‘I hear you’re pregnant,’ he delivered with a soft hiss.
Involuntarily, Kelda recoiled but she made a swift recovery. ‘And where did you hear that piece of nonsense?’ she managed to toss back boldly.
‘Your brother—’
She lost colour. ‘T-Tim?’
‘He was rather drunk. I gave him a lift back to town,’ Angelo divulged with slow, measured emphasis as though he was exercising immense self-control. ‘After I’d dropped Fiona off, he began to laugh and crack some rather odd jokes. Your mother asked him to keep an eye on you while she was away and he told me why—’
Not a muscle moved on Kelda’s face. ‘That doesn’t explain what you’re doing here at two in the morning—’
‘Are you pregnant?’ Angelo demanded with ferocious anger.
‘I owe you no explanations,’ Kelda flung back. ‘I don’t have to defend myself against Tim’s drunken ramblings.’
‘In Italy, you said that somehow, some day you would get your own back on me for bringing you there.’ The reminder lanced into the smouldering silence. ‘If this is it, I’ll fight you and I’ll break you!’ he swore with brutal clarity. ‘You’ve told your mother that you’re pregnant. I want to know if you’re lying...and if you’re not, I want to know now whose child it is!’
Hysteria was fluttering like a wild bird captured in her throat. Her stomach was churning. ‘Relax, Angelo...it isn’t yours,’ she asserted through bloodless lips, holding herself proudly erect only by rigorous discipline.
The silence throbbed. He didn’t relax in receipt of her assurance. He went rigid.
‘Then why does your brother think it is?’ he lashed back at her finally with splintering savagery, every powerful line of his lean body emanating his bitter anger.
‘They know about Italy, and before you blame me for that, let me disclaim all responsibility. We were photographed at the airport. Someone sent your father a cutting,’ she shared with a tiny tremor in the voice she was fighting to keep level.
Angelo said something raw in Italian and strode over to the window, his back squarely turned to her, scorching tension in the angle of his broad shoulders.
‘I assured them that you weren’t the culprit,’ she muttered tightly, and that at least was true.
‘Then who is?’
She made no response. Her wide green eyes were dark with exhaustion and stress.
‘Russ Seadon...si,’ Angelo decided, flicking her a glance of incandescent golden rage and bitterness. ‘I did recognise him,’ he ground out.
‘Good for you,’ she mumbled shakily because she didn’t have the strength to fight Angelo after the traumas of the past thirty-six hours.
‘Is it his child?’ he demande
d, coming back to her in one long, threatening stride. ‘I demand to know!’
‘You have no right to ask me that,’ Kelda snapped, taking a step back from him.
‘I want the truth!’ Angelo grabbed her wrists with two strong hands and yanked her up against him. ‘If it isn’t mine, whose is it?’
‘Go to hell!’ she gasped, struggling to release herself from his fierce grip.
‘Tell me!’ he blazed down at her insistently, his striking bone-structure clenched with dark fury.
From somewhere deep inside her where outrage could pull on final reserves of energy, she found the courage to hurl, ‘You see, I didn’t pine for you, Angelo! Not for a day or even an hour...’
‘You make me understand why men kill.’ As Angelo stared down into her flushed and exquisitely delicate face, white hot rage flamed in his piercing gaze. ‘I would rather see you buried than swollen with another man’s seed,’ he admitted through clenched teeth.
Losing every scrap of colour, Kelda momentarily sagged in his fierce grip. She looked at him in horror. ‘Are you c-crazy?’
‘Obsessed. Does that please you?’ Angelo drawled with razor-edged softness. ‘I doubt if it does. You want me to stay away, because you’re obsessed, too—’
‘No!’