Flora's Defiance

A stiff late spring breeze gusted down the street of tall, narrow and highly ornamental buildings that bordered the canal Flora was walking alongside and her tears chilled on her cheeks. She stepped hurriedly out of the way of a cyclist riding past and sucked in a steadying breath while she paused to consult the map she had bought to help her negotiate the maze of streets.

It was an effort to think straight while she was being eaten alive by a great burst of angry resentment and regret. But her half-sister was gone and nothing could bring Julie back. Yet on whose say-so had Flora been excluded from knowing about and trying to help the young couple? Flora had a very strong suspicion about the identity of that culprit. While the social workers had been bound by rules of confidentiality, only Angelo van Zaal would have dared to leave Julie’s one close relative in ignorance of her plight.

When she’d first moved to Amsterdam, Julie had sent her sister loads of photos, so now Flora had little difficulty picking out the bright blue-and-white-painted houseboat from the others moored on a quiet stretch of water overlooked by a picturesque terrace of gabled houses. After all, she had a framed sunlit picture of that same evocative scene sitting in her home. She stepped onto the deck and as she did so the door of the cabin opened, framing the tall black-haired male whose inexcusable silence over the past year had stoked her umbrage.

For an instant, Flora froze, her wide green eyes locking onto Angelo van Zaal. He looked strikingly elegant if out of place in his formality in a dark grey business suit and silk tie. The suit had the exclusive fit of a tailored designer garment, framing wide strong masculine shoulders and hugging lean hips and long muscular thighs. As he stepped outside the breeze ruffled his luxuriant black hair above his lean, darkly handsome features. The sheer impact of his physical charisma hit her like a sudden blow to the head, leaving her dizzy. She collided with sapphire-blue eyes and her tummy shimmied like a jelly while her breath feathered in her throat.

‘What on earth are you doing here? ‘ she demanded tautly.

‘This seemed to be an opportune time and place to talk to you.’

‘It’s a little late for that now, isn’t it? ‘ Green eyes flashing as emerald as jewels in sunlight, Flora stalked past his tall still figure into the saloon of the houseboat. The spacious interior had a bare look, for all the surfaces were clear and a stack of cardboard boxes spread out from one corner. ‘In fact I would say that talk of any kind between us now would be a waste of your valuable time.’

Unaccustomed to such a bold unapologetic attack, and with his handsome mouth in a sardonic line, Angelo studied her. Colourful copper-coloured hair falling in a lavish windblown cloud round her shoulders, Flora wore a short black trench coat, jeans and a green sweater, and even in that casual garb she looked amazing, he acknowledged with distinct reluctance. She had the transparent alabaster skin of the true redhead and soft pink self-conscious colour defined her cheekbones while he studied her, quietly marvelling at the amount of emotion she contrived to emanate even when she was silent. Trembling with the force of her fury, Flora undid her coat, dropped it down on a seat and spun back to face him.

‘How could you not tell me what was going on here?’ she demanded in ringing reproach. ‘Willem and Julie were my family as well. At the very least I had a right to know that Julie was taking drugs!’

‘She was an adult of twenty-one, Flora. She made her own choice, which was that under no circumstances were you to be told about their problems.’

Flora lifted her chin in challenge. ‘Meaning?’

‘Exactly what I said. I did speak to her and I know for a fact that her social worker urged her to confide in you, but your sister didn’t want you to know that she had got caught up in drugs and I was not in a position to go against her wishes.’

‘I don’t believe that.’ Flora dealt him a furious unimpressed look, convinced that he was simply trying to palm her off with excuses. ‘You always do as you like, Angelo. You’re a strong man. You’re no one’s whipping boy!’

‘Believe me when I tell you that it was a huge struggle to keep the communication lines between me and Willem and Julie open. Their lifestyle was abhorrent to me but for their daughter’s sake it was imperative that I still retained access to them,’ Angelo retorted grimly. ‘Had I gone against your sister’s wishes they would no longer have trusted me and Mariska would have suffered …’

‘So you got involved and I was left on the outside, kept in ignorance of what was happening in Willem and Julie’s lives until it was too late,’ Flora condemned with unconcealed bitterness.

