Her Christmas Fantasy & The Winter Bride (28 page)

Both surprised and touched by the request, Angie watched her father and her son walk off hand in hand, and marvelled that her parent had not yet asked her a single awkward question. But then perhaps he judged it wisest not to probe too
soon. And he would not be labouring under any misapprehension regarding his grandson's paternity. Angie's cheeks warmed. There had been the most almighty, earth-shattering row when her father had discovered that she'd spent two nights down at the Folly with Leo while he'd been in London with Wallace, staying at the Neville apartment.

Leo's stated hour was almost up. She went upstairs, heading for the Long Gallery where Leo had had his own suite for years. Vibrant Minton majolica ware was displayed in the ornate plaster alcoves. Regency gilt and ebony sofas covered in lemon moire sat at regular intervals below the endless stretch of the mullioned windows. The walls opposite were closely hung with huge family portraits, below which marched an imposing line of marble busts on plinths.

When Angie heard the distant whine of a helicopter, she quickened her steps and in a nerve-racked surge hurried through the main door off the gallery into a part of the house which had until now been forbidden to her. Her father had always held that the family's private rooms were sacrosanct, and she had never dared to take a peek without permission.

She found herself in a very spacious and rather grand sitting room, full of breathtaking early oak furniture and wonderfully comfortable-looking settees and armchairs. According to her father, through the door on the left lay a bedroom, dressing room and bathroom, and through the door on the right lay a room Leo used as an office. She wanted to steal a look beyond both doors, but was terrified of being caught in the act like a nosy schoolgirl.

In fact, terror pretty much encapsulated her entire frame of mind, Angie acknowledged, shamefaced. Leo was so logical, so brutally candid. To ask Leo to understand why she had allowed such a misapprehension to stand…well, it was the equivalent of asking Leo to comprehend madness when he himself was sane.

There was no forewarning of his arrival. The walls were too solid for that. Angie was fiddling with her hair and smoothing down her skirt with moist palms for about the forty-eighth time when the door jerked open. She flinched. Leo thrust it shut behind him with a lean hip while giving Angie the most dazzling smile of raw amusement. That was all she saw—that fantastic smile flashing across his darkly handsome features like blinding sunshine on a wintry day. It transfixed her to the spot, every pulse in her body going crazy in tune to her racing heartbeat.

But then Leo broke the spell of his own enchantment by suddenly tossing the most enormous bouquet of red roses into her startled arms. Wide-eyed and wildly taken aback by that unforeseen development, Angie only just managed to catch them, and only then noticed the silver ice bucket he had had tucked under one arm and which he was now setting down. While Angie watched in sheer, wordless paralysis, Leo withdrew two glasses from a cabinet, popped the cork on the champagne with a noise as loud as a pistol crack and sent the contents foaming expertly down into the waiting glasses.

‘Do you know I've never bought flowers for a woman before? I guess you might have worked that out for yourself when I threw them at you,' he murmured with wry self-mockery. ‘My father always said that the giving of flowers was irredeemably wet, the sole exception to the rule being illness or burial.'

Angie's throat closed over as if a giant hand had squeezed all the life from her vocal cords.

‘We'll dine out tonight,' Leo promised, smouldering dark eyes raking over her slender figure in an explicit look of possession. ‘This was the best I could do at such short notice, and I have to confess that I'm beginning to feel like a randy teenager trying to slyly seduce a daughter under her father's
roof. I will feel much more relaxed about this relationship in London…'

Roses and champagne, Angie reflected, struck dumb by astonishment, her concentration utterly shot by Leo's blazing good humour and the sinking, sick awareness that somewhere along the line—most probably on the phone line—one of them had got their wires very, very badly crossed…

A
NGIE
clasped the glass Leo extended, took a deep swig of champagne to moisten her bone-dry mouth and in excruciating discomfiture muttered, ‘The roses are just beautiful,
really
they are…but I'm afraid you don't understand why—'

‘I understand perfectly.' Helpfully, Leo removed the bouquet she was clutching awkwardly beneath one arm, unbuttoned his well-cut jacket and shrugged indolently free of it. ‘You've made the logical choice.' He sipped his champagne, loosened his tie and discarded it one-handed beneath her arrested gaze. ‘There's no room for you now in Drew's life. At worst, you'd be an embarrassment, at best a temptation he can ill afford. Tally Richardson is his boss's daughter and he's in deep—'

‘That's not what I m-meant, Leo,' Angie interposed in a voice that wobbled in spite of her desperate efforts to keep it steady.

