is one of Mills & Boon’s most popular and bestselling novelists. Her writing was an instant success with readers worldwide. Since her first book, Bittersweet Passion, was published in 1987, she has gone from strength to strength and now has over ninety titles, which have sold more than thirty-five million copies, to her name.

In this special collection, we offer readers a chance to revisit favourite books or enjoy that rare treasure—a book by a favourite writer—they may have missed. In every case, seduction and passion with a gorgeous, irresistible man are guaranteed!

LYNNE GRAHAM was born in Northern Ireland and has been a keen Mills & Boon® reader since her teens. She is very happily married, with an understanding husband who has learned to cook since she started to write! Her five children keep her on her toes. She has a very large dog, which knocks everything over, a very small terrier, which barks a lot, and two cats. When time allows, Lynne is a keen gardener.

USA TODAY Bestselling Author

The Winter Bride
Lynne Graham

www.millsandboon.co.uk

CHAPTER ONE

‘A RISE…YOU’RE ACTUALLY asking us for a rise?’ Claudia looked at the younger woman with shocked and incredulous eyes, much as if the girl had asked for a half-share in the house. ‘I think we’re more than generous as it is. You have your salary as well as free board and lodging, and do please remember that we’re keeping two of you!’

Although Angie was severely embarrassed by that response, she forced herself to continue. ‘I often work six days a week and I baby-sit several nights as well…’

Her persistence fired angry colour in the elegant brunette’s cheeks. ‘I can’t believe that we’re even having this conversation. You do some housework and you mind the children. Why shouldn’t you baby-sit? You have to sit in every night to look after Jake…surely you’re not expecting us to pay extra for what you’d be doing anyway? I don’t know how you can be so ungrateful after all we’ve done for you—’

‘I’m just finding it very hard to make ends meet,’ Angie slotted in tightly, a deep sense of humiliation creeping over her.

‘Well, I’m sure I don’t know what you’re doing with your salary when you have all your bills paid for you,’ her employer retorted very drily. ‘What I do know is that my husband, George, will be extremely shocked when I tell him about this demand of yours.’

‘It wasn’t a demand,’ Angie countered tensely. ‘It was a request.’

‘Request refused, then,’ Claudia told her sharply as she stalked to the kitchen door. ‘I’m very annoyed about this and very disappointed in you, Angie. You have a really cushy job here. Gosh, I wish someone would pay me to stay home and fill the dishwasher! We treat you and Jake like part of our family. We kept you on when you were pregnant…and let me assure you that not one of our friends would even have considered retaining a pregnant and unmarried au pair in their home!’

Angie said nothing. There was nothing more to say unless she was prepared to risk Claudia’s explosive temper and the threat of dismissal. No au pair worked the hours Angie did. But then she wasn’t an au pair even though Claudia persisted in calling her one. She might have come to the Dickson family in that guise, accepting the equivalent of pocket money in place of a salary, but slowly and surely her hours had crept up until she was doing the full-time job of a housekeeper and childminder. At the time she had been so grateful to still have a roof over her head that she had made no objection.

But then she had been very naive when she was pregnant. She had seen the Dicksons as a temporary staging post, had fondly imagined that once she had her baby she would be able to move on to better-paid employment and build up her life again. But piece by piece that confidence had faded once she appreciated the cost of child care and the even greater cost of renting accommodation in a city as expensive as London. Ultimately it had come down to a choice between continuing to work for the Dicksons and moving out to live on welfare.

‘We’ll say no more about this,’ Claudia murmured graciously from the doorway, well aware that silence meant that she had won. ‘Do you think you could start putting the children in the bath now? It is half past six, and they’re so dreadfully noisy when they get over-tired.’

By the time Angie had got the children to bed it was well after eight, and George and Claudia had long since gone out to dine. Six-year-old Sophia and the four-year-old twins, Benedict and Oscar, were lovely children—very rich in material possessions but pretty much starved of parental attention. Their father was a circuit judge, regularly away from home, and their mother a high-powered businesswoman, who only rarely left her office before seven in the evening.

They had a spacious, beautifully furnished home and a Porsche and a Range Rover, but Claudia was so mean with money that she had had a pay meter installed on the gas fire in Angie’s room over the attached garage. Since the room had no central heating, and had originally been cheaply converted only for the purpose of storage space, it was freezing cold in winter.

The doorbell shrilled while Angie was ensuring that the only part of her son exposed to that chilly air was the crown of his dark, curly head. She tucked the duvet round Jake in a rush and hurtled through the door that connected with the bedroom corridor to race downstairs before the bell could go again and wake Sophia, who was a very light sleeper.

Thrusting back the wild tangle of platinum pale hair that had flown round her anxious face, she pressed the intercom. ‘Who is it?’ she asked breathlessly.

‘Angie…?’

In severe shock, Angie fell back from the intercom. Like sand on silk, and splinteringly, shatteringly sexy, the voice had a husky Greek accent that roughened every vowel sound. It had been over two years since she had heard that masculine drawl and recognition filled her with sheer, blind panic.

The doorbell went again in a short, impatient burst.

‘Please don’t do that…you’ll wake the children!’ Angie gasped into the intercom.

‘Angie…open the door,’ Leo drawled flatly.

‘I—I can’t…I’m not allowed to open it when I’m alone in the house at night,’ Angie muttered with feverish relief in telling the truth. ‘I don’t know what you want or how you found me, and I don’t care. Just go away!’

In answer, Leo hit the doorbell again.

With a groan of frustration, Angie flew out into the porch, wrenched back the curtains, undid the bolts and the chain and dragged open the front door.

‘Thank you,’ Leo responded with icy precision.

Poleaxed by his very presence, Angie gaped at him, her pulse thudding wildly at the foot of her throat. ‘You still can’t come in…’

A winged ebony brow lifted with hauteur. ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

Involuntarily, Angie gazed up into eyes the colour of a wild and stormy night, and a shiver of shaken reaction ran through her. Leo Demetrios in the flesh. He was standing close enough to touch on the Dicksons’ doorstep, six feet three inches of daunting sophistication and devastating masculinity. Broad shoulders filled out his superbly cut dinner jacket, perfectly tailored black trousers accentuating lean hips and long, long legs. The overhead security light delineated every carved angle of his savagely handsome features and glinted over his thick blue-black hair, but she still couldn’t believe that he was really, genuinely there in front of her.

‘You can’t come in,’ she said again, running damp palms down over her faded jeans.

‘Angie…I wanna drink…I’m thirsty,’ Sophia mumbled sleepily from the stairs.

Angie jumped and spun round to rush back into the dimly lit hall. ‘Go back to bed and I’ll bring you one up…’

Leo stepped into the porch and quietly closed the door. Angie turned again, giving him a dismayed and pleading look, but she didn’t want to speak to him and alert the sleepy Sophia to the presence of a forbidden visitor. Biting her lip in frantic frustration, she left him there and sped into the kitchen to pour a glass of water and took it upstairs. Claudia and George had only gone out for a quick meal and they might be on their way back even now. They would be absolutely outraged if they found her entertaining a strange man in their home.

Her thoughts in complete turmoil as she struggled to understand why Leo should have sought her out, she settled Sophia and started hurriedly down the stairs again. Mercifully, Leo was still standing in the hall. She wouldn’t have been surprised to find him installed on one of the leather sofas in the drawing room. People ran out red carpets when Leo condescended to visit; they didn’t keep him on the doorstep or leave him to hover in the hall. His hugely successful global electronics empire generated immense wealth, and he wielded formidable power and influence in the business world.

Belatedly encountering Leo’s raking and uninhibited scrutiny of her slender but shapely figure, Angie faltered on the last step of the stairs. His spectacular dark, deep-set eyes smouldered as they skimmed up from the surprisingly full thrust of her breasts to strike her own eyes in direct collision. She ran out of breath and mobility simultaneously, throat closing over, heart pounding so suffocatingly fast behind her ribcage that she felt dizzy.

‘I won’t keep you long,’ Leo informed her with a sardonic smile.

‘What are you doing here?’ Angie practically whispered, struggling to surmount that momentary loss of concentration and finding it almost impossible until a stark current of foreboding assailed her and her bright blue eyes widened in sudden dismay. ‘Are you here because of my father? Is he ill or something?’

Leo frowned. ‘To my knowledge, Brown is in good health.’

