Dark Angel

‘What’s that supposed to mean? Hasn’t anything I’ve said today made the slightest impression on you?’ Kerry pressed in dismay.

‘Nothing,’ Luciano admitted.

At that uncompromising confirmation, her heart sank. Recognising that she had no choice whatsoever but to meet his demand that she return the next day, Kerry dug into her bag to remove the file and walked over to set it on his desk. ‘Then at least look at my business plan for Ballybawn before I come back…that is sticking to the issue and practical and should be much more your style.’

‘Kerry…one final word of advice.’ Luciano shot her a grim look of incredulity. ‘The very last thing I’m likely to be interested in is your business plan for a property that will soon be mine!’

A sense of desperation surged up so hard and fast in Kerry that it made her feel light-headed. She had got nowhere with him but then, she dimly recognised, she was not firing on all cylinders, was she?

‘I can’t quite believe that I’m here with you,’ she muttered out loud, belatedly recognising her own maddening sense of dislocation throughout their meeting. ‘It doesn’t feel real.’

Smouldering golden eyes rested on her delicate features. Not a single reference had she made to his imprisonment for a crime he had not committed. Not a single word of even insincere regret had she proffered. A story-book princess in a fairy-tale tower could not have been more detached from the hard realities of his recent past.

‘I can make it feel real,’ Luciano murmured silkily, snapping his hands over hers and drawing her close before she could even guess his intention.

‘What are you d-doing?’ Every skin cell in Kerry’s body leapt in shock as he used his strong hands to clamp her to his lean, muscular frame. Her heart felt as though it was about to burst right out of her chest.

‘Making it feel real, cara mia.’ A hard, slashing smile on his lean, dark face, Luciano looked down at her, the lush black screen of his lashes merely accentuating the fiery gold challenge of his gaze. ‘When was I ever in your radius this long without touching you?’

With those words he set free a dozen evocative memories that she never, ever allowed herself to consciously think about. In the act of bracing her hands against his sleeves to break his hold on her, Kerry met his eyes and intimate images bombarded her without mercy: sunlight on her skin, Luciano in her arms, the potent allurement of him, the wildness of her own longing and the soaring belief that she was the luckiest woman in the world.

He took her soft pink mouth in a hard, deep kiss. Faster than the speed of light, her own body reacted to the surge of heat that flared in her pelvis. Her head swam, her knees shook. She could no more have halted the chain reaction of her own desire than she could have pulled back from him. More primitive reactions had taken over, making her push herself into contact with the hard muscularity of his lithe, powerful frame. A startled whimper of burning excitement broke in her throat as his tongue ravished the tender interior of her mouth.

Luciano set her back from him. Adrenalin on full charge, he was on a complete high. At that moment, it didn’t matter that the fierce ache of his own sexual hunger was actual pain. He was getting too big a kick out of watching her stumble back from him like a blind woman to steady herself on the chair back and he was revelling in the shell-shocked look on her face. Had the entire range of his ancestors crowed in triumph with him from the heavens he would not have been surprised, for never had his Sicilian genes been more in the ascendant.

‘I see you haven’t lost your taste for me,’ Luciano murmured in husky provocation.

Kerry flinched as though he had doused her with a bucket of cold water. Paper-pale from the aftermath of her own degrading response to him, she hovered, stricken blue eyes locked to him. Bitterly aware as she was of the terrible pain that he had already caused her, her temper exploded. She slapped him hard enough to numb her hand and make her wrist ache.

‘You bastard!’ she condemned. ‘I h-hate you!’

Luciano did not even wince and, as Kerry watched the marks of her own fingers flare up red over his cheekbone, she went into deeper shock at her own behaviour. Nothing he had said excused her violence and never before had she lost control to the extent that she had struck someone else. Blinking in shaken turmoil, appalled that she had let herself down to that extent, she muttered a harried apology.

Luciano surveyed her with lethal golden eyes and an unnerving degree of impassive cool, for he was simply chalking up one more score to be settled. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow…and don’t be late this time.’

