history—the straight line of his Roman nose a classic delineation of masculine features that echoed the works of Leonardo and Michelangelo, coupled with the musculature of a man in his prime. Centuries ago the Saracens had invaded Sardinia, leaving their mark on its history and its inhabitants through the women they had taken and impregnated. It had been Carlo who had told him that legend had it that boy children born to such women were said to possess the physical stamina and legendary merciless cruelty of the men who had fathered them. Gabriel knew that there was Saracen blood in his own family’s past, and he knew too that it showed in his attitude to life. He had no mercy for those who double-crossed him.

Eyes as golden and as deathly watchful as those of an eagle studied the two boys. Privileged, and loved by a doting elderly father. Their childhood was so very different from his own. The sunlight gilded his skin, warmly gold rather than deeply olive. He looked on the promise Carlo had begged from him as an almost sacred trust, an admission from his cousin without words being spoken that he was entrusting his sons to Gabriel’s care because he did not trust their mother—because on his deathbed he had finally been prepared to admit that she could not be trusted.

But still Carlo’s last words to him had been of her.

‘Sasha,’he had told Gabriel. ‘You must understand…’

He had been too weak to say any more, but there had been no need. Gabriel knew all there was to know about Sasha. Just like his mother, she had walked out on him. The memory of that was like a constant piece of grit rubbing against his pride, exacerbating the darkness within him. She was unfinished business, the cause of a blow to his pride against which it had banked a debt of compounded interest—which he was now here to claim in full.

A roar of protest from one of the twins caused Sasha to turn to look in maternal anxiety, and then to call out, ‘Stop fighting, you two.’

Something—no, someone had moved between her and the sun. Immediately she shielded her gaze to see who it was.

There were moments in life that happened both so quickly and yet so slowly that they could never be ignored or forgotten. Sasha felt the abrupt cessation of her heartbeat, then a suffocating sense of shocked disbelief, streaked with fear and panic—and something else so painful that she refused to give it either life or a name. She listened to the slow heavy thud of her heart as though it belonged to another woman, distantly aware of it propelling the blood into her veins, keeping her physically functioning while, emotionally, every nerve felt as though it had been tortured and then severed. Just one word was torn from her throat.

‘Gabriel!’

CHAPTER TWO

JUST one word, but it was so filled with anger, shock and fear that it seemed to reverberate between them.

Sasha had to tilt her head back to look up at Gabriel, and she could feel the panicky beat of the pulse at the base of her throat. She resisted an urge to place a covering hand over it.

‘What are you doing here? What do you want?’ It was a mistake to ask him that. He would be able to hear the panic in her voice and see how she was having to fight to control her fear. The way his mouth was twisting into that cruelly unkind and satisfied smile she remembered so well told her that.

‘What do you think I want?’

His voice was so soft and gentle that it could almost have been the tender stroke of a lover’s touch against her skin, or the brush of an angel’s wings. Just for a second her body reacted to the memories it evoked. She was seventeen again, a desperate bundle of aching, emotional need she had kept hidden beneath a shield of bravado. Her body was bereft of its sexually challenging armour of short skirt and minuscule vest top, and her long hair, with its amateur blonde streaks, was still damp from the shower Gabriel had insisted she have. She was watching him watching her, overwhelmed by the feeling, the longing suddenly shooting through her; knowing for the first time in her life what it felt like to experience physical sexual desire. And she wanted him, desired him so very badly.

A door had swung open on her past. She didn’t want to see what lay behind it, but it was already too late. She remembered how she had been too impatient to wait for him to come to her, running to him instead. He had caught hold of her, holding her at arm’s length whilst he studied her naked body. Even her flesh had signalled its eager readiness to him, her breasts firming and lifting as she imagined him touching her there. But when he did she had realised that her imagination had not had the power to tell her just how his touch would feel, or what it would do to her. The flesh of his fingertips had been hard and slightly rough, the flesh of a man who worked and lived physically, not just cerebrally. She had shivered, and then shuddered with uncontained delight when he had slowly explored the shape of her breasts. The erotic roughness of his touch had increased her arousal so much that she had suddenly become aware of not just how much she wanted him, and how excited she was, but how ready her body was for him, how hot and wet and achingly sensitive that most intimate part of her had felt. As though he had sensed that, too, Gabriel had trailed his hand down over her body, smoothly and determinedly. When he had allowed it to rest on her hip, cupping the gently protruding bone, she had been seized with impatient urgency and the need to feel him caressing her more intimately.

