LEO MAKARIOS paused in the shadows at the top of the flight of wide stairs leading down to the vast hall of Schloss Edelstein, one hand curved around the newel post of the mas- sive carved wood banister, his powerful physique relaxing as he surveyed the arc-lit scene below with a sense of satisfaction.

Justin had chosen well. The four girls really were exquisite. He stood a moment, looking them over. The blonde caught his eye first, but despite her remarkable beauty she was too thin for his tastes, her pose too tense. He had no patience with neurotic women. The brunette beside her wasn't too thin, but for all her glorious swathe of chestnut hair her expression was vacant. Leo's gaze moved on. Unintelligent women irritated him.

The redhead's pre-Raphaelite looks were stunning indeed, but they had, Leo knew, already caught the attention of his cousin Markos, under whose protection the girl was living. His gaze moved on again to the final girl.

And stopped.

His eyes narrowed, taking in the picture she made. The hair was sable. As black as night. The skin was white. As pale as ivory. And the eyes were green. As green as the emeralds she was wearing. Wearing with an air of such total boredom that a sudden shaft of anger went through him. What business had any female to look bored when wearing a Levantsky necklace? Did she not realise what a miracle of the jeweller's art the necklace was? And the earrings and the bracelets and the rings she was adorned with?

Evidently not. Even as he watched her lips pressed together and she gave a conspicuously heavy sigh, placing one hand on her hip and very obviously shifting her weight from one leg to the other beneath her long skirts.

Leo stilled, the anger draining out of him. As she'd given that heavy sigh her breasts had lifted. Already lush from the tightly corseted black gown she was wearing, the movement had made their soft dove-white mounds swell delectably.

Through Leo's lean, powerful frame a familiar and pleasur- able sensation started.

So the sable-haired, green-eyed beauty was bored, was she? Well, he would be happy to remedy that.

Personally.

He started to walk down the stairs.

Anna felt her mood worsening. What was the hold-up now? Tonio Embrutti had gone into a huddle with his assistants, and she could hear the static hiss of vituperative Italian. She gave another sigh, feeling the low-cut décolletage digging in. She hated wearing it — it was far too revealing, and it invited the usual sleazy male attention she tried to avoid.

Her lips pressed together again. Mentally she forced herself to go through one of her karate katas. It both calmed her and reassured her, knowing she could fight off any physical ha- rassment — even if she couldn't stop men leering over her.

She shifted her weight again minutely in the heavy dress. Modelling wasn't as easy as people thought it was, and she could tell that the two amateurs here — Kate and Vanessa — were finding it hard and tiring. Anna's eyes travelled to them. The brunette, Kate, looked vacant without her lenses in — but at least, thought Anna, it meant she couldn't see the lecherous looks aimed at her. The redhead, Vanessa, had other protec- tion — word had gone round that her boyfriend was the cousin of the guy who'd set up this shindig and owned this medieval mansion. Though why, Anna mused, a Greek should own a castle in the Austrian Alps was beyond her. Maybe he just wanted to be close to the private Swiss bank he kept his loot in.

He certainly had a whole load of cash, that was for sure. Schloss Edelstein was vast, perched halfway up a mountain and surrounded by forests and snowfields.

Anna's bored expression lightened suddenly with remem- bered pleasure. The view from her bedroom was breathtaking: sunlight sparkling on the pristine snow, down to the frozen lake below, ringed by mountains. Very different from the view of the gasworks she'd had when she was growing up.

But then Anna had been lucky, she knew — spectacularly lucky.

Spotted in a shopping mall when she was eighteen by a scout for a modelling agency, she'd been incredibly suspicious at first. But the offer had proved genuine. Not that it hadn't taken non-stop hard work to succeed at modelling. Now, even though she was not in the supermodel bracket, and at twenty-six was already facing up to her limited remaining shelf-life, she made a living that was light-years away from what she'd been born to.

