Angel Of Darkness

A steel band of tension was throbbing unbearably round her temples and it tightened another painful notch every time Angelo spoke. Perhaps she was very, very stupid but she just couldn’t grasp why Angelo was behaving the way he was. ‘I don’t kn-know you like this,’ she confided without meaning to.

Angelo vented a grim laugh that ironically made her feel much more at home with him. ‘How could you? Much has changed over the past six years. Does it surprise you to learn that I deeply resented being forced to take responsibility for you when you became my stepsister?’

‘Nobody asked you to take responsibility for me!’ Kelda slung at him.

Angelo dealt her an assessing glance. ‘But there was nobody else to do it. Our parents were abroad so much. And I know for a fact that my father was more than happy to leave you to me,’ he continued drily. ‘Daisy was such an adoring mother that he didn’t want to get into trouble with her for disciplining you. And he would have done, make no mistake. Daisy’s very protective of you. So I got landed with the job nobody else would touch!’

‘How dare you say that?’ Kelda threw at him fierily. ‘How dare you?’

‘And you were the most totally obnoxious teenager,’ Angelo volunteered. ‘You put me off having children for life.’

‘If that means that there’ll never be a junior edition of you running about making someone’s life hell, I’m delighted to hear it!’ But although the ready words flowed from her tongue, Kelda was dismayed to realise that she was deeply and genuinely hurt by what he had thrown at her. And she couldn’t understand why. Hadn’t she always known that Angelo hated her?

The difference was, she appreciated, that it had never once crossed her mind to wonder how Angelo felt about having the burden of a teenager thrust on him. She had not considered that aspect of those years before, had dimly imagined that Angelo had taken over simply to be officious and unpleasant. And why hadn’t she thought more deeply...because to have reflected more deeply would have forced her to acknowledge the truth of what Angelo had said. Daisy and Tomaso had been abroad a great deal and Tim had been a quiet, self-contained boy, quite content to be sent off to boarding school and given plenty of pocket money in return for a lack of personal attention.

‘I was only twenty-one,’ Angelo pointed out, having ignored her childish response. ‘And you were out of control. Between them your mother and your sweet old great-aunt had spoilt you rotten. Daisy, quite frankly, couldn’t cope with you. You are very different from her in temperament.’

Kelda could feel tears burning behind her lowered eyelids. She had never hated Angelo so much and yet simultaneously, she had never felt so savaged. She found herself remembering the loneliness of those years and discovered that inexplicably, deep down inside, she must once have had the vague conviction that to take charge of her in the first place, Angelo must have had some slight affection for her. How she could have thought that and yet believed that he hated her at the same time was no more clear to her than anything else since she had arrived in Tuscany.

‘I was more like your father than your stepbrother,’ Angelo mused with an oddly chilling quality. ‘You don’t know me like this because in the past six years you have become an adult and I can now treat you as one. You wouldn’t believe the pleasure that that freedom gives me.’

Kelda pressed both hands against her pale cheeks and forced herself to look at him over her straining fingers. ‘Why did you bring me here?’ she demanded in a shaken tone.

‘Why?’ Glittering dark eyes slid over the wild tangle of red-gold hair veiling her shoulders in a torrent of curls and lingered on the exquisite perfection of the triangular face pointed at him. ‘Are you really that dumb? Six years ago you virtually destroyed my relationship with my father—’

‘I...I didn’t mean to—’ Kelda was shocked and unprepared for the directness of that attack.

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