A lean brown hand smoothly detached the glass from her convulsive grip, set it aside with his own. ‘Don't be embarrassed, Angie. We won't ever need to discuss Drew again because I won't bring you to the Court when he's visiting Wallace.'

The tip of her tongue snaked out to lick along her lower lip in a frantic, flickering motion, every inch of her whip-taut with tension. ‘But you've got the wrong idea… When I phoned you, I wasn't—'

‘You're talking too much,
pethi mou
…' His slumbrous gaze
appeared to be welded to the soft pink fullness of her mouth and she ran out of breath completely, her breasts tingling in awareness, a shaft of heat feathering between her trembling thighs. In one slow, powerful movement, Leo reached out and tugged her into his arms. ‘And I am not in the mood to talk right now…what I want is to lay you down on my bed and take you over and over again. Then I will know that there will be
no
going back,' he completed with ragged emphasis.

His hungry mouth plunged down onto hers in a devouringly passionate kiss that almost brought Angie to her knees. As he let his tongue slide deep between her lips in electrifying mimicry of the possession he fully intended to take place, and she felt the hard, restive probe of his arousal pressing against her stomach, Angie was clutched by such a driving, desperate longing to let him do exactly what he liked with her quivering and all too willing body that she gave a muffled moan of agonised self-loathing.

With an unashamed growl of hunger, Leo bent and swept her right off her feet. As he shouldered his sure passage into the bedroom beyond, Angie was seeing whirling lights and beckoning paradise. Her fingers speared caressingly into his thick black hair, palm resting lovingly against one hard cheekbone. She pressed her reddened lips helplessly onto the smooth brown skin below his shirt collar and slowly inhaled the hot, musky scent of him, and then, with an aching shudder of regret, she gasped, ‘Leo…put me down…
please
!'

He settled her down onto the oak four-poster bed. Whipping her legs below her and sitting up on her knees, Angie steadied herself on one of the heavily carved, bulbous posts, guilty blue eyes flying to him as she pushed her tumbled hair off her brow with a shaking hand. ‘You misunderstood me on the phone…'

In the act of moving towards her, Leo stopped dead. Ebony brows drawing together, he scanned the pale, tense triangle of
her face. ‘What could I possibly have misunderstood? Something very private and personal concerning you and me; what else is there but
this
?'

Angie gulped. ‘It's my fault. How could you know what else there was before I told you?'

‘What the hell are you talking about?'

‘You'll be very angry—'

‘I'm already angry,' Leo countered without a second of hesitation. ‘You switch on, you switch off—'

‘This isn't about sex. It's about something much more important—'

‘At this moment
nothing
could be more important!' Leo delivered with an unashamed snarl of all-male frustration, glittering dark eyes communicating his outrage.

‘Leo… Oh, hell, there is just no way to work up to this,' Angie confessed in desperation as she forced herself to meet that fulminating stare. ‘Jake is not Drew's son…Jake is yours.'

The silence held…and held long beyond her expectations. She snatched in a shivering breath. Leo was so still, she might not have spoken. And then his bold, dark features clenched in fierce condemnation. ‘What kind of a sick joke is that?'

Angie flinched. Tears of stress were building up to burn behind her eyes. ‘Ask Drew if you don't believe me,' she advised hoarsely. ‘Before I left, I
told
Drew that I was expecting your baby, and, however much of the truth he might choose to give you, he will at least admit that!'

