His seduction had life-changing consequences

Now her boss is back—with marriage in mind!

Personal assistant Merry Armstrong couldn’t resist Angel Valtinos’s sensual charisma. The Greek awakened her with his touch and left her pregnant! When Angel discovers his heir, duty compels him to act. Despite Merry’s independence, Valtinos’s legacy must be legitimized—and seducing her into becoming his wife will be his biggest challenge!

LYNNE GRAHAM was born in Northern Ireland and has been a keen romance reader since her teens. She is very happily married to 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, who knocks everything over, a very small terrier, who barks a lot, and two cats. When time allows, Lynne is a keen gardener.

Also by Lynne Graham

Claimed for the Leonelli Legacy

His Queen by Desert Decree

Brides for the Taking miniseries

The Desert King’s Blackmailed Bride

The Italian’s One-Night Baby

Sold for the Greek’s Heir

Vows for Billionaires miniseries

The Secret Valtinos Baby

And look out for the next book

Castiglione’s Pregnant Princess

Available April 2018

Discover more at millsandboon.co.uk

The Secret Valtinos Baby

Lynne Graham

www.millsandboon.co.uk

ISBN: 978-1-474-07169-7

THE SECRET VALTINOS BABY

© 2018 Lynne Graham

Published in Great Britain 2018

by Mills & Boon, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF

All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, locations and incidents are purely fictional and bear no relationship to any real life individuals, living or dead, or to any actual places, business establishments, locations, events or incidents. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental.

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www.millsandboon.co.uk

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

About the Author

Booklist

Title Page

Copyright

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

Extract

CHAPTER ONE

THE GREEK BILLIONAIRE, Angel Valtinos, strode into his father’s office suite to find both his brothers waiting in Reception and he stopped dead, ebony brows skating up. ‘What is this? A family reunion?’

‘Or Papa is planning to carpet us for something,’ his Italian half-brother, Prince Vitale Castiglione, commented with perceptible amusement because they were all beyond the age where parental disapproval was a normal source of concern.

‘Does he make a habit of that?’ Zac Da Rocha demanded with a frown.

Angel met Vitale’s eyes and his jawline squared, neither passing comment. Zac, their illegitimate Brazilian sibling, was pretty much a wild card. As he was a new and rather mysterious addition to the family circle his brothers had yet to fully accept him. And trust came no more easily to the suspicious Angel than it did to Vitale.

Vitale grinned. ‘You’re the eldest,’ he reminded Angel. ‘You get top billing and first appearance.’

‘Not sure I want it on this occasion,’ Angel conceded, but he swiftly shrugged off the faint and comically unfamiliar sense of unease assailing his innately rock-solid confidence.

After all, Charles Russell had never played the heavy father in his sons’ lives, but even without exercising that authority he had still been a remarkably decent father, Angel conceded reflectively. Charles had not stayed married to either his or Vitale’s mother for very long but he had taken a keen interest post-divorce in fostering and maintaining a close relationship with his sons. Angel had often had cause to be grateful for his father’s stable approach to life and the shrewd business brain he suspected he had inherited from him. His mother was a thoroughly flighty and frivolous Greek heiress, whose attitude to childcare and education would have been careless without his father’s stipulations on his son’s behalf.

Charles Russell crossed his office to greet his eldest son. ‘You’re late,’ he told him without heat.

‘My board meeting ran over,’ Angel told him smoothly. ‘What’s this all about? When I saw Zac and Vitale in Reception I wondered if there was a family emergency.’

‘It depends what you call an emergency,’ Charles deflected, studying his very tall thirty-three-year-old eldest son, who topped him in height by several inches.

A son to be proud of, Charles had believed until very recently when the startling discovery of certain disquieting information had punctured his paternal pride. To be fair, Angel also carried the genes of a fabulously wealthy and pedigreed Greek family, more known for their self-destructiveness than their achievements. Even so, Charles had prided himself on Angel’s hugely successful reputation in the business world. Angel was the first Valtinos in two generations to make more money than he spent. A very astute high-achiever and a loyal and loving son, he was the very last child Charles had expected to disappoint him. Nonetheless, Angel had let him down by revealing a ruthless streak of Valtinos self-interest and irresponsibility.

‘Tell me what this is about,’ Angel urged with characteristic cool.

Charles rested back against his tidy desk, a still handsome man with greying hair in his early fifties. His well-built frame was tense. ‘When do you plan to grow up?’ he murmured wryly.

Angel blinked in bewilderment. ‘Is that a joke?’ he whispered.

‘Sadly not,’ his father confirmed. ‘A week ago, I learned from a source I will not share that I am a grandfather...’

Angel froze, his lean, extravagantly handsome features suddenly wiped clean of all animation, while his shrewd dark eyes hardened and veiled. In less than a split second, though, he had lifted his aggressive chin in grim acknowledgement of the unwelcome shock he had been dealt: an issue he had hoped to keep buried had been unexpectedly and most unhappily disinterred by the only man in the world whose good opinion he valued.

‘And, moreover, the grandfather of a child whom I will never meet if you have anything to do with it,’ Charles completed in a tone of regret.

Angel frowned and suddenly extended his arms in a very expansive Greek gesture of dismissal. ‘I thought to protect you—’

‘No, your sole motivation was to protect you,’ Charles contradicted without hesitation. ‘From the demands and responsibility of a child.’

‘It was an accident. Am I expected to turn my life upside down when struck by such a misfortune?’ Angel demanded in a tone of raw self-defence.

His father dealt him a troubled appraisal. ‘I did not consider you to be a misfortune.’

‘Your relationship with my mother was on rather a different footing,’ Angel declared with all the pride of his wealthy, privileged forebears.

A deep frown darkened the older man’s face. ‘Angel... I’ve never told you the whole truth about my marriage to your mother because I did not want to give you cause to respect her less,’ he admitted reluctantly. ‘But the fact is that Angelina deliberately conceived you once she realised that I wanted to end our relationship. I married her because she was pregnant, not because I loved her.’

Angel was startled by that revelation but not shocked, for he had always been aware that his mother was spoilt and selfish and that she could not handle rejection. His luxuriant black lashes lifted on challenging and cynical dark golden eyes. ‘And marrying her didn’t work for you, did it? So, you can hardly be suggesting that I marry the mother of my child!’ he derided.

