Her Christmas Fantasy & The Winter Bride (32 page)

She got dressed in the
en suite
bathroom and emerged to find that Leo had already gone downstairs. As she descended the staircase, she saw him waiting in the hall. Tall, dark, devastating. Her susceptible heart leapt. There he was, finally wearing a dinner jacket for
her
, and, for an appalled moment, she was honestly afraid that the upsurge of emotion inside her might make her cry.

‘You look breathtaking,' Leo murmured huskily.

‘Yeah, well…you bought the dress.' Angie grimaced to hold the tears back, and surreptitiously sniffed. And demanded the right to take me out of it again, she couldn't help thinking, cheeks warming as she struggled not to mentally anticipate the evening's closing agenda.

Leo burst out laughing.

‘What's so funny?'

He wrapped her into her cashmere coat. ‘It wouldn't translate very well.'

He took her to an extremely smart restaurant. Heads turned and eyes lingered on their entrance. They made a striking couple. A dozen people murmured greetings to Leo, their curiosity about his beautiful blonde companion unconcealed. Leo smiled and nodded in recognition, but he didn't once pause.

‘I gather this is part and parcel of the making-the-relationship-look-normal-and-introducing-me-to-the-public-eye bit,' Angie condemned tightly. ‘Some first date, Leo!'

‘Our first date took place a long time ago. It was a picnic by the lake,' Leo responded silkily. ‘We may not actually have eaten anything out of that hamper until late in the evening,
but it's the one and only date that I've ever had that lasted an entire weekend.'

Face heating at that mortifying reminder, Angie hid behind her menu until a tiny, delicate woven basket of wild flowers was delivered to their table. She blinked in bemusement at the attached card bearing Leo's signature. Where the heck had he got wild flowers in the middle of winter? She found she
had
to ask.

‘I had them flown in from a warmer climate.'

‘Oh…' There had been wild flowers that day by the lake, the scent of the crushed blooms sweet and heady in the hot, still air as she'd lain in his arms… Surely nothing so specific as tender memory could have prompted his gesture?

During the first course, Leo rested bold dark eyes resolutely on her. ‘I planned the whole exercise. I ordered the hamper and then I lay in wait for you, secure in the knowledge that
you
would find
me
.'

Angie very nearly choked on a luscious cube of melon.

Leo poured her a glass of iced water. ‘I have to confess that I didn't have a single decent intention in my head.'

Coughing and spluttering into her napkin, Angie pushed back her plate and snatched at the glass to sip the water and soothe her convulsing throat muscles.

‘And I had to punish you for infiltrating my every sexual fantasy. I was also feeling very guilty. I was seven months out of a marriage which had been a disaster in the bedroom,' Leo continued with devastating candour. ‘And there you were, brazenly ignoring all my keep-off signals, and targeting me with a single-minded tenacity of purpose that was so blatant—'

‘Please don't say any more, Leo,' Angie whispered, verbally on her knees and pleading as she drank down great gulps of iced water, cheeks hot enough to fry eggs on.

‘So unashamed and so
honest
, it was a very powerful draw for me.'

Her brow furrowed as she ran back over that last sentence.

Leo vented a grim laugh of amusement. ‘
Ohi
…no, you didn't realise that, did you? That all the time I was freezing you out on another level I was reluctantly impressed and attracted by your persistence?'

‘It didn't show.' Angie's gaze was riveted to the dark splendour of his, her heartbeat speeding up.

‘I didn't even acknowledge it to myself then,' Leo conceded, his dark, deep drawl husky. ‘But Petrina never wanted me like that. She wasn't capable of that kind of passion. You were, and you seemed to be offering me exactly what I wanted and needed.'

Heated colour blossomed afresh in her cheeks yet she was held fast by the brooding, magnetic intensity of his stare.

An odd little silence fell, thick and heavy. Angie licked nervously at her dry lower lip. Watching her, Leo flinched.

‘Let's get out of here,' he breathed abruptly, a ragged, fevered edge to his voice. ‘It was a cardinal error to start talking about
that
weekend in public!'

