A D'Angelo Like No Other

by Carole Mortimer

  Michael might have started out mocking her, but that conversation, the very air they both breathed, had seemed to become altogether too fraught with physical tension a few minutes ago.

  With physical awareness...?

  A physical awareness that would seem to imply Michael really might be attracted to her under all that cynicism...?

  Despite the sudden intimate turn of their conversation, Eva had great difficulty believing that!

  It wasn’t just that Michael D’Angelo was such an aloofly arrogant and forceful man, there was also the fact that he so obviously didn’t trust her, as well as the fact that he was way out of Eva’s league, and she didn’t just mean because of his immense wealth.

  Ten years her senior, he was also a man of experience and sophistication, and, while Eva knew herself capable of being comfortable in any social setting, she certainly didn’t play the sort of bed-hopping games so many other people enjoyed. People like Michael D’Angelo...

  She wasn’t a prude and nor was she a virgin, having been involved in one year-long relationship a couple of years ago, before the two of them had decided, quite amicably, that their two careers, hers in photography, his in accounting, made the relationship impossible to sustain; Eva had been away far too much on assignments, and they had eventually just drifted apart.

  Eva hadn’t been seriously involved with anyone since—hadn’t so much as been out on a date since taking custody of the twins! She didn’t think Michael D’Angelo, a man who so obviously had issues where trusting women was concerned, would be a good choice for her to think of taking the plunge with now either.

  He might be as handsome as sin, but he was also far too dominating, too intense in nature, too cold to be the sort of man Eva was attracted to. Most importantly of all, Michael was Rafe D’Angelo’s brother!

  And yet she was attracted to him, Eva acknowledged with a sinking heart. Maybe in part, because Michael was such a dominating, intense, and cold man...? There was a certain satisfaction in thinking that such a coolly self-contained man might find her attractive.

  In wondering what sort of lover he would be...

  Despite what she had thought earlier, would Michael lose that outer coldness when making love to a woman?

  And how would it feel to have the freedom to touch and caress the hard planes of that lean and muscled body, to have Michael’s long and elegant hands caressing her breasts, her thighs, and to have his lips and tongue explore and taste—?

  ‘Everything okay?’

  Eva spun round guiltily, her cheeks flushing a fiery red as she looked across at Michael standing in the bedroom doorway, at the fully clothed man who had just been at the centre of her erotic and very naked fantasy.

  ‘Eva...?’ He quirked a questioning brow as he obviously saw that guilty blush colouring her cheeks.

  ‘Everything’s fine,’ she snapped irritably.

  He continued to look at her searchingly between narrowed lids for several long seconds before nodding abruptly. ‘I’m just going to change out of these formal clothes, and then we can decide what to do about our own lunch.’

  Eva looked at him blankly. ‘What to do about it...?’

  ‘Whether to eat in or eat out,’ he dismissed tersely. ‘How much of Paris have you seen since you arrived?’

  She grimaced. ‘The inside of the pension and the scenery on the walk to your gallery this morning.’

  Exactly what Michael had thought Eva would say. ‘Then we’ll eat out. If you would like to get together anything that the twins might need while I’m changing...?’

  She gave a slow and wary shake of her head. ‘I’m not expecting you to—to entertain me.’

  ‘I thought we had agreed to put that particular conversation on hold...?’ Michael gave a hard smile of satisfaction as he saw the becoming blush that instantly coloured those ivory cheeks.

  ‘You know I didn’t mean it in that way!’ She shot him an irritated glare.

  Of course Michael had known that. He just enjoyed seeing Eva blush. Just as he liked the idea that it was his teasing that had caused that blush.

  Which was strange, because teasing, bantering word play wasn’t something he usually bothered with where a woman was concerned. He had always preferred a more straightforward approach. Knowing that beneath a woman’s desire there were always those pound signs.

  And Eva Foster was no different in that regard, he reminded himself impatiently, the only difference being that it was Rafe she wanted money from.

  His humour faded. ‘I have no intention of entertaining you,’ he bit out abruptly. ‘We both need feeding, I don’t cook, there’s no housekeeper here, so the two of us going out to lunch is the logical answer.’

  And Eva had a feeling that ‘logic’ was an important part of Michael’s personality. That he preferred cool, calm practicality to any form of spontaneity. Quite where their previous conversation fitted into that cool logic she had no idea.

  Although his mention of there being ‘no housekeeper here’ confirmed that, apart from the twins, the two of them really would be completely alone in his apartment...

  ‘The four of us,’ she corrected pointedly. ‘And I think you might find that eating out with two small babies isn’t as easy as it sounds,’ she added ruefully.

  That dark gaze flickered to the two currently quiet and contented babies Eva held in her arms. ‘They seem happy enough at the moment.’

  Eva smirked inwardly. He had no idea.

  * * *

  ‘I did try to warn you.’ Eva gave the stony-faced Michael an amused glance between sooty lashes as they left the elegant restaurant situated along the embankment of the Seine, where he had decided they would stop and eat lunch.

