The Winter Bride

‘My town house—where else?’

‘I’m not going home with you!’ Angie exclaimed in shock.

‘Home,’ Jake said more cheerfully. ‘Waff…’

‘He’s obsessed,’ Leo remarked disapprovingly.

‘He’s still only a baby,’ Angie said defensively. ‘How could you do this to us?’

‘With the greatest of ease. I did what was right—’

‘Right?’

‘For better or for worse your child is a Neville. He is a part of my family circle,’ Leo ground out in grudging concession. ‘He should not suffer for the faults of his parents.’

Angie slung him a scorching glance. ‘I am not at fault as a parent in any way.’

‘I would suggest that we save this conversation until we are alone.’

‘I don’t want to go to your house,’ Angie told him between clenched teeth.

‘I’m not checking you into a hotel. You might be stupid enough to disappear again, and I have wasted enough time tracking you down—’

‘I thought it was Wallace who—’

‘My grandfather is in his eighties,’ Leo reminded her drily. ‘I employed the investigation agency and dealt with them, and you were far from easily found.’

‘I didn’t want to be found,’ Angie whispered in sudden, dragging weariness, her taut shoulders slumping in defeat.

Silence fell. For a minute or two, she stared blindly out at the passing traffic but then slowly she turned until she was watching Leo instead. The relaxation of his impressive lean length had an indolent quality which mocked her own explosive tension, yet was, in its own way, highly deceptive for there was nothing indolent about Leo. A white-hot core of raw energy drove him, not to mention his fierce Greek pride. And even without that spectacular bone structure and build Leo would have commanded attention in any company for he had a presence equalled by few men, and women were mesmerised by the high-voltage charge of his intense sexuality.

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.’