Angel of Darkness

‘How dare you say that?’ Kelda threw at him fierily. ‘How dare you?’

‘And you were the most totally obnoxious teenager,’ Angelo volunteered. ‘You put me off having children for life.’

‘If that means that there’ll never be a junior edition of you running about making someone’s life hell, I’m delighted to hear it!’ But although the ready words flowed from her tongue, Kelda was dismayed to realise that she was deeply and genuinely hurt by what he had thrown at her. And she couldn’t understand why. Hadn’t she always known that Angelo hated her?

The difference was, she appreciated, that it had never once crossed her mind to wonder how Angelo felt about having the burden of a teenager thrust on him. She had not considered that aspect of those years before, had dimly imagined that Angelo had taken over simply to be officious and unpleasant. And why hadn’t she thought more deeply...because to have reflected more deeply would have forced her to acknowledge the truth of what Angelo had said. Daisy and Tomaso had been abroad a great deal and Tim had been a quiet, self-contained boy, quite content to be sent off to boarding school and given plenty of pocket money in return for a lack of personal attention.

‘I was only twenty-one,’ Angelo pointed out, having ignored her childish response. ‘And you were out of control. Between them your mother and your sweet old great-aunt had spoilt you rotten. Daisy, quite frankly, couldn’t cope with you. You are very different from her in temperament.’

Kelda could feel tears burning behind her lowered eyelids. She had never hated Angelo so much and yet simultaneously, she had never felt so savaged. She found herself remembering the loneliness of those years and discovered that inexplicably, deep down inside, she must once have had the vague conviction that to take charge of her in the first place, Angelo must have had some slight affection for her. How she could have thought that and yet believed that he hated her at the same time was no more clear to her than anything else since she had arrived in Tuscany.

‘I was more like your father than your stepbrother,’ Angelo mused with an oddly chilling quality. ‘You don’t know me like this because in the past six years you have become an adult and I can now treat you as one. You wouldn’t believe the pleasure that that freedom gives me.’

Kelda pressed both hands against her pale cheeks and forced herself to look at him over her straining fingers. ‘Why did you bring me here?’ she demanded in a shaken tone.

‘Why?’ Glittering dark eyes slid over the wild tangle of red-gold hair veiling her shoulders in a torrent of curls and lingered on the exquisite perfection of the triangular face pointed at him. ‘Are you really that dumb? Six years ago you virtually destroyed my relationship with my father—’

‘I...I didn’t mean to—’ Kelda was shocked and unprepared for the directness of that attack.

‘The only woman ever to put one over on me was just eighteen,’ Angelo spelt out. ‘But no blushing virgin. You knew exactly what you were doing that night—’

‘I didn’t!’ she protested.

‘And it worked a treat,’ Angelo breathed softly, black ice eyes holding distressed green with raw force of will. ‘You waited until you heard Daisy and Tomaso come in and then you skipped into my room, knowing that they’d be surprised to find the party over and that Daisy’s first stop would be your own bedroom. Finding you absent, my father was certain to come looking for me...and what did he discover?’

‘It wasn’t like that!’ Kelda argued half an octave higher, appalled by what he was accusing her of. ‘It wasn’t planned!’

‘On the contrary, it was beautifully plotted and carried out,’ Angelo contradicted with satire. ‘You had to keep me quiet about what I’d seen earlier in the evening, and what better way? You were paranoid, as it happens. I had no intention of sharing that sordid little scene with your mother.’

‘If you hadn’t touched me, nothing could have happened!’ Kelda told him in a wild surge.

Angelo threw back his dark head and laughed with sardonic amusement. ‘Cara, this is Angelo you’re talking to, not Daisy! You were standing over me in a minuscule see-through nightdress, eating me with your eyes. Up until that night, I was ashamed of the fact that I wanted you—’

‘W-wanted me?’ Her full attention pinned to him, Kelda sat up straighter again with a jerk that very nearly dislodged the sheet that was her only veil of modesty.

‘You were like a thorn sinking deeper and deeper into my flesh.’ Angelo angled a terrifyingly cold smile over her. ‘Full marks for the pretence of innocence, but you knew, cara. In the cradle, you were as old as Eve. You knew that I wanted you and I’ve often wondered how it would have gone if I hadn’t found you playing the whore so indiscreetly in the library that night. That really was remarkably careless of you—’

‘Careless,’ Kelda repeated, her mind fathoms deep in shock from what he was telling her, only he did not appear to accept that he was telling her anything she hadn’t already known. But dear lord...dear lord, the past she had so recently recalled was assuming colours and depths and meanings that had previously been a mystery to her.

Angelo shot her a suspicious glance. Hard, narrowed, sharp. ‘The only way I could have had you then was by marriage,’ he delivered silkily. ‘That was the price and it would have been one hell of a price to get you flat on your back on the nearest available bed...but I damned near paid it. I was prepared to wait for you to grow up. Now that is a surprise to you, isn’t it?’

‘Y-yes.’ She was incapable of saying anything else.

‘And the reason I’m telling you that six years after the event is that I don’t want you to waste your time plotting and planning how to turn this little sojourn abroad into a trip to the nearest church,’ he spelt out flatly. ‘I will never marry you.’

‘N-no,’ Kelda agreed, feeling like someone taking part in a Salvador Dali dream sequence of spectacular complexity. Marriage and Angelo. She could truly put her hand on her heart and swear that such a prospect had never crossed her mind in her wildest imaginings.

‘But I will make love to you as no man ever has before,’ Angelo swore in a sizzling undertone that purred along her sensitive nerve-endings like bittersweet chocolate, inflaming her in all sorts of intimate places she had never dreamt were so susceptible. She couldn’t take her eyes off him. She was magnetised by the most extraordinary excitement. It came from somewhere deep and dark inside her, some secret place, until that moment undiscovered even by herself.

‘I have had six long years to think about how I intend to entertain you,’ Angelo savoured with unrestrained eroticism. ‘And I knew that this moment would come. When you sent me that Vogue cover, I knew that we were playing the same waiting game. There you were wearing a string of priceless emeralds and nothing else—’

‘It only looked that w-way!’ Kelda heard herself stammer.

He dug a lean brown hand into the pocket of his riding pants and tossed something almost negligently on the white sheet. ‘They came from Cartier...I bought them.’

Her long, luxuriant lashes lifted and dropped again but the glorious string of matched emeralds separated by diamonds still lay like a river of glittering fire in the strong sunlight flooding through the windows. She could not resist touching them with a tremulous finger. She had not seen them in six years.

Angelo laughed, softly, lazily and with immense and unconcealed satisfaction, rampantly amused by her state of dazed, unspeaking paralysis. He strolled confidently round to the side of the bed, scooped up the necklace and sank down on the edge of the bed. He smoothed her torrent of hair gently out of his path and she felt the cool touch of his fingers at her nape, then the weight of the jewels at her throat, and she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move, couldn’t speak...