JACQUELINE BAIRD: Mediterranean Men Unleashed: The Billionaire's Blackmailed Bride

The man was not conventionally handsome, his features too large and harshly chiselled for classic male beauty.

Brutally handsome … was a better description.

There was something insulting about the way his dark eyes slid casually down to her cleavage and lingered for a long moment. But even as she recognized his insolent masculine appraisal for what it was her skin prickled with shocking awareness. The breath caught in her throat and she gave a shaky inward sigh of relief when he casually pulled out the chair next to hers, and lowered his long length into it.

It could be worse, Emily told herself, at least with Anton Diaz seated at her side, she did not have to face him.

Instinctively she recognized he was a man who was supremely confident in his masculinity and totally aware of his effect on the opposite sex, and discreetly she crossed her arms over her suddenly hardening nipples. A sophisticated charmer with an aura of ruthless power about him that would intimidate anybody, man or woman, she concluded. Not her type at all …

Even so, there was no escaping the fact he was an incredibly sexy man, as her body’s unexpected response confirmed.

‘I could not help overhearing your comment, Emily. Shame on you, your chauvinism is showing.’ The devil spoke in a deep, dark, mocking voice that made her hackles rise.

‘What do you mean, Mr Diaz?’ she asked him with cool politeness, flicking him a sidelong glance, and was once again captured by the intensity of his dark eyes.

‘In today’s world of equality between the sexes isn’t it rather politically incorrect to assume all the women should dress as angels and the men as devils? And, given the very striking outfit you are wearing, just a little hypocritical,’ he drawled mockingly.

‘He has got you there,’ Helen piped up and everyone laughed.

Everyone but Emily.

‘My costume was my sister-in-law’s choice, not mine. She has a warped sense of humour,’ she explained, forcing a smile to her lips. ‘And I see you are dressed as a devil, rather upholding my theory. Though you do seem to have forgotten the horns,’ she prompted smoothly.

‘No, I didn’t forget. I never forget anything,’ he asserted, his dark eyes holding hers with an intimacy that made her pulse race and she could do nothing about the pink that tinged her cheeks. ‘I am supposed to be an angel, admittedly a dark angel, but an angel nevertheless.’

Emily saw what he meant, her blue eyes sweeping over him. It was the perfect costume for him. Unrelenting black and somehow threatening … She glimpsed a darkening in his deep-set eyes and something more. Anger … Why? She had no idea, and in an attempt to control her overheated imagination and body she looked somewhere past his left shoulder. She took a deep steadying breath, but for a long moment was incapable of making a response. No man had ever had such a startling effect on her in her life, and she had met plenty, and been attracted to a few, but never quite like this.

She was a twenty-four-year-old freelance marine archaeologist and had spent the last two years since qualifying gaining experience in her field. She had been on a few seagoing explorations. Her colleagues were mostly men, explorers, divers and fellow archaeologists with the skills needed to search and map out underwater wrecks and artifacts. Yet never once had she felt the sudden heat, the stomach-churning excitement that this man aroused in her with one look.

Get a grip, girl, she told herself. He was with his very beautiful girlfriend and, while Emily considered herself passably attractive, she was no competition for the lovely Eloise.

What was she thinking of?

At twenty-one, after a disastrous engagement that had ended abruptly after three days when she had found her fiancé in bed with her flatmate at university, she had sworn off men.

Nigel had been an accountant in her father’s firm. A man she had fallen in love with at sixteen, a man who had kissed her at her eighteenth birthday party and declared he felt the same, a man who had offered her comfort and support when her mother was ill and died, a man whose proposal she had accepted shortly after. A man who, when she had confronted him in bed with her flatmate, had actually admitted the affair had been going on for a year. Her flatmate, her supposed friend, twisted the knife by telling her she was a fool. Nigel’s interest in Emily had only ever been for her money and connections.

Which was a laugh. Admittedly the family home was probably worth millions in today’s market, but they lived in it, had done for generations. The business earned the shareholders a decent dividend each year but not a fortune by any means, but at the time she had felt utterly betrayed. She would no more compete for a man than fly to the moon, and, to be honest, over the intervening years, she had never felt the need. Which was probably why she had never since had a long-term relationship? she thought wryly.

‘Yes, of course, I see it now, a silly mistake on my part,’ she finally responded.

‘You’re forgiven,’ he said with a smile that took her breath away all over again.

But at that moment the last two guests making up the table arrived and Emily smiled with relief. It was her aunt Lisa, her father’s older sister, and her husband, James Browning, who was also the Chairman of the Board of Fairfax Engineering since her dad’s death. She felt the light brush of Anton’s shoulder against hers as, like a perfect gentleman, he stood up until Lisa was seated, and she determinedly ignored it.

Her equilibrium thankfully restored …

James took the seat on the other side of Emily. ‘Aunt Lisa, Uncle James, it’s good to see you,’ she offered, her wayward emotions firmly under control.

But it was the sotto voce comment that Anton Diaz made among the flurry of introduction as he sat back down that threw her off balance yet again. ‘But if a devil is more to your liking I’m sure something can be arranged.’

Her mouth open, her face scarlet, she stared at Anton. One dark brow rose in sardonic query, before he turned to respond to Eloise’s rather loud request for champagne.

Was she hearing things? Had he actually made such a blatantly flirtatious comment or had she imagined what he said?

She did not know … and she did not know whether to feel angry or flattered as dinner was served. Emily’s emotions stayed in pretty much the same state of flux until it was over; she was intensely aware of the man at her side.

The conversation was sociable, and when the meal ended and the band began to play Emily could not help watching Anton and Eloise as they took to the dance floor. Both Latin in looks, they made a striking couple and the way Eloise curved into her partner’s body, her arms firmly clasped around his neck, left no one in any doubt of the intimacy of their relationship.

Emily turned to James and asked what she had been dying to ask all evening. Who exactly was Anton Diaz?

According to her uncle, Anton Diaz was the founder of a private equity business that made massive profits out of buying, restructuring and then selling on great chunks of worldwide businesses. It made him a man of enormous influence and power. It had also made him extremely rich. He was revered worldwide as a financial genius, with a fortune to match. His nationality was hazy, his name was hispanic, yet some considered him Greek because he spoke the language like a native. Rumours about him abounded. Her aunt Lisa offered the most colourful speculation that his grandmother had been the madam of a high-class brothel in Peru, and her daughter had been a wealthy Greek’s mistress for years and Anton Diaz was the result of the affair.

Her aunt also informed her archly that he owned a magnificent villa on a Greek island, a vast estate in Peru, a luxurious apartment in New York and another in Sydney. Recently he had acquired a prestigious office block in London with a stunning penthouse at the top, and there were probably more. Plus the parties he held on his huge luxury yacht were legendary.