The Winter Bride

‘Believe it or not, at the time I thought Jake’s father was as steady as a rock,’ Angie heard herself admit, tongue-in-cheek. ‘I was very much in love with him. In fact I believed he was the very last man likely to leave me in the lurch.’

‘You were only nineteen…what did you know then of men or their motivations?’ Leo’s response was harsh, dismissive, as he glanced with sudden, unconcealed impatience at the thin gold watch on his wrist and strode towards the door. ‘I’m afraid I really do have to leave.’

The abruptness of his exit took Angie by surprise. She sped out after him and by then he was already in the porch. As she opened the door, he stared broodingly down at her and, without warning, time slid dangerously back for Angie and served up a disturbingly intimate memory. Leo…responding with shockingly primal dominance to her flirtation, pinning her down in the meadow grass by the lake and crushing her lips beneath his with an explosive, driving hunger that had just blown her away. Embarrassed heat coiled like a burning, aching taunt low in Angie’s stomach.

A feverish darkness now overlaid the oblique slant of Leo’s cheekbones, but sardonic amusement glittered in his brilliant eyes. He raised a hand and let a long brown forefinger trail gently along the tremulous line of her soft, full mouth, leaving a stunning chain of prickling sensitivity in his wake and sentencing her to shaken stillness. ‘You really are wasted in a domestic role, Angie.’

And then, before she could catch her arrested breath, he swung away, striding out into the night air. ‘Think over what I have said,’ he urged almost carelessly. ‘Wallace is keen to meet the child… I’ll call tomorrow for your answer.’

‘No, don’t. There’s no point. I’ve made up my mind and I don’t need a night’s sleep to consider it,’ Angie told him tightly. ‘In any case, I couldn’t get the time off. The Dicksons have a very busy social calendar over the next ten days, and the house is always full of visitors over Christmas.’

‘Can you really have changed so much?’ Leo murmured lazily. ‘I believed you would walk out of this house like you walked out of my grandfather’s without a backward glance.’

Angie flushed furiously. Naturally Leo had assumed that the prospect of money would make her eagerly snatch at his grandfather’s invitation, but he had miscalculated. Had she? She hadn’t told him that Jake was his—had almost done so in anger, but had ultimately remained silent. Why? At the back of her mind lurked the shameful and mortifying recollection that she had told Leo that it was safe to make love to her that weekend…and she had lied, with both purpose and full knowledge of what she was doing.

From the doorway, she watched numbly as Leo strode towards the sleek black Ferrari parked at a careless angle across the paved frontage of the house. Dimly, she registered that she was trembling; reaction was setting in after the terrible tension, sudden coldness biting into her bones.

Headlights suddenly lit up the front garden. Dredged from her introspection, Angie uttered a soundless groan as George’s Range Rover raked to a halt.

Claudia virtually leapt from the car. ‘What on earth is going on here?’ she demanded, casting Leo, who stood in the shadows, a haughty, questioning look, but aiming her ire at Angie as she stalked towards her.

‘I called with a message for Angie,’ Leo drawled coolly.

‘You let a strange man into the house with my children sleeping upstairs?’ Claudia ranted in furious attack.

‘Darling…’ her less volatile husband said rather loudly. ‘I don’t believe that Mr Demetrios quite qualifies as a strange man.’

‘My father works for Leo,’ Angie said for the sake of brevity. ‘I’ve known him for years.’

Claudia had come to a halt, glancing uncertainly at her husband for guidance. Her tall, thin spouse was calmly shaking hands with Leo. Angrily conscious that she might have made a fool of herself, Claudia gave Angie a filthy look. ‘We’ll discuss this matter in private.’

‘If you don’t mind, I’m going to bed now,’ Angie replied with quiet dignity. ‘Leo kept on ringing the bell. I had to let him in.’

She climbed the stairs, conscious that she had no hope of ultimately escaping one of Claudia’s bossy lectures, but too weary and shaken by Leo’s visit to care. Considering the length of Angie’s employment with her, Claudia ought to be able to trust her by now not to invite an armed robber or child molester into the house. She was almost twenty-two, not a feckless teenage baby-sitter.

Yet Leo had made her feel very much like a teenager again, she conceded grudgingly—hot, bothered, awkward, oversensitive to atmosphere. It had been embarrassment, she told herself—the embarrassment of memories that no woman with any pride would want to recall. And that was all.