In astonishment, she tensed, but Leo was already rising, dark eyes blazing with a sexual hunger he made no attempt to conceal. The
maître d'
surged towards their table. Angie stood up jerkily, her shaken gaze welded to Leo. He snaked a possessive arm around her trembling body and dismissed the older man's concern with an easy, wry reference to an overlooked appointment.

Dimly aware of the rush of curious comment as Leo swept her back outside, Angie's face burned, but she could no more have resisted Leo in that particular mood than she could have resisted the need to draw life-giving air into her lungs.

He signalled to his chauffeur across the street. ‘My flowers, Leo…my flowers!' Angie cried in dismay. ‘I forgot—'

She fell silent as a grinning waiter emerged from the restaurant with the precious little basket. Leo vented an incredulous laugh. ‘But they're useless…they'll be dead in another couple of hours!'

Angie clutched the basket to her as if she was afraid it might be thrust in the nearest waste-paper bin. With a look of rueful amusement and a stifled, husky sound of impatience, Leo pulled her to him without warning and brought his mouth down in hot demand on hers. She went down into that wildly passionate kiss with buckling knees, and stumbled into the car after it in a welter of shell-shocked excitement.

‘Don't come near me,' Leo advised hoarsely as the limo moved off again, street lights glancing over his spectacular bone structure, accentuating the harsh, taut slant of his cheekbones and the golden burn of his smouldering gaze. ‘Not unless you want to be dragged down and ravished right here and now…plundered and pillaged by a male close to the edge.'

Angie shivered convulsively, her body boneless and utterly pliant as she shifted infinitesimally, the pounding pulse beat of desire sending helpless little tremors through her.

Leo gritted something raw in Greek. ‘Don't look at me like that…it doesn't help!'

Dry-mouthed, Angie stared back at him, absorbing the splintering, ferocious tension he emanated.

‘I'd do it… I'm not an English gentleman like my cousin. And I have this feeling that you are going to learn to make love in some very unusual places because sometimes, when I look at you, I think I
can't
wait…not another day, not another hour, not another
second
!' he groaned, and flung his arrogant dark head back, closing his eyes, dense black lashes almost hitting his cheekbones. ‘And knowing that you feel the same way adds a whole new dimension to my agony!'

‘You think I'm wanton, don't you?' Angie prompted chokily.

‘Wanton works wonderfully well for me, Angie,' Leo confided raggedly. ‘In fact, when you fix those huge blue eyes on me, my testosterone count probably hits danger levels. Going from a famine to a feast two and a half years ago was the most unnerving part of the whole experience!'

Unseen by him, Angie was cringing. She was learning a lot, but nothing that made comfortable listening. So the intimate side of his first marriage had been less than satisfactory. If she had ever been able to bring herself to consider that issue, she would have suspected that reality for herself. Leo was a very physical male, tactile, hot-blooded, spontaneous. Petrina had been cool and essentially narcissistic. But it hurt Angie a great deal to accept that all that had ever drawn Leo to her was his sexual frustration, his recognition of her as a willing bed partner likely to satisfy his needs with the minimum of fuss and demands.

‘You were just a silly kid,' Leo breathed with startling abruptness as he lifted his head to look directly at her again, brilliant dark eyes innately shrewd and his accented drawl disturbingly rough. ‘On the outside a woman, but inside one very reckless little girl. But I didn't see that…I didn't even realise you were still a teenager until it was too late.'

Angie had tensed. ‘Didn't you?'

‘I remembered you romping about in the background over the years…but, if you hadn't been so good on a horse, I'd never have noticed you at all,' he admitted bluntly. ‘You were very, very careful not to tell me that you'd just finished school that summer. You talked about the job you were starting in August, but you never admitted that it would be your
first
.'

Angie studied her tightly linked hands, too guilty to meet his gaze. ‘I was a full year older than everyone else in sixth year…I more or less lost the year that my mother died because
I got behind with my work and I had to repeat a year. I wasn't
really
trying to hide my age from you.'

‘Excuse me…you
were
,' Leo countered.

