The Winter Bride

The silence pounded and pulsed.

Nervously, Angie glanced up to find Leo watching her again. Involuntarily, she was entrapped, pulses quickening, skin dampening. Colour drenched her complexion. She ran a nervous hand through the long hair falling round her face, and moved her head to toss it back out of her way. Leo’s gaze followed the rippling motion of that cascade of pale, shining strands, increasing her self-consciousness. Then dense black lashes veiled his burnished dark eyes, and his beautifully shaped, sensual mouth hardened again.

‘How did you find out where I lived?’ Angie asked in a jerky rush, because the silence was unbearable. She did not have his nerves of steel and self-discipline.

‘My grandfather asked me to trace you—’

Her fine brows pleated. ‘Wallace?’ she broke in incredulously, referring to his English grandfather whose daughter had married Leo’s father, a Greek shipping magnate.

‘I’m here only to pass on an invitation,’ Leo imparted smoothly. ‘Wallace would like you to spend Christmas with him.’

‘Christmas?’ Angie parroted weakly.

‘He wants to become acquainted with his great-grandson.’

That final, shattering announcement left Angie gaping at him in even deeper shock. Her knees threatening to give way, she groped her passage down into an armchair. Leo knew she had been pregnant? Leo knew that she now had a child? She had never dreamt that Wallace Neville might share that secret with his grandson.

And now Wallace actually wanted to meet Jake? Yet Wallace had forcefully urged her to terminate her pregnancy over two years ago. The news that the butler’s daughter had been impregnated by one of his grandsons had so appalled him, he had been apoplectic with rage. An unapologetic snob with a horror of scandal, he had been eager to facilitate Angie’s departure from Deveraux Court that very same day.

‘Old men feel their mortality.’ Leo’s dark eyes rested unreadably on her stunningly beautiful face. ‘And, frankly, curiosity seems to be killing him. Obviously it will be in your best interests to grovel gratefully in the face of his generosity.’

‘Grovel?’ Angie echoed in complete bewilderment.

Leo’s appraisal became grim, his mouth twisting. ‘I know about the deal you made with Wallace, Angie. I know the whole story.’

Angie stiffened in disbelief, lashes dropping low on fiercely anxious eyes. ‘I haven’t a clue what you’re talking about.’

‘You know very well what I’m talking about,’ Leo countered steadily.

Her slim fingers closed together and clenched. She studied the carpet until it blurred, her stomach churning with sick apprehension.

‘The thefts, Angie,’ Leo supplied without remorse. ‘Wallace caught you in the act and you confessed.’

Her head flew up, anguish and resentment mingling in her stricken face. ‘He promised that he would never tell anyone!’

She wanted to die right there and then. Wallace had promised, Wallace had promised faithfully—and by ‘anyone’ Angie had meant specifically Leo. She could not bear the knowledge that Leo thought she had been the thief, responsible for stealing several small but valuable objets d’art from Deveraux Court where her father and stepmother both worked and lived.

‘Angie, nothing disappeared after your departure. That fact rather spoke for itself. Wallace had little hope of keeping the identity of the culprit under wraps.’

‘So my father must know as well,’ she mumbled, mortified pain clogging up her vocal cords as she made that final leap in understanding.

‘I’ve never discussed the matter with him,’ Leo retorted crisply.

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.’