Determined to be satisfied with that explanation, she climbed into the bed across the room from Jake’s, having fought a very heavy battle against a feverish longing to snatch him out of bed and hug him tight to comfort herself. That would be selfish, and she was not a selfish mother…was she? No, of course she wasn’t.

She put up with an employer who would have taxed the temper of a saint just so that Jake could eat well, live in a comfortable house and play in a spacious garden with lots of toys. So he had virtually nothing to call his own, and his clothes were all the twins’ hand-me-downs, but he was still too little to appreciate those facts. This year she had wanted to give him a proper Christmas, though. That was why she had dared to risk Claudia’s wrath to ask for more money, but the recollection of the earlier part of the evening could no longer hold her concentration…

It was almost impossible for her to believe that Wallace Neville was willing to entertain the butler’s daughter at his vast ancestral home. Would he have invited her to stay in the main house, or would he have expected her to squash herself back into her father and stepmother’s disgracefully damp and desolate little basement flat? And if Leo’s grandfather had offered her financial help, would she have been weak enough to accept it?

Uneasy with the thought, Angie tossed and turned sleeplessly. It was out of the question anyway. Claudia would blow a gasket if Angie demanded time off over Christmas, and until Jake was old enough to start nursery school at least the Dicksons were their security.

Even so, she still lay awake, staring into the darkness, helplessly remembering the first time she had seen Leo when she was thirteen. Every Christmas and every summer he had come to stay with his grandfather, and although his English was perfect he had remained quintessentially Greek. Exotic, fascinating and extravagantly handsome, he had become the natural focus of Angie’s first crush. Of course, eight years her senior, he had barely noticed that she was alive in those days.

During the summer when she was fourteen, Leo had brought a girlfriend with him. She had had a very irritating giggle. With intense amusement, Angie had watched Leo wince. But the following year laughter had been thin on the ground. Petrina Phillipides had come to visit—a porcelain-perfect and dainty little Greek heiress with a cloud of silky black hair and an elderly maiden aunt in tow as a chaperon. Angie had ground her teeth in disbelief while she had watched Leo fall in love. Couldn’t he see that Petrina was too spoilt, too conceited, too empty-headed, with her silly clothes and even sillier hairstyles, to provide lasting appeal for an intelligent man?

No, Leo had been blind, and the summer after that Petrina had had even better reason to look smug. She had been wearing Leo’s engagement ring. Angie had been aghast, but even then she hadn’t given up all hope. After all, many an engagement was broken before the altar was reached, she had reasoned, snatching at straws.

However, when Wallace had finally flown out to Leo’s wedding and no last-minute miracle had prevented the dreadful deed from being done, Angie had been inconsolable. But by then she had been seventeen, and thoroughly fed up with herself for ever having wasted time languishing over a male who had always been out of reach and who was now another woman’s husband. So she had started dating herself and, boy, had she dated! Her five-foot-ten-inch model-slim body, symmetrical features and waist-length mane of pale blonde hair had ensured that she was never short of eager admirers.

Petrina had been sullenly pregnant that Christmas, and the unimpressed mother of a beautiful baby girl a few months later. Leo had adored his daughter. Angie’s heart had ached when she’d seen him lavish unashamed love and warmth on little Jenny, who had been named after his late mother. Petrina had been an indifferent and petulant parent, thrusting her baby back at the nanny as soon as she decently could, visibly resenting the fact that her daughter and not herself was now the centre of attention. And Angie had thought, Oh, Leo, Leo…why didn’t you wait for me to grow up?

But that very same year tragedy had intervened to destroy Leo’s family. Christmas hadn’t been celebrated at Deveraux Court. Wallace hadn’t had the heart for it, and Leo had remained in Greece. His wife and his baby daughter had been killed in a car crash. That next summer, however, Leo had come back, alone and brooding, and he had taken up residence in the Folly by the lake, shunning all company.

And Angie, in her complete and utter stupidity, had decided that she was finally to have her chance with Leo, and that it had to be then or never, before he flew back to Greece and fell madly in love with some other unsuitable woman…

‘Now that I know who Leo Demetrios is,’ Claudia droned on in her most gracious mood the following afternoon, ‘I realise that you could scarcely keep a man of his importance outside the house. But he has to be the single exception to the rule, Angie. Don’t open that door again when we’re out.’

