The Winter Bride

‘I don’t know why you’re talking to me like this. I don’t like it.’

Unmoved dark eyes rested on her. ‘That won’t make me stop asking because I need to know. Drew always wanted you…but he never wanted you more than when he thought you were mine.’

Angie jerked her blonde head away, her stomach muscles clenching in dismay at his persistence and his insight. He wasn’t telling her anything she hadn’t known but, ironically, she had never been attracted to Drew. Compared to Leo, he had been like gilt beside gold, always overshadowed and diminished. But, for all that, Drew’s attention had been balm to her savaged ego after Leo had ditched her.

And for a while she had gone around with Drew and his friends, nightclubbing and partying, deaf to her father’s outraged disapproval. Was that how the belief that her child was Drew’s had come about? she wondered abstractedly. Or had she been so incoherent in her distress the day that Wallace found her with the miniature portrait that she had left the old man suffering from a genuine misapprehension?

Lean brown fingers reached out and tugged a long strand of silvery pale hair. ‘Angie…?’

Her eyes flew back to Leo, and he was so close that her nostrils flared on the warm and achingly familiar scent of him. A long shiver racked her and her eyes collided unwarily with his darkly intent gaze. A hint of cruel amusement gleamed in his eyes.

‘Stop it,’ she whispered jerkily.

‘Stop what? Playing games?’ An unrepentant winged ebony brow climbed. ‘Why? You played plenty with me that summer.’

The colour drained from Angie’s cheeks, leaving her pale.

‘Theos…of course, I knew,’ Leo drawled very drily. ‘Like Artemis, goddess of the chase and the forest, you hunted me down. It would’ve taken a stronger male than I to withstand the temptation you offered.’

Angie wanted to sink through the floor. Unable to execute that feat, she sidled along the shelving instead, desperate to escape. ‘I’d better go and check on Jake.’

Long tanned fingers closed round her wrist and tugged her inexorably back within reach. ‘Not so fast,’ Leo murmured with deceptive gentleness. ‘You haven’t answered my question yet.’

Angie had the demeaning suspicion that she was playing mouse to Leo’s cat. Abruptly, her chin came up, denying that image. ‘There’s one possibility that doesn’t seem to have occurred to you…’

‘And what is that?’

‘Maybe, at the end of the day, I couldn’t tell the difference between you and Drew,’ Angie clarified with a studied desire to insult.

In reward, a dark rush of blood fired over Leo’s blunt cheekbones, his savagely handsome features suddenly wiped clean of every ounce of mockery. His lean face hardening, he leant forward without warning and planted two spread hands on the shelves on either side of her head, effectively imprisoning her with the solid breadth and strength of his supremely powerful physique. ‘Ohi…no?’ Leo questioned with a shockingly intimidating blaze of anger in his glittering stare.

Angie’s spine grated into bruising collision with the shelving as she instinctively attempted to back away from that dangerous fire. ‘Leo…’

Long fingers whipped across to curve on her cheekbones and hold her still. ‘Let me teach you the difference,’ Leo gritted darkly.

‘No—’

But as her anxious gaze melded with the drowning darkness of his, explosive anticipation tore through her like a storm warning, tightening every muscle and firing every nerve-ending with tortured expectancy. With a guttural sound somewhere between a harsh laugh and a groan, Leo dropped his strong hands to the swell of her hips and took her mouth hotly and hungrily with his own.

He crushed her to him, and the very blood in her veins sang with the heat of her excitement. Under the onslaught of his demanding lips and the carnal thrust of his tongue, Angie burned. He ravaged her mouth with the fierce heat of an innately sexual male, hell-bent on possession, and she fell victim to a hot and disorientating tide of intimate memory that tore down every remaining barrier and reduced her to submissive rubble.

As suddenly as he had reached for her, Leo dragged his mouth from hers again. Glittering dark eyes cloaked, he thrust himself back from her and strode over to the window.

For a split second, Angie thought she might slide down to the rug because her knees were ready to fold beneath her. For a split second, Angie didn’t even recall where she was. But her body ached and pulsed in a way she had almost forgotten, sensually alive and hurting in a way she did not want to acknowledge. She felt the swollen tenderness of her breasts, the painful sense of tormenting emptiness between her thighs, and shivered in disbelieving horror that Leo could still have that devastating an effect on her body.

She studied his back view with stricken eyes, reading the savage tension in his broad shoulders and the rigid bracing of his long, powerful thighs. And just as swiftly she suspected that that sudden flare of physical hunger and even more physical connection might have been no more welcome to him.

