The Winter Bride

His hard, classic profile turned, brilliant dark eyes catching her out, lingering unashamedly as she coloured, his lush lashes dropping low to study her intently with nothing of her own inhibition. A curl of heat clenched her stomach and tensed every muscle in her slender body.

‘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?’

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