Had she then moved closer to him, openly parting her legs, or had he been the one to propel her closer to him, moving his hand to her thigh? She couldn’t remember. But she could remember how it had felt, how she had felt, when he had bent his head to kiss the smooth column of her throat at the same time as he had stroked apart the swollen lips of her sex to dip his fingers in the slick moist heat that was waiting for him. She had almost reached orgasm there and then.

A shudder punched through her. What was she doing, thinking about that now? She could feel the strain of her own emotions. Fear? Guilt? Longing? No, never again. The girl she had been was gone, and with her everything that that girl had felt.

Sasha looked down towards the beach, where her sons were still playing, oblivious to what was happening, and then looked quickly away, instinctively not wanting to contaminate them with what was happening to her. Her sharpest and most urgent need was not to protect herself but to protect them. As she looked away she stepped to one side, as though to draw Gabriel’s attention to her rather than her vulnerable young. There was nothing she would not do to protect her sons. Nothing.

Gabriel tracked the involuntary movement she made away from the two boys. Carlo had claimed that she was a very protective mother, but of course she would have been while she believed that Carlo was a wealthy man and her role as their mother gave her unlimited access to that wealth. Carlo, like many men who come to fatherhood so late in life, had worshipped the flesh of his flesh, evidence of his potency. His heirs…Now the heirs to precisely nothing. Gabriel’s tiger-eyed gaze pounced on the visual evidence of their privileged cosmopolitan lifestyle—expensive Italian clothes, healthy American teeth, upper-class English accents, their flesh and bones that of children who had from birth been well fed and nurtured. At their age he had been wearing rags, his body thin and bony.

He switched his gaze from the beach to the woman in front of him. She too had good teeth, expensive teeth—paid for, of course, by her doting husband. Her doting and now dead husband. Her hair was cut in the kind of style that looked artless but, as Gabriel knew, cost a fortune to maintain. The ‘simple’ linen dress she was wearing, with its elegant lines, no doubt possessed a designer label, just as her hands and feet with their uncoloured but carefully manicured nails spoke of a woman who had the kind of confidence that came from enjoying position and wealth. But not any longer. What had she felt when she had learned of Carlo’s death? Relief at the thought that she would no longer have to give herself to an old man? Avaricious pleasure at the belief that she would now be wealthy?

Well, she would have one of those two feelings to keep, he acknowledged brutally, although probably not for very long. She must be close to thirty now, and if she wanted to find another rich old man to support her she would discover she was competing with much younger, unencumbered women. The kind of women who fawned around him wherever he went.

One of Gabriel’s mistresses had once told him that it was his Saracen ancestry that gave him the dark and dangerous side to his nature that his enemies feared and his women loved. For himself, he believed that any child growing up as he had done—unwanted, harshly treated, both physically and emotionally—quickly learned to give back as good as it got. A child who had to literally fight off the farm dogs for a scrap of bread was bound to develop a hard carapace to protect both his flesh and his spirit.

An unexpected smile dimpled his chin as he watched Sasha swallow and saw the telltale darkening of her eyes, but there was no warmth to that smile. ‘Yes, it must have been hard for you, lying there in bed, letting an old man take his pleasure with your body and being unable to give you any pleasure back. But then, of course, you had all that money to pleasure you, didn’t you?’

‘I didn’t marry Carlo for his money.’

‘No? Then why did you marry him?’

Ah, now he had her. He could hear the uneven ratcheting of her breath escaping from her lungs. How well he knew that fierce need to protect oneself from a death blow. Unfortunately for her it was too late. There was no protection for her here.

‘It certainly wasn’t for love,’he taunted her unkindly. ‘I saw him just before he died. He was in the hospital in Milan. You, I believe, were in New York—shopping. Very conveniently you had also boarded your sons at their school, in order to give yourself the freedom to do so.’

All the colour bled out of her face. Infuriatingly Gabriel recognised that even now, almost bleached of blood and life, she still managed to look impossibly beautiful.

Sasha was terrified she might actually faint, so great was the pressure of her anger. She had gone to NewYork in secret, to meet with yet another specialist to see if there was some way that Carlo might be saved. She might not have loved her husband as a woman, but she had been grateful to him for all that he had done for her and for the twins. The decision to ask the school if the boys could board was not one she had made without a great deal of soul searching. For her, the boys’emotional security was always paramount, but she and they had owed Carlo a huge debt. What kind of person would she be if she had not done absolutely everything she could to find a way to give her husband more time with them? It wouldn’t have been possible to travel to NewYork to seek a second opinion with the boys. And then there had been the added worry of how it would affect them to watch Carlo slowly dying. She had needed to be on hand to visit the hospital and then the hospice sometimes twice or three times a day. Carlo had wanted to die in Italy, not London, where the boys were at school. She had made what she had believed was the best decision she could at the time, but now Gabriel was pin-pointing the guilt that still nagged at her for having had to leave the boys at school for a term.