‘This is outrageous…' Leo glowered at her in disbelief. ‘Drew told me—'

Without warning, temper sparked out of control inside Angie. ‘I don't give a hoot what Drew blasted well told you!' she flung at him in a surge of angry humiliation. ‘I don't have to make excuses or try to explain away your cousin's stupid,
crude lies about me because I had nothing to do with any of that…I wasn't even here!'

Leo had turned very pale beneath his naturally dark skin tone. ‘You are lying…you
have
to be—'

‘Why must I be lying?' Angie broke in, her voice rising even more steeply in pitch. ‘Because you don't like what you're hearing? Well, that's fine by me, Leo…just you go ahead and tell yourself I'm lying and ignore this whole conversation if—'

‘Keep quiet!'
Leo thundered back at her.

Angie jerked, lashes fluttering in shock.

‘Why are you raving at me like a hysteric?' Leo shot at her in wrathful reproof. ‘
Theos
…you think any man would just swallow a story like this when you throw it at him out of the blue? I slept with you two and a half years ago. If you were pregnant, you had ample opportunity to tell me then.'

‘I didn't want to.'

‘And what sort of sense does that make?' His scorching dark eyes were still raw with incredulity. ‘Will you listen to yourself?'

Angie lowered her head, intense mortification engulfing her. ‘I'm sorry that he is yours, I really am but it's not something I can change. Leo,' she muttered in a driven, unsteady plea, ‘what do you see when you look at Jake? He has dark brown eyes, black hair and olive skin—'

‘You said that he'd inherited your mother's colouring.'

‘I lied. My mother was as fair as I am,' Angie mumbled wretchedly.

‘You ran around with Drew and his far from clean-living crowd for many weeks, and half the time he was too drunk to know
what
you were doing!' Leo spelt out with grim emphasis. ‘You think I'm fool enough to be impressed by a child's black hair and brown eyes? Who knows who else you might have slept with during that period?'

Angie's stomach clenched. ‘I think you've said enough.' She unfolded her legs and slid down off the bed, her lower limbs feeling horribly uncoordinated and clumsy. ‘I don't have to take that sort of abuse from anybody.'

Leo closed a lean hand round her forearm before she could sidestep him. ‘I'm not about to apologise for saying out loud what any man might think. That's the way I'm made,' he bit out.

Angie was shaking like a leaf in his hold, but her tear-filled eyes blazed with bitter censure. ‘You were the first man I ever slept with…on what grounds do you base your suspicion that I turned into a tart within weeks of being with you?'

A dark rise of blood fired over the hard slant of Leo's cheekbones.

‘Jake was born eight months and three weeks after that weekend. I have a birth certificate to prove it. He couldn't possibly be anyone else's child.'

‘But we didn't have unprotected sex.'

‘How do you know?' Angie muttered in reluctant challenge of that point, tension suddenly rocketing sky-high within her again.

Leo stared down at her, spiky black lashes low on his piercing dark eyes. ‘You
said
you were on the contraceptive pill. Are you saying that it failed?'

Angie dragged in a slow, shivering breath. ‘No…'

‘Then what are you saying?' Leo enquired intently.

‘I was never on the pill,' Angie said shakily, but she was determined to tell the entire truth. ‘I lied about that too.'

‘You lied…?' Leo echoed not quite steadily as his hand dropped away from her arm.

Angie tore her shamed gaze from his, face scarlet with guilt, heartbeat banging somewhere in the region of her aching throat, and finally nodded in acknowledgement.

‘Why?'
Leo pressed.

Immense weariness flooded Angie. ‘I wanted to get pregnant.'

‘You
wanted
to get pregnant?' Leo repeated in an accented drawl thick with incredulity. He prowled restively away from her like a panther pacing a too small cage, only to swing back again within seconds. ‘You are openly admitting that to me?'

‘Not much point in lying about it now. So you see it's OK to hate me,' Angie conceded chokily.

But Leo wasn't looking at her any more, and a flood of guttural Greek suddenly erupted from him. Before Angie could even catch her breath, Leo strode out of the bedroom at speed, crossed the sitting room beyond and hauled the door onto the Long Gallery open with such raw, physical force that it went slamming back against the wall with a thunderous crash.