She'd learned a lot along the way. Not just how the other half lived — which had opened her eyes big-time — but about how to survive in one of the toughest careers around. And do it without letting the slime get to you.

Because slime, she had swiftly discovered, was a big, big feature of a fashion model's world. Some of the girls, she knew, did every drug they could, and slept with every man who could help their career. And a lot of the men in the fashion world weren't any better either.

Not that everyone was like that, she acknowledged. Some people in the fashion world were fine — there were designers she respected, photographers she trusted, models who were friends. Like Jenny, the blonde of the quartet, her best friend, draped now in white, with a diamond tiara and bracelets up to her elbows.

Anna's eyes narrowed.

Jenny didn't look well. She'd always been thin — what model wasn't? — but now she was on the point of looking emaciated. It wasn't drugs — Jenny didn't do drugs, or Anna would not have been friends with her. She hoped it wasn't just under- eating — especially not if some jerk of a photographer had been telling her to shift some non- existent weight. Illness? A shudder went through Anna. Life was uncertain enough, and you could die in your twenties all right. Hadn't her own mother not made it past twenty-five, leaving her fatherless baby daughter to be brought up by her widowed grandmother?

Whatever it was that was pulling Jenny down, Anna would try and catch some time with her, when today's shoot had fin- ished. If it ever did. At least the huddle around Tonio Embrutti seemed to be ending. He was turning his attention back to the models. His little eyes flashed in his fleshy face, which a cul- tivated designer stubble did not enhance.

"You!" He pointed dramatically at Jenny. "Off!" Anna saw Jenny stare. "Off?" she echoed dumbly. The photographer waved his hands irritably. "The dress. Off. Down to the hips. Peel it off. Then I need the hands crossed over in your cleavage. I want to shoot the bracelets. Hurry up!" He clicked impatiently at a hovering styl- ist and held out a hand for his camera from his assistant.

Jenny stood frozen. "I can't."

The photographer stared at her. "Are you deaf? Remove your dress. Now!" The stylist he'd pointed at was obediently undoing the fas- tenings down the back of Jenny's dress.

"I'm not taking the dress off!"

Jenny's voice sounded high-pitched with tension. Anna saw Tonio Embrutti's face darken. She stepped for- ward to intervene.

"No strips," she announced. "It's in the contract." The photographer's face whipped round to hers. "Shut up!" He turned back to Jenny. Anna walked up to her, putting a hand out to stop the stylist. Jenny was looking as tense as a board.

Another voice spoke. A new voice. "Do we have a problem?"

The voice was deep, and accented. It was also — and Anna could hear it like a low, subliminal tremor in her body — a warning.

A man had stepped out of the shadows consuming the rest of the vast hall beyond the brilliantly illuminated space they were being photographed in.

Anna felt the breath catch in her throat. The man who had stepped into the circle of light was like a leopard. Sleek, pow- erful, graceful — and dangerous.

Dangerous? She wondered why the word had come into her mind, but it had. And even as it formed it was replaced by another one.

Devastating.

The breath stayed caught in her throat as she stared, taking in everything about the man who had just appeared.

Tall. Very tall. Taller than her.

Dark hair, olive skin — and a face that could have stepped out of a Byzantine mosaic. Impassive, remote, assessing.

And incredibly sexy.

It was the eyes, she thought, as she slowly exhaled her breath. The eyes that did it. Almond-shaped, heavy-lidded, sen- sual.

Very dark.

He spoke again. Everyone seemed to have gone totally silent around him. He was the kind of man who'd have that effect on people, Anna found herself thinking.

"I repeat — do we have a problem?" He doesn't like problems — he gets rid of them. They get in his way...

The words seemed to form in her mind of their own accord. "And you are...?" Tonio Embrutti enquired aggressively. Stupidly. The man turned his impassive heavy- lidded eyes on him. For a moment he said nothing.

"Leo Makarios," he said.