‘You know, of course, that the business is ruined and that all he has left you is debt?’

‘Yes, I know,’ she agreed bleakly. There was no point in even attempting to conceal the reality of her financial situation from him, or trying to explain to him how she felt about Carlo. He would not understand because he was incapable of understanding. Their shared experience of damaged childhood years, instead of forging shared bonds of mutual compassion, had turned them into the bitterest of enemies. He would never understand why she had left him for Carlo, and she would never tell him—because there was simply no point.

‘I suppose I should be honoured that you’ve actually come to gloat in person. After all, you weren’t at the funeral.’

‘To watch you cry crocodile tears? Even my stomach isn’t strong enough for that.’

‘But it is, of course, strong enough for you to come here and verbally stone me. It’s been over ten years, Gabriel. Isn’t it time—’

‘Isn’t it time what? That I claimed the debt you owe me, along with its accrued interest? I’m a man who likes payment in full, Sasha. Carlo knew that.’

Something—either old knowledge or female instinct—iced down her spine in a cold trickle of awareness she didn’t want but couldn’t ignore.

‘What do you mean? What did Carlo know?’

‘He knew that when he asked me to lend him money that money would have to be repaid.’

‘You loaned Carlo money?’

Gabriel inclined his head. ‘Against the security of the deeds to his hotels. He had overtraded, and badly. I told him that, but he believed he could borrow his way out of trouble, and since we were family I could not refuse him the help he wanted. Unfortunately for him he did not manage to turn the business around. Fortunately for me his debt was covered by his assets. My assets now. Including this place, of course.’

Sasha stared at him.

‘Yours?’ She couldn’t comprehend what he was saying. ‘You mean that you own this hotel?’

‘This hotel,’ he agreed, ‘and the others. And your home, the money in your bank, the clothes on your back. It all belongs to me now, Sasha. Everything. Carlo’s debt is repaid,’ he told her softly, ‘but yours to me is still outstanding. Did you think it had been forgotten? That I wouldn’t bother to seek retribution?’

She wanted desperately to look at her sons, to reassure herself that they were there, whole and safe, and that none of this could touch or harm them. But she was afraid that somehow just looking at them would draw Gabriel’s attention to their vulnerability.

Instead she drew in a deep, unsteady breath and said, ‘You seek retribution from me? I was the one who was the victim in our relationship, Gabriel. You were the one who—’

‘You were the one who sold herself to the highest bidder.’ Somehow she made herself look at him. ‘You left me with no other option,’ she told him quietly.

It was, after all, the truth. She had gone to him looking for all those things she’d never had, still able to believe that miracles could happen, even for girls like her, and that all the wrongs in her life could be made right. She had still trusted in her dreams then. She felt pity for the girl she had been, was glad that she was gone, and even more glad to be the woman who had taken her place.

Before Gabriel could say anything else she demanded, ‘What is it exactly that you want, Gabriel? I assume you haven’t wasted your precious time coming here just to gloat? Or did you think it would be amusing to throw us out personally? Well, I’ll save you the bother. It won’t take us long to pack.’ Of all the luxuries she would have to give up this was the one she would miss the most. The luxury of pride. Because she knew so well just what a luxury it was.

‘I haven’t finished yet,’ he told her.

There was more? What? Surely it wasn’t possible for things to be any worse?

‘Before he died, Carlo appointed me as his sons’ legal guardian.’

It was a joke. A cruel deliberate attempt to frighten her. Payback time with a vengeance. But of course it couldn’t be true.

‘What’s wrong?’ she heard Gabriel demanding softly when he caught her swift indrawn breath and the shocked disbelief she was trying to hide. ‘Surely Carlo told you that he intended to appoint me as their legal family guardian in accordance with traditional Sardinian law?’

He knew, of course, that Carlo had done no such thing because his cousin had told him so himself.

‘It is for the best,’ Carlo had whispered painfully to Gabriel. ‘Even though I know Sasha won’t see it that way at first.’

She certainly didn’t, Gabriel recognised. Her eyes were wild with disbelief as she shook her head in denial.

This couldn’t be happening, Sasha thought frantically. This was the nightmare to end all nightmares. The ultimate betrayal. A knife-sharp edge of fear sliced into her heart and paralysed her defences.

‘No!’ she told him, shock bleeding the colour from her face, clenching her hands into small, anguished fists. ‘No. I don’t believe you.’

‘My lawyers have all the necessary papers.’