  It was a far less pristine Michael than the one who had left the apartment two hours ago, orange juice now visible down the front of his plain blue shirt, his casual black trousers damp from a glass of water Sam had knocked over, and slightly creased from where he’d had Sophie sitting on his knee for almost all of the meal.

  If Michael had thought that Sophie and Sam would sit happily in their pushchair playing with their toes and gurgling happily while the two of them ate their meal, then he had been in for a rude awakening. The twins had fretted to be picked up within minutes of the two of them sitting down at the table, Eva knowing from experience that it was better for all concerned—namely the other people trying to eat their meals in peace—if she just picked them up rather than trying to reason with them. As Michael had tried to do initially. And very quickly learnt that six-month-old babies hadn’t yet developed the capacity to be reasoned with.

  It had been a very trying couple of hours.

  Not least for Michael, who had obviously been totally at a loss as to how to amuse Sophie, let alone eat his food with one hand, which was all he’d had free when he was holding the baby in his other arm. It was a skill Eva had perfected in the past three months, always seeming to have one or other of the twins on her knee, sometimes both of them, whenever she tried to eat her meals.

  ‘If you insist on us continuing to stay at your apartment, then perhaps we should shop for food and eat there in future...?’ Eva suggested lightly as she wheeled the pushchair along the sun-dappled riverbank beside him, the majesty of the Eiffel Tower visible on the other side.

  It was a view Eva would have loved to stop and photograph, if not for the fact that she had the broodingly silent Michael D’Angelo walking along beside her!

  He shot her an irritated glance from beneath lowered dark brows. ‘I am not about to let a six-month-old baby—or even two of them!—dictate where and when I eat my meals.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No!’

  Eva laughed softly at his determination. ‘Even if it’s easier?’

  His mouth thinned. ‘Easier doesn’t make it acceptable.’
>
  No, it didn’t, and Eva could imagine that this man, so controlled, so serious, rarely took the easy way out in anything he did. Which was probably the main reason—surely the only reason—he had insisted that she and the twins stay at the apartment with him in the first place.

  It was something Eva had been mulling over in her mind a lot during lunch.

  Michael obviously wasn’t convinced by her claim that his brother Rafe was the father of the twins. But he clearly had enough doubts that he was willing to accept this upheaval in his own life in order to keep them all exactly where he could see and hear them, until he was able to straighten things out once Rafe had returned from his honeymoon.

  Because, she had realised, Michael had no intention of allowing her to repeat her claim about the twins’ paternity to anyone else but him.

  Oh, she had accepted that this couldn’t have happened at a worse time for Rafe D’Angelo. She really wasn’t a marriage wrecker, even if the marriage happened to be that of a man responsible for fathering the twins. She even understood Michael’s reasons for deciding to keep her firmly under his watchful eye. But that didn’t mean she had to like it.

  Which was why Eva had felt a certain amount of amusement at Michael’s obvious discomfort during lunch. He was inconveniencing her by insisting on detaining her in Paris; it seemed only fair that he should suffer a little of that same inconvenience himself.

  And Eva knew from caring for the twins full time for the past three months that this was only the beginning of that inconvenience.

  With any luck, Michael would be begging the three of them to leave Paris in just a few days’ time...

  CHAPTER FIVE

  ‘IS IT LIKE this every night?’

  ‘Like what...?’ Eva turned from tidying up to look at Michael as he appeared in the doorway of the sitting room several hours later, pressing her lips together in an effort not to smile as she saw the disgusted look on his face as he eased the soaking wet front of his third clean shirt of the day away from his chest. ‘Maybe you should go and change that,’ she suggested, barely disguising a smirk.

  ‘I intend to, but I’m seriously in need of a whisky first. Leave the tidying for now, and I’ll help you do it later,’ he advised as he walked over to the drinks cabinet. ‘Like one?’ He held up the decanter.

  Why not? ‘With lots of water, thanks,’ she accepted lightly as she took his advice, and made herself comfortable on the sofa. ‘Sophie appears to have taken a liking to you.’ To the extent that her niece had squealed with pleasure when Michael had appeared in the bathroom doorway at bath time, Sophie smiling at him endearingly as she had held her arms up to him to be lifted out of the bath. A charm even the coolly self-contained Michael hadn’t been immune to as he had then helped to put Sophie into her nightclothes before putting both babies down in their cots for the night.

  ‘And you’ve been doing this on your own for three months?’ He handed her the drink before sinking down gratefully into one of the armchairs.

  Michael was surprised at how tired he felt; there was a lot more to this baby minding than he had ever realised.

  For one thing, he had learnt that it was damned dangerous to take your eyes off crawling babies for even a few seconds, as Sam had proved when he had gone over to investigate the Venetian standard lamp and almost pulled it over on top of himself. And Sophie was into everything, constantly having to be distracted away from one disaster or another as she explored the room in detail.

  Michael looked around that room now, too weary to even care that it was no longer the neat and tidy haven he had left this morning but now looked as if two mini tornadoes had swept through it.

  ‘I really will finish tidying up in here in a minute,’ Eva promised as she obviously saw his grimace.