‘No, marrying Angelina Valtinos didn’t work for me,’ Charles agreed mildly. ‘But it worked beautifully for you. It gave you a father with the right to interfere and with your best interests always at heart.’

That retaliation was a stunner and shockingly true and Angel gritted his even white teeth at the comeback. ‘Then I should thank you for your sacrifice,’ he said hoarsely.

‘No thanks required. The wonderful little boy grew up into a man I respect—’

‘With the obvious exception of this issue,’ Angel interjected tersely.

‘You have handled it all wrong. You called in the lawyers, those Valtinos vulture lawyers, whose sole motivation is to protect you and the Valtinos name and fortune—’

‘Exactly,’ Angel slotted in softly. ‘They protect me.’

‘But don’t you want to know your own child?’ Charles demanded in growing frustration.

Angel compressed his wide, sensual mouth, his hard bone structure thrown into prominence, angry shame engulfing him at that question. ‘Of course, I do, but getting past her mother is proving difficult.’

‘Is that how you see it? Is that who you are blaming for this mess?’ the older man countered with scorn. ‘Your lawyers forced her to sign a non-disclosure agreement in return for financial support and you made no attempt at that point to show enough interest to arrange access to your child.’

Angel went rigid, battling his anger, determined not to surrender to the frustrating rage scorching through him. He was damned if he was about to let the maddening baby business, as he thought of it, come between him and the father he loved. ‘The child hadn’t been born at that stage. I had no idea how I would feel once she was.’

‘Your lawyers naturally concentrated on protecting your privacy and your wealth. Your role was to concentrate on the family aspect,’ Charles asserted with emphasis. ‘Instead you have made an enemy of your child’s mother.’

‘That was not my intention. Using the Valtinos legal team was intended to remove any damaging personal reactions from our dealings.’

‘And how has the impersonal approach worked for you?’ Charles enquired very drily indeed.

Angel very nearly groaned out loud in exasperation. In truth, he had played an own goal, getting what he’d believed he wanted and then discovering too late that it wasn’t what he wanted at all. ‘She doesn’t want me to visit.’

‘And whose fault is that?’

‘Mine,’ Angel acknowledged fiercely. ‘But she is currently raising my child in unsuitable conditions.’

‘Yes, working as a kennel maid while raising the next Valtinos heiress isn’t to be recommended,’ his father remarked wryly. ‘Well, at least the woman’s not a gold-digger. A gold-digger would have stayed in London and lived the high life on the income you provided, not stranded herself in rural Suffolk with a middle-aged aunt while working for a living.’

‘My daughter’s mother is crazy!’ Angel bit out, betraying his first real emotion on the subject. ‘She’s trying to make me feel bad!’

Charles raised a dubious brow. ‘You think so? Seems to be a lot of sweat and effort to go to for a man she refuses to see.’

‘She had the neck to tell my lawyer that she couldn’t allow me to visit without risking breaching the non-disclosure agreement!’ Angel growled.

‘There could be grounds for that concern,’ his father remarked thoughtfully. ‘The paparazzi do follow you around and you visiting her would put a spotlight on her and the child.’

Angel drew himself up to his full six feet four inches and squared his wide shoulders. ‘I would be discreet.’

‘Sadly, it’s a little late in the day to be fighting over parental access. You should have considered that first and foremost in your dealings because unmarried fathers have few, if any, rights under British law—’

‘Are you suggesting that I marry her?’ Angel demanded with incredulity.

‘No.’ Charles shook his greying head to emphasise that negative. ‘That sort of gesture has to come from the heart.’

‘Or the brain,’ Angel qualified. ‘I could marry her, take her out to Greece and then fight her there for custody, where I would have an advantage. That option was suggested at one point by my legal team.’

Charles regarded his unapologetically ruthless son with concealed apprehension because it had never been his intention to exacerbate the situation between his son and the mother of his child. ‘I would hope that you would not even consider sinking to that level of deceit. Surely a more enlightened arrangement is still possible?’

But was it? Angel was not convinced even while he assured his concerned father that he would sort the situation out without descending to the level of dirty tricks. But was an access agreement even achievable?

After all, how could he be sure of anything in that line? Merry Armstrong had foiled him, blocked him and denied him while subjecting him to a raft of outrageous arguments rather than simply giving him what he wanted. Angel was wholly unaccustomed to such disrespectful treatment. Every time she knocked him back he was stunned by the unfamiliarity of the experience.

All his life he had pretty much got what he wanted from a woman whenever he wanted it. Women, usually, adored him. Women from his mother to his aunts to his cousins and those in his bed worshipped him like a god. Women lived to please Angel, flatter him, satisfy him: it had always been that way in Angel’s gilded world of comfort and pleasure. And Angel had taken that enjoyable reality entirely for granted until the very dark day he had chosen to tangle with Merry Armstrong...

He had noticed her immediately, the long glossy mane of dark mahogany hair clipped in a ponytail that reached almost to her waist, the pale crystalline blue eyes and the pink voluptuous mouth that sang of sin to a sexually imaginative male. Throw in the lean, leggy lines of a greyhound and proximity and their collision course had been inevitable from day one in spite of the fact that he had never before slept with one of his employees and had always sworn not to do so.

* * *

Merry’s fingers closed shakily over the letter that the postman had just delivered. A tatty sausage-shaped Yorkshire terrier gambolled noisily round her feet, still overexcited by the sound of the doorbell and another voice.

‘Quiet, Tiger,’ Merry murmured firmly, mindful that fostering the little dog was aimed at making him a suitable adoptee for a new owner. But even as she thought that, she knew she had broken her aunt Sybil’s strict rules with Tiger by getting attached and by letting him sneak onto her sofa and up onto her lap. Sybil adored dogs but she didn’t believe in humanising or coddling them. It crossed Merry’s mind that perhaps she was as emotionally damaged as Tiger had been by abuse. Tiger craved food as comfort; Merry craved the cosiness of a doggy cuddle. Or was she kidding herself in equating the humiliation she had suffered at Angel’s hands with abuse? Making a mountain out of a molehill, as Sybil had once briskly told her?

Sadly the proof of that pudding was in the eating as she flipped over the envelope and read the London postmark with a stomach that divebombed in sick dismay. It was another legal letter and she couldn’t face it. With a shudder of revulsion laced with fear she cravenly thrust the envelope in the drawer of the battered hall table, where it could stay until she felt able to deal with it...calmly.