This wasn’t some kind of malicious joke, Sasha recognised numbly. This was real. Her head was aching, bursting with unanswerable questions. She was too distraught to maintain the protective distance of remote disinterest.

‘I don’t understand…Why would Carlo do something like that? Why?’

Gabriel shrugged, a small movement of powerfully strong shoulders. Sickeningly for a second the scene in front of her swung crazily out of focus and she was seeing another, younger Gabriel, sea water sluicing from the bare tanned strength of those same shoulders as he hauled himself up out of the ocean onto the deck of his yacht, his body naked and unashamedly ready for her, just as hers had been equally ready for him.

And she had always been ready for him. Ready, eager, wanting. Hungry for the intimacy of any sexual act that would bring him closer to her and keep him there. She had had no inhibitions, and she suspected he would not have allowed her to have any. With their privacy guaranteed she had thought nothing of shrugging on one of his shirts and wearing nothing else, as turned on by the knowledge that beneath it she was openly available to his touch as she knew he had been. As a lover he had opened her eyes to a whole new world of pleasure, and he had imprinted that pleasure on her body in such a way that she knew she would never be able to forget it. There had been long hours when he had held her on their bed and caressed and kissed his way over every inch of her—the curve of her throat, the tender flesh inside her arm, her fingers. If she closed her eyes she knew she would almost be able to feel the slow wet curl of his tongue as he drew slow patterns of almost unendurable erotic stimulation along the whole length of her.

Aroused to a fever pitch, she would invariably forget his command to remain still and reach for him, arching her back, spreading her legs, moaning with raw delight when he carefully held apart the outer lips of her sex and stroked his tongue-tip the full length of it. Her orgasm would begin before he entered her, her body welcoming his fierce thrusts even while deep down inside herself a part of her ached to feel him there without the barrier of the condoms he’d always insisted on using.

Abruptly Sasha realised the danger of what she was doing. No! Her silent tortured denial reverberated inside her skull. What was happening to her? How could he be making her remember that now?

‘Isn’t it obvious?’ she could hear Gabriel saying coolly. ‘Carlo knew the state his financial and business affairs were in. He told me himself that he wanted to do everything he could to protect his sons and their future. Obviously by making me their guardian he believed he would be morally compelling me to provide for them financially.’

‘No, he wouldn’t do that,’ Sasha protested. But even as she said the words she knew that she was deceiving herself. It was exactly the sort of thing Carlo would have done—albeit for the best of motives. Carlo had had such a deep-rooted sense of family. He had been proud of being a Calbrini, proud too that the twins would bear that name. He had cared about her, and he had protected her from the pain of loving Gabriel and being rejected by him, but the boys had Calbrini blood in their veins, and in the end that had mattered more to him than her.

Sasha was trying hard to remain strong, to focus on what Gabriel was saying instead of slipping back into the past, but the memories Gabriel was evoking had a dangerously strong hold on her and were making her feel frighteningly weak. How could it be that just standing here with him could awaken the kind of erotic thoughts she had truly believed she had left behind in her past?

‘To provide for them financially,’ Gabriel repeated, adding as smoothly as though he were sliding a knife up through her ribs and straight into her heart, ‘and to protect them from their mother.’

It took several seconds for her brain to absorb what he was saying, and then several more for her to react to the cruel injustice of his words. ‘They don’t need to be protected from me, and neither do they need you.’

‘Carlo obviously didn’t agree with you, and neither will the law. I am their guardian. They are my wards. That was their father’s dying wish.’

‘But I am their mother.’

‘The kind of mother who some might say they would be better off not having.’

‘You have no right to say that. You know nothing about my relationship with my sons.’

‘I know you. You went to Carlo because he was prepared to give you what I would not. Now he is dead, and sooner rather than later you will be looking for another man to take his place. Obviously Carlo feared that should you remarry your new husband might not have Carlo’s sons’best interests at heart, and he wanted to protect them.’

‘I would never marry a man unless I thought he would love them as though they were his own.’

‘Wouldn’t you?’

Sasha suspected she knew what he was thinking. ‘You still haven’t forgiven your mother, have you? Well, I am not her, Gabriel. I love my sons—’

‘Enough! This has nothing to do with my mother.’

Sasha wasn’t going to argue with him. What was the point? It would be like trying to break down granite with her bare hands. But she knew that she was right. Gabriel measured women by the yardstick of his mother’s failure to be a mother to him, and he condemned them all along with her. He wanted to believe that all women were capable of abandoning their children for money because he needed to believe it; because not to do so meant accepting that his own mother had left him because of some failure within himself to merit her maternal love. He spoke his beliefs as though they were a truth written in stone, and Sasha knew that inside his head, in what passed for his heart, they were. In his eyes she was already condemned and would remain condemned. What he believed could not be changed, because he did not want it to be changed.

