The Winter Bride

‘I was afraid that you might have ended up on the streets.’ Leo broke the silence with that devastatingly candid admission.

Her jaw dropping, Angie’s eyes widened in outrage.

‘It was a natural fear,’ Leo stated quietly. ‘What money you had wouldn’t have lasted long in a city like this. I believed that you might be forced to rely on your looks to survive.’

‘No. I wasn’t quite that desperate.’ Angie’s hands closed fiercely together on her lap, her voice shaky but acidic. ‘I got by—without relying on my looks.’

‘And I can only hope that the experience taught you a lesson. Drew was dazzled by you, but he always planned to marry money. Only a wealthy woman could afford to keep my cousin in the style he believes to be his due,’ Leo delivered with supreme scorn.

‘I don’t want to talk about Drew.’ Hatred was burning like a bright, blinding light inside Angie’s battered heart at that moment. ‘Right now, I’m just trying to come to terms with what you have done to our lives.’

Leo smiled slightly, very much as a lion might have smiled at a puny and not very bright prey. ‘Soon you will be grateful for my interference.’

‘Never. You can’t play with people’s lives like this!’ But even as Angie told him that she felt as if she was spouting hot air.

Penniless, homeless, jobless. Leo had destroyed everything they had. And Leo had done the unforgivable—he had put her in the degrading position of having to accept that they were now dependent on his generosity. That devastated her pride and stuck in her throat like an indigestible concrete block, but, with a small child’s needs to consider, she couldn’t just walk away in a temper…for where would she walk to?

The car drew up outside a large, impressive town house in a quiet, elegant square. Angie climbed out and reached for Jake, but he scrambled out on his own, deliberately evading her hand, displaying the wilful and stubborn independent streak which she was seeing more and more as he left babyhood behind. An older woman had the front door open even before they reached the top step. She bent her greying head, her attention locking onto Jake and staying there.

‘My housekeeper, Epifania. She will see to the child,’ Leo informed Angie.

‘The child’. Angie swore that she would scream if Leo used that phrase just one more time within her hearing. ‘I will see to him.’

‘Epifania was once my nursemaid,’ Leo revealed drily. ‘I can assure you that she is more than capable of managing one small boy.’

Epifania dragged her attention from Jake, glanced fleetingly at Angie and then swiftly away again to attend to her employer’s instructions.

Leo’s nursemaid. This definitely wasn’t her day, Angie conceded, turning pink with discomfiture. The Greek woman might well notice the resemblance, particularly if she had looked after Leo when he’d been the same age. But how likely was it that the housekeeper would risk causing offence by making any comment? Angie told herself that her secret was safe.

After all, she had no intention of telling Leo that he was the father of her son. Why? It would mean exposing her own lie and taking advantage of Leo in a way that even now she could not bear to do. It wouldn’t be fair because she had quite deliberately run the risk of becoming pregnant. Indeed, hard as it was to recall without a shamed feeling of self-loathing, Angie had actually wanted to conceive that weekend.

More than anything else, she had longed to give Leo a child to replace the one he had lost. And she simply hadn’t thought beyond that crazy, spur-of-the-moment decision…or had she? At the back of her mind, hadn’t she also believed that Leo might find it almost impossible to walk away from the mother of his child? Inwardly, Angie shrank from the depth of calculation which Leo would read into her past behaviour if she admitted that Jake was his son.

She had been stupid and reckless, had known the instant that Leo rejected her just how stupid. She had been hopelessly in love with him and very immature. But Leo would neither understand nor forgive what she had done. He would assume that she had lied to ensnare him because he was a very rich man. With a confession of theft hanging over her head, what else could he possibly think? He would scarcely attribute any purer motive to her planned pregnancy.

Concluding his conversation with Epifania, who already had Jake in her arms, Leo cast open a door. ‘We can talk now, Angie,’ he murmured, yet the soft assurance somehow fell on her ears with all the weight of a threat.

Scolding herself for that fancy, she preceded him into a wonderfully furnished library and, glimpsing her own reflection in the gilded mirror on the wall opposite, she winced. Her hair was in a wild, wind-blown tangle, her face bare of make-up because cosmetics were among the many things she had quickly learned weren’t a necessity. She was wearing a black sweater, jeans and a fleece jacket, all of which had been bought second-hand from charity shops.