And a calm state of mind had become a challenge for Merry ever since she had first heard from the Valtinoses’ lawyers and dealt with the stress, the appointments and the complaints. Legally she seemed mired in a never-ending battle where everything she did was an excuse for criticism or another unwelcome and intimidating demand. She could feel the rage building in her at the prospect of having to open yet another politely menacing letter, a rage that she would not have recognised a mere year earlier, a rage that threatened to consume her and sometimes scared her because there had been nothing of the virago in her nature until her path crossed that of Angel Valtinos. He had taught her nothing but bitterness, hatred and resentment, all of which she could have done without.

But he had also, although admittedly very reluctantly, given her Elyssa...

Keen to send her thoughts in a less sour direction, Merry glanced from the kitchen into the tiny sitting room of the cottage where she lived, and studied her daughter where she sat on the hearth rug happily engaged with her toys. Her black hair was an explosion of curls round her cherubic olive-toned face, highlighting striking ice-blue eyes and a pouty little mouth. She had her father’s curls and her mother’s eyes and mouth and was an extremely pretty baby in Merry’s opinion, although she was prepared to admit that she was very biased when it came to her daughter.

In many ways after a very fraught and unhappy pregnancy Elyssa’s actual birth had restored Merry to startling life and vigour. Before that day, it had not once occurred to her that her daughter’s arrival would transform her outlook and fill her to overflowing with an unconditional love unlike anything she had ever felt before. Nowadays she recognised the truth: there was nothing she would not do for Elyssa.

A light knock sounded on the back door, announcing Sybil’s casual entrance into the kitchen at the rear of the cottage. ‘I’ll put on the kettle...time for a brew,’ she said cheerfully, a tall, rangy blonde nearing sixty but still defiantly beautiful, as befitted a woman who had been an international supermodel in the eighties.

Sybil had been Merry’s role model from an early age. Her mother, Natalie, had married when Merry was sixteen and emigrated to Australia with her husband, leaving her teenaged daughter in her sister’s care. Sybil and Merry were much closer than Merry had ever been with her birth mother but Sybil remained very attached to her once feckless kid sister. The sanctuary had been built by her aunt on the proceeds of the modelling career she had abandoned as soon as she had made enough money to devote her days to looking after homeless dogs.

In the later stages of her pregnancy, Merry had worked at the centre doing whatever was required and had lived with her aunt in her trendy barn conversion, but at the same time Merry had been carefully making plans for a more independent future. A qualified accountant, she had started up a small home business doing accounts for local traders and she had a good enough income now to run a car, while also insisting on paying a viable rent to Sybil for her use of the cottage at the gates of the rescue centre. The cottage was small and old-fashioned but it had two bedrooms and a little garden and perfectly matched Merry and Elyssa’s current needs.

In fact, Sybil Armstrong was a rock of unchanging affection and security in Merry’s life. Merry’s mother, Natalie, had fallen pregnant with her during an affair with her married employer. Only nineteen at the time, Natalie had quickly proved ill-suited to the trials of single parenthood. Right from the start, Sybil had regularly swooped in as a weekend babysitter, wafting Merry back to her country home to leave her kid sister free to go out clubbing.

Natalie’s bedroom door had revolved around a long succession of unsuitable men. There had been violent men, drunk men, men who took drugs and men who stole Natalie’s money and refused to earn their own. By the time she was five years old, Merry had assumed all mothers brought different men home every week. In such an unstable household where fights and substance abuse were endemic she had missed a lot of school, and when social workers had threatened to take Merry into care, once again her aunt had stepped in to take charge.

For nine glorious years, Merry had lived solely with Sybil, catching up with her schoolwork, learning to be a child again, no longer expected to cook and clean for her unreliable mother, no longer required to hide in her bedroom while the adults downstairs screamed so loudly at each other that the neighbours called the police. Almost inevitably that phase of security with Sybil had ended when Natalie had made yet another fresh start and demanded the return of her daughter.

It hadn’t worked, of course it hadn’t, because Natalie had grown too accustomed to her freedom by then, and instead of finding in Merry the convenient little best friend she had expected she had been met with a daughter with whom she had nothing in common. By the time Keith, who was younger than Natalie, had entered her life, the writing had been on the wall. Keen to return to Australia and take Natalie with him, he had been frank about his reluctance to take on a paternal role while still in his twenties. Merry had moved back in with Sybil and had not seen her mother since her departure.

* * *

‘Did I see the postman?’ Sybil asked casually.

Merry stiffened and flushed, thinking guiltily of that envelope stuffed in the hall table. ‘I bought something for Elyssa online,’ she fibbed in shame, but there was just no way she could admit to a woman as gutsy as Sybil that a letter could frighten and distress her.

‘No further communication from He Who Must Not Be Named?’ Sybil fished, disconcerting her niece with that leading question, for lately her aunt had been very quiet on that topic.

‘Evidently we’re having a bit of a break from the drama right now, which is really nice,’ Merry mumbled, shamefacedly tucking teabags into the mugs while Sybil lifted her great-niece off the rug and cuddled her before sitting down again with the baby cradled on her lap.

‘Don’t even think about him.’

‘I don’t,’ Merry lied yet again, a current of self-loathing assailing her because only a complete fool would waste time thinking about a man who had mistreated her. But then, really, what would Sybil understand about that? As a staggeringly beautiful and famous young woman, Sybil had had to beat adoring men off with sticks but had simply never met one she wanted to settle down with. Merry doubted that any man had ever disrespected Sybil and lived to tell the tale.

‘He’ll get his comeuppance some day,’ Sybil forecast. ‘Everyone does. What goes around comes around.’

‘But it bothers me that I hate him so much,’ Merry confided in a rush half under her breath. ‘I’ve never been a hater before.’

‘You’re still hurting. Now that you’re starting to date again, those bad memories will soon sink into the past.’

An unexpected smile lit Merry’s heart-shaped face at the prospect of the afternoon out she was having the following day. As a veterinary surgeon, Fergus Wickham made regular visits to the rescue centre. He had first met Merry when she was offputtingly pregnant, only evidently it had not put him off, it had merely made him bide his time until her daughter was born and she was more likely to be receptive to an approach.