She had learned so much on her own sometimes difficult and painful journey to maturity and acceptance of her own past. And most of all she had learned that it was impossible to make another person’s journey of self-knowledge and healing for them.

Gabriel had decided a long time ago to sacrifice the ability to love and be loved in exchange for the protection of a bitter pride that would not allow him to see her sex as motivated by anything other than the most callous form of self-interest.

Carlo might have believed he was doing what was right, but Sasha wished he had not brought Gabriel back into her life—and more importantly into the lives of her sons. They meant everything to her. There was nothing she would not do to protect them, no sacrifice she would not make.

‘You didn’t have to agree to Carlo’s request,’ she forced herself to point out. ‘Why did you? My sons mean nothing to you.’

Gabriel could hear the hostility in her voice. He looked towards the two boys. Sasha was right, of course; they meant nothing to him beyond the Calbrini blood in their veins. His initial reaction when Carlo had told him his intention had been to refuse. Why should he burden himself with the responsibility of his cousin’s sons, especially when he knew what their mother was? It was obvious what Carlo was trying to do. He was bankrupt and in debt, his sons were too young to fend for themselves, and their mother could not be relied on to protect them; she would sell herself to the first man who could afford her. All this must have gone through Carlo’s mind as it would have done his own. So Carlo had turned to him, on his sons’ behalf, knowing that morally Gabriel could not and would not reject the claim of their shared Calbrini blood.

Since then, however, Gabriel had had more time to reflect on the situation. He had reasoned to himself that in accepting the role of guardian to Carlo’s sons he could spare himself the necessity of producing heirs of his own with all the potential legal pitfalls that could entail. Carlo’s sons were Calbrinis. He had decided that he would spend some time with Carlo’s sons to evaluate for himself whether or not they were worthy of raising as his own heirs. If they were, then as their guardian he would raise them exactly as he would have done his own sons, to become the heirs his vast empire and wealth required. As for Sasha…

He could feel the burn inside his body like that of an old unhealed wound. Their shared history was a page of his life he had never been able to remove. The women who had gone before her, like those who had come after, had never managed to leave the imprint on his senses that she had. She was a payment owed to him in the balance sheet of his life. Fate was now giving him the opportunity to salve his wounded pride.

Once he had collected the capital and interest on her debt to him, once he had reversed the past and forced her into a position where he would be the one to walk away from her—for nothing else would salve his pride—then he would make it plain that there was no place for her in the new lives of her sons, and certainly not in his. Gabriel did not envisage any real problems. He knew Sasha. She was a hedonist and a sensualist, driven by sexual and financial greed. He was not foolish enough to think that he could simply trick her into doing what he wanted. The minute she guessed what he was planning she would cling to the boys, determined not to let go of her passport to his wealth. He would have to be subtle and thorough.

And ultimately, if she refused to relinquish her claim to her sons…?

If she was foolish enough to do that then she would soon realise her mistake.

‘No, but they meant a great deal to Carlo.’ Gabriel answered Sasha’s question coolly. ‘And my word means a great deal to me. Since I have given him my word that I will act in all ways towards them as though they were my own, that is exactly what I intend to do.’

‘What?’ His own? The shock of what Gabriel had said rocked Sasha back on her heels. Why hadn’t she anticipated this? She knew how much Carlo had loved the boys, but she knew too how deep his Sardinian roots went, and how important his family and its honour were to him. If only Carlo had told her what he was planning she could have done something, anything—whatever it would have taken. Pleaded, begged, demanded that he didn’t do this to her. He had known how Gabriel felt about her, how much he despised her. And he had known too…

She took a deep breath. She hadn’t thought about any of this in years. She hadn’t allowed herself to—not once since she had slipped from Gabriel’s bed in the pale light of a false dawn while Gabriel slept, unaware of her intentions. She had taken nothing with her when she left the yacht—not the expensive clothes he had bought her, nor the jewellery—only her passport. And enough money to get the hotel where Carlo was staying, to give herself and her future into his keeping. She had been eighteen then, and Carlo had been in his midsixties. Small wonder that a month later, when he had married her, the officials had thought he was her elderly father. She had not cared, though. All she had cared about was that now she was safe.