Money fairly talked, Angie conceded grimly. Claudia had already been on the phone to all her friends, saying things in her carrying voice like, ‘You’ll never guess who we had in our house last night…the most utterly charming man… Must be worth billions… Yes, employs our au pair’s father… Can you believe, she didn’t even offer him a cup of coffee? Probably quite overpowered by him just turning up like that… I don’t think Greeks can be as class-conscious as we are…’

Oh, don’t you believe it, Angie reflected with gritted teeth as she slammed shut the door on the washing machine and switched it on to drown out Claudia’s verbal ecstasy. When Leo had sobered up to a dawn that woke him to the unlovely reality that he was actually sharing a bed with the butler’s daughter, he had vacated that bed so fast, Angie had been cut to the bone. But even then she had been poorly prepared for the blunt and wounding force of the rejection which had so swiftly concluded their brief intimacy and left her bereft of any hope…or pride.

The doorbell went. Angie padded through to the hall and then stopped dead in the porch. Through the side window, she could see the long, impressive bonnet of a chauffeur-driven limousine. Suddenly breathless with an undeniable sense of anticipation, she pulled open the door. Leo, a breathtakingly elegant vision in a dove-grey suit, white silk shirt and pale blue tie, gazed down at her. He looked drop-dead gorgeous.

And Angie’s treacherous heartbeat hit a dizzy peak, as if she were riding a big dipper. The most intense and shattering surge of physical awareness paralysed her to the spot.

‘I wasn’t expecting you to come back,’ Angie whispered.

Leo dealt her the most fleeting glance before flashing a brilliant smile at something or someone over her shoulder. ‘Mrs Dickson?’

‘Claudia, please…’ the brunette carolled.

Leo strode past Angie as if she were the invisible woman and grasped Claudia’s eagerly extended hand.

‘Leo…?’ Angie muttered in confusion.

‘I’m here to speak to your employer, Angie, if you would excuse us?’

‘Come into the drawing room.’ Claudia gave Leo a delighted smile. ‘Make some coffee, Angie.’

Fizzing with incredulous annoyance at the dismissal, Angie went to put on the kettle then returned to the hall.

‘So dreadfully sorry, but I’m afraid we couldn’t possibly spare her at present. We’ll have visitors staying over Christmas,’ Claudia was saying apologetically.

Angie pressed the door wider and stood on the threshold, furious that she had been deliberately excluded from a discussion that related to her. How dared Leo do this? How dared he go over her head as if she were a child who could not speak up for herself?

‘When did Angie last have a holiday?’ Leo drawled softly from his stance by the marble fireplace.

Caught unprepared by the question, Claudia frowned. ‘Well, er…’

‘In fact, Angie doesn’t receive holidays in this household, does she, Mrs Dickson?’ Raw contempt glittered in Leo’s steady gaze.

‘Where on earth did you get that idea?’ Claudia asked rather shrilly.

‘Leo—’ Angie began weakly.

‘Angie’s working conditions are the talk of the neighbourhood,’ Leo countered with biting censure, his strong, hard-boned features grim. ‘Indeed, sweatshop labour would be a generous description of her terms of employment within your home.’

‘I…I beg your pardon?’ Her face mottling with ugly colour, Claudia was openly shocked by the sudden attack.

‘Leo, for heaven’s sake!’ Angie intervened in horror.

But Leo didn’t even glance in her direction. ‘You took advantage of a pregnant teenager. For more than two years you have worked her round the clock and paid her peanuts for the privilege. One has a duty of care towards one’s staff, but you have disregarded that fact. As you are neither poor nor unintelligent, there is no extenuating circumstance which might excuse such unscrupulous behaviour.’

‘How dare you speak to me like that? Get out of my house!’ Claudia was now brick-red with disbelieving fury.

‘Go and pack, Angie,’ Leo murmured without batting a magnificent eyelash; indeed, the curious beginnings of a smile were already tugging at the corners of his sensual mouth. ‘I will wait in the car.’

‘I’m not going anywhere…’ Angie began unevenly.

‘The talk of the neighbourhood, am I?’ Claudia sent the younger woman a look of outraged accusation. ‘When I think of what we’ve done for you—’

‘You’ve done nothing but use her for your own selfish purposes,’ Leo interposed with sardonic cool.

‘You’re sacked… I want you and that child of yours out of this house—right now!’ Claudia screeched at Angie, full blast.

