Her Christmas Fantasy & The Winter Bride (19 page)

In all her life, Angie knew she had never tasted greater humiliation. Her shaken eyes stung fiercely. She studied Leo's hand-stitched Italian leather shoes and hated him for believing and accepting that she had been the thief. And, even more cruelly, throwing that conviction in her face. Was this why he
had referred to Jake as if her child were nothing whatsoever to do with him?

Was her supposed dishonesty so offensive that Leo could not bring himself to acknowledge that she was the mother of his child? she asked herself in growing bewilderment. What had Leo said?
Wallace
wanted to become acquainted with his great-grandson. Had that been Leo's way of telling her that he himself had no intention of taking the smallest interest in Jake? She found that she couldn't think straight because nothing Leo had yet said had made any kind of sense to her.

‘I want you to leave,' Angie confided shakily. ‘I didn't ask you to come looking for me.'

‘That's an irrational response and you'll think better of it within a very short space of time,' Leo asserted crushingly. ‘Wallace would have called the police if you hadn't told him that you were pregnant. You were fortunate to escape a prison sentence. Those thefts took place over a long period. They were neither opportunistic nor the result of someone succumbing to sudden temptation.'

Briefly, Angie closed her aching eyes in a spasm of bitter regret. When in the heat of the moment she had confessed to something she hadn't done, she had been bolstered by the belief that she was protecting someone she loved and that, in any case, she herself had nothing more to lose. After all, she had already lost Leo, had already accepted that she would have to leave Deveraux Court before her condition became obvious. She had been too proud and too devastated by Leo's rejection to confront him with the consequences of their stolen weekend of passion.

‘Wallace is prepared to overlook the past for the sake of your child,' Leo continued levelly.

‘My child has a name…and his name is Jake,' Angie told him thinly.

If possible, Leo's rawly handsome features set even harder
as he ignored that unasked-for piece of information. ‘In your position it would be very foolish to ignore the offer of an olive branch. I believe that Wallace may now be willing to give you financial assistance.'

‘I want nothing from any of you.' Hotly flushed and deeply chagrined by the assurance, Angie leapt upright again. ‘But I would like to know why Wallace should feel it's
his
responsibility to offer me money!'

Diamond-hard dark eyes assailed hers in icy collision. ‘Obviously because his grandson Drew has failed to observe his duty to support you both.'

In stark confusion, Angie froze. How was it Drew's duty to support her and Jake? And then finally, and most belatedly, comprehension gripped her, only to leave her drowning in bemusement again. Evidently, Leo was under the impression that his cousin, Drew, had fathered her child. How on earth could he think that? How on earth could
anyone
think that?

Outrage swelled inside Angie until she thought the top of her head might come flying off. In that instant it didn't matter how such a ludicrous misapprehension had come about. Angie was too infuriated by Leo's evident opinion of her morals to concern herself with anything else. So, Leo saw her as a thief
and
a tart. After all, only a fairly promiscuous young woman would have become intimate with
both
of Wallace's grandsons within the space of three months. But Leo was clearly quite happy to believe that she had slept with his cousin after sleeping with him, and no doubt was even more content to believe that responsibility for her illegitimate child could be laid at Drew's door rather than his own.

‘Angie, I didn't come here to argue with you or to become involved in personal matters which are frankly nothing to do with me,' Leo drawled in a tone of cool reproof. ‘I've issued the invitation on Wallace's behalf, and I haven't got the time
to wrangle with you—I have a date, and I'm already running very late.'

For a split second, Angie felt as though he had plunged a knife into her ribs and stabbed her to the heart.
A date?
So the grieving widower was finally back in social circulation… Wow, bully for him! And, naturally, Angie's sordid personal problems were beneath his notice and wholly devoid of interest to him. Indeed, knowing Leo as she did—brutally candid, highly intelligent and uncontrolled only in bed, she enumerated painfully—he had probably been congratulating himself on a narrow escape from severe embarrassment ever since she'd been exposed as the household thief.

‘Angie…?' Leo prompted.

She turned round, her perfect features pale and set. As the bitterness rose inside her, it was the most unbearable moment of temptation she had ever experienced. She had a sudden fierce urge to smash Leo's self-possession, punish him for his deliberate distancing of himself from her predicament and hurt him, as he was hurting her with the humiliating pretence that they had never been anything to each other but casual acquaintances.

His hard, dark features were impatient. ‘Wallace is expecting you to arrive on Thursday. I assume I can give him the assurance that you will be accepting his invitation?'

In the unstable hold of a tidal wave of conflicting emotion, Angie tore her pained eyes from the dark, savage splendour of Leo as he stood there, so effortlessly detached from her. The anger went out of her at that same moment.

‘You've just got to be kidding,' she breathed with a forced and brittle smile. ‘I have no desire to spend Christmas with your grandfather, and I should think he would have even less desire to spend it with me.'

‘I thought you might, at the very least, be tempted by the possibility of a reconciliation with your own family.'

A humourless laugh was dredged from Angie. Reconciliation? He didn't know what he was talking about. She had never had anything but an uneasy and difficult relationship with her father. Now an unwed mother, and labelled a thief into the bargain, what possible welcome did Leo fondly imagine she would receive?

‘When I walked out of Deveraux Court…' her throat thickened, making her voice gruff ‘…I knew I would never be walking back. I wasn't sorry to leave and I don't want to return even for a visit. That whole phase of my life is behind me now.'

Bold dark eyes scanned her strained profile in exasperation. ‘I suppose it was less than tactful of me to mention the thefts.'

Angie grimaced, willing back tears, determined not to break down in front of him. ‘I would never expect tact or consideration from you,' she told him helplessly. ‘But I really do object to being patronised. You're out of your mind if you think I would be willing to go cap in hand to your grandfather like some pathetic charity case! I've managed fine on my own.'

The very faintest darkening of colour emphasised the hard slant of Leo's high cheekbones. ‘You are working as a servant…you always swore that you would never do that.'

Angie flinched, fingernails biting painfully into her palms. Servant. Not for Leo, surrounded from birth by the faceless breed, with the more egalitarian label of ‘domestic staff'. As hot pink scored her complexion, she whirled away from him before she was tempted to slap him for that most undiplomatic reminder. ‘
Theos
… Only the most stupid and selfish pride could make you refuse so magnanimous an invitation! Wallace could do a great deal for your son. Think of the child. Why should he
suffer for your mistakes?' Leo demanded abrasively. ‘It is your duty as a mother to consider his future.'

A raw ripple of pain and fury sizzled through Angie as she spun back, blue eyes gleaming like sapphires. ‘And what about his father's duty?'

His wide, sensual mouth twisted. ‘When you got into bed with someone as self-centred and irresponsible as Drew, you must've known that you'd be on your own if anything went wrong.'

Leo was angry, Angie registered in surprise. Tension splintered from the fierce cast of his strong features and icy condemnation glittered in his narrowed gaze. Recognising that look for what it was, Angie realised that Leo was not quite as indifferent as he would like to pretend when it came to his conviction that she had leapt into his cousin's bed so soon after she had succumbed to him. Bitter amusement filled her at the awareness.
He
hadn't wanted her but it seemed he hadn't wanted any other man to want her either.

‘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, over
sensitive 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…