She liked Fergus, she enjoyed his company, she reminded herself doggedly. He didn’t give her butterflies in her tummy, though, or make her long for his mouth, she conceded guiltily, but then how important were such physical feelings in the overall scheme of things? Angel’s sexual allure had been the health equivalent of a lethal snakebite, pulling her in only to poison her. Beautiful but deadly. Dear heaven, she hated him, she acknowledged, rigid with the seething trapped emotion that sent her memory flying inexorably back sixteen months...

CHAPTER TWO

MERRY WAS FULL of enthusiasm when she started her first job even though it wasn’t her dream job by any stretch of the imagination. Having left university with a first-class honours degree in accountancy and business, she had no intention of settling permanently into being a front-desk receptionist at Valtinos Enterprises.

Even so, she had badly needed paid employment and the long recruitment process involved in graduate job applications had ensured that she was forced to depend on Sybil’s generosity for more months than she cared to count. Sybil had already supported Merry through her years as a student, helping her out with handy vacation jobs at the rescue centre while always providing her with a comfortable home to come back to for weekends and holidays.

Her job at Valtinos Enterprises was Merry’s first step towards true independence. The work paid well and gave her the breathing space in which to look for a more suitable position, while also enabling her to base herself in London without relying on her aunt’s financial help. She had moved into a room in a grotty apartment and started work at VE with such high hopes.

And on her first day Angel strode out of the lift and her breath shorted out in her chest as though she had been punched. He had luxuriant black curls that always looked messy and that lean, darkly beautiful face of his had been crafted by a creative genius with exotic high cheekbones, a narrow, straight nose and eyes the colour of liquid honey. Eyes that she had only very much later discovered could turn as hard and cutting as black diamonds.

‘You’re new,’ he commented, treating her to the kind of lingering appraisal that made her feel hot all over.

‘This is my first day, Mr Valtinos,’ she confided.

‘Don’t waste your smiles there,’ her co-worker on the desk whispered snidely as Angel walked into his office. ‘He doesn’t flirt with employees. In fact the word is that he’s fired a couple of his PAs for getting too personal with him.’

‘I’m not interested,’ Merry countered with amusement, and indeed when it came to men she rarely was.

Growing up watching her mother continually search for the man of her dreams while ignoring everything else life had to offer had scared Merry. Having survived her unsettled childhood, she set a high value on security and she was keen to establish her own accountancy firm. She didn’t take risks...ever. In fact she was the most risk-averse person she had ever met.

That innate caution had kept her working so hard at university that she had taken little part in the social whirl. There had been occasional boyfriends but none she had cared to invite into her bed. Not only had she never felt passion, but she had also never suffered from her mother’s blazing infatuations. Watching relationships around her take off and then fail in an invariably nasty ending that smashed friendships and caused pain and resentment had turned Merry off even more. She liked a calm, tidy life, a quiet life, which in no way explained how she could ever have become intimate with a male as volatile as Angel, she acknowledged with lingering bewilderment.

But it was the truth, the absolute truth, that on paper she and Angel were a horrendous match. Angel was off-the-charts volatile with a volcanic hot temper that erupted every time someone did or said something he considered stupid. He wasn’t tolerant or easy to deal with. In the first weeks of her employment she regularly saw members of his personal staff race out of his office as though they had wings on their feet, their pale faces stamped with stress and trepidation. He was very impatient and equally demanding. He might resemble a supermodel in his fabulously sophisticated designer suits, but he had the temperament of a tyrant and an overachiever’s appetite for work and success. The only thing she admired about him in those initial weeks was his cleverness.

Serving coffee in the boardroom, she heard him dissect entire arguments with a handful of well-chosen words. She noticed that people listened when he spoke and admired his intellect while competing to please and impress him. Occasionally beautiful shapely blondes would drift in to meet him for lunch, women of a definite type, the artificial socialite type, seemingly chosen only for their enviable faces and figures and their ability to look at him with stunned appreciation. Those who arrived without an invite didn’t even get across the threshold of his office. He treated women like casual amusements and discarded them as soon as he got bored, and the procession of constantly changing faces made it obvious that he got bored very quickly and easily.

In short, nothing about Angel Valtinos should have attracted Merry. He shamelessly flaunted almost every flaw she disliked in a man. He was a selfish, hubristic, oversexed workaholic, spoiled by a life of luxury and the target of more admiration and attention than was good for him.

But even after six weeks in his radius, dredging her eyes off Angel when he was within view had proved impossible. He commanded a room simply by walking into it. Even his voice was dark, deep and smoulderingly charismatic. Once a woman heard that slumberous accented drawl she just had to turn her head and look. His dynamic personality suffused his London headquarters like an energy bolt while his mercurial moods kept his employees on edge and eager to please. Valtinos Enterprises felt dead and flat when he was abroad.

When one of Angel’s personal assistants left and the position was offered internally, Merry applied, keen to climb the ladder. Angel summoned her to his office to study her with frowning dark golden eyes. ‘Why is a candidate with your skills working on Reception?’ he demanded impatiently.

‘It was the first job I was offered,’ Merry admitted, brushing her damp palms down over her skirt. ‘I was planning to move on.’

Rising to his feet, making her uneasily aware of his height, he extended a slim file. ‘Find somewhere quiet to work. You’re off Reception for the morning. Check out this business and provide me with an accurate assessment of its financial history and current performance. If you do it well, I’ll interview you this afternoon.’

That afternoon, he settled the file back on the desk and surveyed her, his wide, sensual mouth compressing. ‘You did very well but you’re a little too cautious in your forecasts. I enjoy risk,’ he imparted, watching with amusement as she frowned in surprise at that admission. ‘You’ve got the job. I hope you can take the heat. Not everyone can.’

‘If you shout at me, I’ll probably shout back,’ Merry warned him warily.

And an appreciative grin slashed his shapely lips, making him so powerfully attractive that for a split second she simply stared, unable to look away. ‘You may just work out very well.’

So began the most exciting phase of Merry’s working life. Merry was the most junior member of Angel’s personal staff but the one he always entrusted with figures. Sybil was thrilled by the promotion her niece had won but would have been horrified by the long hours Merry worked and the amount of responsibility she carried.

‘The boss has got the hots for you,’ one of her male co-workers told her with amusement when she had been two months in the job. ‘Obviously you have something all those long tall blondes he parades through here don’t, because he’s always watching you.’