  ‘As I said, it will keep,’ Michael dismissed. ‘Is caring for babies always this...frenetic?’

  She smiled ruefully. ‘Today was a good day.’

  Michael frowned as he recalled the chaos in the restaurant earlier today, the need to constantly pry little fingers away from danger since they had returned to the apartment, the coaxing necessary to get the twins to calm down enough to eat their tea, the splashing and squealing at bath time before the babies were placed clean and angelic-looking into their cots, both children having drifted off to sleep as Eva sang to them.

  He gave a shake of his head. ‘How have you managed on your own all these months?’ This evening had been so chaotic he was seriously questioning his suspicions that Eva Foster was a gold-digger; surely no woman would willingly put herself through three months like the day he’d just spent with the twins if she didn’t love them intensely!

  She slipped off her shoes before tucking her legs up beneath her on the sofa. ‘If you remember, I didn’t have any choice in the matter.’

  No, she hadn’t, Michael acknowledged. With no parents, her sister also dead, and no help forthcoming from the father of the twins, there had only been Eva left to care for her niece and nephew. Michael was exhausted after spending only a few hours with them, and he hadn’t been their main carer, just helping out occasionally when Eva obviously hadn’t had enough hands to deal with them both at once.

  How would Michael have coped in the same circumstances?

  It was different for him, of course. He could afford to hire a nanny for the twins, two, if necessary. Eva, on the other hand, had not only lost her beloved sister three months ago, but she had also been left with the sole care of the twins, and obviously didn’t have the money to pay for a single nanny to care for the babies, let alone two. Any more than she had enough money to pay for child-minders while she continued with her career. Whatever that career was...

  And the strain of that had taken its toll, he realised as he looked across to where Eva now sat with her head leaning back against the sofa. Her eyes were closed, that ebony hair falling silkily onto the cream sofa cushions.

  There were deep shadows beneath her closed lids, hollows in the paleness of her cheeks. Her face was all sharp angles, the skin stretched taut across high cheekbones, as if she had recently lost weight. Just as the clothes she had changed into after putting the babies to bed, a pale lemon T-shirt and black denims, seemed slightly loose on her slender frame.

  If Eva really was a fortune-hunter then surely she would have sought out the twins’ father—be it Rafe or some other man—much sooner than this? She certainly wouldn’t have put herself through the hellish months of trying to cope with her sister’s children on her own.

  That was unfair. Eva hadn’t just tried to cope; she had succeeded!

  Until it had all become too much for her. Which was when she had decided to seek out the help of the father of the twins...

  A man she claimed was his brother Rafe.

  Michael still had a problem believing that.

  Because he didn’t want to believe it, because of the complications it would cause in Rafe’s life, in all their lives? Or because that was what Michael really believed?

  Hell if he knew any more.

  He did know that Eva believed it.

  Just as he knew, by the way her whole body had now gone lax, the glass almost slipping from between her fingers, that Eva had fallen asleep!

  Michael rose quickly to his feet to gently pluck the glass from her fingers before it fell to the carpeted floor and woke her up. He placed it gently down on the coffee table beside her before moving quietly about the room turning off most of the lamps, leaving only the Venetian lamp in the corner to cast a warm green glow over the room.

  It was the perfect time for him to go to his bedroom and change out of his wet shirt—again—but he paused beside Eva for several seconds before doing so, frowning darkly as he looked down at her. She looked very young and vulnerable without that fierce pride glittering in those violet-coloured eyes and the defensive and angry flush to
her cheeks, the stubborn set to her mouth, and the determined thrust to her pointed chin.

  Eva had said this morning that she was in her mid-twenties. And already burdened down with two small babies that weren’t even her own—although Michael now thought Eva might take exception to him using that phrase in reference to her custody of the twins she so obviously adored!

  As she seemed to take exception to a lot of the things he had said to her today.

  His previously well-ordered life was now in chaos, his workday totally destroyed, his apartment now invaded by three interlopers.

  Because, until he had spoken to Rafe, Michael dared not do anything else but make sure this young woman stayed exactly where he could see her. No matter what the inconvenience or discomfort to himself.

  And that was all without adding in the fact that Michael found himself unaccountably drawn to her, physically aroused by her, and in such a way that he knew having Eva’s presence in his apartment for the next week or so, even with the twins as chaperones, was also going to play hell with his self-control...

  She was light to his dark. Softness to his hardness. Warmth to his coldness. Laughter to his grimness.

  In a word, Eva Foster was dangerous...

  * * *

  Eva woke slowly, momentarily disorientated as she stretched before opening her eyes to look about the unfamiliar and elegantly appointed room, taking several seconds to remember exactly where she was and why. And with whom.

  Michael D’Angelo...

  All six feet plus dark and broodingly disturbing inches of him!

  Which posed the question, where was he?

  Quickly followed by the realisation that she had fallen asleep without plugging in and turning on the vitally important baby monitor that would allow her to hear the twins cry out if they needed her.

  Eva swung her legs quickly to the floor before sitting up abruptly, her head swimming slightly with the suddenness of the movement.

  ‘Relax, Eva, the babies are both fine.’