She could see Gabriel looking at the boys, and she reacted immediately to what her maternal instincts translated as a threat, reaching for his arm, wanting to stop him from going to them. But before she could touch him Gabriel swung around, his own grip on her wrist making her wince. His body was tensed like that of a hunter, a predator, waiting for her to try to escape so that he could punish her. A shudder of recognition ripped through her belly as she was subjected to the once-familiar signs of her own body’s arousal. How could this be happening? It was over ten years since Gabriel had last touched her. The twins’ birth had flooded her senses and emotions with an intensity of a different kind of love that had obliterated all she had once felt for Gabriel. Or so she had told herself.

How could one touch do this to her? How could he make her feel like this—her lower belly hollow with anticipation, her legs trembling, sweat springing up along her hair line and adrenalin forcing its way along her veins? It was a trick of her own imagination, that was all, she tried to reassure herself. She did not want or desire him. How could she? But the ache of longing inside her was intensifying and drowning out rational thought. Arousal and anger, desire and dislike, all the sweet, savage sexual alchemy of their shared past swept back over her.

She had, she remembered, felt like this the first time she had seen him. Only then the liquid heat erupting inside her body had not been shadowed by either pain or knowledge. The physical ache of her longing for him had seduced her before he had even touched her, and when he had touched her…She closed her eyes, not wanting to remember but it was too late. Inside her head she could hear her own voice as she cried out to him, caught up in the grip of her own unbearable pleasure, her eyes wide open with the awed shock of it while he leaned over her in the shadowy coolness of the yacht’s main cabin, watching her as the expert touch of his fingers brought her to orgasm. Her first orgasm. He had waited until its shuddering hold on her body had eased before giving her the look of hooded triumph that would become so familiar to her and saying laconically, ‘Perhaps now would be a good time to tell me your name?’

She opened her eyes abruptly. Her face burned now at the memory of her own behaviour then. She had only been seventeen, she reminded herself shakily. A child whose head had been stuffed with daydreams. Still, she had felt she knew all there was to know. She was now twenty-eight, a woman who knew enough to realize how dangerous her past had been, and how lucky she was to have escaped from it, and from Gabriel. She was free of that now. Of that and of him, and of all that he had made her feel and want.

She could feel Gabriel looking at her, focusing on her, the intensity of his concentrated gaze making her tremble. He couldn’t guess what she had been thinking, what she had been reliving. She was far too mature now to betray herself to him. Nevertheless, the dull ache inside her was refusing to subside and, as though she had no control over it whatsoever, she could feel her gaze being drawn to his body, to his throat, and the vee of sun-warmed flesh exposed by the neck of his polo shirt. Beneath it his torso would be ridged with muscle, the darkness of his body hair arrowing downwards over the tautness of his belly. Her gaze followed the downward arrowing of her thoughts, coming to rest where her hand and her lips had once rested so intimately and so pleasurably. She could still remember the hard sleekness of male flesh over rigid muscle, its smooth supple movement beneath her eager touch…

What was she doing? Frantically she pushed back the memories. She wanted badly to swallow, to wet the nervous dryness of her lips, but she was afraid of doing so in case…in case what? In case Gabriel guessed what she had been remembering and subjected her to the kind of savagely sexual possession she had once found so exciting? Here, with her sons less than ten yards away?

‘Let go of me,’ she breathed, trying to pull her wrist free.

‘Are you sure that is what you really want? Once you begged me for my touch. Remember?’

She couldn’t help it. She shuddered violently.

‘Ah, yes. I see that you do,’ he taunted her as he released her. Her flesh felt cold without his next to it. Cold and bereft. She mustn’t let herself think like that.

‘Let me warn you, Sasha, just in case you have forgotten. I know exactly what you are.’ He studied her body with a contemptuous and knowing sexual inspection that made her want to hit him.

‘I am the twins’ mother, and that is the only way you will ever know me from now on, Gabriel,’ she fired back at him. Were those words for his benefit, or for her own? He released her arm so quickly she almost lost her balance. She looked at him. His back was turned towards her. She shuddered. How could she ever have been so foolish as to have loved him? But she had. Desperately, wholly and completely, hungering for him to return her feelings, believing that she could trade sex for love. What a fool she had been. But she wasn’t that fool any longer.

CHAPTER THREE

STILL gripped by shock, Sasha watched Gabriel turn towards the boys. She couldn’t get her head around the enormity of what Carlo had done. But they were different from other men, these Sardinian men. They lived by a different code; theirs was a paternalistic society, and the belief in their right to order the lives of their families absolute.

When Carlo had told her about Gabriel’s mother she had seen that he did not share her shock that Gabriel’s father should seek to force his daughter into a marriage of his choosing.

‘No wonder she ran away,’ she had commented.

Carlo had frowned at her and shaken his head. ‘She was fortunate that her father forgave her and that he was powerful enough to persuade Luigi to marry her despite the humiliation she had forced on him.’