‘I haven’t noticed anything,’ she said firmly, reluctant to let that kind of comment go unchallenged.

But even as she spoke she knew she was very carefully impersonal and unobtrusive in Angel’s vicinity because she was conscious of him in a way she had not been conscious of a man before. If she was foolish enough to risk a head-on collision with his spectacular liquid honey eyes, her tummy somersaulted, her mouth dried and she couldn’t catch her breath. Feeling like that mortified her. She knew it was attraction and she didn’t like it, not only because he was her boss, but also because it made her feel out of control.

And then fate took a hand when Merry firmly believed that neither of them would ever have made any sort of a move. A highly contagious flu virus had decimated the staff and as his employees fell by the wayside Merry found herself increasingly exposed to working alone with Angel. At the office late one evening, he offered her a drink and a ride home. She said no thanks to the drink, deeming it unwise, and yes to the ride because it would get her home faster.

In the lift on the way down to the underground car park, Angel studied her with smouldering dark golden eyes. She felt dizzy and hot, as if her clothes were shrink-wrapped to her skin, preventing her from normal breathing. He lifted a long-fingered brown hand and traced his fingertips along the full curve of her lower lip in a caress that left her trembling, and then, as though some invisible line of restraint had snapped inside him, he crushed her back against the mirrored wall and kissed her, hungrily, feverishly, wildly with the kind of passion she was defenceless against.

‘Come home with me,’ he urged in a raw undertone as she struggled to pull herself back together while the lift doors stood open beside them.

Her flushed face froze. ‘Absolutely not. We made a mistake. Let’s forget about it.’

‘That’s not always possible,’ Angel breathed thickly. ‘I’ve been trying to forget about the way you make me feel for weeks.’

Disconcerted by that blunt admission as he stepped out of the lift, Merry muttered dismissively, ‘That’s just sex. Ignore it.’

Angel stared back at her in wonderment. ‘Ignore it?’

As the lift doors began to close with her still inside it, he reached in and held them open. ‘Come on.’

‘I’ll get the Tube as usual.’

‘Don’t be childish,’ Angel ground out. ‘I am fully in control.’

Merry wasn’t convinced, remembering that mad, exciting grab and the slam of her body back against the lift wall, but that instant of hesitation was her undoing because without hesitation Angel closed a hand over hers and pulled her out of the lift. ‘I’ll drop you home.’

‘There are boundaries that shouldn’t be crossed,’ she told him with precision on the way to his car.

‘Don’t preach at me,’ Angel sliced back in a driven undertone. ‘I don’t have a history of making moves on my staff. You are a one-off.’

‘And it won’t happen again now that we’re both on our guard so let’s forget about it,’ Merry counselled, sliding breathlessly into a long silver low-slung bullet of a vehicle that she suspected was worth many times more than her annual salary. ‘I prevented you from making a mistake.’

‘You’re preaching again,’ Angel derided. ‘If I hadn’t stopped kissing you we’d still be in the lift!’

‘No. I would’ve pushed you away,’ she insisted with cool assurance.

She gave him her address, although he didn’t seem to need it, and the journey through heavy traffic was silent, tense and unnerving. He pulled up at the kerb outside the ugly building where she lived. ‘You could afford to live in a better area than this,’ he censured.

‘I have a healthy savings account,’ she told him with pride, releasing her seat belt at the same time as he reached for her again.

His wide sensual mouth crushed hers with burning hunger and no small amount of frustration. Her whole body leapt as though he had punched a button detonating something deep down inside her, releasing a hot surge of tingling awareness in her pelvis that made her hips squirm and her nipples pinch painfully tight.

Angel lifted his tousled dark head. ‘I’m still waiting on you pushing me away. You’re all talk and no action,’ he condemned.

‘I don’t think you’d appreciate a slap,’ Merry framed frigidly, her face burning with mortification.

‘If it meant that you ditched the icy control I’d be begging for it,’ Angel husked suggestively, soft and low, the growl of his accent shaking her up.

Merry launched out of his sports car as though jet-propelled, uncharacteristically flustered and shaken that she had failed to live up to her own very high principles on acceptable behaviour. She should’ve pushed him away, slapped him, thumped him if necessary to drive her message home. Nothing less would cool his heels. He was a highly competitive, aggressive male, who viewed defeat as an ongoing challenge.

His car stayed at the kerb until she stalked into the building and only then did she breathe again, filling her compressed lungs and shivering as though she had stepped out of a freezing snowstorm. She felt all shaken up, shaken up and stirred in a way she didn’t appreciate and almost hated him for.

The feel of his mouth on hers, the taste of it, the explosive charge of heat hurtling at breakneck speed down into her belly and spreading to other, more intimate places she never ever thought about. How dared he do that to her? She would lodge a complaint of sexual harassment! Didn’t he know what he was risking? But being Angel, he wouldn’t care, wouldn’t even stop to consider that he was playing with fire. Indeed, the knowledge would only energise and stimulate him because he loved to push the limits.

She curled up tight in her bed that night, overwhelmed by her first real experience of sexual temptation. When he kissed her she couldn’t think, couldn’t breathe. A kiss had never had that effect on her before and she was unnerved by the discovery that a kiss could be that influential. She toyed with the idea of complaining about sexual harassment, pictured Angel laughing fearlessly in the face of such a threat and finally decided that she didn’t want the embarrassment of that on her employment record. Particularly when such a claim would fail because she hadn’t pushed him away, hadn’t given him an immediate rejection.

The next day she was very nervous going into work, but Angel didn’t do or say anything that was different and she was strangely irritated by that reality: that he could act as though he had never offered to take her home to bed for the night and, afterwards, simply treat her like everyone else. But those same moments of intimacy had carried a higher price for her. It was as though he had stripped away her tough outer layer and chipped her out of her cautious shell to ensure that she began feeling physical and emotional responses she had comfortably held at bay until she’d met him.

During the week that followed she was feverishly aware of Angel to a degree that sent her temperature rocketing. When he looked at her, it was as if a blast of concentrated heat lit her up inside and her bra would feel scratchy against her tender nipples and a dull ache would stir between her thighs, her every tiny reaction in his presence like a slap in the face that shamed her. It was a terrible destructive wanting that wouldn’t go away. He had lit the spark and she seemed stuck with the spread of the fire licking away at her nerves and her fierce pride.