‘Leo!' Angie cried, chasing after him. ‘Where are you going?'

Pure rage blazed from Leo's aggressively set features as he spread both incredibly expressive hands in a violent arc. ‘Where do you think?' he slung at her from between clenched white teeth. ‘I'm going to rip Drew apart…I want to slam him up against the nearest wall and beat him into a pulp for lying to me!'

In panic, Angie grabbed his arm. ‘Leo,
no
!'

Leo shook her off his sleeve and powered on down the gallery with long, purposeful strides. ‘I don't care what you did to him…I don't care how infatuated he was…I don't even care that you may well have tried to pass off my child as his to hang onto him!' he vented in a soaring, savage crescendo as he stopped dead to stare back at her where she stood several feet away.

He moved his eloquent hands in raw rebuttal. ‘None of that matters. None of that matters a damn,' he framed hoarsely. ‘But nothing could ever excuse his lies when my child was
at risk… He let you leave this house alone, penniless, and he knew…that sick, selfish, destructive little bastard
knew
that you were carrying my baby, and not only did he not tell me, but he did everything he could to make
sure
that I would have no reason to follow you!'

‘Leo…I did not try to pass off my baby as Drew's when I found out I was pregnant,' Angie protested painfully. ‘Even if I'd been that kind of woman, I couldn't have because Drew and I were never—'

‘
Cristos
…if you hadn't shared yourself between two men in the same family, none of this would ever have happened!' Leo condemned in an onslaught of scorching derision that cut through her like a whip. ‘You played us off one against the other and this is the end result!'

‘That's not fair,' Angie gasped strickenly. ‘I never slept with Drew!'

‘I tell you what is not fair,' Leo responded wrathfully, seeming to ignore that claim, and if possible his dark eyes blistered over her distraught face with even greater contempt and condemnation. ‘What is not fair is what
you
have done to my son…of all of us the only innocent victim involved!'

Every remaining scrap of colour drained from Angie's cheeks and she fell back from him. Like a juggernaut on automatic pilot, Leo powered on towards the main staircase. But Angie was no longer so keen to race after him and save Drew from certain death. She hadn't played Drew and Leo off one against the other…that was an appalling thing to accuse her of! She had been in too much distress over losing Leo and then discovering that she was pregnant to suspect that Drew cherished far from platonic feelings for her.

An angry shout rudely penetrated her fierce preoccupation, and, with a stifled moan, Angie raced for the stairs, got halfway down them and then froze. Down below in the Great Hall Drew had clearly emerged in all innocence from the
morning room, but now he was in definite and hasty retreat. Leo was striding towards him, his dark features set in a mask of savage threat.

‘Do I have to chase you to get you to fight?' Leo flung at him with sizzling scorn.

‘So Angie finally told you… What's the matter with you?' Drew demanded weakly. ‘I did you a favour with that story of mine…and if you'd left well enough alone she'd never have shown her face here again!'

Leo hit Drew with such speed and force that all Angie saw was a blur of motion and then Drew struggling to pick himself up from the floor. Pale as milk and trembling, Angie braced herself on the bannister, her stomach churning.

‘Why are you trying to blame me for the fact that you've landed your embarrassing little mistake back on your own doorstep?' Drew spat resentfully.

Just as Leo raked back at him in Greek, the green baize door at the back of the hall swung noisily open and catapulted Jake into the proceedings. With a squeal of pleasure, Jake hurtled across the floor and flung himself in high excitement at Leo's legs. Drew took swift advantage of that unexpected stay of execution and headed fast towards the front door.

‘I'm off to the airport to pick up Tally…we'll use the town apartment for a night or two,' Drew flung rather nasally over his shoulder.

Leo said nothing. He didn't even look in his cousin's direction. He was staring fixedly down at Jake, his chiselled profile taut and drawn with strain. Impervious to the atmosphere, the toddler continued to bounce impatiently round his feet, holding his arms up high to be lifted. ‘Carry, Leo…carry!' he urged pleadingly.