As the door closed on Kerry’s hurried departure, a sardonic smile of intense satisfaction lit Luciano’s lean, strong features. She had lost her head. She was breaking up. He would find out what he needed to know tomorrow. And then? He finally understood why no other woman had yet been able to excite his interest. He still wanted her. Why? Had five years shut away from a world that had moved on without him left him trapped in time? In one sense, he acknowledged the truth of that. But he also thought his own urges were a lot more basic. Desire and revenge made an intoxicating combination. He hated her but he still burned to have her under him, to have those long, perfect legs wrapped round him, hear her cry out his name, learn the pleasure that he could give her…before he took it away again.

Outside the impressive building that housed da Valenza Technology, Kerry came to a sudden halt on the acknowledgement that she did not even know where she was going.

Stepping back from the milling crowds on the pavement, she attempted to still her jangling nerves. It did not help her to appreciate that she had made a complete hash of her meeting with Luciano. That kiss followed by that slap. Stupid…stupid…stupid, she told herself angrily as she noticed a café on the other side of the street and headed for the crossing.

He had accused her of trying to ignore the ‘personal dimension’ but what else could he have expected from her? Compassion? Forgiveness? Understanding? The anguish and self-blame that his infidelity had inflicted would live with her until the day she died. Just when she had been within reach of finally believing that she was someone of value, he had dashed her down lower than ever before.

The seeds of her difficult relationship with her stepsister, Rochelle, had been sown right back in childhood, Kerry acknowledged heavily. Within months of divorcing Carrie, her mother, her father had remarried. His second wife, Pamela Bailey, had been a widow with two young children. However, Harold Linwood had made no attempt to remove his four-year-old daughter from the care of her Irish grandparents. In fact, it had been six years before he thought better of that arrangement and finally came to Ireland to take Kerry back to England and into his own home.

By then, Rochelle had been twelve and the spoilt darling of the household. While her fifteen-year-old brother, Miles, had accepted Kerry, neither his mother nor his sister had been as tolerant. Rochelle had been outraged by the belated revelation that the stepfather she adored already had a daughter from a previous marriage. Yet there had never been any risk of Kerry stealing Rochelle’s place in the family. Kerry’s father had been infinitely fonder of his pretty, playful stepdaughter than he had ever been of his own child. Kerry had reminded him far too much of the ex-wife he still hated and denigrated for having humiliated him with her lovers. In addition, her stepmother had truly resented having to raise her irresponsible predecessor’s child.

The following five years had been very unhappy ones for Kerry. At home, she had endured regular taunts about her mother’s promiscuity and at school she had been relentlessly bullied by Rochelle and her friends. Finally reaching breaking point, Kerry had run away from home. When her grandfather had phoned Harold Linwood to inform him that Kerry had shown up safe and sound at Ballybawn, her furious father had washed his hands of his daughter altogether and left her there.

In spite of that, however, six years later, fresh from university and with her business degree and, if anything, even more desperate than she had once been to win acceptance from the older man, Kerry had still applied for a job at Linwoods. She had hoped that as an adult she might achieve the closer relationship with her father that she had failed to establish while she was a child. Looking back, she could only wince at her own innocence, for the older man had only employed her out of a grudging sense of duty. Blood bond or not, she had always been an outsider in the Linwood family and growing up hadn’t changed that fact.

Nor, unfortunately, had it changed Rochelle. And even more than five years after the event, Kerry still felt sick when she recalled the day that she had learnt to her horror that the man she loved, the man whose engagement ring she wore, had in fact slept with Rochelle long before she herself had even met him. Eighteen months earlier, her stepsister had enjoyed a weekend fling with Luciano while she was modelling in Italy. It had been a ghastly coincidence that nobody could have foreseen or even guarded against. Naturally, Luciano had not associated Rochelle Bailey with Linwoods, and when he had been headhunted into the task of revitalising the flagging fortunes of the Linwood wine chain Rochelle had been living in New York.

‘It was just a casual thing,’ Luciano had explained after Rochelle had walked into the office one day and all hell had broken loose when the outspoken blonde realised that Kerry was engaged to one of her own former lovers.