At the end of that week, Angel asked her to stay behind after everyone else had left to go for drinks.

‘Next on the agenda...us,’ Angel murmured sibilantly.

Merry shot him a withering appraisal. ‘There is no us.’

‘Exactly,’ Angel pronounced with satisfaction. ‘Scratch the itch and it goes away and dies, ignore it and it festers.’

‘Your seduction vocabulary needs attention,’ Merry quipped, standing straight in front of him, grudging amusement dancing in her crystalline eyes.

Angel grimaced. ‘I don’t do seduction.’

‘I don’t do one-night stands.’

‘So if I make it dinner and sex I’m in with a chance?’ A sardonic ebony brow elevated.

‘No chance whatsoever,’ Merry contradicted with pleasure. ‘I’m a virgin and I’m not trading that for some sleazy night with my boss.’

‘A virgin?’ Angel was aghast. ‘Seriously?’

‘Seriously,’ Merry traded without embarrassment, reflecting on how her mother had fallen pregnant with her and determined to make every choice that took her in the opposite direction. ‘Sex should mean something more than scratching an itch.’

Angel sprang upright behind his desk, all supple, graceful motion, the fine, expensive fabric of his suit pulling taut over powerful thigh muscles and definable biceps. Her mouth ran dry, her eyes involuntarily clinging to his every movement. ‘It’s never been anything more for me,’ he admitted drily. ‘But I take offence at the word “sleazy”. I am never sleazy and... I don’t do virgins.’

‘Good to know,’ Merry breathed tightly, watching his shirt ripple ever so slightly over his muscular chest as he exhaled while cursing her intense physical awareness of him. ‘May I go home now?’

‘I’ll drop you back.’

‘That’s not necessary,’ she told him coolly.

‘I decide what’s necessary around here,’ Angel pronounced, throwing the door wide and heading for the lift. ‘You realise you’re as rare as a unicorn in my world? Are you holding out for marriage?’

Involuntarily amused by his curiosity, Merry laughed. ‘Of course not. I’m just waiting for something real. I’m not a fan of casual or meaningless.’

Angel lounged back fluidly against the wall of the lift, all naked predator and jungle grace. ‘I’m casual but I’m very real,’ he told her huskily, his deep dark drawl roughening and trickling down her taut spine like a spectral caress.

‘Oh, switch it off,’ Merry groaned. ‘We’re like salt and pepper except you can’t mix us.’

‘Because you’ve got too many rules, too many barriers. Why is that?’

‘Like you are actually interested?’ Merry jibed.

‘I am interested,’ Angel growled, dark golden eyes flashing as the lift doors sprang back. ‘I want you.’

‘Only because you can’t have me,’ Merry interposed drily, her skin coming up in gooseflesh as he flashed her a ferocious appraisal capable of flaying her skin from her bones. ‘That’s how basic you are.’

‘You’re becoming rude.’

‘Your persistence is making me rude,’ Merry told him.

‘I want to see your hair loose,’ Angel bit out impatiently. ‘It’s unusually long.’

‘My mother kept on cutting it short when I was little because it was easier to look after. Now I grow it because I can,’ she said truthfully, her stomach flipping as he shot a sudden charismatic smile at her, his lean, darkly beautiful face vibrant with amusement.

‘You’re a control freak,’ he breathed lazily. ‘Takes one to know one, glikia mou.’

‘That’s why we don’t get on,’ Merry pointed out.

‘We don’t get on because you have a very annoying sort of pious vibe going,’ Angel contradicted. ‘You’re smug.’

‘No, I’m not,’ she argued instantly as they crossed the half-empty car park.

‘You think you’re superior to me because you’re not at the mercy of your hormones...but you were when I touched you,’ Angel breathed, caging her in against the passenger door of his car, the heat of his lean, powerful body perceptible even through the inches separating them and the rich, evocative scent of husky male and exotic cologne filling her nostrils. His hands braced either side of her, not actually touching her quivering length, and her knees turned weak at the thought that he might touch her. ‘You can hardly breathe when I’m this close to you. I see that, I know that...every time I try to step back, it sucks me back in.’

He was like an impenetrable force field surrounding her. She knew she could push him away, she knew he wouldn’t fight, she knew he wouldn’t do anything she didn’t want him to do and a weird sense of unexpected power engulfed her. He was still coming back at her because he couldn’t resist the pull between them and she couldn’t resist it either. It was a weakness deep down inside her that she couldn’t suppress. Nobody had ever made her feel the way he was making her feel and that was a thrill on its own, a shot of adrenalin in her veins to match the feverish pound of her heartbeat. She wanted him. The knowledge ploughed through her like a battering ram, casting everything she had thought she knew about herself into a broken jumble of messy pieces.

‘You’re not my type,’ she whispered in dry-mouthed protest.

‘You’re not my type either,’ Angel admitted thickly. ‘But I’d still have sex in a car park with you any time you cared to ask.’

‘Not about to ask,’ Merry confided shakily. ‘Take me home...back off.’

‘You’re making a major production of this again,’ Angel accused, flashing his key fob to open the car. ‘Stop doing that. It’s...it’s bizarrely unnerving.’

She climbed into his car in a daze, the throb between her legs angry and unsettling, the sensual smoulder in the air almost unbearable, every nerve ending painfully aware of it. She didn’t know how he did that using only words and looks. It was terrifying. He had wiped her mind clean, made her feel stuff she didn’t want to feel, rocked the foundations of her security.

‘I don’t like you,’ she admitted.

‘Thee mou...you don’t have to like me, you only have to want me...and you do.’

And it was agonisingly true, she registered in dismay. Her brain didn’t seem to have anything to do with the equation. She thoroughly disapproved of everything he was and yet the chemistry between them was wild and dominant.

‘We have one night together and sate the craving. Then we put it away and bury it,’ Angel intoned in a driven undertone.

‘I thought you didn’t do virgins.’

‘Evidently you were born to be my single exception.’

‘Is this an actual negotiation?’ Merry enquired incredulously.

‘We have to sort this out. You’re taking my mind off work,’ Angel complained. ‘I can’t handle watching you all day and fantasising about you all night. It’s bad for business.’

‘What’s in it for me?’ Merry whispered unevenly.

‘I’m superlative at sex.’

