Christmas Alpha by Carole Mortimer Page A

there had been flattened in quite a large area, as if that someone had been standing outside for some time.  
      He had also found what looked like footsteps leading directly to the studio window.
      Quite possibly allowing the person to have watched through that window the whole time he had been taking photographs of Eva in those scraps of black lace.
      And afterwards, when he had taken off her bra and feasted on her breasts.  
      “How were the photographs when you checked them earlier?”
      Finn’s fingers fumbled on the smooth jade of the piece he had been about to move, almost overbalancing it before he quickly caught and righted it.
      “Fast reflexes,” Eva mused.
      More like jumpy as the proverbial cat, Finn acknowledged with a grimace as he took his move.
      Eva had insisted on clearing away after their meal earlier, to make up for burning it, and Finn had excused himself on the pretext of looking at the photographs he had taken of her earlier.
      What he had actually done was go through the whole house, checking that all the windows and doors were locked and that Lucien’s state of the art security system was switched on. He had also made a phone call to the man himself, explaining the situation and requesting assistance; if anyone knew anything about security it was the obsessively reclusive Lucien Wynter!
      Finn probably should have called the local police too, just in case, but if he had to take a bet on who was going to come through for him, he would opt for Lucien every time. The man had a level of personal security to rival most heads of state.  
      If it had just been Finn here on his own, then he wouldn’t have bothered even calling Lucien; he was quite capable of looking after himself if he had to. It was Eva he was worried about. If Moira was out there—which he sincerely hoped she wasn’t—then Eva could be in danger. For the simple reason that she was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
      And because Finn had almost made love to her earlier.
      The thought of Moira, of anyone, watching him and Eva intimately together, made him feel sick.
      As for the photographs he had taken of Eva this afternoon...
      He had intended ‘The Mistress’ photographs to be purely of a woman’s body, displaying carnal seduction and lust in every pose. A siren, luring men in, and then holding them captive with her voracity for debauchery and sex.
      That was exactly what Moira had done to her married lover Ian Jackson, Finn was sure of it, and what she had tried to do to him too.
      Eva’s photographs, after the first half a dozen, when she was obviously self-conscious about posing in only her underwear, were of a woman sleek and sensual as a feline, every perfect line of her body full of grace and beauty, and at the same time so damned sexy that any man looking at her would instantly harden with desire.
      The same painful state Finn had been in most of the afternoon.
      He had almost come in his denims when he instructed Eva to face away from him, up on her hands and knees, and then turn to look over her shoulder at him through the silky curtain of her lashes and hair.
      If Moira had been lust and debauchery, then Eva was sensuality and desire, the two types of emotions as different from each other as the two women were.
      It wasn’t what Finn had been looking for at all for his mistress photographs.
      It was better.  
      So much better.
      So much more ...
      “Hah, told you I would make an awful model!” Eva grinned across from him triumphantly at his continued silence.
      Finn gave a non-committal shrug. “We’ll do better tomorrow.”  
      Her grin faded. “Tomorrow...?”
      “Time for the bra to come off tomorrow, Eva. Oh come on,” he reasoned as her eyes widened. “I’ve already seen what’s under that scrap of lace.”  
      “That was completely different.” Eva lowered her lashes so that her emotions were now shielded behind that curtain of