‘I just w-wanted to seem more mature,' Angie protested.

‘Oh, you managed that all right.' His expressive mouth quirked as the chauffeur opened the door beside her, letting in a flood of cool night air.

Angie scrambled out with intense relief. Leo unlocked the front door, thrust it wide. ‘In fact you managed that right up until the magic moment when I realised that I was in bed with a virgin.'

Angie shed her coat and headed for the stairs at speed, escape from the extremely embarrassing nature of the conversation her only ambition.

‘I never would have dreamt that a virgin could be such a polished little temptress,' Leo whispered in her shrinking ear from behind, curving restraining hands round her slim hips when she attempted to take flight. ‘Naturally I'd assumed that you were experienced.'

Temper stirring, Angie broke free of his hold and raced up to the landing. ‘You certainly didn't complain when you found out I wasn't!'

Leo drew level with her, an aggressive strength and poise in his stance, long legs set slightly apart as he gazed down at her. ‘A certain primitive streak in me rejoiced in the knowledge that I was your first lover…but when sanity returned I felt like a complete bastard.'

‘Only you were careful not to feel bad until
after
you'd had what you wanted!' Bitter and accusing chagrin laced her every word. ‘
Theos
…you get one idea in your head and then you stick to it like superglue! There are times when I could quite happily strangle you,' Leo confessed with raw impatience as he reached for her with hands that brooked no refusal and swept
her up into his arms. ‘But that is nothing to what I wanted to do to you when I saw you with Drew! And you smirked at me as if you were a cheap, malicious little—'

Biting off the rest of that wrathful sentence, he swore in Greek at a memory that still evidently whipped him on the raw. His arms tightening round her, he treated her to a grim look of condemnation for that past offence as he strode into his bedroom.

‘I did not smirk…I
didn't
!' Angie gasped furiously. ‘Put me down!'

‘With pleasure…' Leo dropped her down on the well-sprung divan in an inelegant heap of splayed limbs, her hair flying everywhere. ‘It's past time that we had a little plain speaking between us. Not something you excel at,
pethi mou
…but something you will learn to be really, really good at around me!'

‘You think so?' Angie sliced back, clawing her wildly disordered hair off her outraged face.

‘I
know
so. You accused me of ditching you like yesterday's newspaper. You talk and behave as if I took deliberate advantage of your innocence,' Leo launched down at her in an intimidating growl of censure. ‘But we both know that you played a starring role in your own downfall. When a woman throws herself at a man, he sees a sexual invitation, not the opening chapter of a serious affair!'

‘How
dare
you?' Angie was so mad at him, she was shaking.

‘And perhaps you'd care to tell me how I could have continued that affair when everything that had already happened between us was utterly indefensible!' Leo bit out savagely. ‘You were far too young. I was twenty-seven, you were nineteen.'

Angie flung her head back, eyes bright blue chips of fiery scorn. ‘And I was the butler's daughter…let's not forget that!'

Leo shot her a menacing look that would have ground a lesser woman into the dust. ‘Two generations back my family in Greece were fishermen, but I was raised to be proud of my roots. Open your eyes…these days social mobility is everywhere, and highly regarded!'

‘But some of us prefer not to sleep our way to that regard!' Angie told him with a proud toss of her head as she swung her legs towards the edge of the bed.

‘You stay where you are,' Leo told her with a warning flare in his intimidating gaze as he peeled off his dinner jacket in an impatient movement. ‘We will have this out if it takes all night! We both betrayed our respective families' trust that weekend, but at least I acknowledge that I was in the wrong—
when
will you?'

Shaken by that pointed demand, Angie gulped, ‘I did…I do, but—'

Leo sent his jacket sailing across the room onto a chair as if she had given ground on a long-awaited concession. ‘And when you appreciate that you have made a wrong step, do you then say to yourself, “This feels good, so even though it's wrong I'll keep on doing it”?'

Angie got even more flustered. ‘No…but—'

‘There is no
but
,' Leo slotted in fiercely. ‘I did what I believed was right at that moment in time. Since I was not prepared to make a proper commitment to you, I ended it!'