CHAPTER TWO

WHITE-FACED, ANGIE LUGGED a battered suitcase out through the front door with Claudia still shouting recriminations in her wake. A sturdy older man in a chauffeur’s uniform was waiting in silent readiness to take her case. The front door slammed thunderously shut behind her.

Lifting an unsteady hand to press it to her pounding, perspiring brow, Angie hurried round the side of the house to the fenced-in back garden where Jake had mercifully remained throughout the agonising minutes it had taken for her to strip their room of their possessions. And with Claudia standing over her, bent on retribution, their possessions, such as they were, had shrunk alarmingly. The brunette had angrily refused to allow Angie to pack any of Jake’s clothes, saying that the twins’ cast-offs had only been given to her on loan and not to keep. She had maintained the same line when it came to Jake’s toys, which the Dickson children had long since outgrown.

A frightening vision of her former employer forcibly stripping Jake to the buff in the teeth of the winter wind impelling her, Angie raced across the back garden to the sandpit and literally snatched Jake’s sturdy little body into her arms. He looked up at her with a startled frown, huge dark eyes wide. ‘Oh, Jake,’ she almost sobbed as she cuddled her son close and buried her face momentarily in his sweet-smelling, springy black curls. ‘I will kill Leo for doing this to you…I swear it!’

The chauffeur whipped open the passenger door of the limousine. Seeing that Claudia had now emerged from the house, Angie leapt in before Jake could be wrenched out of his shabby duffel coat and dungarees, not to mention his wellington boots.

As the chauffeur closed the door and walked round the bonnet at a stately pace which seemed to challenge Claudia’s aggressive stance, the silence in the spacious, leather-upholstered back seat seemed to thunder. Struggling for breath, her breasts still heaving from her frantic rush to protect Jake from a direct collision with Claudia’s malice, Angie glanced up. A stark frown drawing his winged black brows together, Leo was staring fixedly at the child on her lap.

‘He is very…dark,’ Leo selected after some hesitation.

Angie cloaked startled eyes and bent her head as she swung Jake off her knees onto the seat and began to fiddle with the belt to strap him safely in.

‘I thought the child would be blond…’ Leo added half under his breath, still staring as Jake swivelled to look up at him with lustrous dark brown eyes fringed with curling black lashes, the natural olive tone of his skin obvious against the white polo neck rolled under his dimpled chin.

In panic, Angie thought fast. ‘He takes after my mother…she was as dark as a Celt. It happens that way sometimes—genes, you know, throwback genes,’ Angie muttered rather wildly, and then, reddening, she compressed her lips.

‘I never met your mother.’

Angie had been very much hoping that he hadn’t for her late mother had been as blonde as her daughter. But her mother had only lived at Deveraux Court for a few months before she had walked out on her marriage, pregnant but preferring to go it alone rather than stay with a husband whom she had swiftly learned to despise for his lack of ambition.

Angie breathed in slowly and deeply. It didn’t help to steady her leaping nerves or to subdue the dangerous surge of anger ready to explode from her lips. She focused on Jake’s down-bent dark head and faithfully promised herself that she would not raise her voice and risk upsetting her son.

‘Do you realise what you’ve done?’ Her low-pitched enquiry shook with the effort it took to control her temper.

‘Theos… It is beginning to sink in,’ Leo confessed with outrageous calm. ‘I cannot take you to Deveraux Court until Thursday at the earliest. Wallace has guests. It would be inappropriate for you to arrive while they remain.’

Angie trembled and threw her head up, eyes shimmering like piercing blue arrows of accusation. ‘You have deprived my son of the only home and security he has ever known…’

‘You should be thanking me.’ Bold black eyes instantly challenged her.

‘Th-thanking you?’ Angie stammered in disbelief.

‘How could you remain in that house enslaved by that harpy? Where is your spirit and sense, that you should’ve accepted such terms for so long?’

As raw rage splintered explosively through Angie’s slender frame, she sucked in oxygen like a drowning swimmer in an effort to contain it. ‘I stayed for my son’s benefit,’ she bit out tautly. ‘I was able to be with him all day…and he’s enjoyed many advantages there that I could never have given him.’

‘I made a polite approach and a most modest request. That woman was not reasonable,’ Leo asserted, smoothly disclaiming all responsibility.