When, regardless of all Luciano’s efforts to comfort and calm her, Kerry had continued to be extremely distressed, he had finally studied her with frowning perturbation. ‘It was no big deal to either of us,’ he had reasoned. ‘I’m not proud of it but I’m not ashamed of it either. At times, I’ve been forced to work such long hours that it was impossible for me to sustain a longer relationship. Don’t make so much of this. It’s very unfortunate that Rochelle is your stepsister, but we’re all adults and Rochelle and I parted as friends.’

Only Rochelle had wanted more than a friendly parting. And Luciano had either been unusually obtuse in refusing to concede that fact or far too clever to highlight it. That same afternoon all Kerry’s happiness in their engagement had died, only to be replaced by a helpless sense of threat and insecurity. She had needed no crystal ball to foresee that Rochelle’s competitive instincts would soon cause trouble.

Within forty-eight hours, Rochelle had drawn up the battle lines: her stepsister, whose loathing for daily employment was a standing joke, had signed up for a temporary office job at Linwoods and had sashayed into work in a clingy top and a very short skirt. Her stepsister had used every seductive weapon she possessed in her determination to tempt Luciano back into her bed. Kerry had stood on the sidelines like the spectre at the feast while Rochelle flirted shamelessly with Luciano, and when Kerry complained about that Luciano had groaned out loud and told her to stop being ‘paranoid’. Within the space of ten days, he had been telling her that jealousy and possessiveness were very unattractive traits.

Inevitably, Rochelle had won, Kerry reflected painfully as she sat over her untouched coffee in the café where she had taken refuge. Each memory that forced its way through the cracks in her self-discipline was more painful than the previous one…

Just a few short weeks later Kerry had returned from a brief trip back to Ballybawn, and Rochelle, having picked a very distinctive gold designer cuff-link up off her bedroom carpet, handed it to Kerry with a taunting smile of triumph.

‘Yes, Luciano slept with me last night. Why should I cover up for him?’ her stepsister asked, her amused gaze pinned to Kerry’s shattered face. ‘But don’t be too hard on him. He’s a very passionate guy. How could you think that you could hang on to a rampant stud like Luciano with that pitiful I-wanna-be-a-virgin-on-my-wedding-night routine?’

‘He told you…that?’ Kerry was sick with humiliation that something so very private should have been shared and equally aware that only Luciano could have provided that same information.

‘We had a laugh about it,’ Rochelle mocked. ‘You’re a right little goody-two-shoes. However, if it’s any consolation, the sex may have been tremendous but Luciano’s not planning to ditch you and replace you with little old me—’

‘Shut up!’ Kerry shouted, distraught, but there was no silencing Rochelle.

‘But then, I won’t come endowed with the greater part of Daddy Linwood’s chain of wine stores, will I?’ her stepsister continued spitefully. ‘Naturally Luciano has his eye on the main chance. How else do you think he clawed his way up out of the back streets to become what he is now? While you’ve got your wine-store dowry, you’ve got him. Maybe you should consider trading in your sensible underwear and unlocking the bedroom door to prevent him straying again…but then I doubt that a little prude like you could match his incredible stamina and inventiveness between the sheets!’

Choosing to conserve what little pride she had had left, Kerry had decided not to confront Luciano on the score of his infidelity and had simply returned his ring to him. Why had she done it that way? She had felt that while all three of them were still working together at Linwoods, she would suffer the greatest humiliation if Luciano’s behaviour was to become open knowledge. Had she shared that story with the rest of the family, Rochelle, brazen to the last, would have used that as an excuse to ensure that all their friends and employees also found out why Kerry’s engagement had been broken off. The next day, while she had still been steeling herself to go into work, Luciano had been arrested.

A tight, hard knot of pain over those recollections remained with Kerry as she sank back to the present and drank her cold coffee to ease her aching throat. She had loved him, she had loved him so much. She shook her head as though to clear it, angry that the past could still have such a powerful effect on her, and made herself concentrate on the practicalities of her position. Where, for instance, was she planning to spend the night? Of course, Miles would put her up. Relief travelling through her as she came up with that obvious solution, she took out her mobile phone and rang her stepbrother.

‘Of course you can stay. You don’t even have to ask. But what are you doing in London?’ her stepbrother asked in surprise. ‘And why didn’t you mention that you were coming?’