Angie flushed brick-red, utterly mortified by the spurt of fear that had prompted her foolish enquiry. She perfectly understood Leo’s brief look of disconcertion. No doubt it would be a cold day in hell before Leo Demetrios stooped to act as a messenger boy for one of his grandfather’s servants!

In an awkward invitation and sudden revolt against Claudia’s rigid rules, she pressed open the door of the little TV room. ‘We can talk in here,’ she said stiffly, striving desperately for an air of normality.

But oh, dear heaven, that was an impossible challenge with Jake enjoying the sleep of the innocent upstairs and Leo behaving like a coldly polite stranger. Maybe he was afraid that if he was friendly she might throw herself at him again, Angie thought in sudden, cringing horror. Her colour fluctuating wildly, she dropped her head, but cruelly humiliating memories still bombarded her like guided missiles finding an easy target.

She had been foolishly obsessed with Leo for more years than she now cared to recall. And she had not been the sort of dreaming teenager who sat around simply hoping for a miracle to occur. At nineteen, she had plotted and planned like crazy to get her chance with Leo. She had broken every rule in the book to catch him. She had forgotten who he was and who she was in the chase. And, at the end of the day, she had got very much what she had asked for—Leo had dumped her so hard and fast, her head had spun.

The silence pounded and pulsed.

Nervously, Angie glanced up to find Leo watching her again. Involuntarily, she was entrapped, pulses quickening, skin dampening. Colour drenched her complexion. She ran a nervous hand through the long hair falling round her face, and moved her head to toss it back out of her way. Leo’s gaze followed the rippling motion of that cascade of pale, shining strands, increasing her self-consciousness. Then dense black lashes veiled his burnished dark eyes, and his beautifully shaped, sensual mouth hardened again.

‘How did you find out where I lived?’ Angie asked in a jerky rush, because the silence was unbearable. She did not have his nerves of steel and self-discipline.

‘My grandfather asked me to trace you—’

Her fine brows pleated. ‘Wallace?’ she broke in incredulously, referring to his English grandfather whose daughter had married Leo’s father, a Greek shipping magnate.

‘I’m here only to pass on an invitation,’ Leo imparted smoothly. ‘Wallace would like you to spend Christmas with him.’

‘Christmas?’ Angie parroted weakly.

‘He wants to become acquainted with his great-grandson.’

That final, shattering announcement left Angie gaping at him in even deeper shock. Her knees threatening to give way, she groped her passage down into an armchair. Leo knew she had been pregnant? Leo knew that she now had a child? She had never dreamt that Wallace Neville might share that secret with his grandson.

And now Wallace actually wanted to meet Jake? Yet Wallace had forcefully urged her to terminate her pregnancy over two years ago. The news that the butler’s daughter had been impregnated by one of his grandsons had so appalled him, he had been apoplectic with rage. An unapologetic snob with a horror of scandal, he had been eager to facilitate Angie’s departure from Deveraux Court that very same day.

‘Old men feel their mortality.’ Leo’s dark eyes rested unreadably on her stunningly beautiful face. ‘And, frankly, curiosity seems to be killing him. Obviously it will be in your best interests to grovel gratefully in the face of his generosity.’

‘Grovel?’ Angie echoed in complete bewilderment.

Leo’s appraisal became grim, his mouth twisting. ‘I know about the deal you made with Wallace, Angie. I know the whole story.’

Angie stiffened in disbelief, lashes dropping low on fiercely anxious eyes. ‘I haven’t a clue what you’re talking about.’

‘You know very well what I’m talking about,’ Leo countered steadily.

Her slim fingers closed together and clenched. She studied the carpet until it blurred, her stomach churning with sick apprehension.

‘The thefts, Angie,’ Leo supplied without remorse. ‘Wallace caught you in the act and you confessed.’

Her head flew up, anguish and resentment mingling in her stricken face. ‘He promised that he would never tell anyone!’

She wanted to die right there and then. Wallace had promised, Wallace had promised faithfully—and by ‘anyone’ Angie had meant specifically Leo. She could not bear the knowledge that Leo thought she had been the thief, responsible for stealing several small but valuable objets d’art from Deveraux Court where her father and stepmother both worked and lived.

‘Angie, nothing disappeared after your departure. That fact rather spoke for itself. Wallace had little hope of keeping the identity of the culprit under wraps.’

‘So my father must know as well,’ she mumbled, mortified pain clogging up her vocal cords as she made that final leap in understanding.

‘I’ve never discussed the matter with him,’ Leo retorted crisply.

In all her life, Angie knew she had never tasted greater humiliation. Her shaken eyes stung fiercely. She studied Leo’s hand-stitched Italian leather shoes and hated him for believing and accepting that she had been the thief. And, even more cruelly, throwing that conviction in her face. Was this why he had referred to Jake as if her child were nothing whatsoever to do with him?

Was her supposed dishonesty so offensive that Leo could not bring himself to acknowledge that she was the mother of his child? she asked herself in growing bewilderment. What had Leo said? Wallace wanted to become acquainted with his great-grandson. Had that been Leo’s way of telling her that he himself had no intention of taking the smallest interest in Jake? She found that she couldn’t think straight because nothing Leo had yet said had made any kind of sense to her.

‘I want you to leave,’ Angie confided shakily. ‘I didn’t ask you to come looking for me.’

‘That’s an irrational response and you’ll think better of it within a very short space of time,’ Leo asserted crushingly. ‘Wallace would have called the police if you hadn’t told him that you were pregnant. You were fortunate to escape a prison sentence. Those thefts took place over a long period. They were neither opportunistic nor the result of someone succumbing to sudden temptation.’

Briefly, Angie closed her aching eyes in a spasm of bitter regret. When in the heat of the moment she had confessed to something she hadn’t done, she had been bolstered by the belief that she was protecting someone she loved and that, in any case, she herself had nothing more to lose. After all, she had already lost Leo, had already accepted that she would have to leave Deveraux Court before her condition became obvious. She had been too proud and too devastated by Leo’s rejection to confront him with the consequences of their stolen weekend of passion.

‘Wallace is prepared to overlook the past for the sake of your child,’ Leo continued levelly.

‘My child has a name…and his name is Jake,’ Angie told him thinly.

If possible, Leo’s rawly handsome features set even harder as he ignored that unasked-for piece of information. ‘In your position it would be very foolish to ignore the offer of an olive branch. I believe that Wallace may now be willing to give you financial assistance.’

‘I want nothing from any of you.’ Hotly flushed and deeply chagrined by the assurance, Angie leapt upright again. ‘But I would like to know why Wallace should feel it’s his responsibility to offer me money!’

Diamond-hard dark eyes assailed hers in icy collision. ‘Obviously because his grandson Drew has failed to observe his duty to support you both.’

In stark confusion, Angie froze. How was it Drew’s duty to support her and Jake? And then finally, and most belatedly, comprehension gripped her, only to leave her drowning in bemusement again. Evidently, Leo was under the impression that his cousin, Drew, had fathered her child. How on earth could he think that? How on earth could anyone think that?

Outrage swelled inside Angie until she thought the top of her head might come flying off. In that instant it didn’t matter how such a ludicrous misapprehension had come about. Angie was too infuriated by Leo’s evident opinion of her morals to concern herself with anything else. So, Leo saw her as a thief and a tart. After all, only a fairly promiscuous young woman would have become intimate with both of Wallace’s grandsons within the space of three months. But Leo was clearly quite happy to believe that she had slept with his cousin after sleeping with him, and no doubt was even more content to believe that responsibility for her illegitimate child could be laid at Drew’s door rather than his own.

‘Angie, I didn’t come here to argue with you or to become involved in personal matters which are frankly nothing to do with me,’ Leo drawled in a tone of cool reproof. ‘I’ve issued the invitation on Wallace’s behalf, and I haven’t got the time to wrangle with you—I have a date, and I’m already running very late.’

For a split second, Angie felt as though he had plunged a knife into her ribs and stabbed her to the heart. A date? So the grieving widower was finally back in social circulation… Wow, bully for him! And, naturally, Angie’s sordid personal problems were beneath his notice and wholly devoid of interest to him. Indeed, knowing Leo as she did—brutally candid, highly intelligent and uncontrolled only in bed, she enumerated painfully—he had probably been congratulating himself on a narrow escape from severe embarrassment ever since she’d been exposed as the household thief.

‘Angie…?’ Leo prompted.

She turned round, her perfect features pale and set. As the bitterness rose inside her, it was the most unbearable moment of temptation she had ever experienced. She had a sudden fierce urge to smash Leo’s self-possession, punish him for his deliberate distancing of himself from her predicament and hurt him, as he was hurting her with the humiliating pretence that they had never been anything to each other but casual acquaintances.