She looked poor and shabby, and she was standing in a room decorated with a truly awesome disregard for expense, with its discreetly gleaming antique furniture, ornate floor-length curtains, fresh flowers and glowing Persian rugs. Digging her hands into her pockets, she glanced uneasily at Leo.

Lounging back against the edge of a mahogany desk in a stray patch of sunlight, he was watching her, brilliant, beautiful eyes now boldly and ruthlessly appraising. Caught unprepared, Angie felt that appraisal like a physical touch. Her slender figure tensed, colour staining her taut cheekbones as she found herself inexorably meeting that look. And just as suddenly she was running out of breath, mouth drying, heartbeat racing as she connected with the electrifying shimmer of those dark golden eyes. Heat like an insidious spark that built terrifyingly fast into a forest fire blazed deep in the pit of her stomach.

Slowly Leo uncoiled himself, straightened and strolled, sure-footed and silent as a prowling predator, towards her. Her throat closed over convulsively, her lips parting as she strove with every atom of her being to break away from the compelling stare. He halted two feet away from her and the silence between them stretched tighter and tighter until it clawed at her nerves.

‘Alone at last,’ Leo purred with intense satisfaction.

Angie blinked in bemusement. Her heart was pounding so frighteningly fast, she was convinced it might burst.

‘Tell me,’ Leo continued in that same mesmeric undertone that sent a shiver of the most appalling sexual awareness down her rigid spinal cord.

‘Tell you what?’ Something like pure panic beginning to assail her as she registered how she was reacting to his proximity, Angie stepped back from him.

Leo merely closed the distance again, virtually cornering her against the bookshelves. ‘I ask only for an honest answer to one very simple question. It is a question which I have had to wait a very long time to ask. Did you use me like man bait to make Drew jealous? Or…did you end up in bed with him on the rebound from me?’

As Leo calmly resurrected the past—or his version of the past—sheer shock immobilised Angie. The tip of her tongue flicked out nervously to moisten her full lower lip. Leo’s gaze narrowed and dropped to follow the tiny movement, his entire attention nailed to the generous pink curve of her mouth.

Momentarily released from his forceful scrutiny, Angie sucked in an audible, sharp, swift breath of relief and gasped, ‘Neither!’

‘Oh, it has to be one of them—unless you have the morals of a whore, and I would be most reluctant to assume that of a girl of nineteen,’ Leo informed her with ruthless cynicism. ‘I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt in conceding that perhaps you felt something for one of us!’

Angie flinched and turned scarlet simultaneously, anger flaring in her bright blue eyes. ‘You have no right to ask.’

‘Two men…and one very, very beautiful girl,’ Leo spelt out slowly. ‘A recipe for disaster when the very beautiful girl was also impulsive, passionate and rebellious.’

‘I don’t know why you’re talking to me like this. I don’t like it.’

Unmoved dark eyes rested on her. ‘That won’t make me stop asking because I need to know. Drew always wanted you…but he never wanted you more than when he thought you were mine.’

Angie jerked her blonde head away, her stomach muscles clenching in dismay at his persistence and his insight. He wasn’t telling her anything she hadn’t known but, ironically, she had never been attracted to Drew. Compared to Leo, he had been like gilt beside gold, always overshadowed and diminished. But, for all that, Drew’s attention had been balm to her savaged ego after Leo had ditched her.

And for a while she had gone around with Drew and his friends, nightclubbing and partying, deaf to her father’s outraged disapproval. Was that how the belief that her child was Drew’s had come about? she wondered abstractedly. Or had she been so incoherent in her distress the day that Wallace found her with the miniature portrait that she had left the old man suffering from a genuine misapprehension?

Lean brown fingers reached out and tugged a long strand of silvery pale hair. ‘Angie…?’

Her eyes flew back to Leo, and he was so close that her nostrils flared on the warm and achingly familiar scent of him. A long shiver racked her and her eyes collided unwarily with his darkly intent gaze. A hint of cruel amusement gleamed in his eyes.

‘Stop it,’ she whispered jerkily.

‘Stop what? Playing games?’ An unrepentant winged ebony brow climbed. ‘Why? You played plenty with me that summer.’

The colour drained from Angie’s cheeks, leaving her pale.