‘I had some business to take care of and I didn’t realise that I’d have to stay over until tomorrow.’ Comforted by the familiar warmth of Miles’s welcome, Kerry had to resist the urge to tell him then and there about the repossession order hanging over Ballybawn. He was at the office and she could hear voices in the background and he would not be able to speak freely.

‘I wish I’d known that you were going to be here because I’ve got a business dinner to attend with your father tonight,’ Miles complained.

In disappointment at that news, Kerry pulled a face. ‘So I’ll keep you up late when you get back.’

On the way to the train station, she shopped for a few necessities for her overnight stay. At the same time, finding that she was no longer able to block out the demeaning memory of her own wanton response in Luciano’s arms little more than an hour earlier, she cringed with shame. What on earth had come over her? He had taken her by surprise and she had been upset and on edge, she reasoned feverishly. But why had Luciano kissed her? He could only have done it out of sheer badness. It had been the mother of all put-downs, administered by a male who had raised the skill to the level of an art-form.

As Kerry boarded the train to Oxford she considered the ludicrous family-conspiracy theory which Luciano seemed to believe lay behind their broken engagement. Why had the most obvious explanation not occurred to him? Why had he not immediately grasped that she had found out about his stolen night of passion with her stepsister? And how could he possibly accuse the Linwoods of framing him?

But then, to be fair, she reflected, if Luciano had not been the thief, who had been? Having read the newspaper reports that covered his appeal in depth, she had been genuinely shocked by the number of irregularities that had undermined the original investigation of his case. It seemed that the police had targeted the man they saw as the most likely culprit and had failed to follow up conflicting evidence.

So, who else had had access to those doctored office accounts? A whole host of people, Kerry conceded, but none of them dubious characters. Her father did not even come into the equation, for he had no need to steal what he had every right to take. It would be just as crazy to consider Miles a possible suspect: she knew her stepbrother inside out and would have staked her life on his integrity. Equally, Rochelle had not worked at Linwoods long enough during that period to have been involved.

At the time, the firm’s chief accountant had been Kerry’s uncle, George Linwood, who had since retired. His deputy then had been his son, Steven. That branch of the family was most noted for church activity and charitable endeavours. Even the office manager and the sales director had been distant Linwood relations. At executive level, Linwoods had always been very much a family concern. Could she credit that one of them might have been embezzling from the business? Certainly someone had, but she had come full circle, considered every potential candidate and come up with precisely nothing!

Miles opened the door of his elegant apartment. Tall and slim, he had classic blond good-looks similar to Rochelle’s but his friendly hug immediately emphasised that that resemblance only ran skin-deep. ‘How’s my girl?’

‘I’ve been better,’ Kerry confided unevenly.

As her stepbrother took her into his spacious lounge and offered her a drink, she noticed that his eyes were red-rimmed with tiredness and that he was thinner than he had been when she had last seen him. But there was nothing new in that, Kerry acknowledged, for her stepbrother might work very hard but he also liked to party. A devoted follower of the belief that you were only young once, Miles had always enjoyed a frantic social life with a like-minded circle of mates and a succession of leggy girlfriends.

A soft drink clutched in her hand, Kerry plunged straight into telling her stepbrother about the arrears on Luciano’s loan and the repossession order.

‘What a bastard da Valenza is!’ Miles exclaimed with a supportive heat that warmed her. ‘But surely even he couldn’t be serious about evicting the old folk?’

‘He’s got the law on his side and that’s all he needs.’

‘In his pocket by the sound of it!’ Miles tossed back his whisky and immediately went to pour himself another. ‘He got out of prison on a forensic technicality. They should’ve left him locked up!’

Kerry frowned. ‘He did do five years. Considering that the missing money was replaced, that’s a long time to serve for a first offence and if it’s true that he’s innocent—’

‘Are you telling me that you actually believe the rubbish the papers have been printing?’ Miles demanded with sudden raw derision. ‘You’ll not be feeling so generous when do Valenza throws you all out of the castle!’

Disconcerted by that attack, Kerry studied her stepbrother in surprise and dismay.

