by Lynne Graham
In many ways after a very fraught and unhappy pregnancy Elyssa’s actual birth had restored Merry to startling life and vigour. Before that day, it had not once occurred to her that her daughter’s arrival would transform her outlook and fill her to overflowing with an unconditional love unlike anything she had ever felt before. Nowadays she recognised the truth: there was nothing she would not do for Elyssa.
A light knock sounded on the back door, announcing Sybil’s casual entrance into the kitchen at the rear of the cottage. ‘I’ll put on the kettle...time for a brew,’ she said cheerfully, a tall, rangy blonde nearing sixty but still defiantly beautiful, as befitted a woman who had been an international supermodel in the eighties.
Sybil had been Merry’s role model from an early age. Her mother, Natalie, had married when Merry was sixteen and emigrated to Australia with her husband, leaving her teenaged daughter in her sister’s care. Sybil and Merry were much closer than Merry had ever been with her birth mother but Sybil remained very attached to her once feckless kid sister. The sanctuary had been built by her aunt on the proceeds of the modelling career she had abandoned as soon as she had made enough money to devote her days to looking after homeless dogs.
In the later stages of her pregnancy, Merry had worked at the centre doing whatever was required and had lived with her aunt in her trendy barn conversion, but at the same time Merry had been carefully making plans for a more independent future. A qualified accountant, she had started up a small home business doing accounts for local traders and she had a good enough income now to run a car, while also insisting on paying a viable rent to Sybil for her use of the cottage at the gates of the rescue centre. The cottage was small and old-fashioned but it had two bedrooms and a little garden and perfectly matched Merry and Elyssa’s current needs.
In fact, Sybil Armstrong was a rock of unchanging affection and security in Merry’s life. Merry’s mother, Natalie, had fallen pregnant with her during an affair with her married employer. Only nineteen at the time, Natalie had quickly proved ill-suited to the trials of single parenthood. Right from the start, Sybil had regularly swooped in as a weekend babysitter, wafting Merry back to her country home to leave her kid sister free to go out clubbing.
Natalie’s bedroom door had revolved around a long succession of unsuitable men. There had been violent men, drunk men, men who took drugs and men who stole Natalie’s money and refused to earn their own. By the time she was five years old, Merry had assumed all mothers brought different men home every week. In such an unstable household where fights and substance abuse were endemic she had missed a lot of school, and when social workers had threatened to take Merry into care, once again her aunt had stepped in to take charge.
For nine glorious years, Merry had lived solely with Sybil, catching up with her schoolwork, learning to be a child again, no longer expected to cook and clean for her unreliable mother, no longer required to hide in her bedroom while the adults downstairs screamed so loudly at each other that the neighbours called the police. Almost inevitably that phase of security with Sybil had ended when Natalie had made yet another fresh start and demanded the return of her daughter.
It hadn’t worked, of course it hadn’t, because Natalie had grown too accustomed to her freedom by then, and instead of finding in Merry the convenient little best friend she had expected she had been met with a daughter with whom she had nothing in common. By the time Keith, who was younger than Natalie, had entered her life, the writing had been on the wall. Keen to return to Australia and take Natalie with him, he had been frank about his reluctance to take on a paternal role while still in his twenties. Merry had moved back in with Sybil and had not seen her mother since her departure.
* * *
‘Did I see the postman?’ Sybil asked casually.
Merry stiffened and flushed, thinking guiltily of that envelope stuffed in the hall table. ‘I bought something for Elyssa online,’ she fibbed in shame, but there was just no way she could admit to a woman as gutsy as Sybil that a letter could frighten and distress her.
‘No further communication from He Who Must Not Be Named?’ Sybil fished, disconcerting her niece with that leading question, for lately her aunt had been very quiet on that topic.
‘Evidently we’re having a bit of a break from the drama right now, which is really nice,’ Merry mumbled, shamefacedly tucking teabags into the mugs while Sybil lifted her great-niece off the rug and cuddled her before sitting down again with the baby cradled on her lap.
