The Winter Bride

‘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?’