‘But to make her marry a man she did not love—’

‘It was his right as her father.’

‘And forcing her to abandon Gabriel, her baby? You can’t believe that was right, Carlo.’

‘Not right, no, but Giorgio was a proud man and the head of our family. The purity of the Calbrini bloodline was a matter of honour to him, and to accept as his grandson a child whose blood—’

‘But in the end he had to accept Gabriel, didn’t he?’

Carlo had inclined his head, as though in acceptance of her argument, but Sasha had known that in his heart he was as old-fashioned and traditional as Gabriel’s grandfather. She suspected that he had only told her the story of Gabriel’s birth because, despite what Gabriel had done to her, Carlo had still felt he had a duty to stand by his second cousin. He might have offered her the protection of his money and his name, but he had still been a Calbrini. And so were her sons. Carlo had never forgotten that, and neither must she—although for very different reasons.

Gabriel was still watching her sons.

‘There isn’t any point in me introducing you to them. After all, you are hardly likely to be playing a hands-on role in their lives, are you?’ she challenged him.

‘On the contrary. I intend to make my duties as their guardian a priority—which is why I am here. Who knows how badly they may have been damaged by the circumstances of their life?’

He had answered without even looking at her.

‘They miss Carlo, but his death has not damaged them…’

Gabriel swung round to face her.

‘The damage to which I refer is not that caused by the death of their father but rather by the life of their mother.’

A terrible cold stillness had her in its grip.

‘You have no right to say that.’

‘I have every right. They are my wards. It is my moral and legal duty to protect them.’

‘From me? I am their mother!’ Her hands were curled so tightly her nails bit into her flesh.

He turned slowly to face her, the golden eagle eyes as flat as polished stones.

‘You may be their mother, but you are also a woman who craves the lifestyle only a very rich man can provide. When such a man pays you for the use of your body he will not want his enjoyment of that body to be interrupted by the needs of a pair of nine-year-old boys. In the eyes of most courts such a mother would be considered derelict in her maternal duty and not worthy of the name.’

She could almost feel the acid burn of his bitterness.

‘Just because your own mother abandoned you—’

‘You will not speak of her.’

Sasha had never felt more angry, nor more afraid.

‘I have decided that it is in the best interests of my wards that they remain here, on the island that was their father’s home, while I consider what is best for their future.’

‘That is not your right.’

Sasha was afraid, and fighting hard not to show it, Gabriel recognised. The pulse in her throat was fluttering like a trapped bird struggling to be free. He could almost feel the waves of panic and fear beating up through her body. He could certainly see the shocked outrage in her eyes.

‘They are my sons,’ Sasha insisted fiercely. ‘My sons.’

‘And my legal wards now, under traditional Sardinian law. This is a patriarchal society, as you well know.’

Sasha was shaking her head. ‘You can’t do this. I won’t let you.’

‘You can’t stop me.’ He gave her a cold smile. ‘You cannot afford to go to court. You have no money. Carlo is dead, and you need to find another man to support you. A man who, like Carlo, is blind to the reality of what you are. Don’t bother denying it,’ he told her harshly before she could protest. ‘After all, we both know, don’t we, that you are accustomed to selling yourself to whichever man will pay the most? After all, that is why you came to me…and why you left me. Isn’t it?’

He had tossed the question at her almost casually, but Sasha wasn’t deceived. Nothing Gabriel ever did was done casually or without purpose. Even knowing that, she couldn’t stop herself from betraying her own agitation as she told him quickly, ‘That was all a mistake.’

‘Yes—your mistake,’ he agreed.

‘No, that wasn’t…’ she began, and then stopped. ‘It was a long time ago.’ What was she doing? She had no need to explain herself to him, and every need to protect herself from the contempt he had always felt for her. Gabriel was dangerous, he always had been and he always would be, and she now had the two best reasons in the world not to re-enact her own past like a moth drawn to the flame that would ultimately destroy it.

‘Not that long ago. It’s only just over ten years ago since I picked you up off the street where your previous lover had left you. Remember? You told me that you’d been offered the starring role in a porno movie mogul’s latest skinflick, but you’d star in a private one for me instead. Your words, not mine!’ He was walking away from her now and heading for her sons. ‘The she-leopard does not change her spots.’

‘Where are you going?’ she demanded frantically, even though she already knew the answer. The smile he gave her made her bite down hard into her bottom lip to stop herself from shuddering in open dread.

‘I am going to introduce myself to my wards,’ Gabriel answered her softly.

