Her Christmas Fantasy & The Winter Bride (23 page)

‘No man could stay angry with a woman who looks like you…'

‘The king of the cliché too.'

Leo snaked out a long arm and closed it round her waist so fast that he gave a great shout of laughter when he saw her disconcerted face. ‘Come to Brussels with me in the morning. Give me something to look forward to in the evenings—and I will look after you in every way you can think of…and in many that you probably can't,' he promised in a savouring tone of such intense desire that she shivered violently, exhaus
tion suddenly engulfing her as she struggled to react to his lightning-fast and disorientating change of mood.

‘Dream on,' Angie advised raggedly, but even her weary pulses leapt as she met those brilliant dark eyes.

‘Why fight me? Why pretend?' Leo demanded in equally sudden exasperation as he freed her again to stare down at her in brooding challenge. ‘I am not suggesting a couple of stolen nights on the tiles… Stay with me until this burns out for both of us!'

And Angie recalled that day in the meadow by the lake when Leo had become bored with her girlish brand of teasing flirtation and had impatiently dragged her down into a passion which had far exceeded her naive expectations, swiftly, surely and ruthlessly overstepping the boundaries she had foolishly believed she could retain. When Leo wanted something, he wanted it yesterday. And, just below that sophisticated and cool cosmopolitan surface, Leo was as shockingly domineering and unashamedly primal in his appetites as a sixteenth-century pirate marauding the seven seas.

‘No—and I won't say thank you for asking,' Angie muttered, but she was striving not to reel visibly from a proposition which had shaken her to her very depths. ‘
Theos
, Angie,' Leo breathed grimly, his eloquent mouth curling. ‘What more could you expect me to offer you now?'

Angie's paralysis gave and a sharp laugh empty of humour was dragged from her. She loathed Leo so much in that moment, she frankly marvelled that she did not succumb to physically attacking him. Neanderthal hypocrite, with his double standards, and proud of it! He thought she was a tart and a thief, didn't even trust her near his big fancy desk, so he wouldn't treat her as he might have treated any other woman.

‘If I'd been interested, which I'm
not
,' she stressed with
cloaked and embittered eyes, ‘you might have just begun the way guys usually begin—you might just have asked me for a date—'

‘A
date
?' Leo ejaculated with savage incredulity.

‘Who knows? If you'd given me roses and poured enough champagne down my throat, and chatted me up with all that hypocrisy you consider beneath your exalted status, you might even have got lucky,' Angie framed with a suffocating, choking sense of injustice and wounded pride. ‘As it is you just burnt out at supersonic speed, Leo. Congratulations!'

And with that last word Angie walked out of the library before the angry, scorching tears stinging her eyes overcame her in front of him.

Leo had certainly told her what he wanted from her—just sex, and the opportunity to rid himself of a lust for her body that was no more welcome to him now than it had been in the past. Gosh, that weekend must have been something special in his memory too! She had had nobody to compare him to then and nobody even now, and suddenly that reality infuriated her. All these wretched, mixed-up emotions tumbling around inside her, the terrible pain lurking ready to pounce at the very heart of that turmoil. Leo… Leo…Leo. Yet she knew she wanted him every bit as much as she hated him for not offering her more—so where did that leave her?

 

A determined hand shook her awake. Like a zombie, Angie fought to focus on the dark and forceful male features swimming above hers. ‘Go away,' she groaned, closing her heavy eyes again.

The warm duvet was rolled back and Leo scooped her up into his arms before she could even register what was happening to her.

‘What the heck are you doing?' she squawked.

‘Bringing you down for breakfast.'

‘Is there no food in the house?'

After a pause, the broad, muscular chest against which Leo had her firmly cradled rumbled with appreciative amusement. ‘Funny…'

‘What time is it?'

‘Six—'

‘Six?'
Angie yelped as he carried her down the stairs with complete cool. ‘That means I've only been in bed for a couple of hours!'

‘I'm leaving for the airport at seven.'

‘Go ahead; just put me back in bed before you go…and for heaven's sake put me down before you drop me!'

Leo lowered her down to the cold, tiled floor of the hall with a controlled strength that was deeply impressive, and finger-combed her tumbled hair back from her sleep-flushed face with an easy familiarity that shocked her back out of being impressed. But then plunging her into shock, she conceded dazedly, was what Leo had always excelled at.