‘Oh...’ Her lashes fluttered, her tummy somersaulting again as she wondered if she really was about to do what he wanted her to do, what she herself wanted to do. And that was the answer there and then when she was least expecting to see or understand it.

He would make a great introduction to sex for her, she thought dizzily. It would end the insane craving he had awakened inside her and maybe then she could return to her normal tranquil self. That prospect had huge appeal for her. The need would be satisfied, the intolerable longing ended. All right, it wasn’t the big romance with hearts and flowers that she had dimly envisioned, but then possibly that had never been a very practical aspiration. What he was offering was basic and honest even if it was casual and uncommitted and everything she had once sworn she would never participate in. It was not as though she had been saving herself for a wedding ring. She had been saving herself for love, but love hadn’t happened.

‘So, you’re suggesting that I just use you,’ Merry remarked grittily as he pulled into another underground car park.

‘We use each other,’ Angel exhaled in a rush and, killing the engine, stretched out a long powerful arm to enclose her in almost the same moment.

His mouth crashed down on hers with a hunger that blew her away. Somehow he made it that she didn’t remember getting out of the car, didn’t remember getting into a lift or emerging from it. There was only that insane, greedy melding of their mouths and the frantic impatient activity of their hands in a dimly lit hall. Her coat fell off or maybe he helped it. His jacket disappeared at similar speed. She kicked off her shoes. He wrenched off his tie and cannoned into a door as he lifted her off her feet.

‘We have to slow down,’ he told her roughly, dark golden eyes shimmering like gold ingots, his sexual excitement patent. ‘Or I’ll screw this up for you.’

He laid her down on a wide, comfortable mattress and stood over her, stripping without inhibition. All she wanted was his mouth on hers again, that magical escape from the limits of her own body that sent her flying higher than she had ever known she could fly. He shed his trousers and her attention locked warily on the very obvious bulge in his boxers while she struggled to accept that she could, even briefly, be with a man who was chronically untidy and dropped clothes in a heap on the floor. Not her type, not her type; she rhymed it like a mantra inside her head, her bulwark against getting attached in any way. It was sex and she didn’t want to regard it as anything else.

He unzipped her dress and flipped her over to remove it with deft precision and release her bra, before pausing to carefully unsnap the clasp in her hair and let his skilled mouth roam across her pale shoulders. He tugged her round and up to him then, long fingers lifting to feather her curtain of dark coffee-coloured hair round her shoulders, thready shimmers of lighter caramel appearing in the light filtering in from the hall.

‘You have amazing hair,’ he muttered intently, gazing down into blue eyes as pale as an Arctic sky.

‘Is that a fetish of yours?’

‘Not that I’ve noticed, but that prissy little smile of yours turns me on no end,’ Angel confided, disconcerting her.

‘I do not have a prissy smile.’

‘Talking too much,’ Angel growled, crushing her ripe mouth beneath his again, running his hands down the sides of her narrow ribcage to dispose of her bra and let his hands rise to cup the small delicate mounds of her breasts.

As his thumbs grazed her sensitive nipples a gasp parted Merry’s lips, and when his hungry mouth followed there she fell back against the pillows and dug her fingers into his thick tangle of curls. Heat arrowed in stormy flashes right to her core, leaving her insanely conscious of how excited she was becoming. Her thighs pressed together, her hips dug into the mattress as she struggled to get a grip on herself, but it was as if her body were streaking ahead of her and no matter how hard she tried to catch it, she couldn’t.

He shifted position, ran his tongue down over her straining midriff to her navel, parted her from her knickers without her noticing, traced her inner thighs with a devil’s expertise until she was splayed out like a sacrifice. And then the flood of crazy pleasure came at her in breathless, jolting stabs that shocked and roused her to a level that was almost unbearable. She was shaken by what she was allowing him to do and how much her body craved it and how very little she could control her own reactions. She twisted and turned, hauled him back to her at one point and kissed him breathless, wanting, needing, trembling on the edge of something she didn’t understand.

The tight bands in her pelvis strained to hold in the wild searing shots of pleasure gripping her and then her control broke and she writhed in a wild frenzy of release. The sound of her own gasping cry startled her, her eyes flying wide, and Angel grinned shamelessly down at her like a very sexy pirate, a dark shadow of stubble merely accentuating his fantastic bone structure.

‘You’re staying the whole night,’ he told her thickly.

‘No,’ Merry muttered, head rolling back on the pillows as he crawled up her body like the predator he truly was. ‘Once it’s done, it’s over.’

‘You are so stubborn,’ Angel groaned in frustration, nipping up her slender throat to find her swollen lips again, teasing and tasting and letting his tongue plunge and twin with hers until she was beyond thought and argument again. He donned protection.

He eased into her slowly, very slowly, and impatience assailed her. She didn’t want or need to be treated like fine china that might shatter or like that rare unicorn he had mentioned. Her body was slick and eager again, the pulse at the heart of her racing with anticipation. She tilted under him, angling up her hips, and the invitation was too much for his control and he jerked over her and plunged deep. A brief burning sting of pain made her stiffen and gasp.

‘That’s your own fault,’ Angel growled in exasperation. ‘If you would just lie still.’

‘I’m not a blow-up doll.’

‘I was trying not to hurt you.’

‘I’m not breakable either,’ Merry argued, every skin cell on red alert as she felt her body slowly stretch to enclose his, tiny little shimmers of exquisite sensation flying through her as he began to move, hinting that the best was yet to come. ‘Don’t stop.’

And he didn’t. He sank deep into her with a shuddering groan of pleasure and the pace picked up, jolting her with waves of glorious excitement. She arched her body up, suddenly needy again, hungry again, marvelling at the limitless capacity of her body to feel more and yet more. But this time the climb to pleasure was slower and she writhed, blue eyes lighting up with impatience and a need she had never expressed before. Her heart raced, her pulses pounded and that sweet, seductive throb of delight grew and grew inside her until she could contain it no longer. Every barrier dropped as her body exploded into an ecstatic climax that left her limp and stunned.

Angel released her from his weight but made a move to pull her under his arm and retain a hold on her. Quick as a flash Merry evaded him, her whole being bent on immediate escape. They had had sex but she didn’t want to hang around for the aftermath. Dignity, she told herself staunchly, dictated an immediate departure. She slid out of the other side of the bed, bending down to scoop up her discarded clothes.

