by Lynne Graham
It had happened. Wishing it hadn’t would change nothing. Angelo had not realised that he was her first lover and she was ferociously grateful for the fact. She could not have borne the humiliation of Angelo knowing that he had proved to be the one male the Iceberg found irresistible. Better that Angelo should think that he was no more special than any other man her name had been linked with...as it was, Angelo looked so bloody triumphant that her teeth ground together.
‘I need a shower,’ she said abruptly, and viewed him expectantly.
‘With company,’ Angelo attached smoothly, viewing her with brilliant dark eyes that devoured.
She lowered her lashes in shock. Every bone and muscle in her body ached. He was an insatiable lover but she had naturally assumed that he was currently at bay. He had actually woken her up and fed her to sustain her through another session of torrid sex. Her stomach quivered with nausea. ‘Forget it,’ she said tartly.
‘I can’t,’ Angelo confided in a husky murmur. ‘I let you sleep as long as I could but I can’t forget that in a few hours we’ll be on separate flights back to London.’
She had forgotten that. The reminder was timely and she embraced it with enormous relief. It was over. She could live with that. It was over and she could return home and, if not forget it had ever happened, at least forgive herself. Her sexual infatuation had been exorcised, she told herself. She had surrendered once to her basic instincts and now, she was effectively cured and free...
‘And there we must necessarily practise greater discretion,’ Angelo pointed out silkily but she could hear the cool menace of steel in the assurance. ‘Your mother would be needlessly distressed by our affair.’
‘We’re not having an affair,’ Kelda told him in a stifled undertone of distaste as she reached for her robe, thrust her arms into it and sprang off the bed.
Angelo closed a lean hand on her wrist before she could brush past him. ‘Perhaps you’d like to tell me what we are having?’
‘In the future...nothing,’ she spelt out, emerald eyes colliding furiously with impassive gold. ‘What we had? A one-night stand. A little tacky, a little foolish, but that’s all.’
Beautifully shaped brown fingers moved caressingly on the tender skin above her wrist. ‘I have never had a one-night stand in my life.’
‘I find that very hard to credit!’
‘I expect you would, cara,’ Angelo held her fast when she attempted to coolly pull free, ‘since tacky little foolish experiences undoubtedly litter your past,’ he incised with succinct derision, watching the blossoming of pink highlight her exquisite face. ‘But I do not intend to feature on such a list.’
Kelda was trembling with rage. She yanked her arm free. ‘Sorry, caro...you’re already on it,’ she spelt out like a spitting cat.
‘Are you scared?’ Angelo drawled lethally. ‘Are you scared of the response you give me?’
She could still feel his fingerprints on her skin. Her mouth felt swollen, her breasts tender, her body almost frighteningly alien to her. And she looked at him and her chest went tight. Angelo emanated power in a forcefield of energy. He was one hundred per cent in control. Nothing she had yet said had even angered him.
‘Why should I be?’ She blessed the mask of indifference she had learnt to assume on demand for the camera, for deep down inside she was sick and squirming at the necessity of the hard-bitten act he was forcing her to assume. ‘Did you think you were somehow different from the others, Angelo? Do you think I gave you something more than I gave them? That’s your ego talking,’ she asserted with a scornful little smile on her wide, generous mouth. ‘You’re good...but you’re not so good that I want to repeat the experience.’
He had gone white beneath his naturally dark complexion. Hooded eyes of black ice surveyed her and every nerve-cell in her quivering body tensed. Raw threat had tasted the atmosphere. Every scrap of playfulness had been wiped from his clenched, hard features. She could feel the violence in him. Inches below the civilised veneer dwelt the naked predator as wild as any animal, and she had always known that, known that Angelo’s savage self-discipline and seething intelligence alone controlled that side of his temperament.