‘Don’t even think about him.’
‘I don’t,’ Merry lied yet again, a current of self-loathing assailing her because only a complete fool would waste time thinking about a man who had mistreated her. But then, really, what would Sybil understand about that? As a staggeringly beautiful and famous young woman, Sybil had had to beat adoring men off with sticks but had simply never met one she wanted to settle down with. Merry doubted that any man had ever disrespected Sybil and lived to tell the tale.
‘He’ll get his comeuppance some day,’ Sybil forecast. ‘Everyone does. What goes around comes around.’
‘But it bothers me that I hate him so much,’ Merry confided in a rush half under her breath. ‘I’ve never been a hater before.’
‘You’re still hurting. Now that you’re starting to date again, those bad memories will soon sink into the past.’
An unexpected smile lit Merry’s heart-shaped face at the prospect of the afternoon out she was having the following day. As a veterinary surgeon, Fergus Wickham made regular visits to the rescue centre. He had first met Merry when she was offputtingly pregnant, only evidently it had not put him off, it had merely made him bide his time until her daughter was born and she was more likely to be receptive to an approach.
She liked Fergus, she enjoyed his company, she reminded herself doggedly. He didn’t give her butterflies in her tummy, though, or make her long for his mouth, she conceded guiltily, but then how important were such physical feelings in the overall scheme of things? Angel’s sexual allure had been the health equivalent of a lethal snakebite, pulling her in only to poison her. Beautiful but deadly. Dear heaven, she hated him, she acknowledged, rigid with the seething trapped emotion that sent her memory flying inexorably back sixteen months...
CHAPTER TWO
MERRY WAS FULL of enthusiasm when she started her first job even though it wasn’t her dream job by any stretch of the imagination. Having left university with a first-class honours degree in accountancy and business, she had no intention of settling permanently into being a front-desk receptionist at Valtinos Enterprises.
Even so, she had badly needed paid employment and the long recruitment process involved in graduate job applications had ensured that she was forced to depend on Sybil’s generosity for more months than she cared to count. Sybil had already supported Merry through her years as a student, helping her out with handy vacation jobs at the rescue centre while always providing her with a comfortable home to come back to for weekends and holidays.
Her job at Valtinos Enterprises was Merry’s first step towards true independence. The work paid well and gave her the breathing space in which to look for a more suitable position, while also enabling her to base herself in London without relying on her aunt’s financial help. She had moved into a room in a grotty apartment and started work at VE with such high hopes.
And on her first day Angel strode out of the lift and her breath shorted out in her chest as though she had been punched. He had luxuriant black curls that always looked messy and that lean, darkly beautiful face of his had been crafted by a creative genius with exotic high cheekbones, a narrow, straight nose and eyes the colour of liquid honey. Eyes that she had only very much later discovered could turn as hard and cutting as black diamonds.
‘You’re new,’ he commented, treating her to the kind of lingering appraisal that made her feel hot all over.
‘This is my first day, Mr Valtinos,’ she confided.
‘Don’t waste your sm
iles there,’ her co-worker on the desk whispered snidely as Angel walked into his office. ‘He doesn’t flirt with employees. In fact the word is that he’s fired a couple of his PAs for getting too personal with him.’
‘I’m not interested,’ Merry countered with amusement, and indeed when it came to men she rarely was.
Growing up watching her mother continually search for the man of her dreams while ignoring everything else life had to offer had scared Merry. Having survived her unsettled childhood, she set a high value on security and she was keen to establish her own accountancy firm. She didn’t take risks...ever. In fact she was the most risk-averse person she had ever met.
That innate caution had kept her working so hard at university that she had taken little part in the social whirl. There had been occasional boyfriends but none she had cared to invite into her bed. Not only had she never felt passion, but she had also never suffered from her mother’s blazing infatuations. Watching relationships around her take off and then fail in an invariably nasty ending that smashed friendships and caused pain and resentment had turned Merry off even more. She liked a calm, tidy life, a quiet life, which in no way explained how she could ever have become intimate with a male as volatile as Angel, she acknowledged with lingering bewilderment.