His hard, dark features were impatient. ‘Wallace is expecting you to arrive on Thursday. I assume I can give him the assurance that you will be accepting his invitation?’

In the unstable hold of a tidal wave of conflicting emotion, Angie tore her pained eyes from the dark, savage splendour of Leo as he stood there, so effortlessly detached from her. The anger went out of her at that same moment.

‘You’ve just got to be kidding,’ she breathed with a forced and brittle smile. ‘I have no desire to spend Christmas with your grandfather, and I should think he would have even less desire to spend it with me.’

‘I thought you might, at the very least, be tempted by the possibility of a reconciliation with your own family.’

A humourless laugh was dredged from Angie. Reconciliation? He didn’t know what he was talking about. She had never had anything but an uneasy and difficult relationship with her father. Now an unwed mother, and labelled a thief into the bargain, what possible welcome did Leo fondly imagine she would receive?

‘When I walked out of Deveraux Court…’ her throat thickened, making her voice gruff ‘…I knew I would never be walking back. I wasn’t sorry to leave and I don’t want to return even for a visit. That whole phase of my life is behind me now.’

Bold dark eyes scanned her strained profile in exasperation. ‘I suppose it was less than tactful of me to mention the thefts.’

Angie grimaced, willing back tears, determined not to break down in front of him. ‘I would never expect tact or consideration from you,’ she told him helplessly. ‘But I really do object to being patronised. You’re out of your mind if you think I would be willing to go cap in hand to your grandfather like some pathetic charity case! I’ve managed fine on my own.’

The very faintest darkening of colour emphasised the hard slant of Leo’s high cheekbones. ‘You are working as a servant…you always swore that you would never do that.’

Angie flinched, fingernails biting painfully into her palms. Servant. Not for Leo, surrounded from birth by the faceless breed, with the more egalitarian label of ‘domestic staff’. As hot pink scored her complexion, she whirled away from him before she was tempted to slap him for that most undiplomatic reminder. ‘Theos… Only the most stupid and selfish pride could make you refuse so magnanimous an invitation! Wallace could do a great deal for your son. Think of the child. Why should he suffer for your mistakes?’ Leo demanded abrasively. ‘It is your duty as a mother to consider his future.’

A raw ripple of pain and fury sizzled through Angie as she spun back, blue eyes gleaming like sapphires. ‘And what about his father’s duty?’

His wide, sensual mouth twisted. ‘When you got into bed with someone as self-centred and irresponsible as Drew, you must’ve known that you’d be on your own if anything went wrong.’

Leo was angry, Angie registered in surprise. Tension splintered from the fierce cast of his strong features and icy condemnation glittered in his narrowed gaze. Recognising that look for what it was, Angie realised that Leo was not quite as indifferent as he would like to pretend when it came to his conviction that she had leapt into his cousin’s bed so soon after she had succumbed to him. Bitter amusement filled her at the awareness. He hadn’t wanted her but it seemed he hadn’t wanted any other man to want her either.

‘Believe it or not, at the time I thought Jake’s father was as steady as a rock,’ Angie heard herself admit, tongue-in-cheek. ‘I was very much in love with him. In fact I believed he was the very last man likely to leave me in the lurch.’

‘You were only nineteen…what did you know then of men or their motivations?’ Leo’s response was harsh, dismissive, as he glanced with sudden, unconcealed impatience at the thin gold watch on his wrist and strode towards the door. ‘I’m afraid I really do have to leave.’

The abruptness of his exit took Angie by surprise. She sped out after him and by then he was already in the porch. As she opened the door, he stared broodingly down at her and, without warning, time slid dangerously back for Angie and served up a disturbingly intimate memory. Leo…responding with shockingly primal dominance to her flirtation, pinning her down in the meadow grass by the lake and crushing her lips beneath his with an explosive, driving hunger that had just blown her away. Embarrassed heat coiled like a burning, aching taunt low in Angie’s stomach.

A feverish darkness now overlaid the oblique slant of Leo’s cheekbones, but sardonic amusement glittered in his brilliant eyes. He raised a hand and let a long brown forefinger trail gently along the tremulous line of her soft, full mouth, leaving a stunning chain of prickling sensitivity in his wake and sentencing her to shaken stillness. ‘You really are wasted in a domestic role, Angie.’

And then, before she could catch her arrested breath, he swung away, striding out into the night air. ‘Think over what I have said,’ he urged almost carelessly. ‘Wallace is keen to meet the child… I’ll call tomorrow for your answer.’

‘No, don’t. There’s no point. I’ve made up my mind and I don’t need a night’s sleep to consider it,’ Angie told him tightly. ‘In any case, I couldn’t get the time off. The Dicksons have a very busy social calendar over the next ten days, and the house is always full of visitors over Christmas.’

‘Can you really have changed so much?’ Leo murmured lazily. ‘I believed you would walk out of this house like you walked out of my grandfather’s without a backward glance.’

Angie flushed furiously. Naturally Leo had assumed that the prospect of money would make her eagerly snatch at his grandfather’s invitation, but he had miscalculated. Had she? She hadn’t told him that Jake was his—had almost done so in anger, but had ultimately remained silent. Why? At the back of her mind lurked the shameful and mortifying recollection that she had told Leo that it was safe to make love to her that weekend…and she had lied, with both purpose and full knowledge of what she was doing.

From the doorway, she watched numbly as Leo strode towards the sleek black Ferrari parked at a careless angle across the paved frontage of the house. Dimly, she registered that she was trembling; reaction was setting in after the terrible tension, sudden coldness biting into her bones.

Headlights suddenly lit up the front garden. Dredged from her introspection, Angie uttered a soundless groan as George’s Range Rover raked to a halt.

Claudia virtually leapt from the car. ‘What on earth is going on here?’ she demanded, casting Leo, who stood in the shadows, a haughty, questioning look, but aiming her ire at Angie as she stalked towards her.

‘I called with a message for Angie,’ Leo drawled coolly.

‘You let a strange man into the house with my children sleeping upstairs?’ Claudia ranted in furious attack.

‘Darling…’ her less volatile husband said rather loudly. ‘I don’t believe that Mr Demetrios quite qualifies as a strange man.’

‘My father works for Leo,’ Angie said for the sake of brevity. ‘I’ve known him for years.’

Claudia had come to a halt, glancing uncertainly at her husband for guidance. Her tall, thin spouse was calmly shaking hands with Leo. Angrily conscious that she might have made a fool of herself, Claudia gave Angie a filthy look. ‘We’ll discuss this matter in private.’

‘If you don’t mind, I’m going to bed now,’ Angie replied with quiet dignity. ‘Leo kept on ringing the bell. I had to let him in.’

She climbed the stairs, conscious that she had no hope of ultimately escaping one of Claudia’s bossy lectures, but too weary and shaken by Leo’s visit to care. Considering the length of Angie’s employment with her, Claudia ought to be able to trust her by now not to invite an armed robber or child molester into the house. She was almost twenty-two, not a feckless teenage baby-sitter.

Yet Leo had made her feel very much like a teenager again, she conceded grudgingly—hot, bothered, awkward, oversensitive to atmosphere. It had been embarrassment, she told herself—the embarrassment of memories that no woman with any pride would want to recall. And that was all.

Determined to be satisfied with that explanation, she climbed into the bed across the room from Jake’s, having fought a very heavy battle against a feverish longing to snatch him out of bed and hug him tight to comfort herself. That would be selfish, and she was not a selfish mother…was she? No, of course she wasn’t.

She put up with an employer who would have taxed the temper of a saint just so that Jake could eat well, live in a comfortable house and play in a spacious garden with lots of toys. So he had virtually nothing to call his own, and his clothes were all the twins’ hand-me-downs, but he was still too little to appreciate those facts. This year she had wanted to give him a proper Christmas, though. That was why she had dared to risk Claudia’s wrath to ask for more money, but the recollection of the earlier part of the evening could no longer hold her concentration…

It was almost impossible for her to believe that Wallace Neville was willing to entertain the butler’s daughter at his vast ancestral home. Would he have invited her to stay in the main house, or would he have expected her to squash herself back into her father and stepmother’s disgracefully damp and desolate little basement flat? And if Leo’s grandfather had offered her financial help, would she have been weak enough to accept it?