She had called up the devil in him, but he had given her no choice. Better to deal with Angelo as the hostile enemy she knew best than as the passionate lover he had proved to be. That Angelo she did not feel equipped to deal with. She stood her ground, hanging on to her faintly amused smile with rigorous determination. It was over now. He would leave her alone. Angelo, chased by her sex practically from the edge of the cradle, would not continue his pursuit in receipt of such a scathing rejection.
‘Have you anything else to add?’ His wine-dark voice trickled like the gypsy’s curse down her taut spinal cord.
‘Angelo,’ she sighed, shrugging a shoulder, ‘you know what I’m like. I like variety—’
‘You’re a whore,’ he breathed in a raking undertone of suppressed and seething rage. ‘You disgust me.’
Disturbingly, the brutal admission stabbed like a knife into her. A sudden haze of moisture interrupted her vision of him, brightening her green eyes to luminescence. But she stared him down, only dimly registering that she was shaking all over, her legs like cotton wool supports.
‘And to think that you excited me so much that I took no precautions,’ Angelo drawled between gritted teeth, shooting her a look of such savage loathing that she was pinned there like a butterfly to a specimen board. ‘I hope I do not live to regret the omission.’
As the door slammed on his exit, Kelda stared at the space where he had been with stunned eyes and parted lips. He had said...he had said he had not used contraception and he was afraid that he might live to regret it! Kelda was ingloriously sick in the bathroom, her body’s response to the horrendous scene she had forced. Only then did the tears come, slow and painful as thorns being plucked from her flesh, and what was worst was that she really didn’t know why she was crying.
CHAPTER SIX
‘WE’RE dining with Tomaso and Daisy this evening...’
Kelda threw her head up from the English newspaper she had been doggedly studying. Her fiery mane of curls flew in all directions. ‘I beg your pardon?’
Angelo dealt her a look of black-ice warning. ‘I said that I would bring you with me—’
‘An ambitious guy, aren’t you?’ Kelda snaked back at him, her eyes awash with disbelief behind the screen of her dark glasses. She had had to force herself to come down and join him for breakfast. He would have read a request for a tray in her room as weakness. Since she had been unforgivably weak in other departments, she could not fall short of her own expectations yet again. For that reason, she was seated here in the courtyard, struggling to swallow food that threatened to choke her and make no pointless comment concerning the passport and wallet which she had discovered by her plate.
‘I have no intention of permitting the conflict between us to damage their relationship—’
‘And when was this cosy little arrangement made?’ Kelda breathed shakily.
‘Before you left London. Your mother said that you wouldn’t come—’
‘She was right!’
‘I said that you would...and you will,’ Angelo swore with an emphasis that was disturbingly chilling. ‘We will arrive together and we will leave together. We will be polite and pleasant to each other in their company—’
‘Bloody hell!’ Kelda gasped inelegantly, too disconcerted by this unlikely vision to conceal her reaction.
‘Polite and pleasant,’ Angelo repeated drily. ‘Your mother’s fears will then be put to rest. Your feelings will cease to be a matter of concern to her—’
‘I’m not playing happy families for your benefit!’ Kelda bit out.
Dear lord, she was thinking sickly, he had planned the evening even before she’d arrived in Italy. He had promised her mother what must have seemed the impossible and he had never doubted that he could deliver. Her blood ran cold.
‘Y
our life will be a living hell if you don’t, I promise you that.’
The husky deepening of his rich vowel sounds made the hair prickle at the nape of her neck. Accidentally she clashed with hard dark eyes, bottomless as a well shaft to the unwary. Her sensitive stomach turned over. She bent her head. She would have gone, no matter what he did or said. But Angelo would never believe that. He seemed to think that she had a malicious need to damage their parents’ relationship.
Yet without even realising it, she had come to terms with that renewed bond. Once again, Daisy had unfairly dropped the news on her without any prior warning of what was to come. It had been rather like a ghastly re-run of the bridal couple’s visit to her school all those years ago. And Kelda was uncomfortably aware that she had reacted with no more maturity this time than she had then.
