Angel Of Darkness

‘Max couldn’t afford you,’ Angelo said with dulcet emphasis. ‘But I can, and I don’t need to know one end of a camera from another to know exactly what to do with you.’

Kelda’s head was swimming with a mess of utterly bewildered thoughts. There was no assignment? Then why bring her here? Why would Angelo lure her to Tuscany? Why was Angelo surveying her as if she was a cream cake and he was starving for a bite to eat? Angelo had never looked at her like that before...and all the double entendres...what on earth was going on? Had Angelo gone insane? This was not Angelo as she knew him. This was another Angelo entirely.

‘You really are the most spectacularly beautiful creature,’ Angelo murmured in a thickened undertone. ‘And if you stay in that bed much longer, I’m likely to join you.’

Kelda wrenched the sheet so high it came adrift from the foot of the mattress and exposed her bare feet, but she didn’t notice. She couldn’t take her eyes off Angelo’s darkly handsome features. ‘W-what are you talking about?’ she demanded in a near shriek. ‘Have you gone crazy?’

Angelo winced at the ear-splitting decibels. ‘I wish I had volume control on your voice.’

‘Y-you brought me here...all the way to Italy for an assignment that doesn’t exist,’ she recounted, spitting out each work with clarity. ‘What I want to know is why?’

‘I have this feeling that our mutual parents will get on much more happily with you out of the way,’ Angelo drawled. ‘I could quite happily have knocked you on the head and dragged you out of your apartment by the hair forty-eight hours ago. But that would have been foolish. And, cara, I am very rarely foolish—’

‘You are right out of your tiny mind!’ she launched at him in seething bewilderment.

‘No. If you had simply disappeared, questions would have been asked,’ he pointed out speciously. ‘This way you’re here on a perfectly respectable alibi—’

‘But I won’t be here for long! And you’re going to pay for this!’ Kelda spat.

‘I have your passport, your money and your credit cards...not much use, those, are they?’ Angelo remarked silkily. ‘You’re right up to your limit on all of them.’

‘You have my passport...how do you know I’m up to my limit?’ she suddenly heard herself demanding.

‘I am completely conversant with your financial status,’ Angelo admitted unashamedly. ‘And I have to say, in my capacity as a banker, how did you get yourself in such a mess? You are in debt to the tune of thousands!’

Abruptly she turned her head away, utterly humiliated that Angelo of all people should know such things. She had been foolish with her money when she’d first started earning. But when Daisy had divorced Tomaso and had, inconceivably, refused to accept any alimony from him, Kelda had been determined to buy her mother a decent home to live in again.

She had bought Daisy a lovely little cottage not too far from London. It had not come cheap. She had sent her mother off on holiday several times. She had settled her brother’s debts times without number, bought expensive presents for her family and friends. Her apartment had been the only major item she had ever bought for herself. It had never occurred to her that the gravy-train of her high income could come to a sudden frightening halt. But it had and she just hadn’t been prepared for it.

‘You really do need a rich patron, who can settle your debts and pick up the tab for your expensive tastes...someone who would never question the bills,’ Angelo murmured with the soft, smooth delivery of a devil’s advocate. ‘I’m very generous with my lovers...I’ve never had a mistress before...you see, strange as it may seem to you cara...I’ve never had to buy a woman before. But the more I look at you in that bed and contemplate total possession and title, the more I see your investment potential...’

A steel band of tension was throbbing unbearably round her temples and it tightened another painful notch every time Angelo spoke. Perhaps she was very, very stupid but she just couldn’t grasp why Angelo was behaving the way he was. ‘I don’t kn-know you like this,’ she confided without meaning to.

Angelo vented a grim laugh that ironically made her feel much more at home with him. ‘How could you? Much has changed over the past six years. Does it surprise you to learn that I deeply resented being forced to take responsibility for you when you became my stepsister?’

‘Nobody asked you to take responsibility for me!’ Kelda slung at him.

Angelo dealt her an assessing glance. ‘But there was nobody else to do it. Our parents were abroad so much. And I know for a fact that my father was more than happy to leave you to me,’ he continued drily. ‘Daisy was such an adoring mother that he didn’t want to get into trouble with her for disciplining you. And he would have done, make no mistake. Daisy’s very protective of you. So I got landed with the job nobody else would touch!’

‘How dare you say that?’ Kelda threw at him fierily. ‘How dare you?’

‘And you were the most totally obnoxious teenager,’ Angelo volunteered. ‘You put me off having children for life.’

‘If that means that there’ll never be a junior edition of you running about making someone’s life hell, I’m delighted to hear it!’ But although the ready words flowed from her tongue, Kelda was dismayed to realise that she was deeply and genuinely hurt by what he had thrown at her. And she couldn’t understand why. Hadn’t she always known that Angelo hated her?

The difference was, she appreciated, that it had never once crossed her mind to wonder how Angelo felt about having the burden of a teenager thrust on him. She had not considered that aspect of those years before, had dimly imagined that Angelo had taken over simply to be officious and unpleasant. And why hadn’t she thought more deeply...because to have reflected more deeply would have forced her to acknowledge the truth of what Angelo had said. Daisy and Tomaso had been abroad a great deal and Tim had been a quiet, self-contained boy, quite content to be sent off to boarding school and given plenty of pocket money in return for a lack of personal attention.

‘I was only twenty-one,’ Angelo pointed out, having ignored her childish response. ‘And you were out of control. Between them your mother and your sweet old great-aunt had spoilt you rotten. Daisy, quite frankly, couldn’t cope with you. You are very different from her in temperament.’

Kelda could feel tears burning behind her lowered eyelids. She had never hated Angelo so much and yet simultaneously, she had never felt so savaged. She found herself remembering the loneliness of those years and discovered that inexplicably, deep down inside, she must once have had the vague conviction that to take charge of her in the first place, Angelo must have had some slight affection for her. How she could have thought that and yet believed that he hated her at the same time was no more clear to her than anything else since she had arrived in Tuscany.

‘I was more like your father than your stepbrother,’ Angelo mused with an oddly chilling quality. ‘You don’t know me like this because in the past six years you have become an adult and I can now treat you as one. You wouldn’t believe the pleasure that that freedom gives me.’

Kelda pressed both hands against her pale cheeks and forced herself to look at him over her straining fingers. ‘Why did you bring me here?’ she demanded in a shaken tone.

‘Why?’ Glittering dark eyes slid over the wild tangle of red-gold hair veiling her shoulders in a torrent of curls and lingered on the exquisite perfection of the triangular face pointed at him. ‘Are you really that dumb? Six years ago you virtually destroyed my relationship with my father—’

‘I...I didn’t mean to—’ Kelda was shocked and unprepared for the directness of that attack.