Uneasy with the thought, Angie tossed and turned sleeplessly. It was out of the question anyway. Claudia would blow a gasket if Angie demanded time off over Christmas, and until Jake was old enough to start nursery school at least the Dicksons were their security.

Even so, she still lay awake, staring into the darkness, helplessly remembering the first time she had seen Leo when she was thirteen. Every Christmas and every summer he had come to stay with his grandfather, and although his English was perfect he had remained quintessentially Greek. Exotic, fascinating and extravagantly handsome, he had become the natural focus of Angie’s first crush. Of course, eight years her senior, he had barely noticed that she was alive in those days.

During the summer when she was fourteen, Leo had brought a girlfriend with him. She had had a very irritating giggle. With intense amusement, Angie had watched Leo wince. But the following year laughter had been thin on the ground. Petrina Phillipides had come to visit—a porcelain-perfect and dainty little Greek heiress with a cloud of silky black hair and an elderly maiden aunt in tow as a chaperon. Angie had ground her teeth in disbelief while she had watched Leo fall in love. Couldn’t he see that Petrina was too spoilt, too conceited, too empty-headed, with her silly clothes and even sillier hairstyles, to provide lasting appeal for an intelligent man?

No, Leo had been blind, and the summer after that Petrina had had even better reason to look smug. She had been wearing Leo’s engagement ring. Angie had been aghast, but even then she hadn’t given up all hope. After all, many an engagement was broken before the altar was reached, she had reasoned, snatching at straws.

However, when Wallace had finally flown out to Leo’s wedding and no last-minute miracle had prevented the dreadful deed from being done, Angie had been inconsolable. But by then she had been seventeen, and thoroughly fed up with herself for ever having wasted time languishing over a male who had always been out of reach and who was now another woman’s husband. So she had started dating herself and, boy, had she dated! Her five-foot-ten-inch model-slim body, symmetrical features and waist-length mane of pale blonde hair had ensured that she was never short of eager admirers.

Petrina had been sullenly pregnant that Christmas, and the unimpressed mother of a beautiful baby girl a few months later. Leo had adored his daughter. Angie’s heart had ached when she’d seen him lavish unashamed love and warmth on little Jenny, who had been named after his late mother. Petrina had been an indifferent and petulant parent, thrusting her baby back at the nanny as soon as she decently could, visibly resenting the fact that her daughter and not herself was now the centre of attention. And Angie had thought, Oh, Leo, Leo…why didn’t you wait for me to grow up?

But that very same year tragedy had intervened to destroy Leo’s family. Christmas hadn’t been celebrated at Deveraux Court. Wallace hadn’t had the heart for it, and Leo had remained in Greece. His wife and his baby daughter had been killed in a car crash. That next summer, however, Leo had come back, alone and brooding, and he had taken up residence in the Folly by the lake, shunning all company.

And Angie, in her complete and utter stupidity, had decided that she was finally to have her chance with Leo, and that it had to be then or never, before he flew back to Greece and fell madly in love with some other unsuitable woman…

‘Now that I know who Leo Demetrios is,’ Claudia droned on in her most gracious mood the following afternoon, ‘I realise that you could scarcely keep a man of his importance outside the house. But he has to be the single exception to the rule, Angie. Don’t open that door again when we’re out.’

Money fairly talked, Angie conceded grimly. Claudia had already been on the phone to all her friends, saying things in her carrying voice like, ‘You’ll never guess who we had in our house last night…the most utterly charming man… Must be worth billions… Yes, employs our au pair’s father… Can you believe, she didn’t even offer him a cup of coffee? Probably quite overpowered by him just turning up like that… I don’t think Greeks can be as class-conscious as we are…’

Oh, don’t you believe it, Angie reflected with gritted teeth as she slammed shut the door on the washing machine and switched it on to drown out Claudia’s verbal ecstasy. When Leo had sobered up to a dawn that woke him to the unlovely reality that he was actually sharing a bed with the butler’s daughter, he had vacated that bed so fast, Angie had been cut to the bone. But even then she had been poorly prepared for the blunt and wounding force of the rejection which had so swiftly concluded their brief intimacy and left her bereft of any hope…or pride.

The doorbell went. Angie padded through to the hall and then stopped dead in the porch. Through the side window, she could see the long, impressive bonnet of a chauffeur-driven limousine. Suddenly breathless with an undeniable sense of anticipation, she pulled open the door. Leo, a breathtakingly elegant vision in a dove-grey suit, white silk shirt and pale blue tie, gazed down at her. He looked drop-dead gorgeous.

And Angie’s treacherous heartbeat hit a dizzy peak, as if she were riding a big dipper. The most intense and shattering surge of physical awareness paralysed her to the spot.

‘I wasn’t expecting you to come back,’ Angie whispered.

Leo dealt her the most fleeting glance before flashing a brilliant smile at something or someone over her shoulder. ‘Mrs Dickson?’

‘Claudia, please…’ the brunette carolled.

Leo strode past Angie as if she were the invisible woman and grasped Claudia’s eagerly extended hand.

‘Leo…?’ Angie muttered in confusion.

‘I’m here to speak to your employer, Angie, if you would excuse us?’

‘Come into the drawing room.’ Claudia gave Leo a delighted smile. ‘Make some coffee, Angie.’

Fizzing with incredulous annoyance at the dismissal, Angie went to put on the kettle then returned to the hall.

‘So dreadfully sorry, but I’m afraid we couldn’t possibly spare her at present. We’ll have visitors staying over Christmas,’ Claudia was saying apologetically.

Angie pressed the door wider and stood on the threshold, furious that she had been deliberately excluded from a discussion that related to her. How dared Leo do this? How dared he go over her head as if she were a child who could not speak up for herself?

‘When did Angie last have a holiday?’ Leo drawled softly from his stance by the marble fireplace.

Caught unprepared by the question, Claudia frowned. ‘Well, er…’

‘In fact, Angie doesn’t receive holidays in this household, does she, Mrs Dickson?’ Raw contempt glittered in Leo’s steady gaze.

‘Where on earth did you get that idea?’ Claudia asked rather shrilly.

‘Leo—’ Angie began weakly.

‘Angie’s working conditions are the talk of the neighbourhood,’ Leo countered with biting censure, his strong, hard-boned features grim. ‘Indeed, sweatshop labour would be a generous description of her terms of employment within your home.’

‘I…I beg your pardon?’ Her face mottling with ugly colour, Claudia was openly shocked by the sudden attack.

‘Leo, for heaven’s sake!’ Angie intervened in horror.

But Leo didn’t even glance in her direction. ‘You took advantage of a pregnant teenager. For more than two years you have worked her round the clock and paid her peanuts for the privilege. One has a duty of care towards one’s staff, but you have disregarded that fact. As you are neither poor nor unintelligent, there is no extenuating circumstance which might excuse such unscrupulous behaviour.’

‘How dare you speak to me like that? Get out of my house!’ Claudia was now brick-red with disbelieving fury.

‘Go and pack, Angie,’ Leo murmured without batting a magnificent eyelash; indeed, the curious beginnings of a smile were already tugging at the corners of his sensual mouth. ‘I will wait in the car.’

‘I’m not going anywhere…’ Angie began unevenly.

‘The talk of the neighbourhood, am I?’ Claudia sent the younger woman a look of outraged accusation. ‘When I think of what we’ve done for you—’

‘You’ve done nothing but use her for your own selfish purposes,’ Leo interposed with sardonic cool.

‘You’re sacked… I want you and that child of yours out of this house—right now!’ Claudia screeched at Angie, full blast.

CHAPTER TWO

WHITE-FACED, ANGIE LUGGED a battered suitcase out through the front door with Claudia still shouting recriminations in her wake. A sturdy older man in a chauffeur’s uniform was waiting in silent readiness to take her case. The front door slammed thunderously shut behind her.

Lifting an unsteady hand to press it to her pounding, perspiring brow, Angie hurried round the side of the house to the fenced-in back garden where Jake had mercifully remained throughout the agonising minutes it had taken for her to strip their room of their possessions. And with Claudia standing over her, bent on retribution, their possessions, such as they were, had shrunk alarmingly. The brunette had angrily refused to allow Angie to pack any of Jake’s clothes, saying that the twins’ cast-offs had only been given to her on loan and not to keep. She had maintained the same line when it came to Jake’s toys, which the Dickson children had long since outgrown.

