Lynne Graham - The Winter Bride

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.