‘Theos…of course, I knew,’ Leo drawled very drily. ‘Like Artemis, goddess of the chase and the forest, you hunted me down. It would’ve taken a stronger male than I to withstand the temptation you offered.’

Angie wanted to sink through the floor. Unable to execute that feat, she sidled along the shelving instead, desperate to escape. ‘I’d better go and check on Jake.’

Long tanned fingers closed round her wrist and tugged her inexorably back within reach. ‘Not so fast,’ Leo murmured with deceptive gentleness. ‘You haven’t answered my question yet.’

Angie had the demeaning suspicion that she was playing mouse to Leo’s cat. Abruptly, her chin came up, denying that image. ‘There’s one possibility that doesn’t seem to have occurred to you…’

‘And what is that?’

‘Maybe, at the end of the day, I couldn’t tell the difference between you and Drew,’ Angie clarified with a studied desire to insult.

In reward, a dark rush of blood fired over Leo’s blunt cheekbones, his savagely handsome features suddenly wiped clean of every ounce of mockery. His lean face hardening, he leant forward without warning and planted two spread hands on the shelves on either side of her head, effectively imprisoning her with the solid breadth and strength of his supremely powerful physique. ‘Ohi…no?’ Leo questioned with a shockingly intimidating blaze of anger in his glittering stare.

Angie’s spine grated into bruising collision with the shelving as she instinctively attempted to back away from that dangerous fire. ‘Leo…’

Long fingers whipped across to curve on her cheekbones and hold her still. ‘Let me teach you the difference,’ Leo gritted darkly.

‘No—’

But as her anxious gaze melded with the drowning darkness of his, explosive anticipation tore through her like a storm warning, tightening every muscle and firing every nerve-ending with tortured expectancy. With a guttural sound somewhere between a harsh laugh and a groan, Leo dropped his strong hands to the swell of her hips and took her mouth hotly and hungrily with his own.

He crushed her to him, and the very blood in her veins sang with the heat of her excitement. Under the onslaught of his demanding lips and the carnal thrust of his tongue, Angie burned. He ravaged her mouth with the fierce heat of an innately sexual male, hell-bent on possession, and she fell victim to a hot and disorientating tide of intimate memory that tore down every remaining barrier and reduced her to submissive rubble.

As suddenly as he had reached for her, Leo dragged his mouth from hers again. Glittering dark eyes cloaked, he thrust himself back from her and strode over to the window.

For a split second, Angie thought she might slide down to the rug because her knees were ready to fold beneath her. For a split second, Angie didn’t even recall where she was. But her body ached and pulsed in a way she had almost forgotten, sensually alive and hurting in a way she did not want to acknowledge. She felt the swollen tenderness of her breasts, the painful sense of tormenting emptiness between her thighs, and shivered in disbelieving horror that Leo could still have that devastating an effect on her body.

She studied his back view with stricken eyes, reading the savage tension in his broad shoulders and the rigid bracing of his long, powerful thighs. And just as swiftly she suspected that that sudden flare of physical hunger and even more physical connection might have been no more welcome to him.

‘The difference between my cousin and I,’ Leo framed rawly as he swung back to face her, burnished, censorious dark eyes like flaring arrows of gold, ‘is that I was ashamed of what happened between us two and a half years ago!’

‘Ashamed?’ Angie repeated sickly.

‘Cristos…what else?’ Leo demanded in a wrathful growl of rebuke. ‘What did you expect? My wife had been dead only seven months…and you were nineteen and naive as they come, for all your wiles! Did you think I could be proud of making such a conquest? The teenage daughter of one of my grandfather’s most loyal and trusted dependants? And, even worse, a virgin?’

CHAPTER THREE

ANGIE HAD TURNED TO STONE, the pallor of her perfect features pronounced but rigidly uninformative—for one necessary skill she had learned working for Claudia was the ability to keep her face devoid of expression. But, inside herself, she was cringing. ‘Conquest’…‘dependant’…‘virgin’… Not one single term welcome to her ears—indeed each and every one of them emphasising the humiliating inequality which had always divided her from Leo.

In bitter mortification, she flew out of the room and down the hall, not even knowing where she was going in an unfamiliar house. Espying a cloakroom, she hurriedly and gratefully took refuge there. No, she had never had the advantage of a level playing field with Leo, she conceded wretchedly. Everything had separated them—age, background and experience. But, worst of all, she had met Leo in the time-warp world of Deveraux Court, leaving herself forever fixed in his mind as the butler’s daughter and never, it seemed, to be anything else.