But it was the truth, the absolute truth, that on paper she and Angel were a horrendous match. Angel was off-the-charts volatile with a volcanic hot temper that erupted every time someone did or said something he considered stupid. He wasn’t tolerant or easy to deal with. In the first weeks of her employment she regularly saw members of his personal staff race out of his office as though they had wings on their feet, their pale faces stamped with stress and trepidation. He was very impatient and equally demanding. He might resemble a supermodel in his fabulously sophisticated designer suits, but he had the temperament of a tyrant and an overachiever’s appetite for work and success. The only thing she admired about him in those initial weeks was his cleverness.
Serving coffee in the boardroom, she heard him dissect entire arguments with a handful of well-chosen words. She noticed that people listened when he spoke and admired his intellect while competing to please and impress him. Occasionally beautiful shapely blondes would drift in to meet him for lunch, women of a definite type, the artificial socialite type, seemingly chosen only for their enviable faces and figures and their ability to look at him with stunned appreciation. Those who arrived without an invite didn’t even get across the threshold of his office. He treated women like casual amusements and discarded them as soon as he got bored, and the procession of constantly changing faces made it obvious that he got bored very quickly and easily.
In short, nothing about Angel Valtinos should have attracted Merry. He shamelessly flaunted almost every flaw she disliked in a man. He was a selfish, hubristic, oversexed workaholic, spoiled by a life of luxury and the target of more admiration and attention than was good for him.
But even after six weeks in his radius, dredging her eyes off Angel when he was within view had proved impossible. He commanded a room simply by walking into it. Even his voice was dark, deep and smoulderingly charismatic. Once a woman heard that slumberous accented drawl she just had to turn her head and look. His dynamic personality suffused his London headquarters like an energy bolt while his mercurial moods kept his employees on edge and eager to please. Valtinos Enterprises felt dead and flat when he was abroad.
When one of Angel’s personal assistants left and the position was offered internally, Merry applied, keen to climb the ladder. Angel summoned her to his office to study her with frowning dark golden eyes. ‘Why is a candidate with your skills working on Reception?’ he demanded impatiently.
‘It was the first job I was offered,’ Merry admitted, brushing her damp palms down over her skirt. ‘I was planning to move on.’
Rising to his feet, making her uneasily aware of his height, he extended a slim file. ‘Find somewhere quiet to work. You’re off Reception for the morning. Check out this business and provide me with an accurate assessment of its financial history and current performance. If you do it well, I’ll interview you this afternoon.’
That afternoon, he settled the file back on the desk and surveyed her, his wide, sensual mouth compressing. ‘You did very well but you’re a little too cautious in your forecasts. I enjoy risk,’ he imparted, watching with amusement as she frowned in surprise at that admission. ‘You’ve got the job. I hope you can take the heat. Not everyone can.’
‘If you shout at me, I’ll probably shout back,’ Merry warned him warily.
And an appreciative grin slashed his shapely lips, making him so powerfully attractive that for a split second she simply stared, unable to look away. ‘You may just work out very well.’
So began the most exciting phase of Merry’s working life. Merry was the most junior member of Angel’s personal staff but the one he always entrusted with figures. Sybil was thrilled by the promotion her niece had won but would have been horrified by the long hours Merry worked and the amount of responsibility she carried.
‘The boss has got the hots for you,’ one of her male co-workers told her with amusement when she had been two months in the job. ‘Obviously you have something all those long tall blondes he parades through here don’t, because he’s always watching you.’
‘I haven’t noticed anything,’ she said firmly, reluctant to let that kind of comment go unchallenged.
But even as she spoke she knew she was very carefully impersonal and unobtrusive in Angel’s vicinity because she was conscious of him in a way she had not been conscious of a man before. If she was foolish enough to risk a head-on collision with his spectacular liquid honey eyes, her tummy somersaulted, her mouth dried and she couldn’t catch her breath. Feeling like that mortified her. She knew it was attraction and she didn’t like it, not only because he was her boss, but also because it made her feel out of control.