‘You interfered in something which was none of your business, and you gave Claudia precisely two minutes to snap to attention and do your bidding before you went on the offensive. I told you there was no way that I could leave the Dicksons over Christmas… I told you that nothing on earth would persuade me to go back to Deveraux Court,’ Angie reminded him in a steadily rising crescendo. ‘But you wouldn’t listen, and now we’re homeless and I’m out of a job!’

Leo cast her a gleaming look of reproof. ‘Drop the dramatics, Angie. Naturally, I will assume responsibility for you both until such time as Wallace relieves me of the necessity.’

Angie was so close to exploding, she couldn’t trust herself to speak.

‘Thursday, you go to Deveraux Court and eat humble pie. I don’t care if it chokes you. It is the price of reacceptance, and you will pay it,’ Leo informed her with daunting conviction. ‘Today I did you a favour.’

Angie gulped. ‘A favour? As of this moment, my son has only the clothes he is wearing and not one single toy to his name—’

‘Waff.’ Jake spoke up for the first time, with an air of expectancy. ‘Want Waff…’

Angie froze in dismay. ‘Waff’s at home, darling,’ she muttered weakly. ‘He couldn’t come.’

Jake scowled, looking so shockingly like a miniature version of his father that for an instant Angie could not believe that Leo had not guessed the truth the minute he’d seen him. ‘Want Waff…Waff like cars too.’

Angie swallowed the great lump threatening her throat and shot Leo a look of accusing censure. ‘Perhaps you would like to explain that the T-O-Y,’ she spelt out, ‘which he has slept with every night of his life, no longer belongs to him.’

‘What are you talking about? Ah…you mean you were careless enough to forget it in your rushed departure.’

‘N-no, that’s not what I meant,’ Angie managed unevenly. ‘All his clothes and almost all his playthings originally belonged to Claudia’s children and she refused to let me remove any of them from the house—not very surprising, after the way you insulted her. She couldn’t get back at you, so she took her temper out on my child instead!’

His lean, dark features stiffened with incredulous comprehension. ‘His clothes…his toys?’

Angie nodded jerkily.

‘Toy,’ Jake said doggedly. ‘Waff toy.’

‘So we buy some more—particularly this Waff thing,’ Leo gritted with stark impatience. ‘I wouldn’t have believed that any woman could exercise such petty spite!’

‘A W-A-F-F cannot be bought at any price,’ Angie informed him in a voice thick with condemnation and a deep inner dread of Jake’s bedtime. ‘It was made by Claudia’s grandmother for Sophia. It’s a pink giraffe.’

Leo spread unimpressed and autocratic lean brown hands. ‘I will buy a proper giraffe.’

‘It won’t fool him, Leo.’ Slowly, numbly, Angie shook her aching head, wondering why she was focusing on a humble but much loved soft toy when she didn’t even know where they would be sleeping tonight. ‘Where are you planning to take us?’

‘My town house—where else?’

‘I’m not going home with you!’ Angie exclaimed in shock.

‘Home,’ Jake said more cheerfully. ‘Waff…’

‘He’s obsessed,’ Leo remarked disapprovingly.

‘He’s still only a baby,’ Angie said defensively. ‘How could you do this to us?’

‘With the greatest of ease. I did what was right—’

‘Right?’

‘For better or for worse your child is a Neville. He is a part of my family circle,’ Leo ground out in grudging concession. ‘He should not suffer for the faults of his parents.’

Angie slung him a scorching glance. ‘I am not at fault as a parent in any way.’

‘I would suggest that we save this conversation until we are alone.’

‘I don’t want to go to your house,’ Angie told him between clenched teeth.

‘I’m not checking you into a hotel. You might be stupid enough to disappear again, and I have wasted enough time tracking you down—’

‘I thought it was Wallace who—’

‘My grandfather is in his eighties,’ Leo reminded her drily. ‘I employed the investigation agency and dealt with them, and you were far from easily found.’

‘I didn’t want to be found,’ Angie whispered in sudden, dragging weariness, her taut shoulders slumping in defeat.

Silence fell. For a minute or two, she stared blindly out at the passing traffic but then slowly she turned until she was watching Leo instead. The relaxation of his impressive lean length had an indolent quality which mocked her own explosive tension, yet was, in its own way, highly deceptive for there was nothing indolent about Leo. A white-hot core of raw energy drove him, not to mention his fierce Greek pride. And even without that spectacular bone structure and build Leo would have commanded attention in any company for he had a presence equalled by few men, and women were mesmerised by the high-voltage charge of his intense sexuality.