Why on earth had he kissed her? The ultimate put-down? Her insult had drawn an overwhelmingly primitive masculine response. But then, in the grip of strong emotion, Leo was no English gentleman of restraint, and he was very highly sexed. A dangerous little quiver of remembrance ran through Angie and her face burned with shame. She had no excuse to offer for her own behaviour. Leo still attracted her in much the same way that a magnet attracted iron filings. But it was just a physical thing now, she told herself with driven defensiveness—all down to body chemistry and hormones, and nothing whatsoever to do with her emotions.

A knock sounded on the door. Angie ignored it.

‘Angie, you have a count of five to show yourself…’

Leo’s warning sent Angie flying for a towel to dry her face with, which she had splashed thoroughly with cold water in the forlorn hope of cooling herself down.

She unlocked the door. ‘Where’s Jake?’ she questioned stiffly, focusing on Leo’s pale blue silk tie.

‘Upstairs with Epifania. Listen,’ Leo advised impatiently.

And she heard Jake’s delighted chortles of glee filtering down from the floor above. Her son sounded as if he was having a whale of a time.

‘I don’t want to talk about the past!’ Angie stated fiercely.

‘It’s unfinished business. I want it dealt with,’ Leo countered without apology.

Angie flung her head high, blue eyes darkened by stress. ‘There was nothing unfinished about it. You made yourself perfectly plain at the time—sorry, Angie, I needed a woman and I was drunk!’ she interpreted with a raw bitterness she could not conceal.

Leo’s even white teeth gritted. ‘That wasn’t what I said—’

‘That’s what it came down to!’ In too much pain from her memories to find such proximity to Leo bearable, Angie wrapped her arms around herself in a starkly protective movement. ‘Don’t you ever touch me again. Once bitten, forever shy!’

Leo sent her a flashfire glance of involuntary amusement. ‘That rejection routine of yours needs some extensive work and application.’

A deep flush of mortification lit Angie’s cheeks as he reminded her of her eager response in his arms. Her skin felt super-thin, as if the tiniest dent might wound her to the death. And it was Leo who was doing that to her, and that appalled her because she had honestly believed that Leo could not have the power to hurt her any more. She had buried that foolish teenager deep and fancied herself mature beyond imagining. Now she was discovering her error.

Leo curved a hand over her tense shoulder and she flinched away. He vented a soft, soothing sound that was terrifyingly sexy. ‘You’re trembling…’

‘I’ll never forgive you for bringing me here! Where the heck are we supposed to go now? I’m not crawling back to Deveraux Court to grovel—or eat humble pie—so where does that leave us?’

Leo surveyed her mutinous face with reflective cool. ‘Enjoying my hospitality,’ he supplied smoothly, and swung on his heel.

‘But I don’t want to accept your hospitality, Leo.’

Leo stilled, and responded without turning his arrogant dark head. ‘In five days’ time, you will have seen sense and you will be heading to the Court. If you haven’t the wit to grovel, you will undoubtedly feel the rough edge of Wallace’s tongue—but then that’s your business, not mine.’

As he left her standing there, Angie felt horribly alone and scared for the first time in a long while. The feeling of insecurity gripping her now was intense. The very last place she wanted to go was Deveraux Court, and the very last place she wanted to stay was in Leo’s house.

She finally headed upstairs, where the housekeeper showed her into a large bedroom which connected with the even more spacious room where the older woman had been keeping Jake occupied. An evening meal was suggested, and her son’s likes and dislikes were discussed in almost embarrassing detail.

But not by word, look or gesture did Epifania even hint that Jake might be anything more than the child of a guest. Angie scolded herself for the guilty conscience which had made her far too imaginative earlier. Of course Epifania hadn’t spotted any instant resemblance which linked Jake to her employer! Clearly the housekeeper was just extremely fond of children.

Forty minutes later, Angie and her son were summoned down to eat. One solitary place was set at the massive polished table in the imposing gold and blue dining room, and, to the left of it, a high chair for Jake. Evidently Leo was not to join them. But then undoubtedly Leo did not dine at so early an hour. When Angie took Jake back upstairs, a positive feast of plush soft toys and a small mound of packages awaited them in his bedroom. A giant furry giraffe was prominent in the spread.

