Exotic Nights

He wasn’t even asking her to stay just because she might want to. She couldn’t let him see that she was hurting so much inside.

She smiled, but it felt tight. ‘So you’re saying that if I stay with you, until such time as you or I grow bored, you’ll help launch my career? And what if I don’t want to stay?’

Leo’s eyes turned very black; his jaw tensed. ‘I don’t think you’ll have any problem setting up on your own, Angel, but you can’t deny that this is a launching pad that would put you at a whole other level.’

Angel felt sick. What he was doing was so cruel, and yet … he was also handing her the moon, sun and stars. He was right. With patronage from him, her career would be assured. Could she do that, though? Share his bed knowing that some day in the future he’d be letting her go, albeit leaving her with a glittering career as a token prize?

Suddenly all the ambition that Angel had always harboured felt very flat. She knew if she had the choice that she’d take Leo’s love over the launching of a successful career. A career could always be pursued—but true love? Clearly love was not a word in his vocabulary, and if he ever did come to settle down it would be with someone eminently more suitable than her.

Angel felt as if she was breaking into little pieces inside, but she took a studied sip of her drink and then looked up. ‘Do you know the only reason I didn’t leave my home before now?’ She laughed briefly. ‘No doubt you must have wondered what on earth I was doing there when my father so evidently hated my guts.’ She looked away, and then back again. ‘I stayed for Delphi. Because after Damia’s death she was lost, went in on herself. Irini, her mother, is next to useless, my father is cut off from human emotion … and poor Delphi was there all on her own. So I promised that no matter what I’d stay with her until she was ready to leave. I was hoping after college I’d persuade her to move out with me, but then father’s business started to unravel and we just didn’t have the money. Delphi’s studying law. I worked to help her get through college, but it meant we couldn’t leave home.’

Leo was as silent and still as a statue.

‘I’ve been waiting for a long time for my freedom, Leo. Now that Delphi is married to Stavros I can finally go and live my own life.’

Leo’s jaw twitched. ‘And that’s what you want? Despite what I can offer you?’

Angel nodded and forced a brittle smile. ‘Getting the commission from Ari is more than I could have ever hoped for in the first place. And I think you must have realised by now that I was never proper mistress material.’

Leo stood tall and dark and dominant. Unmoving. No emotion flickering across his impassive face. Finally he said, ‘I have to go to New York tomorrow on business. I’ll be gone for about two weeks. I would just ask that you think about what I’ve said and then decide. I won’t push you for a decision now.’

Angel nodded slowly, feeling as though she was being impaled. ‘Very well.’

And that was it. Angel got up and put her glass on the drinks board. She turned and said, ‘I’m tired. I’m going to bed.’

‘Goodnight, Angel.’

And she walked out of the room, knowing that it would be the last time she saw Leo Parnassus.

Leo walked into the villa two weeks later and knew instantly that Angel was gone. He had never, ever faced this prospect: a woman walking away from him. In his supreme arrogance he’d not contemplated that she might go. And yet he hadn’t called or made contact because something superstitious had stopped him—almost as if he didn’t know, she wouldn’t have left. But she had.

He walked to her workspace and opened the door. Everything was cleaned away, all the tools and lefto

ver metals and gems in neat piles and rows. She’d left it all, and a note.

Dear Leo, I’ve left everything out so that it’ll be easy to take away and dismantle. I know it might seem a little weird to say this after everything that happened, and all the circumstances, but thank you for everything. All the best, Angel.

Leo crumpled up the note and stood for a long moment with his head downbent. And then, with an inarticulate roar of rage, he swept an arm along the top of the workbench, sending tools and metals and gems flying. Tiny diamonds winked up at him mockingly from the floor.

Three months later

Angel’s lower back ached. She put her two hands there and stretched, arching backwards. She was pregnant, and just beginning to show. The growing thickness of her middle had become a little bump practically overnight. The day after her final conversation with Leo she’d had some spotting, which she’d believed to be her period when in fact it hadn’t been. It was only when she’d missed her next period that she’d got worried and had her pregnancy confirmed.

‘You should sit down, lovey—take the weight off your feet.’

Angel smiled at Mary, the woman she worked with in the little tourist café in the grounds of the abbey of her old school in the west of Ireland. ‘I’m not about to go into labour because of a little lower back pain.’

The older woman, whom Angel had known since she’d started at the school all those years before, when Mary had been the cook there, smiled fondly. ‘No. Maybe not. Well, in that case you can see to the latest arrival—some man on his own. I’d say that’s it for the day, then. The last tour are pulling out of the car park now.’

Angel picked up her notepad, and a tray to clear off any dirty tables while she was out. She was looking forward to getting back to the tiny house she shared with a niece of Mary’s and having a long hot bath. As she walked out into the dining area the evening sun glinted for a moment, so she couldn’t see anything.

When she emerged more fully she had the impression of someone tall and dark standing up, a chair scraping back on the floor just before she saw him properly. But she didn’t have to see him. She knew.

Leo. Tall and imposing and dark and gorgeus. Leo.

Angel felt faint. Her blood was draining downwards in a rush and everything tilted alarmingly.

In a second she was in a chair. Leo was crouching down, looking up at her, and Mary was there too, fussing. ‘Are you all right, Angela? I knew you shouldn’t be on your feet for all that time. Honestly, you’re so stubborn.’