Only during that stolen weekend had she learnt that Leo was a male of volatile temperament and intense passion. That cool, controlled front he wore to the world had been no more indicative of his true character than a one dimensional image. And that revelation, that shocking but joyous discovery of a fire that burned even hotter than her own, had sent Angie flying from the height of what had probably been infatuation down into the infinitely more dangerous and vulnerable depths of deep and very real love. From that point on, loving Leo had been a one-way ticket ever downward to hell, she acknowledged painfully.

‘Why are you doing this to me?' she whispered tightly.

‘I wanted to speak to you before I left.'

‘Speak…'

In answer, Leo threw wide the dining-room door. ‘We'll breakfast first.'

‘I don't eat before I wash.'

‘Unwashed, you look tousled and pink and sexy… I love it.'

Unnerved by that blatant admission and the scorchingly sensual smile that went with it, Angie raced back upstairs again and slammed the door on his laughter. Leo was advancing on her like an invading army on all fronts. Strange, wasn't it? When she had chased him up hill and down dale he had been most frustratingly elusive. But when she now attempted to do the sensible thing and run the other way Leo went into hot pursuit mode. But then no doubt it was Leo's natural drive to be the hunter rather than the quarry…and it certainly hadn't taken him long to turn the tables on her that weekend.

It took Angie precisely five minutes to wash her face and brush her teeth and dive into jeans and a sweatshirt. Jake was still soundly asleep. She stalked into the dining room and took a seat opposite Leo. As Epifania poured coffee into fine porcelain cups, Leo lounged back indolently in his carved dining chair, a vision of continental elegance in an exquisitely tailored navy suit and burgundy silk tie. He had all the dark and brooding magnificence of a Renaissance prince. Her pulse fluttered at the base of her throat like a trapped butterfly.

Awesomely aware of his level scrutiny, Angie refused the housekeeper's offer of a cooked breakfast and helped herself with a not quite steady hand to toast. The silence lingered until the door closed.

‘I want your promise that you'll still be here when I return,' Leo said quietly then.

‘To serve myself up on a platter to Wallace like the Christmas turkey? You have just got to be joking!'

Leo surveyed her steadily, and somehow that dark, piercing gaze made her squirm. ‘He's a very old man who grew up in a radically different world and, whether or not you like to face it, you wronged him. You should have respect for his wish to
meet his only great-grandchild. I confess that I myself was surprised that he should be prepared to express that wish.'

Angie was very tense. ‘I'm sorry, but I'm not going.'

‘I'm afraid I can't even offer Drew as bait,' Leo murmured with a curled lip.

Angie gave him an abstracted frown. ‘Sorry?'

‘My cousin won't be featuring in the seasonal festivities. Shortly after your departure, Wallace and Drew had an almighty row about his debts and a bitter parting of the ways,' Leo revealed wryly. ‘Since then, Drew has been living in New York.'

Angie nodded, not really that surprised by the news. Drew Neville had lost his parents when he was ten, and Wallace had raised him to adulthood, fondly fulfilling his grandson's every desire, only to become outraged by the end result of that indulgence. He had expected Drew to take over the management of the estate, but Drew had demonstrated the strongest possible aversion to working for a living.

Indeed, battles over his extravagance and his laziness had been frequent and explosive. In Angie's time, however, Drew had still been coasting along fairly happily on an extremely generous allowance and the comfortable conviction that, as he had had the good fortune to be born in the direct male line, and not to a mere, insignificant daughter like Leo, he would one day inherit the Court and all it contained.

‘No comment?'

Her brow furrowing, Angie met intent dark eyes and finally registered
why
Leo was treating her to that frowning scrutiny. Naturally, he had been expecting rather more of a reaction to his announcement that the supposed father of her child now lived way across the Atlantic!

Angie lowered her head and stared into her coffee cup. She could've kicked herself for not working out sooner that Drew
had
to be estranged from his family. How else could the belief
that he was her son's father ever have arisen? After all, had Drew been on the spot to defend himself, he would soon have scotched any belief that there was the remotest chance that he could have had anything to do with Angie's pregnancy! And, all of a sudden, Angie felt quite weak with relief that Drew was thousands of miles away and out of touch. Had it been otherwise, she would not have been able to conserve her pride and save face by taking advantage of Leo's staunch conviction that Jake was his cousin's child.

‘Frankly, after all this time, I couldn't care less where Drew lives. And certainly his absence, or indeed even his presence,' Angie went on daringly, ‘wouldn't make the slightest difference to my determination not to go back to Deveraux Court.'