As Jake whooped in delight and rushed to investigate, Angie stilled in surprise and dismay on the threshold.

‘You see? A young child is easily distracted with new toys,’ Leo drawled with cool superiority from behind her.

Sharply disconcerted because she hadn’t heard his approach, Angie whipped round. ‘Where did all these things come from?’

‘A friend made the selection for me and had them sent over. There should be some clothes as well.’

Angie reddened with discomfiture. ‘And how much did this generous gesture of yours cost?’

Leo shifted a relaxed shoulder in a dismissive shrug. ‘That’s irrelevant.’

‘Is it?’ Angie queried with embarrassed heat. ‘Surely you can appreciate that I can’t accept this stuff?’

‘It was nothing…forget it,’ Leo responded drily.

‘But I can’t let you just pay for it all!’

His beautifully expressive mouth curled. ‘Don’t make me drag up that past you’re so very reluctant to recall.’

‘And what’s that supposed to mean?’

‘When it comes to moral principles, we both know you are not Pollyanna.’

Understanding came too late to protect Angie from that humiliating reminder. She turned white as if Leo had struck her. He was referring to the thefts.

Leo made an impatient movement with one brown hand. ‘Try just to be yourself around me, Angie. I loathe hypocrisy…and all this fuss about a few necessities for a child? Who do you think you are impressing with this charade of objections?’

Angie backed unsteadily into the bedroom and closed the door. She wanted to race back out again and grab Leo by his arrogant, judgemental throat and scream, I am not a thief! She wanted to proclaim her innocence with the very strongest force. But she had surrendered that right of her own volition over two years ago. Only by naming the true culprit could she clear her own name, and, if she did that, she would still cause unthinkable damage…

Leo would not allow even a reformed and deeply repentant thief to remain in his grandfather’s home. He would bring in the police and press charges without hesitation. Leo had no liberal convictions where crime and punishment were concerned.

Lost in increasingly distressing introspection, Angie undressed Jake and bathed him in the en suite. Leo despised her for her apparent greed and dishonesty. Why hadn’t she faced up to that harsh fact sooner? Just minutes ago, his distaste and anger had rung out as clear as a bell. And she had drawn his censure by daring to behave as if she wasn’t the greedy, grasping profiteer and eager free-loader he undoubtedly saw her as. Leo believed she had got off too lightly for her sins. And no doubt he also thought that returning to Deveraux Court to grovel to Wallace and cringe at the knowledge that everyone knew her to be a thief was a long-overdue slice of her just desserts.

The packages revealed a sensible skeleton wardrobe for Jake. Underwear and pyjamas, a duo of sweaters, shirts and trousers, all bearing the brand name of a reasonably priced chain store—unlike the array of blatantly expensive toys. Sighing, Angie tucked Jake into the comfortable single bed. Over-tired now, her son flipped fussily between the soft toys which had earlier enthralled him, and then he said that fatal word which Angie had been hoping not to hear.

‘Waff…where Waff?’

‘Waff’s not here. I’m sorry,’ Angie groaned as Jake’s bottom lip began to wobble alarmingly, big dark eyes suddenly flooding with tears.

‘Want Waff!’ Jake sobbed.

Fifteen minutes of lamentations later, the housekeeper had joined Angie in her efforts to console and distract Jake, but the whole house continued to echo with the boy’s noisy, convulsive sobs.

Without warning, Leo strode in. In an off-white dinner jacket and black silk bow-tie, he was clearly on his way out for the evening. He cast a grim glance down at Jake, an abandoned slump of utter misery on the bed. ‘Your son knows how to get what he wants.’

‘That’s not fair, Leo,’ Angie muttered in reproach.

Releasing his breath in a slow, driven hiss, Leo crouched fluidly down beside the bed and gently shook Jake’s shoulder to gain his attention. ‘Jake…I’m going to get Waff.’

‘Don’t make promises you can’t keep,’ Angie hissed, but it was too late. Her son’s damp, tousled head had come off the pillow and a look of pathetic hope was already blossoming in his tear-drenched eyes.

‘If George Dickson wants to be sued through the courts for a pink giraffe, I’ll do it,’ Leo swore, vaulting upright again.

‘Don’t be daft…that would take forever.’