Lynne Graham - The Winter Bride

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?’