‘But nonetheless you will go,' Leo told her very quietly.

There was something about that tone which sent a little ripple of apprehension down Angie's already taut spinal cord but irritably denying the impression, she forced a mocking smile. ‘How? Are you planning to tie me up and stuff me in the boot of your car?'

Leo released his breath in an almost languorous sigh, spiky black lashes low on hooded dark eyes. ‘Don't make me use pressure on you, Angie. I'm not in the habit of taking a sledgehammer to a nut but, if you push me, I'll shatter you into so many pieces you will find it a great challenge to put yourself together again.'

The blood slowly drained from Angie's shattered face. That silken, soft tone of threat had been infinitely more effective than an angry shout would have been. And the chilling scrutiny which went with it churned up her stomach. ‘You can't intimidate me.'

‘I believe I just did…and it shouldn't have been necessary,' Leo drawled. ‘You
owe
Wallace at least one visit.'

‘And where does that fit in with the pass you made at me last night?' Angie prompted in helpless confusion.

‘It doesn't. You and I are one thing, and my grandfather and I another,' Leo informed her very drily. ‘And at his age I think he's got to come first, don't you?'

T
HE MORNING
L
EO WAS DUE BACK,
Epifania bustled round the town house humming under her breath, so Angie sat in the beautifully landscaped back garden, glumly watching Jake gather gravel off the paths into tiny piles and transfer each stone individually into a bucket with the happy concentration of a little boy knowing he was getting thoroughly dirty.

She curled her chilled hands up inside her sleeves. Her one presentable outfit—a loose dark blue cotton jacket and matching short skirt—was more summer-weight than winter-weight. Her head was sore and her throat raw with the onset of a cold and, even in the sunlight and the shelter of the walls, she was freezing. And all she had to look forward to was a return to Deveraux Court, she reflected with an appalled shiver.

Wallace would get to meet his great-grandchild simply because she had less than five pounds to her name and was too much of a coward to face up to Leo's nebulous threat of retribution. Although really there hadn't been anything
remotely
nebulous about that threat, she reminded herself grimly. She had labelled herself a thief and she was aware that she could still be prosecuted. Naturally Leo would crack that whip of reality over her head. He hadn't had to spell out his meaning any more clearly.

And she had duly cringed and shuddered, not so much from the intimidation itself but from a stupid sense of savage shock and pain that Leo could turn those hard, dark, ice-cold eyes
on her as he had and frighten the living daylights out of her without remorse.

He had phoned twice over the past few days. Angie had refused to speak to him. Epifania had been aghast at such a rude response. Leo was her idol, and idols deserved fulsome worship and appreciation. The housekeeper had been very chatty until she'd finally appreciated that Angie didn't want to hear generously offered little titbits about Leo from the age of nought to thirty.

In fact the less Angie heard about Leo's wonderfully idyllic childhood, genius-level brilliance and meteoric rise to success and power in contrast to the deep and abiding tragedies of his private life—death of his mother, his father, his wife, his child—well, the safer she would be. Don't feed an obsession, starve it to death, Angie had urged herself staunchly. She had stopped loving him years ago. Yet somehow Leo
still
had the power to reach down inside her and hurt her so deeply that he terrified her.

Leo paused to watch her where she perched on the ornate bench, her mane of hair blowing back from her perfect profile, slim shoulders taut, long, shapely legs crossed. His strong, dark face instantly lightened and relaxed. Jake saw him first, surging upright and hurtling across the gravel to throw himself at Leo's knees. ‘Waff man!' he cried excitedly.

It was hard to say which of them was most taken aback by that unexpected welcome. Angie froze, but Leo froze even more, his big, powerful body rigid. She saw into him then. A male who genuinely loved children but who didn't want anything to do with
her
child. Mean, nasty, she thought painfully, and then Leo suddenly bent down to lift Jake up and Jake, unable to distinguish strained pretence from sincerity, flung his little arms round Leo and hugged him tight.

‘Put him down…' Just as suddenly, Angie could not bear
the knowledge and weight of her own pretence. Seeing father and son so close, and yet so far from each other in their mutual ignorance of their true relationship, pierced her like a guilty knife. Mean and nasty, she repeated afresh to herself. Well, the lie that had made Jake's conception possible had been pretty mean and nasty too, she conceded heavily.