He didn't say it loudly, thought Anna. He didn't say it por- tentously. And he certainly didn't say it self- importantly.

Yet there was something about the way the man who owned Schloss Edelstein, whose company owned every jewel that she and the other three models were draped with, and who owned a whole heap more besides spoke. Something about the way he said his name that almost — almost — made her feel sorry for Tonio Embrutti.

Almost, but not quite. Because Tonio Embrutti was, without doubt, one of the biggest jerks she'd ever had the displeasure to be photographed by.

"Yes," she announced clearly, before the photographer could get a word out. "We do have a problem."

The heavy-lidded eyes turned to her.

How, she found herself thinking, could eyes that were so impassive make her feel every muscle in her body tighten? As though she were an impala — caught out on a deserted African plain, with the sun going down.

When the big cats came out to hunt.

But she wasn't an impala, and this Leo Makarios was no leopard. He was just a rich man who was having a fun time getting his latest rich-man's toy some media attention. Starting with publicity photos, courtesy of four models specially hired for the purpose.

But not hired to strip. "Your photographer," she said sweetly, "wants us to breach the contract." Her voice changed. Hardened. "No nude work. It's in the contract," she informed him. "I made sure it was. Check it out."

She went on standing protectively beside Jenny. The other two girls — the amateurs — had, she noticed, instinctively closed in on each other as well. Both were looking uneasy.

Leo Makarios was still looking at her.

She was looking back. Something was happening to her. Something deep down. In her guts. Something she didn't like.

Slime. Was that it? Was that what it was about the way Leo Makarios was looking at her that she didn't like?

No, she thought slowly. Definitely not slime. That she could handle. She'd had to learn how, and now she could.

But this was worse. What Leo Makarios was doing to her hit somewhere completely different.

She could feel it happening. Feel the slow, heavy slug of her heart rate. Feel the blood start to pulse.

As if for the very first time in her life.

Oh, no, she thought, with the kind of slow-motion thinking that came with great shock. Not this.

Not him.

But it was.

Leo let his eyes rest on her.

She wasn't looking bored now.

Two quite different emotions were animating her face, though she was, he could see, trying not to let the second one through.

The first emotion was anger. The girl was angry. Very angry. It was an old anger too, one that was familiar to her. But the second emotion was coming as a shock to her. He felt a surge of satisfaction go through him. She might be hiding it, but he'd seen it — seen the tell-tale minute flaring of her pupils as her eyes had impacted with his.

The satisfaction came again, but he put it to one side. He'd attend to it later — when the time was appropriate. Right now he had other matters to deal with.

He flicked his eyes to the blonde. Yes, definitely the neurotic type, he thought. Tense and jittery, and the type to give any man a headache. She was fantastically beautiful, of course, but he didn't envy the man who had the handling of her.

"Let me understand," he said to her. "You do not want this shot? The one Signor Embrutti desires?"

The girl was almost trembling she was so tense. She shook her head.

Tonio Embrutti burst into a fusillade of staccato Italian. Leo halted him with a peremptory hand.

"No breast shots. Not for her. Not for any of them. Their clothes stay on — all of them," he spelt out, for good measure.

His eyes moved over the four girls, resting momentarily on the redhead. A smile almost flickered on his mouth. He could just imagine his cousin Markos's reaction to seeing his mis- tress's naked charms paraded in the publicity shots accompa- nying the launch of the rediscovered Levantsky collection — long-hidden in a secret Tsarist cache in the depths of Siberia and recently returned to the commercial world courtesy of a shrewd acquisition by Makarios Corp.

Markos would have beaten him to a pulp for allowing it! If he could land a punch, that was, thought Leo, with dark humour.

Not that he would give him cause to — or any man who had an interest in the girls here.

His eyes flicked back to the sable-haired model. Was she taken? Just because she'd responded to him it didn't mean that another man didn't have his marker on her. She wouldn't be the first female to think she'd do better trading up to a Makarios.