A frightening vision of her former employer forcibly stripping Jake to the buff in the teeth of the winter wind impelling her, Angie raced across the back garden to the sandpit and literally snatched Jake’s sturdy little body into her arms. He looked up at her with a startled frown, huge dark eyes wide. ‘Oh, Jake,’ she almost sobbed as she cuddled her son close and buried her face momentarily in his sweet-smelling, springy black curls. ‘I will kill Leo for doing this to you…I swear it!’

The chauffeur whipped open the passenger door of the limousine. Seeing that Claudia had now emerged from the house, Angie leapt in before Jake could be wrenched out of his shabby duffel coat and dungarees, not to mention his wellington boots.

As the chauffeur closed the door and walked round the bonnet at a stately pace which seemed to challenge Claudia’s aggressive stance, the silence in the spacious, leather-upholstered back seat seemed to thunder. Struggling for breath, her breasts still heaving from her frantic rush to protect Jake from a direct collision with Claudia’s malice, Angie glanced up. A stark frown drawing his winged black brows together, Leo was staring fixedly at the child on her lap.

‘He is very…dark,’ Leo selected after some hesitation.

Angie cloaked startled eyes and bent her head as she swung Jake off her knees onto the seat and began to fiddle with the belt to strap him safely in.

‘I thought the child would be blond…’ Leo added half under his breath, still staring as Jake swivelled to look up at him with lustrous dark brown eyes fringed with curling black lashes, the natural olive tone of his skin obvious against the white polo neck rolled under his dimpled chin.

In panic, Angie thought fast. ‘He takes after my mother…she was as dark as a Celt. It happens that way sometimes—genes, you know, throwback genes,’ Angie muttered rather wildly, and then, reddening, she compressed her lips.

‘I never met your mother.’

Angie had been very much hoping that he hadn’t for her late mother had been as blonde as her daughter. But her mother had only lived at Deveraux Court for a few months before she had walked out on her marriage, pregnant but preferring to go it alone rather than stay with a husband whom she had swiftly learned to despise for his lack of ambition.

Angie breathed in slowly and deeply. It didn’t help to steady her leaping nerves or to subdue the dangerous surge of anger ready to explode from her lips. She focused on Jake’s down-bent dark head and faithfully promised herself that she would not raise her voice and risk upsetting her son.

‘Do you realise what you’ve done?’ Her low-pitched enquiry shook with the effort it took to control her temper.

‘Theos… It is beginning to sink in,’ Leo confessed with outrageous calm. ‘I cannot take you to Deveraux Court until Thursday at the earliest. Wallace has guests. It would be inappropriate for you to arrive while they remain.’

Angie trembled and threw her head up, eyes shimmering like piercing blue arrows of accusation. ‘You have deprived my son of the only home and security he has ever known…’

‘You should be thanking me.’ Bold black eyes instantly challenged her.

‘Th-thanking you?’ Angie stammered in disbelief.

‘How could you remain in that house enslaved by that harpy? Where is your spirit and sense, that you should’ve accepted such terms for so long?’

As raw rage splintered explosively through Angie’s slender frame, she sucked in oxygen like a drowning swimmer in an effort to contain it. ‘I stayed for my son’s benefit,’ she bit out tautly. ‘I was able to be with him all day…and he’s enjoyed many advantages there that I could never have given him.’

‘I made a polite approach and a most modest request. That woman was not reasonable,’ Leo asserted, smoothly disclaiming all responsibility.

‘You interfered in something which was none of your business, and you gave Claudia precisely two minutes to snap to attention and do your bidding before you went on the offensive. I told you there was no way that I could leave the Dicksons over Christmas… I told you that nothing on earth would persuade me to go back to Deveraux Court,’ Angie reminded him in a steadily rising crescendo. ‘But you wouldn’t listen, and now we’re homeless and I’m out of a job!’

Leo cast her a gleaming look of reproof. ‘Drop the dramatics, Angie. Naturally, I will assume responsibility for you both until such time as Wallace relieves me of the necessity.’

Angie was so close to exploding, she couldn’t trust herself to speak.

‘Thursday, you go to Deveraux Court and eat humble pie. I don’t care if it chokes you. It is the price of reacceptance, and you will pay it,’ Leo informed her with daunting conviction. ‘Today I did you a favour.’

Angie gulped. ‘A favour? As of this moment, my son has only the clothes he is wearing and not one single toy to his name—’

‘Waff.’ Jake spoke up for the first time, with an air of expectancy. ‘Want Waff…’

Angie froze in dismay. ‘Waff’s at home, darling,’ she muttered weakly. ‘He couldn’t come.’

Jake scowled, looking so shockingly like a miniature version of his father that for an instant Angie could not believe that Leo had not guessed the truth the minute he’d seen him. ‘Want Waff…Waff like cars too.’

Angie swallowed the great lump threatening her throat and shot Leo a look of accusing censure. ‘Perhaps you would like to explain that the T-O-Y,’ she spelt out, ‘which he has slept with every night of his life, no longer belongs to him.’

‘What are you talking about? Ah…you mean you were careless enough to forget it in your rushed departure.’

‘N-no, that’s not what I meant,’ Angie managed unevenly. ‘All his clothes and almost all his playthings originally belonged to Claudia’s children and she refused to let me remove any of them from the house—not very surprising, after the way you insulted her. She couldn’t get back at you, so she took her temper out on my child instead!’

His lean, dark features stiffened with incredulous comprehension. ‘His clothes…his toys?’

Angie nodded jerkily.

‘Toy,’ Jake said doggedly. ‘Waff toy.’

‘So we buy some more—particularly this Waff thing,’ Leo gritted with stark impatience. ‘I wouldn’t have believed that any woman could exercise such petty spite!’

‘A W-A-F-F cannot be bought at any price,’ Angie informed him in a voice thick with condemnation and a deep inner dread of Jake’s bedtime. ‘It was made by Claudia’s grandmother for Sophia. It’s a pink giraffe.’

Leo spread unimpressed and autocratic lean brown hands. ‘I will buy a proper giraffe.’

‘It won’t fool him, Leo.’ Slowly, numbly, Angie shook her aching head, wondering why she was focusing on a humble but much loved soft toy when she didn’t even know where they would be sleeping tonight. ‘Where are you planning to take us?’

‘My town house—where else?’

‘I’m not going home with you!’ Angie exclaimed in shock.

‘Home,’ Jake said more cheerfully. ‘Waff…’

‘He’s obsessed,’ Leo remarked disapprovingly.

‘He’s still only a baby,’ Angie said defensively. ‘How could you do this to us?’

‘With the greatest of ease. I did what was right—’

‘Right?’

‘For better or for worse your child is a Neville. He is a part of my family circle,’ Leo ground out in grudging concession. ‘He should not suffer for the faults of his parents.’

Angie slung him a scorching glance. ‘I am not at fault as a parent in any way.’

‘I would suggest that we save this conversation until we are alone.’

‘I don’t want to go to your house,’ Angie told him between clenched teeth.

‘I’m not checking you into a hotel. You might be stupid enough to disappear again, and I have wasted enough time tracking you down—’

‘I thought it was Wallace who—’

‘My grandfather is in his eighties,’ Leo reminded her drily. ‘I employed the investigation agency and dealt with them, and you were far from easily found.’

‘I didn’t want to be found,’ Angie whispered in sudden, dragging weariness, her taut shoulders slumping in defeat.

Silence fell. For a minute or two, she stared blindly out at the passing traffic but then slowly she turned until she was watching Leo instead. The relaxation of his impressive lean length had an indolent quality which mocked her own explosive tension, yet was, in its own way, highly deceptive for there was nothing indolent about Leo. A white-hot core of raw energy drove him, not to mention his fierce Greek pride. And even without that spectacular bone structure and build Leo would have commanded attention in any company for he had a presence equalled by few men, and women were mesmerised by the high-voltage charge of his intense sexuality.

His hard, classic profile turned, brilliant dark eyes catching her out, lingering unashamedly as she coloured, his lush lashes dropping low to study her intently with nothing of her own inhibition. A curl of heat clenched her stomach and tensed every muscle in her slender body.

‘I was afraid that you might have ended up on the streets.’ Leo broke the silence with that devastatingly candid admission.

Her jaw dropping, Angie’s eyes widened in outrage.

‘It was a natural fear,’ Leo stated quietly. ‘What money you had wouldn’t have lasted long in a city like this. I believed that you might be forced to rely on your looks to survive.’

‘No. I wasn’t quite that desperate.’ Angie’s hands closed fiercely together on her lap, her voice shaky but acidic. ‘I got by—without relying on my looks.’