‘Every time I look at him I think of you with Drew,' Leo admitted grimly as he settled the restive toddler in his arms gently back down onto solid earth. ‘But that's not your son's fault, is it? And I hope I am man enough to recognise my own failings.'

‘That old dog-in-the-manger feeling?' Angie questioned tartly, but a tiny betraying catch in her voice interfered with her delivery. ‘I'm glad you recognise it as a failing…for you certainly didn't want me—'

‘I didn't let you go to stand back and watch you make a bloody fool of yourself over my cousin!' Leo responded with biting censure. ‘You didn't,
let me go
, Leo. You binned me like yesterday's newspaper.'

His even white teeth gritted. ‘For a woman, you can be very blunt.'

‘You taught me that.'

Drew again, Angie reflected bitterly. Leo was so certain that his cousin was Jake's father. He hadn't the slightest doubt—and suddenly she marvelled at that
absolute
certainty of his. Mightn't the average male have at least wondered whether there was a small possibility that her child might be his? No form of contraception was foolproof.

She cleared her throat, no longer able to deny her own dangerous curiosity to know how and in what manner Leo had first learnt of her pregnancy. ‘When did Wallace tell you that I was pregnant?' she asked stiffly.

A winged black brow lifted. ‘He didn't tell me…at least, not until I opened the subject with him.'

Angie frowned in confusion. ‘Then
how
…?'

Leo dealt her an almost pitying look. ‘It was Drew who couldn't wait to tell me. In fact, he boasted about his virility—'

‘Drew
b-boasted
…?' Angie heard herself stammering in stunned disbelief.

Leo absorbed the beetroot-red flush of chagrin washing over her face but misunderstood its source. ‘Presumably he felt it was safe to own up. By then you had been gone several weeks…and I believe he gave you the money for an abortion. No doubt he believed that that would be the end of the episode.'

Angie was very still, and then her tremulous mouth compressed rock-hard and she dropped her head. She marvelled that she didn't explode with sheer outrage, for no longer did she need to wonder at Leo's unquestioning acceptance that Jake was another man's child. His cousin's confession, his cousin's crude, cruel
lies
, evidently couched in the most offensive male terms, had ensured Leo's conviction. For if Drew had accepted responsibility and even pretended that he had offered her the money for a termination as a send-off, what normal, rational male would then doubt the paternity of the unborn child involved?

‘If it's any consolation, I hit him,' Leo informed her lazily.

‘You hit him…?' Angie framed weakly, still numb with fury at the betrayal of someone she had considered a friend, and unable at that moment to even begin to understand why Drew should have done such a crazy thing. She snatched in a deep, shuddering breath. ‘If he's still alive, you didn't hit him hard enough!'

The silence thundered and then Leo flung back his arrogant dark head and laughed with earthy appreciation.

Startled by that disorientating response, Angie glanced up. She saw Leo as she had so often seen him that long-ago weekend—shorn of all cool reserve and distance, and utterly irresistible. The breathtakingly charismatic smile slashing his hard, dark features stopped her heart dead in its tracks. Her breathing quickening, Angie simply stared, helpless as a bird caught in the hunter's net.

Then Leo glanced down at his watch, faint impatience drawing his black brows together as he registered the time. ‘We'll leave for the Court as soon as you're ready.'

Dragged back down to reality and ashamed of every leaping sense that sought to betray her, Angie stood up. ‘I'll never forgive you for forcing me to go back there.'

‘Occasionally one has to be cruel to be kind,' Leo said drily. ‘If you had been foolish enough to do a disappearing act while I was away, I might not have been able to find you again.'

Angie wasn't listening; she was already picturing the horrors of humiliation awaiting her. Return of the prodigal, but not to a feast of celebration. Wallace would meet his great-grandson, even if the paternity of that great-grandson was not quite what he apparently imagined it to be. And her father was either in for a heck of a nasty shock or presently praying nightly that his scarlet woman of a daughter would not dare to show her face again and embarrass him. Jake's illegitimacy would be as big a badge of public shame in Samuel Brown's eyes as it would be in his elderly employer's.

However, her exposure as the household thief would've been an even greater sin to a man whose unswerving devotion to the Neville family, their every minute interest and their ancestral home was so extreme, he would probably have handed
his daughter over to the police personally had he found her with that miniature portrait in her possession.

‘Angie…?'

Angie swallowed hard on the thickness in her throat. ‘I think you owe me one favour, Leo. I want you to promise me that as soon as this wretched visit is over you'll fix me up with a job somewhere.'