‘I asked you to stay,’ Angel reminded her.

‘I’m going home,’ she said as he vaulted out of bed and headed into what she presumed was a bathroom, his lean, powerful body emanating impatience and annoyance in perceptible waves.

She would have liked a shower but she was determined not to linger. With a grimace, she pulled her clothes back on and was out in the hall cramming her feet back into her shoes and hurriedly calling a taxi when Angel reappeared, bronzed and still unashamedly naked in the bedroom doorway. ‘I don’t want you to leave.’

‘I’ve already ordered a taxi.’ Merry tilted her chin, her long hair streaming untidily round her flushed heart-shaped face. ‘We agreed and it’s better like this.’

‘I asked for one night—’

‘You can’t have everything your way,’ Merry declared flatly. ‘I enjoyed myself but all good things come to an end.’

Angel swore in Greek. ‘You drive me insane.’

‘What’s your problem? According to your forecast, we’re done and dusted now,’ she pointed out helplessly.

Yet for all her proud nonchalance in front of him, Merry travelled home in a daze of mounting panic. Back at her apartment she had to wait until the shower was free. She felt shell-shocked by what she had done. Her body ached but her brain ached almost as much, trying to rationalise the fleeting madness that had overtaken her. She tried to examine it from Angel’s unemotional point of view, but that didn’t work for her when her own emotions were throwing tantrums and storming about inside her as much as if she had killed someone. Done and dusted, forget about it now, she reminded herself doggedly. He had much more experience in such encounters than she had, had to know what he was talking about. The curiosity and that unnatural hunger had been satisfied and now it would all die a natural death and become an embarrassing memory that she’d never ever share with anyone, she told herself with determination.

Only in the days that followed Merry slowly came to appreciate that, for all his evident experience, Angel Valtinos had got it badly wrong. Feed a cold, starve a fever was a saying she had grown up with, and before very long had passed she knew that it had been a serious mistake to feed the fever. She saw it in the way Angel’s stunning dark eyes locked on her like magnets, heard it in the terseness of his instructions to her and she felt the pull of him inside herself as if he had attached a secret chain to her. Excitement crashed over her when he was close by, her temperature climbing, her heart thumping. Slowly, painfully, she came to appreciate that she was infatuated with him and very nearly as giddy and mindless as a silly schoolgirl in his vicinity. The suspicion that she was more her mother’s daughter than she had ever dreamt she could be appalled her.

Was that the real explanation of why she had slept with Angel Valtinos? She had asked herself again and again why she had done that, why she had made such an impulsive decision that went against everything she believed, and now she was being faced with an answer that she loathed. At some point in their relationship she had begun getting attached to him, possibly around the time she had started admiring his intellect and shrewd business instincts. That attachment was pitiful, she decided with angry self-loathing, and in haste she began to look for another job, desperate to leave Angel and Valtinos Enterprises behind her.

Two weeks after their first encounter, Angel showed up at her apartment one evening without the smallest warning. The same angry frustration that powered him was running through her.

‘What are you doing here?’ she demanded, far from pleased to be surprised in her cotton pyjamas, fresh from the shower and bare of make-up.

Angel grimaced, his lean, darkly handsome features taut and troubled as he leant back against her bedroom door to close it. ‘My car brought me here.’

‘What on earth—?’ she began, disconcerted by his sudden appearance in a place where she had never imagined seeing him.

Angel settled volatile dark golden eyes on her angrily. ‘I can’t stay away,’ he grated rawly, his beautiful mouth compressing.

‘B-but...we agreed,’ she stammered.

‘Massive fail,’ Angel framed darkly. ‘Biggest bloody mistake of my life!’

Merry almost laughed and fortunately killed the urge. It was simply that Angel’s innate love of drama not only amused her, but somehow touched her somewhere down deep inside, somewhere where she was soft and emotional and vulnerable even though she didn’t want to be. He had come to her even though he didn’t want to. He resented his desire for her, had tried to stamp it out and failed. She grasped immediately that that weakness for her infuriated him.

‘I want to be with you tonight.’

‘Angel—’

He came down on the bed beside her and framed her face with long, cool brown fingers. ‘Say my name again,’ he demanded.

‘No,’ she said stubbornly. ‘I don’t do what you tell me to do outside working hours.’

‘Thee mou...stop challenging me,’ he groaned, tilting her head back to follow the long, elegant column of her throat down to the slope of her shoulder, nipping and kissing a tantalising path across her sensitised skin while she quivered. ‘This isn’t me. This isn’t what I’m about.’

‘Then why are you here?’ she whispered weakly.

‘Can’t stay away.’ He carried her hand down to where he was hot and hard and wanting and groaned without inhibition as she stroked him through the fine, crisp fabric of his well-cut trousers.

Heat coursed through her in molten waves, the hunger unleashed afresh. Simply touching him inflamed her. She tried to fight it, she tried to fasten it down and ground herself, but Angel smashed any hope of control by welding dark golden eyes to hers and kissing her with barely contained ferocity. Not a single thought passed her mind beyond the thrillingly obvious reality that he needed her and couldn’t stay away. That knowledge vanquished every other consideration. She kissed him back with the same uncontrollable, desperate passion.

‘I intended to take you out to dinner,’ Angel admitted breathlessly as he fought with her pyjamas, his sleek, deft skills with feminine clothing deserting him.

‘You hungry?’ she gasped, almost strangling him with his own tie in her struggle to loosen it.

‘Only for you,’ he growled fiercely against her swollen mouth. ‘Watching you round the office all day, being unable to touch, even to look.’

And then they were naked in her bed, naked and frantic and so tormentingly hungry for each other that she writhed and squirmed and he fought to hold her still. He produced a condom, tore it from the wrapper with his teeth. ‘We don’t want an accident,’ he said unevenly.

‘No, no accidents,’ she agreed helplessly, lying there, shocked by what she was doing but participating all the same, quite unable to deny him. Their clothes lay festooned all around them and she didn’t care. Angel had come to her and she was happy about that, there in her pin-neat room made messy by his presence.

He drove into her yielding flesh with a heartfelt sound of satisfaction and she wrapped her legs round him, arching up and gasping at every fluid stroke. The excitement heightened exponentially, the pulsing pound of intolerable desire driving them off the edge fast into a hot, sweaty tangle of limbs and shuddering fulfilment.

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