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CHAPTER ONE

LEAH HUNTINGTON COLLAPSED onto the plastic chair behind her s out fro out “REJECTED” on the application form blurred in front of her eyes Her heart squeezed painfully as she fingered the flat sketches on her drawing board, the possibility of seeing her creation take for like a puff of smoke

Sweat ran down her back, the slohir of the ceiling fan scraping against her nerves She ran crahten with tension

Mrs DuPont, the buying iven Leah only two months to create her first collection and all Leah had noere flat sketches And as she had to do everything herself instead of contacting a factory like she did for the fashion house, every minute was important

Thethe funds she required to source raw s she needed and it was all sitting in that bank

She dialed the nuo

Her heart ha faster and faster, an o she couldn’t breathe past There could be only one hed on the other end of the phone His ansas curt, i the explanation, waiting for Leah to call

They couldn’t use the trust fund as security to approve her loan because—Leah could hear the hushed reverence in theher fund had denied the use of the trust fund, her trust fund, as security

Stavros

Leah threw the handset across the roo She kicked the chair aside, the i, every nerve cell in her hue

Howto let him?

She picked up the phone again, her vision blurry noith unchecked tears Her throat burned as she took a deep breath, her thu over the numbers on the handset

She wanted to demand an explanation, she wanted to

But as the point? His secretary would politely tell her that he was not available It was the same answer she had received over the last year every tih they both lived in Athens, theyon the opposite ends of the planet