Angel of Darkness

‘One more word and I’m calling a cab!’ Kelda swore. ‘If I’d told her anything, she would have been so shattered, the entire restaurant would have known about it before we got out!’

‘It won’t matter once they’re married. They’ll spend most of their time abroad. It will seem natural that I should visit my stepsister—’

‘Angelo...I want nothing to do with you!’ she practically screamed at him in frustration. ‘Why do you find that so impossible to accept?’

He insisted on seeing her right to the door of her apartment. He was walking right into the trap without the smallest encouragement from her. Her headache had turned into a killer by the time he took her key from her and unlocked the door. Russ would be waiting...she hoped. Then it would all be at an end.

‘You’re not feeling well.’ Angelo pressed her over the threshold and followed her in. ‘Can I get you anything?’

That he had noticed su

rprised her. ‘I’ll be fine.’ Her exasperated gaze was probing the lounge for Russ. He wasn’t there.

‘Will you be all right?’ Abruptly Angelo swore and stilled, the hand at her spine dropping away.

Kelda’s strained green eyes widened to their fullest extent as Russ strolled out of her bedroom, only a small towel wrapped round his hips. ‘I thought you were never coming home, darling,’ he sighed reproachfully, and smiled at Angelo. ‘Thanks for bringing her back safely.’

Outraged incredulity had clenched Angelo’s hard dark features. He swung round. ‘You bitch,’ he grated in a shaken undertone, seemingly unable to take his eyes off Russ.

Kelda was trembling. The look in Angelo’s eyes was flat and cold and dead. And somehow that terrified her. She had to resist an extraordinary and utterly ridiculous urge to start explaining that Russ was a close friend of the platonic variety, pretending to be something else at her request.

‘I couldn’t believe...’ Angelo fell silent, shot her a glance of such smouldering violence that she stumbled back against the wall, afraid of physical attack. The front door thudded shut in his wake. Kelda sagged like a rag doll.

Russ sighed. ‘How did I do?’

‘You were incredible.’ Her own voice sounded as if it was coming from miles away. Her head felt as if it was about to split wide open.

‘You weren’t having second thoughts about me doing this, were you?’ Russ studied her shuttered white face anxiously.

‘Of course not.’

It was done. It was over. Angelo was gone...but why did that knowledge hurt so much?

Russ expelled his breath. ‘I thought it would be funny, but it wasn’t,’ he acknowledged. ‘Rossetti was shattered.’

‘His ego was dented...that’s all,’ Kelda mumbled, suddenly deathly tired and drained.

* * *

Kelda’s week in New York modelling designer knitwear stretched to five weeks in the end. Russ had tugged some useful strings, put her on the cover of two glossy magazines and all of a sudden she had found that her career was taking off again. For a month she was heavily in demand. Ella was constantly on the phone to her and slowly but surely she got word of possible assignments back home as well. The world had a short memory. Danny Philips was old news.

She was flicking through her diary on the flight back to London when she noticed. She raked through the pages again, certain she had made a mistake. But she had not made an oversight. There was no familiar little cross marking the start of her last period. She was three weeks overdue.

She sat there in a blank haze of shock, suddenly cold and shivery. Her heart had plunged to her stomach and her stomach felt as if she had swallowed an indigestible lump of concrete. It had felt like that several times before over the past ten days. She had lost weight through her lack of appetite but that hadn’t worried her. A model could never be too thin for the camera.

She had blocked out those days in Italy very efficiently since leaving London. Work had been her panacea, her saviour. She had been too busy and too tired to torment herself with vain regrets for what couldn’t be altered. It was over. She had made a mistake. She could learn to live with that...that was what she had told herself when her mind strayed.

And now this. It couldn’t happen to her, she had thought in Italy, brushing that spur of fear away with confidence. She had never thought about being pregnant, couldn’t even imagine being pregnant, and now she was faced with the possibility that she might well be. In defiance, she listed all the other things that might have made her late, but the cloud of dark foreboding refused to lift.

She bought a pregnancy test at the airport. Even that embarrassed the hell out of her. Her name came over the public address system while it was being wrapped and she froze.

Tomaso and Daisy had come to meet her off the plane but traffic had held them up. She was touched, but her recent purchase weighed like lead in her holdall.

‘We’ve got a surprise for you,’ Daisy asserted.

Kelda gave her mother a rather weak smile and climbed into the back of Tomaso’s stately Rolls. ‘What sort of a surprise?’

‘The cottage is yours,’ her mother pointed out. ‘And after next week I won’t be needing it any more—’