‘And I can only hope that the experience taught you a lesson. Drew was dazzled by you, but he always planned to marry money. Only a wealthy woman could afford to keep my cousin in the style he believes to be his due,’ Leo delivered with supreme scorn.

‘I don’t want to talk about Drew.’ Hatred was burning like a bright, blinding light inside Angie’s battered heart at that moment. ‘Right now, I’m just trying to come to terms with what you have done to our lives.’

Leo smiled slightly, very much as a lion might have smiled at a puny and not very bright prey. ‘Soon you will be grateful for my interference.’

‘Never. You can’t play with people’s lives like this!’ But even as Angie told him that she felt as if she was spouting hot air.

Penniless, homeless, jobless. Leo had destroyed everything they had. And Leo had done the unforgivable—he had put her in the degrading position of having to accept that they were now dependent on his generosity. That devastated her pride and stuck in her throat like an indigestible concrete block, but, with a small child’s needs to consider, she couldn’t just walk away in a temper…for where would she walk to?

The car drew up outside a large, impressive town house in a quiet, elegant square. Angie climbed out and reached for Jake, but he scrambled out on his own, deliberately evading her hand, displaying the wilful and stubborn independent streak which she was seeing more and more as he left babyhood behind. An older woman had the front door open even before they reached the top step. She bent her greying head, her attention locking onto Jake and staying there.

‘My housekeeper, Epifania. She will see to the child,’ Leo informed Angie.

‘The child’. Angie swore that she would scream if Leo used that phrase just one more time within her hearing. ‘I will see to him.’

‘Epifania was once my nursemaid,’ Leo revealed drily. ‘I can assure you that she is more than capable of managing one small boy.’

Epifania dragged her attention from Jake, glanced fleetingly at Angie and then swiftly away again to attend to her employer’s instructions.

Leo’s nursemaid. This definitely wasn’t her day, Angie conceded, turning pink with discomfiture. The Greek woman might well notice the resemblance, particularly if she had looked after Leo when he’d been the same age. But how likely was it that the housekeeper would risk causing offence by making any comment? Angie told herself that her secret was safe.

After all, she had no intention of telling Leo that he was the father of her son. Why? It would mean exposing her own lie and taking advantage of Leo in a way that even now she could not bear to do. It wouldn’t be fair because she had quite deliberately run the risk of becoming pregnant. Indeed, hard as it was to recall without a shamed feeling of self-loathing, Angie had actually wanted to conceive that weekend.

More than anything else, she had longed to give Leo a child to replace the one he had lost. And she simply hadn’t thought beyond that crazy, spur-of-the-moment decision…or had she? At the back of her mind, hadn’t she also believed that Leo might find it almost impossible to walk away from the mother of his child? Inwardly, Angie shrank from the depth of calculation which Leo would read into her past behaviour if she admitted that Jake was his son.

She had been stupid and reckless, had known the instant that Leo rejected her just how stupid. She had been hopelessly in love with him and very immature. But Leo would neither understand nor forgive what she had done. He would assume that she had lied to ensnare him because he was a very rich man. With a confession of theft hanging over her head, what else could he possibly think? He would scarcely attribute any purer motive to her planned pregnancy.

Concluding his conversation with Epifania, who already had Jake in her arms, Leo cast open a door. ‘We can talk now, Angie,’ he murmured, yet the soft assurance somehow fell on her ears with all the weight of a threat.

Scolding herself for that fancy, she preceded him into a wonderfully furnished library and, glimpsing her own reflection in the gilded mirror on the wall opposite, she winced. Her hair was in a wild, wind-blown tangle, her face bare of make-up because cosmetics were among the many things she had quickly learned weren’t a necessity. She was wearing a black sweater, jeans and a fleece jacket, all of which had been bought second-hand from charity shops.

She looked poor and shabby, and she was standing in a room decorated with a truly awesome disregard for expense, with its discreetly gleaming antique furniture, ornate floor-length curtains, fresh flowers and glowing Persian rugs. Digging her hands into her pockets, she glanced uneasily at Leo.

Lounging back against the edge of a mahogany desk in a stray patch of sunlight, he was watching her, brilliant, beautiful eyes now boldly and ruthlessly appraising. Caught unprepared, Angie felt that appraisal like a physical touch. Her slender figure tensed, colour staining her taut cheekbones as she found herself inexorably meeting that look. And just as suddenly she was running out of breath, mouth drying, heartbeat racing as she connected with the electrifying shimmer of those dark golden eyes. Heat like an insidious spark that built terrifyingly fast into a forest fire blazed deep in the pit of her stomach.

Slowly Leo uncoiled himself, straightened and strolled, sure-footed and silent as a prowling predator, towards her. Her throat closed over convulsively, her lips parting as she strove with every atom of her being to break away from the compelling stare. He halted two feet away from her and the silence between them stretched tighter and tighter until it clawed at her nerves.

‘Alone at last,’ Leo purred with intense satisfaction.

Angie blinked in bemusement. Her heart was pounding so frighteningly fast, she was convinced it might burst.

‘Tell me,’ Leo continued in that same mesmeric undertone that sent a shiver of the most appalling sexual awareness down her rigid spinal cord.

‘Tell you what?’ Something like pure panic beginning to assail her as she registered how she was reacting to his proximity, Angie stepped back from him.

Leo merely closed the distance again, virtually cornering her against the bookshelves. ‘I ask only for an honest answer to one very simple question. It is a question which I have had to wait a very long time to ask. Did you use me like man bait to make Drew jealous? Or…did you end up in bed with him on the rebound from me?’

As Leo calmly resurrected the past—or his version of the past—sheer shock immobilised Angie. The tip of her tongue flicked out nervously to moisten her full lower lip. Leo’s gaze narrowed and dropped to follow the tiny movement, his entire attention nailed to the generous pink curve of her mouth.

Momentarily released from his forceful scrutiny, Angie sucked in an audible, sharp, swift breath of relief and gasped, ‘Neither!’

‘Oh, it has to be one of them—unless you have the morals of a whore, and I would be most reluctant to assume that of a girl of nineteen,’ Leo informed her with ruthless cynicism. ‘I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt in conceding that perhaps you felt something for one of us!’

Angie flinched and turned scarlet simultaneously, anger flaring in her bright blue eyes. ‘You have no right to ask.’

‘Two men…and one very, very beautiful girl,’ Leo spelt out slowly. ‘A recipe for disaster when the very beautiful girl was also impulsive, passionate and rebellious.’

‘I don’t know why you’re talking to me like this. I don’t like it.’

Unmoved dark eyes rested on her. ‘That won’t make me stop asking because I need to know. Drew always wanted you…but he never wanted you more than when he thought you were mine.’

Angie jerked her blonde head away, her stomach muscles clenching in dismay at his persistence and his insight. He wasn’t telling her anything she hadn’t known but, ironically, she had never been attracted to Drew. Compared to Leo, he had been like gilt beside gold, always overshadowed and diminished. But, for all that, Drew’s attention had been balm to her savaged ego after Leo had ditched her.

And for a while she had gone around with Drew and his friends, nightclubbing and partying, deaf to her father’s outraged disapproval. Was that how the belief that her child was Drew’s had come about? she wondered abstractedly. Or had she been so incoherent in her distress the day that Wallace found her with the miniature portrait that she had left the old man suffering from a genuine misapprehension?

Lean brown fingers reached out and tugged a long strand of silvery pale hair. ‘Angie…?’

Her eyes flew back to Leo, and he was so close that her nostrils flared on the warm and achingly familiar scent of him. A long shiver racked her and her eyes collided unwarily with his darkly intent gaze. A hint of cruel amusement gleamed in his eyes.

‘Stop it,’ she whispered jerkily.

‘Stop what? Playing games?’ An unrepentant winged ebony brow climbed. ‘Why? You played plenty with me that summer.’

The colour drained from Angie’s cheeks, leaving her pale.

‘Theos…of course, I knew,’ Leo drawled very drily. ‘Like Artemis, goddess of the chase and the forest, you hunted me down. It would’ve taken a stronger male than I to withstand the temptation you offered.’

Angie wanted to sink through the floor. Unable to execute that feat, she sidled along the shelving instead, desperate to escape. ‘I’d better go and check on Jake.’

Long tanned fingers closed round her wrist and tugged her inexorably back within reach. ‘Not so fast,’ Leo murmured with deceptive gentleness. ‘You haven’t answered my question yet.’