‘The difference between my cousin and I,’ Leo framed rawly as he swung back to face her, burnished, censorious dark eyes like flaring arrows of gold, ‘is that I was ashamed of what happened between us two and a half years ago!’

‘Ashamed?’ Angie repeated sickly.

‘Cristos…what else?’ Leo demanded in a wrathful growl of rebuke. ‘What did you expect? My wife had been dead only seven months…and you were nineteen and naive as they come, for all your wiles! Did you think I could be proud of making such a conquest? The teenage daughter of one of my grandfather’s most loyal and trusted dependants? And, even worse, a virgin?’

CHAPTER THREE

ANGIE HAD TURNED TO STONE, the pallor of her perfect features pronounced but rigidly uninformative—for one necessary skill she had learned working for Claudia was the ability to keep her face devoid of expression. But, inside herself, she was cringing. ‘Conquest’…‘dependant’…‘virgin’… Not one single term welcome to her ears—indeed each and every one of them emphasising the humiliating inequality which had always divided her from Leo.

In bitter mortification, she flew out of the room and down the hall, not even knowing where she was going in an unfamiliar house. Espying a cloakroom, she hurriedly and gratefully took refuge there. No, she had never had the advantage of a level playing field with Leo, she conceded wretchedly. Everything had separated them—age, background and experience. But, worst of all, she had met Leo in the time-warp world of Deveraux Court, leaving herself forever fixed in his mind as the butler’s daughter and never, it seemed, to be anything else.

Why on earth had he kissed her? The ultimate put-down? Her insult had drawn an overwhelmingly primitive masculine response. But then, in the grip of strong emotion, Leo was no English gentleman of restraint, and he was very highly sexed. A dangerous little quiver of remembrance ran through Angie and her face burned with shame. She had no excuse to offer for her own behaviour. Leo still attracted her in much the same way that a magnet attracted iron filings. But it was just a physical thing now, she told herself with driven defensiveness—all down to body chemistry and hormones, and nothing whatsoever to do with her emotions.

A knock sounded on the door. Angie ignored it.

‘Angie, you have a count of five to show yourself…’

Leo’s warning sent Angie flying for a towel to dry her face with, which she had splashed thoroughly with cold water in the forlorn hope of cooling herself down.

She unlocked the door. ‘Where’s Jake?’ she questioned stiffly, focusing on Leo’s pale blue silk tie.

‘Upstairs with Epifania. Listen,’ Leo advised impatiently.

And she heard Jake’s delighted chortles of glee filtering down from the floor above. Her son sounded as if he was having a whale of a time.

‘I don’t want to talk about the past!’ Angie stated fiercely.

‘It’s unfinished business. I want it dealt with,’ Leo countered without apology.

Angie flung her head high, blue eyes darkened by stress. ‘There was nothing unfinished about it. You made yourself perfectly plain at the time—sorry, Angie, I needed a woman and I was drunk!’ she interpreted with a raw bitterness she could not conceal.

Leo’s even white teeth gritted. ‘That wasn’t what I said—’

‘That’s what it came down to!’ In too much pain from her memories to find such proximity to Leo bearable, Angie wrapped her arms around herself in a starkly protective movement. ‘Don’t you ever touch me again. Once bitten, forever shy!’

Leo sent her a flashfire glance of involuntary amusement. ‘That rejection routine of yours needs some extensive work and application.’

A deep flush of mortification lit Angie’s cheeks as he reminded her of her eager response in his arms. Her skin felt super-thin, as if the tiniest dent might wound her to the death. And it was Leo who was doing that to her, and that appalled her because she had honestly believed that Leo could not have the power to hurt her any more. She had buried that foolish teenager deep and fancied herself mature beyond imagining. Now she was discovering her error.

Leo curved a hand over her tense shoulder and she flinched away. He vented a soft, soothing sound that was terrifyingly sexy. ‘You’re trembling…’

‘I’ll never forgive you for bringing me here! Where the heck are we supposed to go now? I’m not crawling back to Deveraux Court to grovel—or eat humble pie—so where does that leave us?’

Leo surveyed her mutinous face with reflective cool. ‘Enjoying my hospitality,’ he supplied smoothly, and swung on his heel.

‘But I don’t want to accept your hospitality, Leo.’

Leo stilled, and responded without turning his arrogant dark head. ‘In five days’ time, you will have seen sense and you will be heading to the Court. If you haven’t the wit to grovel, you will undoubtedly feel the rough edge of Wallace’s tongue—but then that’s your business, not mine.’

As he left her standing there, Angie felt horribly alone and scared for the first time in a long while. The feeling of insecurity gripping her now was intense. The very last place she wanted to go was Deveraux Court, and the very last place she wanted to stay was in Leo’s house.