For several precious seconds Sasha was too caught up in her own emotions and the past Gabriel had evoked to move, but somehow she managed to break free of them to run after him, calling out fiercely, ‘Leave them alone! Don’t you dare touch my children.’

Entering a new decade had added to her beauty rather than taken from it, Gabriel admitted reluctantly as he watched her speed towards him. Her breasts were rising and falling with emotion and exertion beneath the thin covering of her dress when she finally reached him. It caught him off guard to look at her and feel the familiar hunger grip his body. She had always had good breasts—firm-fleshed and erotically real, warm and pliable to the touch, the skin tasting of woman and sunshine and sex, her dark brown nipples always greedily eager for the attention of his fingers and his lips. In his mind’s eye he could still see her, virtually naked on the private deck of his yacht, her head thrown back so that the sea breeze could tousle her hair, her lips curved into a smile of wanton, intensely sensual pleasure as she offered herself up to him.

Now, as then—although for different reasons—she was standing immediately in front of him, between him and her children in fact, so that it was impossible for him not to look directly at her. Motherhood had given her breasts a softer fullness that suited her, but it didn’t seem to have taken away the narrowness of her waist, nor the sensuality of a body that was made for sexual pleasure. A body he had once known as intimately as he knew his own—perhaps more so. As a lover Sasha had had an incomparable blend of fierce sexual passion and a feminine ability to lose herself and give herself so completely in the act of sex that it had felt as if she was handing every bit of herself over to him for their mutual pleasure. But of course he had been far from the only man to enjoy Sasha’s sexuality, and he certainly hadn’t been the first to pay for it—if not in money, then certainly in kind, with the lifestyle of a rich man’s mistress. She had as good as admitted that to him the night he had picked her up, if not actually out of the gutter, then certainly heading towards it.

He frowned darkly, angered by the power she still had to occupy his thoughts, even though he assured himself it was no longer with the white-hot overwhelming desire for her that had once burned inside his brain as well as his body. She had got under his skin and left an ache he could still feel ten years later, even if the savage heat of the need that had once threatened to consume him had ultimately burned out. Burned itself out, or been ruthlessly stamped out by him? What did it matter which? He had known from the first time he had taken her to bed that the intensity of his hunger for her was not something he wanted in his life. If he had aided in its destruction then he had acted wisely, out of self preservation. What he was feeling now was simply an echo of a long-dead feeling.

But not so dead that the embers didn’t smoulder with the heat of his desire for compensation. It had been bad enough that she had walked out on him for Carlo. But the fact that Carlo had fathered two sons on her and taken pride in them had struck painfully at the carefully guarded wound left by the misery of Gabriel’s own childhood.

For him—a man who had received neither love, compassion nor kindness—to be given the responsibility of protecting the childhood of these children was either an act of great foolhardiness or great trust. It had certainly been an act of moral desperation. Not that Gabriel would ever punish two innocent young lives for the sins of their mother—not after the way he himself had suffered.

He had received word that Carlo had died a matter of hours after he had seen him. Alone, without Sasha at his side, because she had been shopping.

Sasha. He didn’t want to think about the past they had shared, but it refused to be thrust away. Inside his head he could see her clearly as she had been the night he had first seen her. Her hair longer than it was now, inexpertly streaked and slightly tangled in the warm evening breeze. She had been wearing a cheap short skirt and a top that had revealed more of her breasts than it concealed, making her look every inch exactly what she was as she stood on the roadside in St Tropez. He wouldn’t even have contemplated stopping if she hadn’t virtually thrown herself in front of his car. Pretty, available, hungry girls like Sasha were ten a penny in St Tropez in the season, going from lover to lover, climbing upwards while they could towards their ultimate trophy of a man foolish enough and rich enough to offer them more than a night’s sex in return for a thick wad of euros. Sasha, he remembered, had been carrying a large straw basket which, she had told him with a small shrug, contained all her belongings.

‘I had to leave quickly, so I just brought what I could,’ she had told him disarmingly, when she had by some sleight of hand managed to get herself into the passenger seat of his Ferrari without him actually having invited her to do so.

That had been in May. From the little she had told him about herself he’d gathered that the man she had left had been part of the detritus swirling around in the wake of Cannes Film Festival—a ‘producer’ looking for young flesh to satisfy his own jaded appetite and those of the debased human beings he made his skinflicks for. But Gabriel hadn’t wanted to waste time listening to her talk when there were so many far more pleasurable uses for those soft full lips of hers. There was a practical streak to Sasha, as there was to all successful courtesans. She had quickly worked out that having to satisfy only one man would be a far more cost-effective way of using her body than risking being passed hand to hand by the producer and his friends.

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