Angie had the demeaning suspicion that she was playing mouse to Leo’s cat. Abruptly, her chin came up, denying that image. ‘There’s one possibility that doesn’t seem to have occurred to you…’

‘And what is that?’

‘Maybe, at the end of the day, I couldn’t tell the difference between you and Drew,’ Angie clarified with a studied desire to insult.

In reward, a dark rush of blood fired over Leo’s blunt cheekbones, his savagely handsome features suddenly wiped clean of every ounce of mockery. His lean face hardening, he leant forward without warning and planted two spread hands on the shelves on either side of her head, effectively imprisoning her with the solid breadth and strength of his supremely powerful physique. ‘Ohi…no?’ Leo questioned with a shockingly intimidating blaze of anger in his glittering stare.

Angie’s spine grated into bruising collision with the shelving as she instinctively attempted to back away from that dangerous fire. ‘Leo…’

Long fingers whipped across to curve on her cheekbones and hold her still. ‘Let me teach you the difference,’ Leo gritted darkly.

‘No—’

But as her anxious gaze melded with the drowning darkness of his, explosive anticipation tore through her like a storm warning, tightening every muscle and firing every nerve-ending with tortured expectancy. With a guttural sound somewhere between a harsh laugh and a groan, Leo dropped his strong hands to the swell of her hips and took her mouth hotly and hungrily with his own.

He crushed her to him, and the very blood in her veins sang with the heat of her excitement. Under the onslaught of his demanding lips and the carnal thrust of his tongue, Angie burned. He ravaged her mouth with the fierce heat of an innately sexual male, hell-bent on possession, and she fell victim to a hot and disorientating tide of intimate memory that tore down every remaining barrier and reduced her to submissive rubble.

As suddenly as he had reached for her, Leo dragged his mouth from hers again. Glittering dark eyes cloaked, he thrust himself back from her and strode over to the window.

For a split second, Angie thought she might slide down to the rug because her knees were ready to fold beneath her. For a split second, Angie didn’t even recall where she was. But her body ached and pulsed in a way she had almost forgotten, sensually alive and hurting in a way she did not want to acknowledge. She felt the swollen tenderness of her breasts, the painful sense of tormenting emptiness between her thighs, and shivered in disbelieving horror that Leo could still have that devastating an effect on her body.

She studied his back view with stricken eyes, reading the savage tension in his broad shoulders and the rigid bracing of his long, powerful thighs. And just as swiftly she suspected that that sudden flare of physical hunger and even more physical connection might have been no more welcome to him.

‘The difference between my cousin and I,’ Leo framed rawly as he swung back to face her, burnished, censorious dark eyes like flaring arrows of gold, ‘is that I was ashamed of what happened between us two and a half years ago!’

‘Ashamed?’ Angie repeated sickly.

‘Cristos…what else?’ Leo demanded in a wrathful growl of rebuke. ‘What did you expect? My wife had been dead only seven months…and you were nineteen and naive as they come, for all your wiles! Did you think I could be proud of making such a conquest? The teenage daughter of one of my grandfather’s most loyal and trusted dependants? And, even worse, a virgin?’

CHAPTER THREE

ANGIE HAD TURNED TO STONE, the pallor of her perfect features pronounced but rigidly uninformative—for one necessary skill she had learned working for Claudia was the ability to keep her face devoid of expression. But, inside herself, she was cringing. ‘Conquest’…‘dependant’…‘virgin’… Not one single term welcome to her ears—indeed each and every one of them emphasising the humiliating inequality which had always divided her from Leo.

In bitter mortification, she flew out of the room and down the hall, not even knowing where she was going in an unfamiliar house. Espying a cloakroom, she hurriedly and gratefully took refuge there. No, she had never had the advantage of a level playing field with Leo, she conceded wretchedly. Everything had separated them—age, background and experience. But, worst of all, she had met Leo in the time-warp world of Deveraux Court, leaving herself forever fixed in his mind as the butler’s daughter and never, it seemed, to be anything else.

Why on earth had he kissed her? The ultimate put-down? Her insult had drawn an overwhelmingly primitive masculine response. But then, in the grip of strong emotion, Leo was no English gentleman of restraint, and he was very highly sexed. A dangerous little quiver of remembrance ran through Angie and her face burned with shame. She had no excuse to offer for her own behaviour. Leo still attracted her in much the same way that a magnet attracted iron filings. But it was just a physical thing now, she told herself with driven defensiveness—all down to body chemistry and hormones, and nothing whatsoever to do with her emotions.

A knock sounded on the door. Angie ignored it.

‘Angie, you have a count of five to show yourself…’

Leo’s warning sent Angie flying for a towel to dry her face with, which she had splashed thoroughly with cold water in the forlorn hope of cooling herself down.

She unlocked the door. ‘Where’s Jake?’ she questioned stiffly, focusing on Leo’s pale blue silk tie.

‘Upstairs with Epifania. Listen,’ Leo advised impatiently.

And she heard Jake’s delighted chortles of glee filtering down from the floor above. Her son sounded as if he was having a whale of a time.

‘I don’t want to talk about the past!’ Angie stated fiercely.

‘It’s unfinished business. I want it dealt with,’ Leo countered without apology.

Angie flung her head high, blue eyes darkened by stress. ‘There was nothing unfinished about it. You made yourself perfectly plain at the time—sorry, Angie, I needed a woman and I was drunk!’ she interpreted with a raw bitterness she could not conceal.

Leo’s even white teeth gritted. ‘That wasn’t what I said—’

‘That’s what it came down to!’ In too much pain from her memories to find such proximity to Leo bearable, Angie wrapped her arms around herself in a starkly protective movement. ‘Don’t you ever touch me again. Once bitten, forever shy!’

Leo sent her a flashfire glance of involuntary amusement. ‘That rejection routine of yours needs some extensive work and application.’

A deep flush of mortification lit Angie’s cheeks as he reminded her of her eager response in his arms. Her skin felt super-thin, as if the tiniest dent might wound her to the death. And it was Leo who was doing that to her, and that appalled her because she had honestly believed that Leo could not have the power to hurt her any more. She had buried that foolish teenager deep and fancied herself mature beyond imagining. Now she was discovering her error.

Leo curved a hand over her tense shoulder and she flinched away. He vented a soft, soothing sound that was terrifyingly sexy. ‘You’re trembling…’

‘I’ll never forgive you for bringing me here! Where the heck are we supposed to go now? I’m not crawling back to Deveraux Court to grovel—or eat humble pie—so where does that leave us?’

Leo surveyed her mutinous face with reflective cool. ‘Enjoying my hospitality,’ he supplied smoothly, and swung on his heel.

‘But I don’t want to accept your hospitality, Leo.’

Leo stilled, and responded without turning his arrogant dark head. ‘In five days’ time, you will have seen sense and you will be heading to the Court. If you haven’t the wit to grovel, you will undoubtedly feel the rough edge of Wallace’s tongue—but then that’s your business, not mine.’

As he left her standing there, Angie felt horribly alone and scared for the first time in a long while. The feeling of insecurity gripping her now was intense. The very last place she wanted to go was Deveraux Court, and the very last place she wanted to stay was in Leo’s house.

She finally headed upstairs, where the housekeeper showed her into a large bedroom which connected with the even more spacious room where the older woman had been keeping Jake occupied. An evening meal was suggested, and her son’s likes and dislikes were discussed in almost embarrassing detail.

But not by word, look or gesture did Epifania even hint that Jake might be anything more than the child of a guest. Angie scolded herself for the guilty conscience which had made her far too imaginative earlier. Of course Epifania hadn’t spotted any instant resemblance which linked Jake to her employer! Clearly the housekeeper was just extremely fond of children.

Forty minutes later, Angie and her son were summoned down to eat. One solitary place was set at the massive polished table in the imposing gold and blue dining room, and, to the left of it, a high chair for Jake. Evidently Leo was not to join them. But then undoubtedly Leo did not dine at so early an hour. When Angie took Jake back upstairs, a positive feast of plush soft toys and a small mound of packages awaited them in his bedroom. A giant furry giraffe was prominent in the spread.

As Jake whooped in delight and rushed to investigate, Angie stilled in surprise and dismay on the threshold.

‘You see? A young child is easily distracted with new toys,’ Leo drawled with cool superiority from behind her.

Sharply disconcerted because she hadn’t heard his approach, Angie whipped round. ‘Where did all these things come from?’

‘A friend made the selection for me and had them sent over. There should be some clothes as well.’

