LITMIR.BIZ

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      As a child, Anna Cleary loved reading so much that during the midnight hours she was forced to read with a torch under the bedcovers, to lull the suspicions of her sleep-obsessed parents. From an early age she dreamed of writing her own books. She saw herself in a stone cottage by the sea, wearing a velvet smoking jacket and sipping sherry, like Somerset Maugham.

      In real life she became a schoolteacher, and her greatest pleasure was teaching children to write beautiful stories.

      A little while ago, she and one of her friends made a pact to each write the first chapter of a romance novel in their holidays. From writing her very first line Anna was hooked, and she gave up teaching to become a full-time writer. She now lives in Queensland, with a deeply sensitive and intelligent cat. She prefers champagne to sherry, and loves music, books, fourlegged people, trees, movies and restaurants.

       Recent books by the same author:

      AT THE BOSS’S BECK AND CALL

       UNTAMED BILLIONAIRE, UNDRESSED VIRGIN

       TAKEN BY THE MAVERICK MILLIONAIRE

       MY TALL DARK GREEK BOSS

      CHAPTER ONE

      ARIADNE leaned over the balcony rail and contemplated plunging into the sea. Serve Sebastian Nikosto right if she was found floating face down. He’d have to look elsewhere for a bride. But though summer heat shimmered on the afternoon air, Sydney Harbour looked deep and chill, and she edged back. Knowing her parents had died in those restless waters didn’t make them any more appealing. She could be eaten by sharks!

      The view was spectacular, she supposed, even after the heartstopping beauty of Naxos, but it all felt remote to her. Her joy in coming back to Australia had withered. She felt as alien as she ever had in any foreign place. Incredible to think she was born here.

      She turned back into her hotel suite and sank onto the bed’s luxurious coverlet, reaching listlessly for the tour brochure that had sucked her in. The Katherine Gorge. Uluru. How thrilled she’d been, how excited. The sad joke was there never had been any such pleasures intended for her. She was here to be chained to the bed of a stranger.

      Unless she ran. The minuscule hope reared again in her heart. This Sebastian Nikosto had failed to meet her plane. Maybe he’d changed his mind?

      The phone rang and she nearly jumped out of her skin. Thea, ringing to apologise for the trick and tell her to come home? Explain about the mistake with the hotel booking?

      It was Reception. ‘Good afternoon, Miss Giorgias, you have a visitor. A Mr Nikosto. Do you wish to meet him in the lobby, or shall I give him your room number?’

      ‘No.’ Her heart had jolted out of its niche but she gasped, ‘I’ll come down.’

      With a shaking hand she replaced the phone. She would just have to tell Nikosto she was Ariadne Giorgias, an Australian citizen, not a commodity to be traded in some deal.

      She struggled on with her jacket. Her face was paler than her blonde hair, her eyes the dark blue they looked when she was angry, or afraid.

      Her legs felt numb. On the way down in the lift she tried to quell her nerves with some positive thinking. Courage was all that was needed. Australia was a civilised country. Women couldn’t be forced here. In fact, she was curious to see what sort of man would sink so low as to barter for a wife in the twenty-first century. Was he so old he was locked in the traditions of the past? So repulsive as to have no other choice?

      Anyway, she was brave. She would refuse. After all, she was the notorious bride who’d left the heir to one of the richest fortunes in Greece standing at the altar. That had taken courage, though her uncle and aunt’s world had judged it differently.

      Still, when she stepped out of the lift on the ground floor and saw the obese elderly man in baggy clothes standing near the reception desk, she felt the blood drain from her heart. How could they? How could they? Then, even as the opulent lobby with its long low lounges and glass-walled views of the city swayed sickeningly in her sight, the man hailed some people across the room and walked to join them.

      Oh. So not him. That small relief, at least. For the moment.

      Her anxious gaze roved the groups of travellers, busy hotel staff, people queuing at the desks, and lighted on another unaccompanied man, this one tall and lean, dressed in a dark suit. He was standing by the entrance with his back to her, phone to his ear, jacket switched back at one side while his free hand rested on his hip. He was pacing backwards and forwards with a lithe, coiled energy, occasionally gesticulating with apparent impatience.

      He turned suddenly in her direction, then checked. Her nerves jumped. She could tell he’d caught sight of her because the lines of his tall frame tensed, and even from this distance she could see him frown. He said something into his phone, then snapped it shut and slipped it inside his jacket.

      Despite her moment of bravado, her stomach clenched.

      He hesitated a moment, then walked across the wide lobby towards her, his frown smoothing away. Too late though, because she’d already seen it. As he drew nearer she saw, with a growing sense of unreality, that he was good-looking. A sleek, beautiful male in the matchless Greek style, though he had that indefinable, characteristic bearing of an Australian man. Athletically built, even in a suit. Why would he ever need to order in a woman?

      He

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