And then fate took a hand when Merry firmly believed that neither of them would ever have made any sort of a move. A highly contagious flu virus had decimated the staff and as his employees fell by the wayside Merry found herself increasingly exposed to working alone with Angel. At the office late one evening, he offered her a drink and a ride home. She said no thanks to the drink, deeming it unwise, and yes to the ride because it would get her home faster.
In the lift on the way down to the underground car park, Angel studied her with smouldering dark golden eyes. She felt dizzy and hot, as if her clothes were shrink-wrapped to her skin, preventing her from normal breathing. He lifted a long-fingered brown hand and traced his fingertips along the full curve of her lower lip in a caress that left her trembling, and then, as though some invisible line of restraint had snapped inside him, he crushed her back against the mirrored wall and kissed her, hungrily, feverishly, wildly with the kind of passion she was defenceless against.
‘Come home with me,’ he urged in a raw undertone as she struggled to pull herself back together while the lift doors stood open beside them.
Her flushed face froze. ‘Absolutely not. We made a mistake. Let’s forget about it.’
‘That’s not always possible,’ Angel breathed thickly. ‘I’ve been trying to forget about the way you make me feel for weeks.’
Disconcerted by that blunt admission as he stepped out of the lift, Merry muttered dismissively, ‘That’s just sex. Ignore it.’
Angel stared back at her in wonderment. ‘Ignore it?’
As the lift doors began to close with her still inside it, he reached in and held them open. ‘Come on.’
‘I’ll get the Tube as usual.’
‘Don’t be childish,’ Angel ground out. ‘I am fully in control.’
Merry wasn’t convinced, remembering that mad, exciting grab and the slam of her body back against the lift wall, but that instant of hesitation was her undoing because without hesitation Angel closed a hand over hers and pulled her out of the lift. ‘I’ll drop you home.’
‘T
here are boundaries that shouldn’t be crossed,’ she told him with precision on the way to his car.
‘Don’t preach at me,’ Angel sliced back in a driven undertone. ‘I don’t have a history of making moves on my staff. You are a one-off.’
‘And it won’t happen again now that we’re both on our guard so let’s forget about it,’ Merry counselled, sliding breathlessly into a long silver low-slung bullet of a vehicle that she suspected was worth many times more than her annual salary. ‘I prevented you from making a mistake.’
‘You’re preaching again,’ Angel derided. ‘If I hadn’t stopped kissing you we’d still be in the lift!’
‘No. I would’ve pushed you away,’ she insisted with cool assurance.
She gave him her address, although he didn’t seem to need it, and the journey through heavy traffic was silent, tense and unnerving. He pulled up at the kerb outside the ugly building where she lived. ‘You could afford to live in a better area than this,’ he censured.
‘I have a healthy savings account,’ she told him with pride, releasing her seat belt at the same time as he reached for her again.
His wide sensual mouth crushed hers with burning hunger and no small amount of frustration. Her whole body leapt as though he had punched a button detonating something deep down inside her, releasing a hot surge of tingling awareness in her pelvis that made her hips squirm and her nipples pinch painfully tight.
Angel lifted his tousled dark head. ‘I’m still waiting on you pushing me away. You’re all talk and no action,’ he condemned.
‘I don’t think you’d appreciate a slap,’ Merry framed frigidly, her face burning with mortification.
‘If it meant that you ditched the icy control I’d be begging for it,’ Angel husked suggestively, soft and low, the growl of his accent shaking her up.
Merry launched out of his sports car as though jet-propelled, uncharacteristically flustered and shaken that she had failed to live up to her own very high principles on acceptable behaviour. She should’ve pushed him away, slapped him, thumped him if necessary to drive her message home. Nothing less would cool his heels. He was a highly competitive, aggressive male, who viewed defeat as an ongoing challenge.