‘Look, I’m sorry…I didn’t mean to come down on you like that,’ Miles groaned in immediate apology. ‘I’m under a lot of pressure at the office right now.’

Kerry’s troubled gaze softened.

‘Let’s concentrate on your problems,’ he suggested. ‘Any hope of the bank—?’

‘No—’

‘I wish that I was in a position to help but I’ve never been the type to save up for a rainy day,’ her stepbrother told her with a grimace. ‘Were you thinking of approaching your father?’

Kerry winced. ‘He’s never had any time for my grandparents.’

‘And, between ourselves, Linwoods isn’t doing very well,’ Miles volunteered. ‘The Salut chain is hitting us right where it hurts—’

‘I think I saw one of their ads on TV the last time I was over—’

‘They’re selling wine like it’s the ultimate cool lifestyle choice…Their stores are fitted out like fancy continental bars. They’re taking our customers and undercutting our prices. How they can afford to do that on top of a rapid expansion and a nationwide marketing campaign I have no idea, but your father’s giving me a lot of grief over it.’

‘I know that working for Dad isn’t easy.’

‘I don’t think you’re following me…Salut is hammering us. We’re already facing the prospect of closing our smaller outlets and cutting back on staff.’ As Miles took account of the time, he frowned and got up. ‘I’d better get changed for this dinner do.’

Fifteen minutes later, Harold Linwood arrived to pick up his stepson. When Kerry answered the door to her father, a guarded expression tightened the older man’s features. A stockily built man with greying hair in his sixties, he spoke to her much as though she was a distant acquaintance. It was even more embarrassing when Miles tried to suggest that Kerry could join them that evening and her father stiffened with visible irritation.

‘I’m so tired, I couldn’t face going out again,’ Kerry cut in hastily.

When the two men had gone, Kerry compressed her tremulous lips hard. Why was it that she was still cut to the bone by her father’s total lack of interest in her? Why was it that memory would always plunge her right back to her ten-year-old self? Unhappily, she was unlikely ever to forget overhearing her father talking to her stepmother on the phone from Ballybawn.

‘How would I describe Kerry? Set beside Miles and Rochelle, she’ll definitely be the runt of the litter. Expect red hair, buck teeth and specs. Yes, I do accept that I’m asking a lot of you, Pamela,’ Harold Linwood had snapped, ‘but how can I leave her here? No, I’m not exaggerating…the O’Briens are as nutty as fruit-cakes…if I don’t intervene now, the kid will go the same way her slut of a mother went!’

Exhaustion sent Kerry to bed long before her stepbrother’s return. She knew she would need her wits about her when she met with Luciano again. Only she had no need to sleep on what she had to tell him! But wasn’t it pitiful that she should still feel gutted and humiliated by his infidelity? For her grandparents’ sake she had to fight Luciano with every weapon she had. If he truly had no suspicion that she had found out about his night in Rochelle’s bed, he was about to be caught at a severe disadvantage. Surely that fact could be made to work in her grandparents’ favour?

Luciano would not be able to deny that he had wronged her. Wouldn’t he feel guilty? Didn’t he deserve to feel guilty? All she needed was a few months’ grace on that repossession order and one good summer season of visitors to prove that the Ballybawn estate could bring in sufficient money to start eating into those loan arrears.

Tomorrow was another day, Kerry reminded herself bracingly…

CHAPTER THREE

ARRIVING at the office at eight the next morning, Luciano found Costanza sniggering over Kerry’s business plan.

‘Have you looked at this yet?’ the brunette demanded with positive glee.

‘No.’ Reaching for the file, Luciano set it back on the desk. ‘I didn’t ask you to look at it either.’

Today he would bring down the curtain on Kerry’s hope that a compromise could be reached where the castle was concerned. How could she still be that naive? But then she had no real idea who she was dealing with, had she? A brooding smile of acknowledgement formed on Luciano’s sculpted mouth. For her benefit, he had once subdued all that was tough, unsentimental and aggressive in his own nature. He had even once sunk to the level of seeking out a field filled with poppies to stage a romantic proposal. He still felt quite queasy at that recollection and he moved fast to suppress other equally disturbing images.