Angel of Darkness

‘Damn you, Angelo!’

‘You need to eat something,’ he murmured prosaically. ‘What do you want?’

‘You’re insane,’ she accused weakly.

‘Guilty as hell. You’re sick, you’re pregnant and your wrists have a full set of my fingerprints on them,’ Angelo enumerated curtly. ‘How do you expect me to feel?’

He left the room. Shakily, she lifted her wrists into the light and saw the purplish bruising he had inflicted earlier. She hadn’t felt any pain at the time. Her fair skin marked easily but feeling a total heel had to be a new sensation for Angelo, and not one that would do him any noticeable harm. He would leave her now and go back to Fiona. Lying had been the right thing to do, she told herself wretchedly. The torturous cycle of destruction inside her would be stopped and she would heal. Angelo would leave her alone.

It took him a long time but eventually he reappeared with a bowl of soup.

They were in a state of temporarily suspended hostilities, she acknowledged. Dawn was breaking outside. She remembered another dawn and her cheeks burned, making her duck her head down and tuck into the soup. The soup was as burnt as her skin. She persevered beneath his taut scrutiny, ridiculously conscious all of a sudden of a desire not to reject even so small an olive branch. In the harsher light, the strain in his darkly handsome visage was pronounced. He looked as savaged as she felt.

The words he had employed came back to haunt her. Sickness...obsession...exorcism. And sex. Unhealthy, destructive, debilitating. Not flattering. And what was that hangover from his childhood? He liked to be in control. Scarcely a revelation to anyone in Angelo’s radius! Angelo could turn an impromptu picnic into an organised field expedition.

‘Why do you have to be in control?’

His eyes veiled. ‘I grew up with a woman like you. A free spirit. Any man, any time, any place—’

Like you... She swallowed hard on her angry frustration. ‘What woman?’

‘My mother. And she wasn’t ashamed of it either. My father adored her but he couldn’t live with her affairs. That’s why he divorced her, but she still got custody of me. I hated the life I had with her. She was suffocatingly possessive and very volatile—’

‘So are you.’

Angelo dealt her a chilling half-smile. ‘Only with you, and that I can overcome,’ he stated with cool conviction. ‘I don’t want to live on the wild side with any woman. I want a quiet, well-behaved, conservative wife who would die of shock if I made love to her the way I make love to you. At times, she’ll bore me...after a few years, I’ll be walking out the door and forgetting she exists, and not long after that I will most probably set up a mistress.’

‘And I hope like hell your wife throws orgies while you’re at the office!’ Kelda breathed in a blitz of stormy revulsion and pain.

‘You might; she won’t. She’ll accept the package deal. Many women do. Status, money, children and a husband whose infidelities are discreet.’

‘You burnt the soup.’ Kelda rolled over, presenting him with her narrow back. Her fingers clawed like talons into the pillow beside her head. She could not deal with such honesty. He was not trying to hurt her. He was telling her what he believed would make him happy...or as happy as he believed he could afford to be and still be one hundred percent in control.

‘You should keep that appointment with the doctor. If you need anything—’ He hesitated. ‘Try not to involve me unless it’s an emergency.’

She listened to the car drive off, strained to hear the last distant sounds and then flopped. He burnt the soup and I ate it. And she started to laugh like a madwoman until the dragging sobs surfaced and finally she cried, cried for herself alone. Angelo, the Angel of Darkness, who made the City quail, was an emotional coward. A wimp like that wasn’t worth her tears, and he wasn’t fit to be the father of her child either!

CHAPTER EIGHT

‘I‘VE been laughing into my cornflakes every morning this week following Carol Philips’ story of life with dear, misunderstood Danny,’ Gina said mockingly to the table at large. She looped a straying strand of cornsilk hair from her brow with a beringed hand and giggled. ‘He actually brought one of his women home to lunch and let her think that his wife was his sister!’

‘Carol Philips was a doormat. She got what she asked for,’ one of the other women remarked drily. ‘I’d have thrown him and his floozy out...I wouldn’t let any man treat me like that!’

‘She had two young children and he kept her very short of money,’ Kelda put in quietly. ‘She was only eighteen when he married her. She had never had a job. I can understand how trapped she must have felt—’

‘Oh, you!’ Her friend Gina wrinkled her classic nose. ‘How can you feel sorry for Danny’s wife after what he did to you?’

‘I must have hurt her as well,’ Kelda pointed out ruefully.

‘Even she admitted that you were the only one who dumped him immediately you found out that he was married—’

‘And it’s cleared your name of all that rubbish that was printed,’ Russ commented. ‘You came out squeaky clean, compared with all the others the wronged wife chose to name. There’s been quite a few red faces on the catwalks this past week!’

Her companions continued to trawl over Carol’s revelations, a tabloid exposé which had been running all week and causing more hilarity than anything else. Danny’s wife had sold her story because Danny had left her practically destitute when he’d swanned off to New York, taking the children’s curvaceous teenage nanny with him.

Kelda pushed back her chair and got up.

‘Are you feeling all right?’ Gina asked anxiously, searching her pale face.