‘You won't need a job. Your future is already assured. Either I will keep you or Wallace will keep you.'

‘Nobody needs to keep me, Leo.'

‘My offer is open any time you want to take it up.'

She spun away, jumpy as a cat on hot bricks. ‘You're astonishingly persistent.'

Leo laced long, lean fingers into several strands of her pale hair and tugged her head gently back to him. Raw desire blazed in his bold dark eyes. ‘Hungry…very, very hungry,' he corrected her without shame.

That close to him, Angie trembled, her nostrils flaring on the clean, warm male scent, so distinctively his and as addictive as a drug to her. That same hunger thundered through every fibre of her being without conscience. She could no more have denied his power over her than she could have denied her need to breathe, but when her awareness shrank to the lustrous brilliance of those spectacular eyes she knew that her own physical weakness would tear her apart at the seams if she wasn't careful.

Leo looked nothing short of spectacular in a superb double-breasted navy pinstripe suit which outlined every honed angle of his magnificent physique. Just four and a half days he had been away, but it had felt like a lifetime to Angie. The urge to accept that wretched phone just to hear that deep, dark, rich drawl had tormented her,
shamed
her. Her nails carved sharp
crescents into her moist palms as she balled her hands into defensive fists because she wanted so badly to touch him.

Leo inclined his dark head, lean fingers rising to tilt her chin so that he could look at her. ‘You look so bloody haunted and miserable…anybody would think I have insulted you!' he condemned with suppressed savagery. ‘I am expressing a need openly, honestly, but I won't promise you anything I won't deliver, and at the end of it I will leave you and your son secure. You want the roses and the champagne, I'll give them to you—but all I want from you is
you
.'

Angie twisted her pounding head away. ‘Back off, Leo.'

‘I don't know how… I have hardly slept since I left London… I was
angry
with you! We could have been together in Brussels—'

‘Yes… A few days is about the limit of your attention span as I recall—'

With a stifled expletive, Leo gathered her into his arms and brought his mouth down on hers, all explosive fire and frustration. Her head spun and her lower limbs shook, and the heat of her own treacherous craving stormed through her chilled flesh, leaving her weak and pliable and yet oh, so hot, oh, so sensitive that her skin felt as if it was burning up. Moaning deep in her throat beneath the erotically invasive thrust of his tongue, she clung to him with the same desperation with which she might have clung to the edge of a cliff.

And then a little hand tugged at her nylon-covered thigh, demanding attention, and Jake said insistently, ‘Mummy?' and the effect was as good as a bucket of icy water thrown over her racing pulses and madly accelerated heartbeat.

In one charged motion, Leo released her and stepped back, a dull flush across his high cheekbones. Jake gazed up at his mother in frank curiosity, and then he gazed up at the tall, dark Greek towering over him. Angie gave her son a shaky
smile and, satisfied, he finally toddled off again back to his bucket and his gravel.

‘I forgot that we were not alone,' Leo murmured in a distant tone, and his accent was very thick.

‘Please don't touch me like that again.' Angie didn't even trust herself enough to look at him, not when her body still screamed and pulsed with guilty, wicked, unsated excitement. ‘I want you to stay away from me.'

‘Impossible. I'm driven by a very powerful need to possess you again.'

‘But I won't be possessed ever again by you!' Angie blazed up at him with explosive abruptness.

‘You can fight me…but can you keep on fighting yourself as well?' Leo enquired with lethal effect.

Paling in fear of the merciless insight behind that question, Angie spun away, snatched up her son—who vented a startled chorus of complaint—and stalked back into the house.

After washing Jake's hands and dusting him down, she closed her suitcase and hauled it off the bed. She searched her face in the mirror, dwelling accusingly on her swollen mouth and the vulnerable brightness in her eyes. You fall by the wayside again, you deserve everything you suffered before and
worse
, she warned her reflection. Yet in some secretive, shameful way the raw strength of Leo's desire excited her and encouraged her thoughts to fly off in dangerous directions. Was it possible that Leo might actually have regretted that rejection two and a half years ago? Six weeks after that weekend they had spent together, Leo had returned to the Court for a flying visit…

He had climbed out of his glossy limousine in the rear courtyard, watching her pick her way across the cobbles in spindly heels and a tiny satin slip dress. The hand she had been resting on Drew's arm to balance herself had then chosen
to cling in a possessive display, and she had tossed her hair back and smiled brilliantly.