‘I made Mariska’s needs my priority,’ Angelo countered without apology. ‘I did the best I could in a very difficult situation.’

‘Well, the best you could wasn’t good enough, was it? ‘ Flora threw at him fierily, her temper rising again like steam inside a kettle as the sheer awfulness of what she had learned that morning bit into her like painful claws on tender flesh. ‘Less than a year after Mariska’s birth, your stepbrother and my sister are both dead and their child is an orphan!’

His superb bone structure rigid, Angelo surveyed her with cool ice-blue, astonishingly clear eyes set above the smooth olive planes of his handsome face. His eyes had the shockingly vivid clarity of a glacier lake she had once seen in the Alps, she thought absently. It struck her that so far nothing she had said had moved him in the slightest and his rigorous self-control seemed to mock her emotional state.

‘Willem and Julie were a fatal combination,’ Angelo murmured in a tone of flat finality. ‘Willem was weak and troubled, and before they even met Julie was a habitual drug user.’

As the ramifications of that accusation sank in, shocking Flora all over again, she released a jagged laugh of disbelief. ‘How dare you try to blame Julie for what happened to them? How dare you insinuate that she was the prime instigator?’

‘I am telling you what I know to be the truth. I have no desire to malign your memory of your sister.’

Flora shot him an enraged glance, green eyes luminous as green glass on the seashore. ‘Then don’t do it.’

‘I did not hurl the first stone,’ Angelo countered levelly, his attention wandering to the way the fine wool sweater lovingly moulded the small pouting curves of her breasts and defined the slight bump of her prominent nipples. He suspected that she wasn’t wearing a bra and the full taut sensation of heaviness at his groin increased as he imagined peeling off that sweater. It took enormous self-discipline to wrench his mind back from that erotic reverie and her ability to distract him without even trying to do so infuriated him.

‘You could have told me that Willem and Julie had got involved in drugs! ‘ Flora slung at him in a seething undertone, her eyes bright with antagonism and accusation. The growing tension in the atmosphere only put her more on edge. ‘And you could have told me that I had to conceal where I got that information from.’

‘As I’ve already said, when I was unable to persuade either Willem or his wife to stop using drugs or even to enter counselling, my main goal was to protect Mariska from their excesses.’

Flora snatched in an audible breath in an

effort to calm her teeming emotions down to a more controllable level. She folded her arms tightly and crossed the floor, her slender spine stiff as a pencil. The dreadful compulsion to stare at him had her in its hold, though, for when she looked once she always had to look back at him again and admire his amazing bone structure, dazzling eyes and tall, powerful physique. That he could stun her even in the midst of a bitter argument outraged her sense of what was decent. In measured rejection she fixed her eyes on the view of the quiet canal beyond the window. ‘It’s so unfair that you’re trying to foist the blame on Julie.’

‘I am not trying to do that,’ Angelo rebutted, his attention jerking away from the snug fit of her jeans over her heart-shaped derrière, for his imagination had really not required that added stimulus in her radius. His susceptibility to her every move around him galled him and gave him a disturbingly unfamiliar sense of being out of control. ‘But I must be honest with you, even if you find that honesty offensive.’

‘It is deeply offensive that you should accuse my sister of having been an habitual substance abuser,’ Flora pointed out thinly, turning back to him for emphasis while her tongue slid out to moisten the dry curve of her lower lip.

‘Even if I know that to be true?’ Instantly engaged in picturing the effect of that small pink tongue tip on a highly sensitive part of his own anatomy, Angelo surveyed the sultry raspberry-tinted fullness of her mouth with driven concentration. She was making him feel ridiculously like a sex-starved adolescent boy and his hands clenched into defensive fists by his side.