Angie reddened with discomfiture. ‘And how much did this generous gesture of yours cost?’

Leo shifted a relaxed shoulder in a dismissive shrug. ‘That’s irrelevant.’

‘Is it?’ Angie queried with embarrassed heat. ‘Surely you can appreciate that I can’t accept this stuff?’

‘It was nothing…forget it,’ Leo responded drily.

‘But I can’t let you just pay for it all!’

His beautifully expressive mouth curled. ‘Don’t make me drag up that past you’re so very reluctant to recall.’

‘And what’s that supposed to mean?’

‘When it comes to moral principles, we both know you are not Pollyanna.’

Understanding came too late to protect Angie from that humiliating reminder. She turned white as if Leo had struck her. He was referring to the thefts.

Leo made an impatient movement with one brown hand. ‘Try just to be yourself around me, Angie. I loathe hypocrisy…and all this fuss about a few necessities for a child? Who do you think you are impressing with this charade of objections?’

Angie backed unsteadily into the bedroom and closed the door. She wanted to race back out again and grab Leo by his arrogant, judgemental throat and scream, I am not a thief! She wanted to proclaim her innocence with the very strongest force. But she had surrendered that right of her own volition over two years ago. Only by naming the true culprit could she clear her own name, and, if she did that, she would still cause unthinkable damage…

Leo would not allow even a reformed and deeply repentant thief to remain in his grandfather’s home. He would bring in the police and press charges without hesitation. Leo had no liberal convictions where crime and punishment were concerned.

Lost in increasingly distressing introspection, Angie undressed Jake and bathed him in the en suite. Leo despised her for her apparent greed and dishonesty. Why hadn’t she faced up to that harsh fact sooner? Just minutes ago, his distaste and anger had rung out as clear as a bell. And she had drawn his censure by daring to behave as if she wasn’t the greedy, grasping profiteer and eager free-loader he undoubtedly saw her as. Leo believed she had got off too lightly for her sins. And no doubt he also thought that returning to Deveraux Court to grovel to Wallace and cringe at the knowledge that everyone knew her to be a thief was a long-overdue slice of her just desserts.

The packages revealed a sensible skeleton wardrobe for Jake. Underwear and pyjamas, a duo of sweaters, shirts and trousers, all bearing the brand name of a reasonably priced chain store—unlike the array of blatantly expensive toys. Sighing, Angie tucked Jake into the comfortable single bed. Over-tired now, her son flipped fussily between the soft toys which had earlier enthralled him, and then he said that fatal word which Angie had been hoping not to hear.

‘Waff…where Waff?’

‘Waff’s not here. I’m sorry,’ Angie groaned as Jake’s bottom lip began to wobble alarmingly, big dark eyes suddenly flooding with tears.

‘Want Waff!’ Jake sobbed.

Fifteen minutes of lamentations later, the housekeeper had joined Angie in her efforts to console and distract Jake, but the whole house continued to echo with the boy’s noisy, convulsive sobs.

Without warning, Leo strode in. In an off-white dinner jacket and black silk bow-tie, he was clearly on his way out for the evening. He cast a grim glance down at Jake, an abandoned slump of utter misery on the bed. ‘Your son knows how to get what he wants.’

‘That’s not fair, Leo,’ Angie muttered in reproach.

Releasing his breath in a slow, driven hiss, Leo crouched fluidly down beside the bed and gently shook Jake’s shoulder to gain his attention. ‘Jake…I’m going to get Waff.’

‘Don’t make promises you can’t keep,’ Angie hissed, but it was too late. Her son’s damp, tousled head had come off the pillow and a look of pathetic hope was already blossoming in his tear-drenched eyes.

‘If George Dickson wants to be sued through the courts for a pink giraffe, I’ll do it,’ Leo swore, vaulting upright again.

‘Don’t be daft…that would take forever.’

‘Give me an hour… George struck me as a very level-headed and rational man.’

Stunned, Angie watched him stride back out again. Leo was planning to drive over to the Dicksons’ to demand custody of a pink giraffe? Jake sat up, rubbing at his eyes. ‘Waff…?’ he mumbled with a hint of a wobbly smile.

‘Wait and see…maybe,’ Angie said carefully.

Leo was back, however, within the hour. He came through the door with Waff extended like a small but tremendously important peace offering. Jake shot out of bed like a jet-propelled missile, hurled himself ecstatically at Leo’s knees and accepted Waff back, tucking the battered toy possessively under his arm. ‘Night, night,’ he said happily, accepting Angie’s help to climb back into bed.

‘How did you do it?’ Angie whispered as Leo moved back to the door again.

‘Dickson was so embarrassed, he couldn’t hand Waff over fast enough. He sends his apologies for what he termed “an unfortunate misunderstanding”,’ Leo informed Angie very drily over his shoulder.

‘Really?’ Angie followed Leo out into the corridor. ‘What else did he say?’

‘I’m afraid I don’t have the time to tell you.’

Belatedly, Angie reread the significance of the dinner jacket he wore and flushed uncomfortably. ‘You’re running late again.’

His dark eyes gleamed as he studied her. ‘And tomorrow morning I’m flying over to Brussels for a few days. You’ll have the house to yourself until Thursday.’

He went on down the stairs, and Angie listened to the distant thud of the front door and glanced in at Jake again. Leo’s son had gone out like a light, Waff a barely visible pink splodge tucked under his chin. For some reason she found that she couldn’t stop wondering who the lady in Leo’s life was… Did she play games? Probably not. Games were the province of the young and brash and insecure, she reminded herself heavily. And quite the reverse of appealing when recognised for what they were by the quarry.

In the early hours, Angie lay awake. Leo hadn’t come home, Leo obviously wasn’t coming home—and why had she been unconsciously straining to hear his return? she asked herself with angry self-loathing. Take the average single male on a Saturday night—he did not sit in toasting his feet by the fire. When that same male was also gorgeous, rich, oversexed and spoilt for female choice, he was undoubtedly involved in an intimate relationship, and extremely unlikely to come racing home like Cinderella, struggling to beat the clock at midnight.

Switching on the light, she peered at her alarm clock. Almost two. The house was silent as the grave. Desperate for something to read to pass the time, she slid out of bed, automatically reached for her towelling dressing gown and then realised that, in her eagerness to escape Claudia, she hadn’t retrieved it, or several other garments which she could ill afford to lose, from the wash. More things to replace, and she had barely five pounds to her name, she reflected dully. Furthermore Christmas was hurtling towards them at break-neck speed and she had next to nothing bought for Jake.

She crept downstairs and into the library. Surprise, surprise… Leo’s shelves were packed with books written in Greek. As she began flipping irritably through a pile of business magazines in search of something lighter, the door suddenly opened. In fright, Angie almost jumped a foot in the air.

Bold dark eyes whipped over her paralysed figure. ‘What are you doing in here?’

Recovering, Angie pushed an awkward hand through her tumbled hair. ‘I was looking for something to read—’

‘On my desk?’ Leo prompted drily, possibly because she was standing only a foot from it with the air of being caught in mid-flight.

‘I haven’t been anywhere near your desk,’ Angie muttered defensively, backing away from it as Leo moved slowly forward. ‘I was glancing through the magazines on that chair.’

‘Since when were you interested in electronics?’

Angie stared at him. His black hair was tousled. His bow-tie was missing and his shirt partially unbuttoned, revealing a disturbing triangle of brown skin and the start of the riot of dark, curling hair that she knew covered his pectoral muscles. Embarrassed by that knowledge and the memory, Angie momentarily shut her eyes. But still she saw Leo standing there, strong jawline blue-shadowed with the same early-morning stubble which had once felt so interestingly, arousingly rough against her softer, smoother skin.

Inside her own head, she shrieked at her treacherous subconscious to leave her alone and stop throwing up things she didn’t want to remember—most particularly when it was obvious that Leo had recently vacated some other woman’s bed. As that conviction assailed her, a searing spasm of hot jealousy and resentment shot through Angie, leaving her deeply shaken.

‘Were you looking for money?’

Her dazed and troubled eyes flew wide. ‘M-money?’ she stammered blankly.

Leo gave her a grim smile. ‘Somehow I don’t think you have graduated to safe-cracking yet.’

As Angie grasped his meaning, pain and anger combined in the bitter look she threw at him. ‘Damn you to hell, Leo. I wouldn’t steal from you!’ she flung at him, and turned strickenly away, devastated by the extent of his distrust.

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