But once the shock of Daisy’s announcement had worn off, Kelda had accepted that her response had been entirely selfish. She had upset her mother. She had focused, not on her mother’s potential happiness, but on her own determination not to be forced into contact with Angelo again. That admitted, however, Angelo had merely exacerbated the situation by launching straight into attack that night at her apartment. After all, she reflected bitterly, Angelo had had three months, not twenty-four hours to adjust to their parents’ reconciliation.
‘Is that understood?’ Angelo probed.
She bit her tongue and tasted blood. It tasted of defeat. ‘Yes!’ she slung the word at him. ‘But your interference was unnecessary.’
‘The car will be here to pick us up in half an hour.’
Her throat closing over, she took the dismissal with head held high, but she seethed with such a turmoil of emotion that she marvelled she didn’t just explode. Messily, loudly, stupidly. Perhaps, at last, she was learning. Impulse and temper, her two biggest failings, invariably got her into trouble around Angelo. Angelo rejoiced in being neither impulsive nor uncontrolled, and that, she registered painfully, was why Angelo was in the ascendant.
When would she start feeling better? When? Because right now...right now, she felt worse than she had last night and that was saying something! She had not slept. She had paced the floor. She had cried. Coming to philosophical terms with the fact that she had gone to bed with Angelo was proving far more difficult than she had hoped. His powerful sexuality had been her downfall. She wasn’t the only woman to make such a mistake in the heat of passion...and she wouldn’t be the last. But for how long was she to feel guilty, ashamed, miserable? And why should she feel soiled by the promiscuous pretence she had put on for his benefit?
Hadn’t she only given him what he expected? Angelo despised her. But that hadn’t prevented him from using her in the most vicious way of all. Her own wanton sensuality had been his weapon of destruction. She would not allow him to wield that weapon ever again. It was finished, over. One day of insanity. It had taught her a hard lesson. Surely there would be no further complications?
It wasn’t that easy to get pregnant...was it? She was not some silly teenager...but she had acted as recklessly as one. Angelo had clearly assumed that she was on the contraceptive pill. Angelo, she thought hysterically, had been more concerned at the threat of having caught some dread disease. From a virgin. And he hadn’t noticed. She had once read that men often couldn’t tell the difference.
She never spoke a word the whole way to the airport in the limousine. Like a stretcher case, she was in limbo. But she could literally feel Angelo’s presence. The atmosphere vibrated round Angelo. Always. Utterly different from his father, he had volcanic energy and equally volcanic moods. But here in Italy she had seen a side of Angelo that she had never known existed.
Angelo, flirtatious, teasing, infuriating. Angelo, passionate, irresistible, even sympathetic. As a teenager, she had not understood that, below the surface ice, Angelo absolutely seethed and burned with emotion. Then he had seemed merely grim, forbidding and sarcastic. Now, she was painfully conscious of the scorching atmospheric undertones.
‘I’ll pick you up at seven tonight,’ he drawled.
Climbing out, she simply ignored him.
‘Kelda...?’
As she waited for the chauffeur to extract her case, a hand like an iron vice suddenly hooked on to her shoulder. Before she could react, she was flattened up against the side of the limousine with Angelo’s hard, muscular body plastered to hes. He took her mouth in an unrestrained demonstration of sexual aggression. But she still caught fire and burned. Aware of every lithe line of his powerful body, she could feel the force of his own arousal, and that made her knees buckle.
She felt his fingers brush the back of her neck and she didn’t realise what he was doing until he stepped back with the necklace in his hand. She blinked in bemusement. She had actually forgotten that she was still wearing it. He dropped the glittering emeralds into her palm and closed her unsteady fingers round them.
‘Seven,’ he said again. ‘Or would you like me to come earlier?’
She scraped herself almost clumsily off the car, all the while helplessly hypnotised by the scorching hunger, blatantly burnishing his golden eyes. That hunger pulled hot strings inside her. Oxygen snarled up in her convulsed throat. It was the excitement that frightened her the most. The most incredible, explosive excitement that thrummed and throbbed between them in waves of heat.
‘Dio,’ Angelo sighed in a tigerish growl of dissatisfaction. ‘I have a meeting at four.’
‘I disgust you,’ Kelda reminded him shakily.
‘When I’m out of bed. In it, you drive me crazy,’ Angelo dropped in a sizzling purr and swinging on his heel, he walked away.
Unnoticed by either of them, a photographer, standing on the far side of the car park, lowered his camera with a satisfied smile.
On her commercial flight, she thought of his far more comfortable journey in his private jet. Like a married man with a mistress, he was covering their tracks. But she had no intention of becoming Angelo’s mistress and it was a shock to appreciate that her little performance the night before had not killed that ambition of his stone-dead. That utterly ridiculous ambition. If he hadn’t taken her so much by surprise in that car park, she would have pushed him away, she told herself.
There was a promising call on her answering machine from the estate agent when she got back. A cash offer for her apartment and more than she had expected to receive. When she went straight back out again to see the agent, she was even more pleased to hear that the buyer was interested in purchasing most of her furniture as well. She would be moving to a rented apartment and she didn’t want the cost of storage.
‘There shouldn’t be any problem,’ the agent extolled cheerfully. ‘He’s a Swiss executive, buying on behalf of his company, and fortunately for you he particularly liked the location of your apartment. They want possession by the end of the month. Get round to your solicitor and sign on the dotted line as soon as possible...before the guy realises that he could have got a better deal elsewhere.’
She went straight away and it cost her a pang or two of regret. Owning her own apartment had symbolised success. Selling it underlined how much Danny Philips’ lies had cost her. But she was sensible enough to acknowledge that she had aimed rather too high when she had bought, and that if ever she was in the same position again she would be much more modest in her requirements.
The bell went about six when she was in the shower. It was Russ Seadon, the photographer whose talents had first catapulted her to fame. He was engaged to Gina Delfont, another model, who was also Kelda’s closest friend. She often stayed with them when she was working in New York and was happy to return their hospitality whenever she could.
Russ dropped his bag in her guest-room and spent half an hour catching up on all the news before settling down with a pizza in front of the television. Kelda paced her bedroom floor, dreading the evening ahead. Angelo wasn’t going to leave her alone. He wasn’t going to make things that easy for her.
And she was out of her depth w
ith Angelo. When he touched her, intelligence went out of the window, and if anything more happened between them she would never forgive herself. He wanted to use her for sexual release alone. Her skin crawled at the awareness of how vulnerable she had become. Somehow Angelo had to be made to walk back out of her life again...but how? What would most anger Angelo?
Absently she winced at the clatter Russ was making in her kitchen and then her furrowed brow cleared. The belief that she had another man in her life would most anger Angelo...and here she was with another man staying under her very roof...
‘You want me to what?’ Russ echoed dazedly ten minutes later.
Kelda’s cheeks were hot with growing embarrassment. ‘Forget it!’ she urged hurriedly. ‘It was a stupid idea—’
Suddenly, Russ laughed. ‘This guy won’t take no for an answer...is that it?’
Kelda nodded. ‘All I want you to do is look at home here, as if you’re waiting up for me,’ she spelt out awkwardly.
‘He’s not likely to get violent, is he?’ Russ checked.
She shook her head and prayed that she was right.
Russ grinned on his way out of the door with her spare key. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll be back in time. I think I’m going to enjoy this!’
Kelda got dressed, selecting a clinging trouser-suit in shocking pink. It had strategic and daring cut-outs and she wore it like a suit of armour, calculated to repel. Angelo’s dainty little blonde women were invariably given to conservative wardrobes.
‘You look like a trapeze artist. It suits you.’ Infuriatingly, Angelo let his lustrous dark eyes travel over her with offensive and blazingly confident familiarity.
Kelda tossed the emerald necklace carelessly into the glove compartment of his Ferrari.
‘Is that some sort of a statement?’ Angelo drawled, lazily unconcerned by the gesture.
